Bob P. on Notating "Swing"
The question of exactly how to notate what are often called "swung eighths" is a fascinating one. What am I talking about? Well, starting at some ill-defined time in the late teens or early twenties (of the 20th century! - this is a Y2K compliant Web page!), popular American music started to be usually played with a certain lilt, or what much later started to be called "swing". There is another whole interesting question as to how and why this came about, which perhaps we'll address on another page sometime.
The question of exactly how to write this lilt down in music notation is the subject of this page. I'll use as our example the first theme of James P. Johnson's piece entitled "Caprice Rag". Johnson wrote this number at some time in the early to mid teens. He made a piano roll of it in 1917. The piece was published for the first time, as far as I know, in a folio entitled "Ragtime Piano" (Mills Music, 1963), although the book by Blesh & Janis "They All Played Ragtime" lists the piece as having been copyrighted in 1917 by Mills. Assuming I am correct, this piece is still under active copyright - only use this piece with the permission of the publisher (now Belwin-Mills).
The published form of the piece shows the first theme written out as a series of eighth notes. (To view the notation samples in this page, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader.) 
Interpreted literally and played rather slowly, the tune sounds like this:
Pretty uninteresting, eh? However, if one listens to James P.'s recording of the piece that he made in 1944, you find that he plays it VERY fast! At the composer's tempo, there actually is no possibility of putting in any noticable swing, and at that speed the published notation, again interpreted literally, seems to be quite a good representation of how the composer plays the piece:
So, since (I claim, anyway!) this sounds like the composer playing the piece, we're done, right? Maybe for this piece, we are, but let's look into this a little more.
The traditional way of indicating "swing" in printed sheet music is to write each pair of eighth notes (in 4/4 or cut time) as a dotted-eighth and a sixteenth. But in popular music of the 20th century this almost never was meant to be taken literally. There are several historical precedents for this kind of imprecise notation. For example, in music from the Baroque era in a Gigue movement written in 4/4, the dotted-eighth/sixteenth notation was meant to be played with the first note twice as long as the second, i.e. with a triplet feel.Here is a tune from a Handel sonata for violin and keyboard, interpreted exactly as it is written:
Well, although there is admittedly a certain perverse charm to that rather jumpy interpretation, it sounds kind of nervous, as though it keeps looking over its shoulder to see who's following it! The correct interpretation of the dotted eighth/sixteenth pairs is to 'round them off' to what would technically be written as a quarter note and an eighth note with a bracket over them and a '3'. The numeral 3 is short for 3:2, which in turn means these notes are meant to played at 2/3 of their usual duration (fit 3 of these into the time that would normally be occupied by 2 of them). This makes the Handel sound a lot smoother and more reasonable:
Now, in popular American music after about 1920 or a little earlier, a similar notational convention has been often employed. In 4/4 time, a dotted eighth/sixteenth pair has been meant to be interpreted in a more-or-less triplet feel.
Had "Caprice Rag" been written in dotted eighth/sixteenth pairs, and were that notation to be taken literally, it would sound something like this:
Gee, that's awful, isn't it? Sounds like it's tripping all over itself. But that was certainly never what was intended by this notation. A pure triplet feel, with the second note of each pair exactly half as long as the first note, which we might term 2:1 swing, would sound like this:
Now, that "pure triplet" feel is arguably too "prancy" for this tune, and although it seems that many piano rolls were cut exactly in this way, that live players tend to play a swing which is roughly midway between 1:1 and 2:1. That would be 1.5:1, or in integers, 3:2. When we play the excerpt in this way, that is, with the first note of each pair taking 3/5 of the beat and the second note the remaining 2/5 of the beat, what we get seems appropriate to a tempo a little slower than the frantic pace of the Johnson recording, but faster than the "old soft shoe shuffle" of 2:1 swing:
Exact notation of 3:2 swing is a little more unusual than the other "species" of swing. In fact, I've never seen an example of this notation, but here is one way of notating this, applied to our example:
Page first published June 14, 1999
Last updated June 19, 1999
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