Weirdest time signatures in traditional prog

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 Awesoreno wrote:

Sometimes the artistry comes from how the time signatures work mathematically. You don't have to do everything by "feel." For many, the "feel" comes from the novelty of the numbers. Art comes in all forms, it's a reflection of life. Sometimes, life is about emotions, and other times, it involves ordered patterns, equations, forms, etc. So I'm sure math rockers wouldn't appreciate an attack on their art. It is every bit as valid as dreaming away music. And don't me started on Jazz. The best Jazz artists practiced for hours on the numbers and the math that comes with tonality, scales, chords, key signatures, chromaticism, etc. Only then could they do it effortlessly by feel. 

Hi,

I was just reading a book about this idea of not knowing anything. And the story goes that actor Paul Scofield did over one hundred performances of it, and when it came to "... never, never, never, never, never ... " it never even occurred to him that he did it differently every night and no one thought it wasn't right, or good. And he was the type of actor that would tell you ... I don't want to know ... because he had the intuition and ability to speak the words correctly and get the point across. 

In our younger days, when we were learning an instrument, we didn't know music, and even though we were told to do this and that, many of us, specially those that ended up in the rock medium, or even jazz medium, plainly continued with what they were hearing by themselves and to make sense of it ... and that "learning" is often more important than the actual teachers and schools ... because in it, you find your sense of yourself ...NEVER defined by the notes or the "music" that you are supposed to learn.

At this point, coming up with something different that we will "define" as a different time signature is quite often very weird ... and out of place ... it could have come from a space that we never knew was there, but it helped create something that stuck, and you improved on it.

"Prog" and "Progressive" mostly showed that music could be different and attuned to something else ... and the time signatures may have been there, however they were not the element that made the music shine, although folks ... way later when the music was written down ... thought it was a great composition, and sometimes this is a perfect example of how we misplace the learning with respect to "time" and "our abilities" ... we did what felt right to us ... and the notes did not matter as much as the feeling that the weird change created.

Seeing some time changes in many a piece of music today, we always fail to realize how this is SEEN way AFTER it was created. None of the artists really discussed these things ... but with some credit to Herbie Hancock, he only knew his stuff learned in school when he got on with Miles, and it probably taught him that what he did in the background, did not interfere with Miles playing and continuity ... and this is a completely different kind of learning that you can not get in school ... it's all, at that moment, about your experience and how you reacted to it.