What are musical ligatures and what are they for?

Everything big is made up of small things. In music it is no different. Music is an art composed of many details that allows it to have an impressive diversity. As in writing text, just changing a letter or placing a comma can change the meaning of an entire sentence. In music, changing the length of just one note or adding a rest can alter an entire phrase. In this article by a TEACHER we will talk about musical ligatures, one of those elements in music that allows us to make variations by altering the notes.

Index

1. Concepts to understand ligature in music
2. What is musical ligature
3. Functions of the musical ligature

Before we talk about musical ligatures, it is important that let's understand other concepts so that we have everything very clear.

Musical figures and duration

In musical writing we have different figures. Notes, which are those symbols on the staff that tell us which notes to play on an instrument, have different shapes. These forms show us the

Compass and meter

The way to measure parts in music is with a unit called “compass" that in the staff we can visualize it when the staff is divided by a vertical line. In a measure we can write a limit of notes, this limit is indicated by a number in the form of a fraction that is written right at the beginning of the staff. We call this number "metrics" He is responsible for letting us know how many notes we can write in one measure and when we should move on to the next.

Rhythmic

The rhythm It can become a concept that we easily confuse with other elements of music, but if we establish it simply, the rhythm is the succession of individual sounds. When we place one sound after the other (regardless of whether they are in tune) we are already creating rhythm. The interesting thing about rhythm is all the possibilities that we can create with musical figures.

Image: pentagram city

Basically, the musical ligature is when we join 2 or more musical figures (the same or different) in the same sound, so that their durations add to each other. The musician knows that when viewing a ligature, only the first note that generates the sound is played, and leaves it playing until the ligature ends.

For this to happen, it is important to mention that it must be the same musical note (sol + sol, re + re, etc.) or a same surface when we speak of percussive instruments (we would use the same drum, cymbal or element of percussion). It is worth mentioning that silences never bind, since in reality a silence is by definition the absence of a note.

Music is known to be closely related to mathematics, so to talk about musical ligatures we need to mention numbers. For example, if we link a round with a half note: a round one lasts 4 times, and a half one lasts 2 times. In other words, if we link these two figures, the total time the note keeps sounding is 6 beats. (4+2=6).

Image: YouTube

In addition to the fact of wanting to prolong a note, we also use the musical ligature for 2 reasons more: to make the music easier to read and to join the last note of a measure with the first of the following. Below we analyze these two functions so that you better understand what musical ligatures are.

Make it easier for the musician to read

There are times when rhythm can get very complex, but the goal of good music writing is to allow the musician to read as comfortably as possible. If the figure we want to make sounds difficult to read, we can afford to divide and bind it, to make it more visual and easy to understand. This does not alter its duration, we simply write it differently.

There is a concept that we use frequently: the “imaginary line". The imaginary line is a line that we mentally place (it is not written on the staff) to divide a measure into 2 or more fractions. Since dividing the totals allows us to better analyze the parts, this allows us to simplify a measure that can be very complex rhythmically. The objective when using this imaginary line is that the musical figures that we write do not cross this line by themselves.

For example: if we have a half note in the second half of a 4/4 bar, it might be easier to think of this half as 2 linked quarter notes. In this way we can much more easily visualize the imaginary line that divides the measure in half.

Union of notes in different measure

Just because a measure has ended does not necessarily mean that the sound must also end. When we want the last note of a measure keep playing until the next measure, we link that note with the first one of the next one. It is even common that if we want a note to last for a long time, the figure is linked for 2 or more bars.

Music is a vast world to explore, the more elements we know, the better we will take advantage of musical diversity, or create richer music. Lusical ligature is just one of many elements that we can play with to create interesting things.

Image: blogdeclasedavid.blogspot.com

If you want to read more articles similar to What are musical ligatures and what are they for?, we recommend that you enter our category of Musical language.