Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 10, 2016

I’d hate to be his drummer.

1100+ lengths??? That’s over 15 miles!

I did countless laps. Simple.

“I stopped counting after the first lap.”“But you only did one lap!”“Like I said, I stopped counting after the first lap.”

Jef makes a better effort to make music notation correct than any cartoonist since Charles Schultz. Still a couple of mistakes, though. Keep trying!

The joke is supposed to be that he CAN count (in music) but can’t count in swimming. Trouble is, he CAN’T COUNT in music, either. More than a few mistakes there.

I remember singing a song or two in college that switched from 4/4 time to 5/4 (and 7/4!!!) time for a measure or two — definitely an odd, yet oddly effective, technique. And while I’ve never seen 3/8 or 9/8 time, I have seen 12/8 time before.

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” theme (from Disney’s Fantasia) is a known tune composed in the rare 3/8 time. It is similar to counting in 3/4 time. The “Mission: Impossible” theme is a known tune composed in the rare 5/4 time. Not much outside of classical music for 9/8 time, a common one being J.S. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring”.

How can their be written mistakes in music?….There are no rules anymore!…….The Dead did all kind of crazy things with rhythm…..Sounded great to me…..

Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Chichester Psalms’ is written in pretty much any tempo except 3/4, 4/4, or anything else remotely normal. When our church choir did it, I think I just went with the flow and didn’t really try to count it. For one thing, I was trying very hard to keep up with the phonetic Hebrew. It was a weird sort of fun, though.I thought maybe he was keeping time to various swimming strokes—or multiplying the number or feet or yards he’d done. . .

I can only keep an accurate count of my laps when I’m in a 50 metre pool. In a 25 metre pool I usually lose count past the 600 metre point. Meh, who cares. I just go for time rather than distance. An hour of swimming is an hour of swimming.

maybe Frazz should have set his swimming regimen to music!

From Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, there’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk” which has a 9/8 section.

Take Five, Frazz…

It all makes sense in hex …

Never had the problem back in the 40s when I began playing flute. Professional lessons for years. However timing was a bear. Some music would change the timing like Frazz’s piano score. Then began playing tenor banjo in the 50’s. Finally learned timing when playing Dixieland with other instruments, & then late 5-string in folk music. Now at 80, mouse droppings on music are hard to read fast enough to manage tricky timing.

Are any of these identifiable?

puddleglum10669/8 is use in both the hymn Blessed Assurance and Foster’s Beautiful Dreamer. Just don’t combine the words of the former with the tune of the latter – it makes it even more saccharine than the original.

Whenever I lose count, I just pick the highest number I’m sure of (which equals the lowest of the alternatives, in the case above it would be 1100). Then I can just say “at least 1000m”. Maybe it was 1150 but definitely 1000.