This article explores manipulations of the nearly ever-present backbeat in rock music from the “long” 1980s. The status of the backbeat as not only metrically consonant but a defining feature of rock meter is discussed within the context of dual-aspect meter. Operating from the assumption that isochronous snare drum hits in rock are heard as a backbeat, placing those snare drum hits on beats other than 2 and 4 creates a particular kind of metrical dissonance, which I refer to as a backbeat switch. I examine two ways in which a backbeat switch occurs, the quick flip and the polymetric pogo. A quick flip usually occurs at a phrase break, where the drummer apparently (but intentionally) “drops a beat” and then resumes the backbeat pattern, thus shifting it “to the left.” A polymetric pogo involves a situation where the backbeat-insistent drummer is pitted against the rest of the band playing in an odd-cardinality meter, resulting in snare hits that bounce back and forth between even-numbered beats and odd-numbered beats every other measure. Short examples by The Cars, Paul Weller, Steve Vai, and Sting are used to demonstrate the article’s fundamental concepts, and longer examples by Tesla, Jerry Goldsmith, and Extreme place these concepts into larger contexts.
Iuriĭ Kholopov’s Garmonicheskiĭ analiz (Harmonic analysis) is a three-volume anthology, intended to accompany his textbook Garmoniia: Prakticheskiĭ kurs (Harmony: a practical course), which formed the basis of the harmony courses he taught at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1980s. This paper provides a small glimpse into the anthology, particularly volume 3. This volume, which deals primarily with non-tonal music of the twentieth century, is the only one with its own subtitle: hemitonicism. The subtitle refers to a simple, intuitive analytical system in which groups of intervals that involve one or more semitones play a prominent role. The paper concludes with an examination of Kholopov’s analysis of Denisov’s Romanticheskaia muzyka (Romantic Music) for oboe, harp, and string trio (1968), a representative example of the analyses in Garmonicheskiĭ analiz’s third volume.
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