In music, why do they have cut-time when they can just write the music in common time?
by 
camjam
ANSWERS: 4
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It has to do with the difference between rhythm and pulsation, between the count and the beat. Cut time looks at first glance like 4/4, but it's really 2/2, felt and conducted in two beats per measure, not four, because of the tempo and the assignment of single pulsations to half notes. Listen to a Sousa march and try to count it in four -- just doesn't work (and of course you would march to it at two beats per measure). So why can't such music just be written in 2/4? It can be, and many marches are, with all the note values half of the cut time equivalent. But that's not always convenient, or just not the way the composer felt the situation. And there are almost certainly historical reasons I don't know -- that's almost always true when we come to ask why music notation is one way rather than another.
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Depending if, you: Question asker. knows how written music works. You may know that cut time is usually used in marches or anykind of upbeat song: Stars and Stirpes Forever, On Wisconsin. These song have cut time signitures. I have no idea on why they decided to invent cut time, but I would have imagined that all the sixteenth notes and eighth note bars were getting irratating. So they wrote it a different way.
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We consider the two time signatures cut-time (2/2) and common time (4/4). So why take 2 and not 4 as a beat unit (the bottom number of a time signature)? - Sometimes, the choice of beat unit is simply down to tradition - At other times, the choice of beat unit note can give subtle hints as to the character of the music: for example, time signatures with a longer beat unit (such as 3/2) can be used for pieces in a quick tempo to convey a sense of the time flying by. (borrowed from the very good Wikipedia article "Time signature", paragraph "Rewriting meters"; "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_signature" )
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Some songs will change between half time, common time and cut time. When reading a chart, switching between those times, the page can get muddled and confusing. Its sometimes easier to just change the time signature than to write a bunch of 16th notes.
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