Annotation for Hasty, Christopher
Meter as Rhythm
Annotation (by Jeanne Bamberger):
- This is a highly significant and original approach to the big question of the relation between meter and rhythm. Hasty argues that meter, rather then being a static and invariant measure uninfluenced by context, is a generative process which is actively "becoming"--i.e., being recreated in the course of a work's unfolding through time. In this sense it is as dynamic and as context dependent as a unique phrase, a motive, or a rhythm. He develops a new theoretical framework which can take into account the continuousness of time and movement as necessary to any analysis of musical structure. According to the author, "To take measurements or to analyze and compare patterns we must arrest the flow of music and seek quantitative representations of musical events. But music as experienced is never so arrested and is not...an expression of numerical quantity. To the extent we find it comprehensible, music is organized; but this is an organization that is communicated in process and cannot be captured or held fast. What we can hold onto are spatial representations (scores, diagrams, time lines) .... However, a piece of music or any of its parts, while it is going on, is incomplete and not fully determinate--while it is going on, it is open, indeterminate, and in the process of becoming a piece of music or a part of that piece." P. 3
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