In last Saturday’s guitar orchestra rehearsal, I marvelled the hemioles we played in one of our pieces. A fellow guitarist remarked, “six, eight, three, four.” I declared that I’d write a piece that included hemioles. For the rest of the day, I thought about how I’d do it. Can it be a solo instrumental piece or does it have to be a duet? I couldn’t sleep that night without writing hemiole guacamole.
The term hemiole, also spelled hemiola, refers to a rhythmic device in music, specifically a rhythmic shift where three beats are grouped as if they were two.
One example is in the song in West Side Story — the lyrics “I want to be in America.” You hear the six eighth notes “I want to be in A-” followed by three quarter notes “mer- i – ca.”
Another example is the instrumental guitar interlude in George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”
Read more about it here. There are two kinds of hemiole. I use the horizontal one (across time). The vertical one is stacking through multiple parts (players). Hemiole is an example of polyrhythm.
I used several musical devices in this pieces besides the hemiole in bar 4 shown above.
The others are explored in my next pieces:
- arpeggio
- descending line
- moveable chord shapes
