Transcript for the Piece Audio version of WNYC's Fishko Files: Five Four Time

Five Four Time Script

Among the most celebrated themes in TV history is Lalo Schifrin’s piece written for Mission Impossible. One of the appealing things about it, whether you’re aware of it or not, is that it is written in 5/4 time. 5 beats to the measure, instead of the usual 3 or 4. Count and you’ll see; 1,2,3,4,5; 1,2,3,4,5. It was written in the 1960’s, for that iconic television series. You’d think by now, in our very sophisticated 21st century world, 5/4 time would be commonplace. But in Western music, it’s not; and it never was! In fact in the world of musical rhythms, things started out much more ambiguous than they have become….

...there was a time if we look back for example, to medieval music where you have endless streams of notes that form vague contours….(Isacoff 1:00)

By vague contours, Pianist and writer Stuart Isacoff means no strict rhythm or beat. But a beat IS the norm nowadays…

… people tend to need some kind of an anchor, to feel that there’s an organization happening rhythmically in the music….(Isacoff same as above)

What rhythm? What beat? Why 3’s and 4’s, of course; that’s what we’ve come to expect in the west. That must be why we’re so interested in something that departs from that –
Like music written in 5, or quintuple meter…

…you know, we have Tchaikovksy’s example, the famous so-called ‘waltz’ from the Pathetique symphony, which is of course, anything but a waltz…(Beckerman 13:20)
(he plays the theme)

Michael Beckerman, head of the Music Department at NYU, points to Tchaikovsky. Writing in the 1890’s. Wanting to do something a little different. Tchaikovsky wrote the second movement of the celebrated 6th symphony in 5, with a 3 –note figure, a triplet, which acts as a kind of diversionary tactic…

...(he plays and counts the melody, cross to the recording) (15:00)

He tried to mask it with the 3 note figure, but if you count it, you hear it. Five, plain as day.

What’s nice about 5 is that like other forms and time signatures and musical devices, it works as a means for personal expression: Tchaikovsky made it sound like Tchaikovsky.
James Reese Europe, the Harlem musician working in the early 20th century, used it too…
in a piece he wrote, in 5, for Vernon and Irene Castle, the famous dance team of the era…

…the piece is called the Castles half and half –and it’s supposedly called the half and half because it’s half of a fox trot, which is in 4, and half of a waltz, which is in 3…and the piece itself is really quite charming…(plays piece in 5) (Is. 9:25)

In that case Europe used five – or 3 and 2, really – to make a tune as absolutely characteristic of that just pre-jazz moment as it could have been.

And the restless Frederic Chopin, experimenting and improvising constantly, made a classically Chopin-sounding sonata movement that can be counted in five. Go ahead, count.

But if there was a moment when 5 exploded into the public consciousness, that was certainly the Brubeck moment. Brubeck’s excursion into 5 made his name and his fortune…

…Here we have 3 and 2 again, but it has a hotness to it.. What we have in Brubeck is a complicated rhythm, and it’s a rhythm that arises when you actually put 2 against 3. So that if you have one hand playing 2 and the other 3, you have for example: (he plays) and that gives it a kind of a different swinging lilt, and therefore we end up with this pattern. (Isacoff 14:45)

You would think that might have opened the floodgates for the use of 5. But you’d be wrong. No question that it heightened the awareness of it, in a lovely playful way; and some did follow…

…I remember when I was a kid there was a group called The Pentangle and they had a tune called ‘Light Flight’, which was: (sings), and it made them stand out in some ways from other groups because of taking that kind of metrical chance. (Beck. 16:00)

But 5 is still an oddball thing that musicians and listeners love to collect and admire.
Like this old favorite by Gustav Holst, Mars, Bringer of War, from The Planets. That’s in the collection. Are you counting?

These days it’s even become a LITTLE bit fashionable to make a statement in 5 by adding a beat to something written in 4. By that I mean something like the Richard Rodgers song “I didn’t know what time it was.” The song was written in 4, always played or sung in 4.
Pianist Brad Mehldau makes it into a sort of lopsided jazz waltz -- in 5.

So 5/4 in western music is less than a tradition, but more than a gimmick

... I think it’s also an idea, a concept, a throwing down a gauntlet in certain places and styles…it was cool to do 5’s and 7’s, and I think that persists and lingers today. You know Radiohead…
and it’s sort of a way of making a certain kind of point about where you stand…

It’s a way of saying I’m not going to get stuck in 3s and 4s like everybody else.

It’s as easy as…1,2,3,4,5.

From The Fishko Files, I’m Sara Fishko

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