Upbeat

What it means

An upbeat is the unstressed beginning before the first strong beat. The piece or phrase does not begin on the downbeat but, as it were, takes a run-up: one or more notes lead toward the first full bar. The upbeat already belongs rhythmically to the following phrase, even though it stands before the first bar line.

The upbeat is to be distinguished from the complete bar, which begins on the downbeat, and from the syncopation, in which an accent is displaced within the bar. The upbeat displaces nothing; it merely places something before. Within a piece too, individual phrases frequently begin with an upbeat, without an upbeat standing at the very beginning.

In the notation

At the start of a piece the upbeat bar is incomplete: it contains only as many note values as the upbeat is long. The missing remainder usually stands at the end of the piece, so that the first and last bars together yield a complete bar — an old convention that many but not all editions follow. With repeats the upbeat before the repeat sign is played along. The counting of bars as a rule begins only with the first complete bar.

Musical use

Upbeats are especially frequent in vocal music, because many words begin unstressed and the speech accent is to coincide with the musical one. Dance and march music too works with them: the upbeat produces the pull toward the downbeat and hence the forward-directed motion. In instrumental music the upbeat layout of many themes shapes their character, because the goal of the theme is reached only after the bar line.

Performance practice

Play the upbeat lighter than the following downbeat — it leads toward, it does not stand for itself. Count the missing beats inwardly before you enter, or the tempo is off from the start. With string players the upbeat as a rule belongs on the up-bow, so that the target note lies on the down-bow. And with repeats see that the upbeat is joined on again at the end, without a beat being lost.