Hasty's Meter as Rhythm

‘Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm’

This is the English version of a commissioned piece that appears in German in Musikschrifttum 1: Musiktheorie, edited by Ullrich Scheideler and Felix Wörner. Bärenreiter and Metzler, 2015.

In Meter as Rhythm, Christopher Hasty offers a radical alternative to conventional oppositional accounts that cast meter as a fixed set of locations or timepoints and rhythm as the variegated expressive shapes that occupy the space that meter delineates. In challenging this viewpoint, Hasty is attempting “to take meter seriously” (Hasty 1999, 292) by considering it not as a container or frame within which rhythms occur but as an active, vital rhythmic impulse itself. This involves emphasising process over product, becoming over being, and qualitative change over quantitative measurement. Hasty acknowledges the influence of A. N. Whitehead on his theory; Whitehead, like Bergson, holds that there are no unchanged substances and that being is always conditioned by the qualitative flux of becoming. In asserting that meter is a constitutive process, Hasty rejects the notion that duration is an abstraction removed from the musical events that constitute it. Instead, meter is a “process whereby completed, durationally determinate events (not timepoints) can condition newly emerging events” (Hasty 1999, 283). Why not timepoints? Because Hasty asks us to consider the events that define metric identity through the totality of their durational existence, as inseparable from, irreducible to, and constitutive of duration.

Hasty’s theory is founded on the notion of durational projection. A projective account considers durations as active events. An event begins, and while it is taking place its durational identity is yet to be determined; it is only when it gives way to a new beginning that it is completed (or “past”) and that it acquires projective durational potential, which may or may not be actualized in a new event. While an event is present, therefore, it has a dual identity: it is determinate because it has begun and indeterminate because its identity is not yet known, since it is still in the process of becoming. Beginning, therefore, engenders a potential for duration. When a duration ends, there is no longer becoming: the event has become. End—defined in two ways, as an “aim” or “goal” and as “cessation,” “stop,” or “limit”—is thus a denial of the ongoingness of activity that beginning engendered. The aim or goal of becoming is the identity of the event; the point at which it gives way to the next event is the point at which it ceases or stops. Thus two definitions of “end”: an aim while the event is becoming, a cessation thereafter. It is the beginning of the new event that “makes past” the first event, giving the first event its duration. This first event can then project its durational potential onto the new event. In this way the two events are co-constitutive: it is not until the first event ends that it has projective potential, which is then projected onto the new event.

Second events can also behave as continuations that “will participate in the becoming of an event previously begun” (104). The first event is past, but “present” in its implications for the becoming of the new event. Continuation signifies a decision not to think of the new event as a new beginning, and therefore not to make the first event past. In the example below (following Hasty’s Example 9.5, p. 109), there is a new event at “R” (giving durational determinacy to the first event, which is then projected as durational potential onto the new event), but if we choose to interpret (that is, if there is some phenomenological reason for choosing to interpret) the new event as a continuation, then multiple strata of projective activity result.

In this example, beginning and continuation are construed at at least one level as one event. Note that (1) Q’ is not a continuation for Q; it is a continuation of Q for S (at the bar-measure level), (2) Q’ is a new beginning for Q (at the half-note level), and (3) R’ is a continuation of R (at the quarter-note level) and for Q’.

Once beginning and continuation are understood, Hasty refines some of his terms to reflect specific musical behaviors that might impact metrical interpretation. The most important of these is anacrusis, which is a particular kind of continuation that, rather than looking back to the beginning, is connected cognitively to the next beginning. Another important concept is deferral, which is an action often found in triple meter whereby an expected new beginning is recast as a further continuation of the present event.

Hasty unpacks the implications of his theory through a series of close readings of musical excerpts, each serving to illuminate a particular aspect of durational projection as it applies to meter. For example, in his analysis of the Courante from Bach’s C Major Cello Suite, BWV 1009, Hasty challenges sedimented notions of metric identity, asking if every bar of 3/4 of the Courante is the same measure of 3/4. A reading that suggests so is impoverished (at best); Hasty demonstrates how the particularity of events in each measure, with the projective/projected potentials that result, is much more variegated than a traditional metric reading would allow. This becomes more clear when Hasty compares two Courantes. In the Eb Major Courante (BWV 1010), contrasts of harmonic motion and stasis are interpreted as real metric events, and Hasty makes a case both for a radically different metric reading from that of the C Major Courante and for different interpretations at different points in the Eb Major Courante itself, based on new projective information that emerges over the course of its unfolding.

