Meter as Rhythm

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.

""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. ""--

"[A] significant contribution to the study of the temporal aspects of music."--Choice

"As a seminal text on the theory of temporality, Christopher Hasty's Meter As Rhythm remains relevant to music scholarship today. In fact I would argue it is�more relevant today than ever. Rhythm has become one of the most important subjects of study today, in music theory, popular music, and world music alike." -- Nancy Yunhwa Rao, Professor of Music, Department of Music, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

"Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm is a foundational text in contemporary music theory. Hasty's accomplishment still unparalleled in any other existing study of meter, historical or contemporary was to encourage a complete revision of our core beliefs concerning this musical phenomenon along the lines of process philosophy. With acute sensitivity to the history of ideas surrounding temporality and to the minutiae of music's phenomenal unfolding, Hasty's book offers a distinctive theory of meter. It is a document to which all subsequent theories of musical temporality must respond." -- Roger Mathew Grant, Associate Professor of Music, Wesleyan University