One. 3/4 time translates to 3 beats per measure, and quarter note getting one beat.

[The original answer is succinct and remains the one-line response to the question, but usually, when someone asks a question like this, it is a sign that they need some fundamental explanation of how time signatures work, and how our notation system arrived at its current condition. The following is an attempt to provide this background.]

Our music notation system is now about a millennium old. The notation of durations (lengths of notes in time) is much shorter, however. The note names (letter names) go back to the 9th Century, or before. Duration symbols go back at least to the 12th C, although for much of the first half of their existence, many of the signs did not have an absolute meaning.

The modern system has been in the current form, for the most part, for a mere 300 years, or so. A direct line of succession can be drawn, however, from the black, mensural notation system of the late 13th C. We'll join that process in the 14th century, however, for a brief look at those components which influenced today's system:

The basic note shapes (more different forms than we use today) were the Brevis, Semibrevis, Minima, Semiminima, Fusa and SemiFusa. The notes were drawn with a square-nib pen, which easily made thick and thin lines (by using the thin or thick dimensions of the tip.) The brevis was rectangular, the semibrevis oblique, forming a shape that has been called diamond or lozenge, a square with it's points aimed at the four compass points. A line was added vertically from the upper-most or lower-most point for smaller notes, the minima appearing as a semibrevis with such a tail. The Semiminima appeared as a minima with the head filled in, the Fusa added a flag, the semifusa added two, and so on.

The shapes rounded in time, probably for speed of writing, and the way of beating time shifted to shorter values. European names for the largest notes are largely Anglicizations of the latin originals: Breve and Semibreve (double Whole note and whole note in America). The minim got renamed Quaver (quarter note in America) and continued divisions got "half" prefixes: hemi, semi, demi, etc.

The mensural notation for time (which indicated how many smaller notes the Breve and Semibreve divided into as well as a sense of how fast to count the 'tactus') had a tight relationship to the idea of perfection (probably also related to the concept of the Trinity): Perfect referred to division by 3, Imperfect to division by two. Additional terms (Tempus and Prolation) referred to the Breve and Semibreve, so that Tempus Perfecta (Perfect Time, loosely) meant the breve was divided into 3 semibreves, while Tempus Imperfecta meant the Breve was divided into two (binary). Although we have abandoned the idea of a note shape referring to two different quantities of next-smaller notes, we have kept the concept in triplets and compound (12/8, 9/8, etc) time signatures. The signs for Tempus (division of the Breve) were a circle (perfecta, unbroken) and C (a broken circle, imperfecta) and for Prolation (the division of the Semibreve) the presence (perfecta) or absence (imperfecta) of a dot in the center of the larger Tempus sign. Also, a slash through the sign would indicate doubling of speed (most of the time) and C printed backwards (with the points to the left) indicated quadrupling.

The tactus was not a simple beat concept: the tactus was essentially the measure (mensure). For Imperfect time, the leader or teacher would beat down with the hand for the first half of the tactus and up for the second, for perfect time, down for the first two thirds, then up for the last third (leading into the down stroke for the next mensure.)

To make things more interesting, proportion signs were used. 3 over 2 (it's not really a fraction!) indicated that the duration that previously contained two of a particular note would now contain three: i.e., another form of triplet notation. This was "cancelled" by the inverse sign: 2 over 3, which would make the notes revert to their earlier durations. Some theorists went way overboard with this concept, producing pieces which were pretty much impossible to perform accurately.

The modern system, then, dispensed with most of the mensuration signs, although it kept C and C with a slash as being 4/4 and 2/2, respectively, and modified the proportion signs into a system of time signatures, using "bar lines" to mark the measure (mensure) explicitly, and stating how many parts the measure was to be divided into, and which note type was used for the division. 4/4, then, is 4 divisions of a measure, with a quarter note (the old Fusa, rounded off) 'filling each division'. 3/4 means the measure is 3 quarternotes long, 2/2 means two half-notes in each measure.

The actual beating of each measure is left to the conductor (or leader), although it has become tradition to beat quarters in slower music and half notes in faster music. However, this is not a hard and fast rule: in compound time, it is presumed that the beat falls on dotted-quarter-notes, and so each subunit of the measure is composed of three eighths. Additionally, 3/4 time might be beat on every quarter, but often, especially in quicker music derived from dances, the leader will beat the measure.

What 3/4 really _doesn't_ mean, despite decades of school children being told so, is "three beats to the measure and the quarternote gets one beat." The difference between that and "The measure has three divisions, and each one is a quarternote" is just considered too fine to bother with.

Resources

Top Categories

Product

Company