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.

Christopher Hasty's scholarly work engages problems in the theory and analysis of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries from the standpoint of process and experience. His book Meter as Rhythm (1997) won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory for the Outstanding Music Theory Book of the Year. His current research interests include process philosophy, poetic prosody, and ecological and post-cognitivist psychology.

- PART I - METER AND RHYTHM COMPOSED - ONE - General Characterization of the Opposition - Periodicity and the Denial of Taste - Rhythmic Experience - Period versus Pattern; Metrical Accent versus Rhythmic Accent - TWO - Two Eighteenth-Century Views - THREE - Evaluations of Rhythm and Meter - FOUR - Distinctions of Rhythm and Meter in Three Influential American Studies - FIVE - Discontinuity of Number and Continuity of Tonal "Motion" - PART II - A THEORY OF METER AS PROCESS - SIX - Preliminary Definitions: - Begining, End, and Duration - "Now" - Durational Determinacy - SEVEN - Meter as Projection: - "Projection Defined" - Projection and Prediction - EIGHT - Precedents for a Theory of Projection - NINE - Some Traditional Questions of Meter Approached from the Perspective of Projective Process: - Accent - Division - Hierarchy - Anacrusis - Pulse and Beat - Metrical Types - Equal/Unequal - TEN - Metrical Particularity: - Particularity and Reproduction - Two Examples - ELEVEN - Obstacles to a View of Meter as Process: - Meter as Habit - "Large Scale Meter as Container (Hypermeter) - TWELVE - The Limits of Meter: - The Durational "Extent" of Projection - The Efficacy of Meter - Some Small Examples - THIRTEEN - Overlapping, End as Aim, Projective Types: - Overlapping - End as Aim - Projective Types - FOURTEEN - Problems of Meter in Early-Seventeenth-Century and Twentieth-Century Music: - Monteverdi, "Oime, se tanto amate" (First Phase) - Shutz, "Adjuro vos, filiae Jerusalem" - Webern, Quartet, op. 22 - Babbitt, Du - SIXTEEN - The Spatialization of Time and the Eternal "Now Moment"