Calls and Responses

Abstract

The animating claim of Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm is that meter is a phenomenon which is produced as it goes along. Hasty's theory is rooted in embodied-cognitive acts of experiencing music and marks an important intervention into how we understand the structure of that experience. It does so by working from within the contours of experience and how the interrelations of (passive) past, (active) present and (projections towards) future events give shape to those contours and how we come to understand them. Equally important, it offers an expansive process-oriented conception of what metre is in the first place, eschewing metaphors such as 'container' or 'grid' that assume metre to be an abstract and consistent structuring phenomenon which organises a musical surface in some way, which we can characterise straightforwardly by noting how many beats there are in a bar, how those beats are subdivided, and the like. As Justin London suggests in his 'many metres hypothesis', We do not encounter "generic 4/4" […] but a pattern of timing and dynamics that is particular to the piece, the performer, and the musical style. Therefore, to give an ecologically valid account of meter, we must move beyond a theory of tempo-metrical types to a metrical representation that involves particular timing relationships […]. (London 2004, p. 159) 276Music Analysis, 42/ii (2023)