This approach was manageable, although I began to sense that using this method was often like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. For a number of semesters, I taught meter identification exclusively through traditional time signatures. In my current position, I teach music theory in the department of recording industry, which is structured primarily around popular music classical, jazz, and art music is taught in the music department across campus. In adopting a more detailed language for meter in pop/rock, therefore, I hope to attune the reader (and thus our students) to these other central features.Īs a sort of epistemological background, my approach to meter in pop/rock music derives from my own teaching of meter in the classroom. But as I show below, this approach ignores many important aspects of rhythmic and metric organization in pop/rock music. Indeed, it is entirely feasible to categorize meter in pop/rock with this basic scheme as a starting point. The conventional approach-by which a piece of music is considered, at least on a basic level, to be duple or triple (whether the beat is organized into groups of two or three) and as simple or compound (whether the beat divides into two or three)-is, one might argue, an elegantly efficient categorization scheme, one that balances too much versus too little information. (Theoretical investigation into these interesting but less common metric organizations can be found in the references cited in the previous paragraph.)įor some readers, the addition of categories beyond traditional time signatures might seem like the byproduct of an overactive concern with taxonomy. My focus here will thus be on a general scheme, and I will not address complex, additive, mixed, or irrational meters. I thus do not deprecate traditional time signatures rather, I show that the combination of traditional time signatures with various drum feels and swing rhythms engenders a robust language to catalog the diverse landscape of normative metric configurations found in pop/rock music. Specifically, I posit that two additional factors-swing and drum feel-are critical components of meter in pop/rock music and that our classification system should include information about these factors to adequately portray the rhythmic and metric hierarchy of a song. ![]() In contrast to this earlier work, I argue in this chapter that traditional time signatures are limited in their ability to fully represent the typical metric organizations found in pop/rock music, and accordingly, it is useful to include features beyond the traditional time signature in descriptions of rhythm and meter in pop/rock music. One notable exception is Rosenberg (2011), who discusses the use of popular music in the teaching of rhythm and meter, but her goal is primarily to show how pop/rock songs can be used to illustrate traditional concepts, not how pop/rock songs might challenge them. Recent work focuses instead on analyses of metric dissonance, microtiming, and complex/mixed meters in specific styles (e.g., Butler 2001 Pieslak 2007 Osborn 2010 Danielsen 2010 McCandless 2013 Osborn 2014 Biamonte 2014), sidestepping issues of pedagogy and meter classification taken more broadly. ![]() Generally speaking, scholarship to date on pop/rock music-whether implicitly or explicitly-takes the use of traditional time signatures to be an adequate classification scheme for meter in pop/rock music. Very often, the perfect balance between these two opposing views is difficult if not impossible to achieve. On the other hand, categorization schemes that were developed within a centuries-old musical practice might be ill-equipped to fully describe music of the modern era. ![]() On the one hand, it seems useful to employ existing terminology when talking about new styles, if only because a common language helps us communicate and connect ideas. For instance, it is somewhat unclear if and how the precepts of classical functional harmony are relevant to rock music. For the past few decades, the field of music theory has struggled with the question of how well traditional concepts-that is, those that were developed to describe and analyze the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms-can be applied to popular music, for example, Beck, Björk, and Beyoncé.
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