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Sawatzky, Grant Michael

University of British Columbia

In the influential 1989 study Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music, William Rothstein developed a method for analysis of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European common-practice music that describes how melodic gestalts and their supporting harmonic progressions relate to the metrical alternation of strong and weak beats, especially hypermeter (metrical structure beyond the notated bar). The interaction of these two kinds of temporality constitutes the “phrase rhythm” of the music. Interacting temporal structures exist in much other music, but application of Rothstein’s method to a broader corpus is hindered when the music is without the formulaic harmonic progressions that help define gestalts, or does not feature regular pulsation at certain levels of its meter. To overcome these limitations, I propose a way to generalize Rothstein’s insights. I reconceive phrase rhythm as arising from the “grouping-complex”: a network of interrelationships among different ways of partitioning the same span of musical time. These ways include event affiliation, gestalt segmentation, rhythmic/motivic parallelism, and partitioning by phenomenal accent, among others. Theorists, I show, recognize these more general partitions, but have not investigated how they can interact independently of alignment to well-formed meter or involvement in tonal prolongation. This approach makes it possible to identify and describe distinctive phrase-rhythmic effects (e.g., overlap, elision, and phrase expansion) in music that does not feature the melodic, harmonic and metrical schemata of the common-practice corpus. I demonstrate these effects in passages by Debussy, Mussorgsky, and Bartók. Moreover, I avoid the “conformational” analytical frame of much writing about phrase structure and meter, wherein a passage is described in terms of its conformity to some a priori model that is taken to be “normative.” The “generative” analytical frame I favour allows for the description of emergent phrase-rhythmic structures of considerable nuance and complexity, whether or not “tonal,” and with or without meter. Analyses of music by Stravinsky, Luther, Schubert, Bach, and Bartók demonstrate. This also makes it possible to conceive of the music in terms of grouping-complexes—dubbed “multivalent”—wherein different affordances of the same passage may be appreciated as mutually informing rather than as competing interpretations (argued via analyses of Schumann and Mozart examples).

Text; Still Image

2024-10-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89354

Music - Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/