Time Signatures in Modern Music

Sammanfattning: In the beginning of the 20th Century with the emergence of a new musical language as the Second Viennese School (Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern) took over, suddenly music pushed forward and away from traditional harmony, rhythm and even notation. Music started to lose its traditional feel of patterns, cadences and regularity and instead embraced new complexity, as composers started to avoid time signature patterns, tonal melodies, and harmonies. Throughout this thesis, new experimental notation methods were analysed in a way of confronting the traditional way of using bar lines and time signatures. Avant-gardists such as Witold Lutosławski formulated their own way of expressing this new, modern, and more complex idiomatic music. Furthermore, I describe my own thoughts, perception on my piece Butterflies for Norrköping Symphony Orchestra as well as interviews with people from different areas within the spectrum of this theme. A clear view of the genuine necessity why time signatures were traditionally used in contrast to what music has nowadays evolved.