Sextuple meter (British metre) or sextuple time (chiefly British) is a musical meter characterized by six beats in a measure. The beats most commonly have the pattern strong-weak-weak-medium-weak-weak, though this is not the only possibility. Like the more common duple, triple, and quadruple meters, it may be simple, with each beat divided in half, or compound, with each beat divided into thirds. The most common time signatures for simple sextuple meter are 6
4 and 6
8, and compound sextuple meter is most often written in 18
8 or 18
16. A time signature of 18
8 or 18
16, however, does not necessarily mean that the bar is a sextuple meter with each beat divided into three. It may, for example, be used to indicate a bar of triple meter in which each beat is subdivided into six parts. In this case, the meter is sometimes characterized as "triple sextuple time". Such a division of time may be encountered more frequently in the Baroque period: for example, variation 26 of the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach has 18
16 in one hand against 3
4 in the other, exchanging hands at intervals until the last five bars where both hands are in 18
16. Using 3
4 for both hands would result in continuous sextuplets.
Sextuple meter should not be confused with the similarly notated compound duple meter. While both are notated with time signatures that have 6 as the top number, the former has six beats to a bar, while the latter has two beats to a bar. In practice, 6
4 is more commonly used for sextuple meter and 6
8 or 6
16 for compound duple meter. When 6
8 is used to signify sextuple meter, often the words "in six" or the equivalent in other languages are used to clarify the meter. An example of a piece in true sextuple time (notated as 6
4) is Charles-Valentin Alkan's Odi profanum vulgus et arceo: Favete linguis in E♭ minor, No. 34 of his 49 Esquisses; No. 12 of that set, Barcarollette, also in E♭ minor, is in compound sextuple time (18
8).