what it means that Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” is written in 7/4 time?
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So the basic thing to know is that the rythm of a music is created by the length of each music note. For example it can be long-short-short (bamm dada) which is different from short-short-long (dada bamm).
In our western music system the length of these notes are always halved: there is the longest (whole), then half, then quarter and so on. The whole is represented by the number 1, the half is 1/2, the quarter is 1/4 etc. (And there are ones that break this rule.)
In a simple drum run (if it goes like dum-dum-dum-dum all the time without any extra trick), one “dum” is most of the time a length of one quarter, or in other words 1/4.
Now, people instinctively put emphasis on certain notes. Specifically, in our music culture we tend to group 4 of the quarters together and emphasize the first one of the group. It would be like (imagine a drum):
DUM-duh-duh-duh-DUM-duh-duh-duh
Note that the first DUM is not longer, just louder.
So these 4 quarters (or 4/4) make something we call a bar, that’s the basic unit of the music. In other words, a normal usual bar is the length of 4 base drum beats. Of course if a music would be only quarters, that would be very boring. In a normal bar you can put various kind of stuff (like one whole or two halves or a half and two quarters), as long as it has a total length of 4 basic drum beats.
Even the drum can vary like:
DUM-dada-duh-duh (where the “dada” is as long as one “duh”).
So in our culture the majority of the songs have this basic kind of “heart beat” like the bar is a group of 4 quarters and the first ones are emphasized. They are also the easiest to dance with, because you instinctively move your body with the bars, and a 4/4 bar gives you even number of movements. Left-right-left-right.
But there are other kind of music. One famous non 4/4 music is waltz, which has 3 quarters in a bar (3/4). The waltz beat would be
DUM-duh-duh-DUM-duh-duh
And it’s also kinda difficult to dance.
And then there’s this song you ask, in this one one bar consists of 7 quarter beats. These kind of songs sound unusual, they are difficult to sing (because normally you want to sing in 4/4), difficult to dance. They often convey some excited or unfinished or odd feeling. And this is why musicians, if they want to give you this subconsciously odd feeling, make music in such timing as 7/4.
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