Annotation for Lester, Joel
Notated and Heard Meter
Annotation (by Bill Tilghman):
- In this article Lester argues that in many 20th-century
compositions the precise notation of rhythm in the composer's
score, using conventional meters and durational values, should
not be considered an accurate representation of the way the music
is rhythmically perceived by listeners. Therefore, analyses of
these works that assume the same correspondence of notated
durations to perceived durations that we assume in tonal music
may well be misdirected. Lester begins with a brief examination
of the nature and function of meter in tonal music, emphasizing
how various types of accentuation create and generally reinforce
the multiple nested levels of pulses that we perceive as meter,
and how these pulses mark off the functionally equivalent
units of time that allow us to perceive durations of musical
events in a way that usually relates closely to the way these
durations are notated. (This discussion summarizes points made in
Lester
1986.) Lester contrasts this with the
situation in much post-tonal music (two pieces by Babbitt serve
as examples), where the relative lack of regularly-recurring
accents of any kind makes the establishment of a metric hierarchy
highly unlikely. In the absence of such a metric grid, listeners
will have difficulty perceiving the structural meaning that
derives from an event's particular metric placement
(anticipating, delaying, etc.), the durations of events (since
this is measured in terms of functionally-equivalent metric units
rather than literal clock time), or even the tempo of the music
(since this depends on the establishment of at least one salient
level of pulse), at least as they appear in the notation. The
challenge for theorists is to create an analytical model that
accords with listeners' perceptions rather than with performers'
notations.
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