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 IMETER AND RHYTHM COMPOSED
ONEGeneral Characterization of the Opposition Periodicity and the Denial of TasteRhythmic ExperiencePeriod versus Pattern; Metrical Accent versus Rhythmic Accent
TWOTwo Eighteenth-Century Views
THREEEvaluations of Rhythm and Meter
FOURDistinctions of Rhythm and Meter in Three Influential American Studies
FIVEDiscontinuity of Number and Continuity of Tonal "Motion"
PART IIA THEORY OF METER AS PROCESS
SIXPreliminary Definitions:Begining, End, and Duration"Now"Durational Determinacy
SEVENMeter as Projection:"Projection Defined"Projection and Prediction
EIGHTPrecedents for a Theory of Projection
NINESome Traditional Questions of Meter Approached from the Perspective of Projective Process:AccentDivisionHierarchyAnacrusisPulse and BeatMetrical Types - Equal/Unequal
TENMetrical Particularity:Particularity and ReproductionTwo Examples
ELEVENObstacles to a View of Meter as Process:Meter as Habit"Large Scale Meter as Container (Hypermeter)
TWELVEThe Limits of Meter:The Durational "Extent" of ProjectionThe Efficacy of MeterSome Small Examples
THIRTEENOverlapping, End as Aim, Projective Types:OverlappingEnd as AimProjective Types
FOURTEENProblems 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. 22Babbitt, Du
SIXTEENThe Spatialization of Time and the Eternal "Now Moment"