Meter As Rhythm

In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration. Drawing on insights from modern "process" philosophy, he advances a fully temporal perspective in which meter is released from its mechanistic connotations and recognized as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Part one of the book reviews oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy in the speculations of theorists from the eighteenth century to the present. Part two reinterprets these contrasts to form a highly original account of meter that engages diverse musical repertories and aesthetic issues.

""In thinking about music it is difficult to avoid representing any concrete instance as if it were a stable and essentially pre-formed entity composed of fully determinate and ultimately static objects or relations. Certainly, in the actual performance of music there is no escaping the contingency and indeterminacy that inhere in every temporal act. When we attempt to analyze the musical event, however, it is most convenient to imagine that the intricate web of relationships that comes into play on such an occasion has already been woven in a prior compositional act or in a determinate and determining order of values and beliefs. We can, for example, point to the score as a fixed set of instructions for the recreation of an essentially self-same work or as a repository wherein the traces of a composer's thought lie encoded awaiting faithful decoding by a receptive performer/listener. Or, with even greater abstraction, we can point to the presence of an underlying tonal system, the governing rules of a style or "common practice," the reflection of a set of existing social relations, or the role of hardened ideologies in music's production and reception. It must be said that there is some truth in the variety of determinacies that intellectual analysis would ascribe to music (if little truth in the claims of any one perspective to speak for the whole). But it must also be said that, to the extent the abstractions of analysis deny or suppress the creativity, spontaneity, and novelty of actual musical experience, analysis will have misrepresented music's inescapably temporal nature. The challenge of taking this temporal nature into account lies in finding ways of speaking of music's very evanescence and thus of developing concepts that would capture both the determinacy and the indeterminacy of events in passage. Stated in this way, such an enterprise appears to be loaded with paradox. However, much of the paradox disappears if we can shift our attention from objects or products to process and from static being to dynamic becoming. Indeed, such a shift might provide a perspective from which the great variety of determinacies we ascribe to music could be seen as inseparable components of musical communication. ""--

Patterns is one of the most comprehensive drum methods available. Covering a wide range of materials, the books can be used in any order, or in any combination with one another. They are a must for developing the kinds of skills necessary for drumset performance. Rhythm and Meter Patterns introduces the student to a wide range of rhythmic and metric possibilities, including odd rhythms, mixed meters, polyrhythms, and metric modulation.

In this book Christopher Hasty presents a striking new theory of musical duration. Drawing on insights from modern "process" philosophy, he advances a fully temporal perspective in which meter is released from its mechanistic connotations and recognized as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Part one of the book reviews oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy in the speculations of theorists from the eighteenth century to the present. Part two reinterprets these contrasts to form a highly original account of meter that engages diverse musical repertories and aesthetic issues.

Table of contents

Hearing Rhythm and Meter: Analyzing Metrical Consonance and Dissonance in Common-Practice Period Music is the first book to present a comprehensive course text on advanced analysis of rhythm and meter. This book brings together the insights of recent scholarship on rhythm and meter in a clear and engaging presentation, enabling students to understand topics including hypermeter and metrical dissonance. From the Baroque to the Romantic era, Hearing Rhythm and Meter emphasizes listening, enabling students to recognize meters and metrical dissonances by type both with and without the score. The textbook includes exercises for each chapter and is supported by a full-score anthology. PURCHASING OPTIONS Textbook (Print Paperback): 978-0-8153-8448-9 Textbook (Print Hardback): 978-0-8153-8447-2 Textbook (eBook): 978-1-351-20431-6 Anthology (Print Paperback): 978-0-8153-9176-0 Anthology (Print Hardback): 978-0-367-34924-0 Anthology (eBook): 978-1-351-20083-7

Drawing on insights from the modern "process" philosophy of Bergson, William James, and A. N. Whitehead, Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm releases meter from its mechanistic connotations and recognizes it as a concrete, visceral agent of musical expression. Hasty reinterprets oppositions of law and freedom, structure and process, determinacy and indeterminacy to form a theory that engages diverse repertories and aesthetic issues. The revised 20th anniversary edition facilitates the work's current contexts of application, from new subfields in ethnomusicology and music cognition to non-music fields like literary studies, physics, and biology.

Part II systematically develops a fully temporal theory of meter that engages a variety of interpretive possibilities open to the performer. Here analyses of music from the early 17th century to the mid-20th century demonstrate the explanatory power of the theory and address broader issues of musical rhythm. The concluding chapters open the theory to more general questions of musical experience and its theoretical representation.