49.91The larger lesson from Workshops 42–49

We can now manipulate time in several fundamentally different ways:

Odd meter: change the size of the bar.

Additive meter: build the bar from unequal groups.

Hemiola/polyrhythm: hear multiple groupings simultaneously.

Clave: organize events around a multi-bar rhythmic timeline.

Displacement: shift a familiar idea within a stable meter.

Odd-length cycle: let motif and bar have incompatible periodicities.

Metric illusion: make one layer suggest another meter without changing the underlying meter.

These are different compositional tools.