After a detailed engagement with Beethoven’s Symphony no. 1, Hasty expands the scope of his theory to consider its relevance for a number of pre- and post-tonal repertoires. In an analysis of Monteverdi’s “Ohimè, se tanto amate,” Hasty describes projective implications that suggest a displacement of the notated meter. This is achieved by anacrusic deferral, extending the two co-dependent events

/ \ (or anacrusis → continuation)

/ \ (| → \) (new beginning recast as deferral),

leading to the displaced next beginning. In this graphic illustration, the third event is expected to be a new beginning based on the projective implications of the first pair, but is reinterpreted as a deferral that points to a new beginning, which subsequently validates this reading. There is strong support for this reading, since the new perceived event bears the trace of the rhythmic character of the first two two-bar measures. While these sorts of displacements are common, it is important to emphasize that here it is a projective action, the deferral of continuation that erases the expectation of a new beginning, that engenders the metric reinterpretation.

Hasty’s reading of this passage suggests some of the value of a theory of meter as projection. Since, as Hasty frequently notes, most metric/rhythmic theory focuses on Western art music between 1700 and 1900, there is cause to believe that those theories will apply problematically to earlier or later music. Indeed, Hasty’s argument is that traditional theories reduce meter to type in a way that is not even consonant with the musics that they do claim to represent. A projective account of meter as rhythm, stemming from focused, sensitive experience with the music as sounds manifesting in time, is repertoire-neutral and conceivably applicable to any musical experience. A number of recent theorists have begun to demonstrate this, considering groove-based popular music (Attas 2015; Butterfield 2006), and diasporic West African music (Stover 2009) from projective perspectives.

The last chapters of Meter as Rhythm turn to temporal issues in 20th-century Western art music. Works by Webern, Babbitt, Boulez, and Lutoslawski are read closely in terms of their meter-projective implications, and many perceptual challenges are foregrounded. In the analysis of Webern’s Quintet, op. 22, for example, durational condensations and accelerations are read as metric impulses; these interpretations are abetted by tonal, timbral, registral, and gestural phenomena, which taken together conspire to project durations that reveal nuanced metric disturbances—an expected continuation coming in too late, for instance.

While implicit throughout Hasty’s theory, the question of performative interpretation is foregrounded in the Webern analysis (and in aspects of the Bach analyses). This is complementary to the listener-orientation that drives most of Hasty’s narrative, and it does much to temper accusations of subjectivity. Hasty doesn’t go very far in unpacking the dialogue between interpretation/production and experience/reception, but there is much fruitful space for future research.

It is highly recommended by this author that, once the longer, more detailed analyses in the second half of the book have been reached, the reader spends some time with the pieces under investigation—listening carefully, repeatedly, without the score, thinking about the projective implications that emerge. This activity will be greatly rewarded once one returns to Hasty’s analyses, particularly since Hasty admits the subjective orientation of his theory and its openness to rival (or complementary) interpretations.

As many (even sympathetic) critics have noted, Hasty’s book is very challenging, both in the density of its philosophical rigor and in the novelty of its concepts. A fruitful entry into Hasty’s theory is his exchange with Justin London (London 1999; Hasty 1999). London’s critique is on logical—philosophical and cognitive grounds, and while London’s suggestion that cognitive studies have demonstrated that listeners do respond to metric impulses as something of a grid against which rhythm is construed is convincing, his philosophical argument is less so, and his mischaracterization of some of Hasty’s key concepts provides Hasty with a platform to clarify the more difficult aspects of his theory. Other related research includes an extended essay on the ongoing-ness of musical experience (Hasty 2010) and a forthcoming book, Thinking with Rhythm.

References

Robin Attas, “Form as Process: The Buildup Introduction in Popular Music” (Music Theory Spectrum 37/2, 2015) . Matthew Butterfield, “The Power of Anacrusis: Engendered Feeling in Groove-Based Musics” (Music Theory Online 12/4, 2006). Christopher Hasty, “Just in Time for More Dichotomies—A Hasty Response” (Music Theory Spectrum 21/2, 1999); “If Music is Ongoing Experience, What Might Music Theory Be: A Suggestion from the Drastic” (Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, 2010). Justin London, “Hasty’s Dichotomy” (Music Theory Spectrum 21/2, 1999). Chris Stover, A Theory of Flexible Rhythmic Spaces for Diasporic African Music (PhD Dissertation, University of Washington, 2009).