Full Description
Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm offers new understandings of musical rhythm through the analysis and comparison of diverse repertoires, performance practices, and theories as formulated and transmitted in speech or writing. Editors Richard K. Wolf, Stephen Blum, and Christopher Hasty address a productive tension in musical studies between universalistic and culturally relevant approaches to the study of rhythm. Reacting to commonplace ideas in (Western) music pedagogy, the essays explore a range of perspectives on rhythm: its status as an "element" of music that can be usefully abstracted from timbre, tone, and harmony; its connotations of regularity (or, by contrast, that rhythm is what we hear against the grain of background regularity); and its special embodiment in percussion parts. Unique among studies of musical rhythm, the collection directs close attention to ways performers and listeners conceptualize aspects of rhythm and questions many received categories for describing rhythm. By drawing the ear and the mind to tensions, distinctions, and aesthetic principles that might otherwise be overlooked, this focus on local concepts enables the listener to dispel assumptions about how music works "in general." Readers may walk away with a few surprises, become more aware of their assumptions, and/or think of new ways to shock their students out of complacency.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface
About the Companion Website
Introduction
Richard K. Wolf, Stephen Blum, Christopher Hasty
1. Thinking With and About Rhythm
Christopher Hasty
2. Formative Processes of Durational Projection in "Free Rhythm" World Music
John Roeder
3. Meter and Rhythm in the Sung Poetry of Iranian Khorasan
Stephen Blum
4. An Approach to Musical Rhythm in Agbadza
David Locke
5. Rhythm and the Physical
Eugene Montague
6. Modern Drum Solos Over Ostinatos
Fernando Benadon
7. Temporal and Density Flow in Javanese
Gamelan Sumarsam
8. Layers and Elasticity in the Rhythm of Noh Songs: "Taking Komi" and its Social Background
Takanori Fujita
9. Rhythmic Metamorphoses: Botanical Process Models on the Atlas Mountains of Morocco
Miriam Rovsing Olsen
10. Mapping a Rhythmic Revolution Through Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Sources on Rhythm and Drumming in North India
James Kippen
11. Time Changes: Heterometric Rhythm in South Asia
Richard Widdess
12. "Rhythm," "Beat," and "Freedom," in South Asian Musical Traditions
Richard K. Wolf
13. New Music - New Rhythm
Christopher Hasty
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
