Pretty much all music is made up of bars, organising and structuring time. And most often, bars are groups of 2, 3 or 4 beats.
So each bar has its own way of grouping notes within the bar – the time signature. For centuries, composers were happy to write a whole piece without ever changing the time signature midway through.
More recently, composers have sometimes wanted to change the natural stress patterns from one bar to the next. They do this by writing a new time signature whenever it needs to change. This can give the music an interesting lurch.
All the extracts at the top of this page come from a passage of Emerging Dances when the composer, David Horne, changes the time signature almost every bar. You can see this on the Explorer close-up below – the bars are different widths and lengths.
