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Any of you composers know what they call a group of say, 9 notes that are to be played as if one beat?

I know what triplets are but I have NINE 32nd notes I need to play in a beat and I don't what to call them. They are 9 notes with a bracket sort of drawn over them (like the triplet bracket) and it has a '9' above the bracket.

TIA for any terminology clarification.

Nineplets?

Nonuplets.

^

No, those are clearly uplets.

Thanks everyone for the help on that one. Does anyone know the answer to another question? This is driving me crazy:

If a piece is in 6/8 time, 6 beats per measure and the eighth note gets the beat, how does one represent a measure where one would need a note to represent 5 eighth notes? I can't figure it out. A dotted quarter equals 3 eighth notes and a dotted half is 6, what's 5???

A dotted 8th tied to an 8th.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Wait, you meant dotted half tied to eighth I think?

Or a half tied to an eighth!!! Yes, that's it. That's 5 beats.

No, he meant dotted quarter tied to quarter.

Terry, in choosing how to represent a note duration, the underlying beat structure must be made apparent. In 6/8, the bar is conceptualized as two subcollections of 3 eighth notes each. So to represent 5 eighth notes, if they start on the downbeat, the convention is to choose a combination that makes it easy to see the location of the subcollections. That means a dotted quarter (for the first subcollection) tied to a quarter (which shows where the second subcollection starts).

The proposal of half note tied to quarter note, while it does reflect 5 eighth notes, obscures the midpoint of the bar where the second subcollection starts, and so it would not be used.

The showing of subcollections is a little more subtle than I have said -- for example a dotted half note is used to show the whole bar, and this does not show the second subcollection. Study some professionally engraved music in various time signatures to start to get a sense of how this works -- particularly study the choice of ties and beams.

bingo!

Sorry...

Thank you everyone and Pianostudent88 for such a detailed explanation. Very helpful. I never thought of midway points or sub collections within the bar. Makes perfect sense. It's a way of being 'musician friendly' perhaps.

To be more specific it's a way of showing where the beats are in a compound meter. What pianostudent88 was saying is that 6/8 is really a duple meter (in 2) with each beat subdivided into three. While the time signature specifies the 8th note gets the beat that's not really true in a compound meter. The 8th note denotes the sub-dividing beat. The same is true of 9/8 and 12/8.

Thanks Steve for your insight.