Music 253B: UC Santa Cruz—Spring 2019 (course# 62567] [ B. L. Carson email / faculty page ]
Tuesdays 2:00 - 5:00 PM in Music Center 245
Office hours (Music Center 148): Mon 11:45-1:15 PM; Tues 12:00-1:00 PM
Description:
Discussion of a variety of critical approaches to musical time, including an overview of approaches to transcription and analysis. Varied application of critical and theorietcial lenses to traditional and experimental musics representing diverse cultures, potentially including division-based, addition-based, and multilayer practices in cultural context.
Work to be completed: Seminarians will annotate a bibliography of scholarship, and a collection of recordings and/or other documentation of musical practices, that intersects “time studies” with their own research or creative work. Each student will complete a small analytical exercise in weeks 4 and 6; all seminarians will also be responsible for 1-paragraph responses to one reading per week, and will choose between two options for a conference-style presentation in weeks 9 & 10.
Analytical examples will be drawn from Deborah Vargas on puro pedo temporality in contemporary Tejano punk, Robert Walser’s studies of syllabic structure and rhyme in Public Enemy, scholarship on Persian and Hindustani systems, Korean P’ung Mul and pansori, performance-practice literature on 17th-century French and German court music and opera, compositional systems developed by Henry Cowell, Milton Babbitt, and Elliott Carter, and studies of West African music by Kofi Agawu, Gerhard Kubik, and others, and both ethnomusicological and psychological studies of “swing” rhythm practices. Critical / theoretical readings will be drawn from within Ethnomusicology, Music Theory, and Media Studies, to include Justin London, Eric Clarke, David Temperley, Laura Mulvey, William James, E. P. Thompson, and Temenuga Trifonova.
Prospectus:
In the broadest sense of the word, a rhythm is a distribution of events in time; rhythm—in that broad sense—could count musical form as one of its manifestations. With that we have one way of making sense of the three short words making-up the slightly celestial-sounding course title.*
Down closer to earth, the term “rhythm” in music usually refers more to immediate sensory experience. A play of sounds demarcate time, and present our ears with a distinctive pattern; perhaps a repeatable one. If the pattern implies or defines a pulse, we’re compelled to move our bodies, or to play along, in some way. It’s in this sense that the word’s second meaning arises: rhythm becomes “pulse”, or periodic, steady movement—a simple meaning that musicians sometimes find annoying: “don’t confuse rhythm with meter”, we tell non-musicians, or we sometimes have to explain that rhythm is in all the instruments, not just the drums and “the rhythm section.” But get over it—they’re closer to the word’s origins than we are. The Greek rhuthmós is “any measured flow or movement”, with connotations of symmetry and pulse. A third common meaning of “rhythm” is a motivic one: when we say one rhythm is different from another, we’re referring to memorable motivic patterns that help identify a piece. In this way rhythm may be the largest part of what bears musical identity, not only in the sense that a signature rhythm marks a tune, but in the sense that our collective knowledge of such rhythms is a source of cohesion in community and society.
This course is also an inquiry into what kinds of rhythmic experience arise in widely divergent material and cultural conditions. What do Korean farmers’ ritual marching & drumming ask of its participants, as listeners and as moving bodies? How do we experience the rhythm of cadential harmonic movement differerently from that of sequential or prolongational harmonic movement, in court and church music of the 17th century? In North Indian classical music, what are some differences between experiences of rhythm pedagogy and experiences of rhythm in performance?
This course is designed to expose students of musicology and composition to a small sample of writing on rhythm, time, and form; represented fields include ethnomusicology, music theory, critical theory, experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and media studies. Its week-to-week agenda will change as a reflection of student interests.
AGENDA:
Below are some readings and assignments, to be modified from week to week, appropriate to our discussions. Wewon’t get through all these readings. Readings will be assigned weekly on the basis of the developing priorities of the seminarians.
*Some composers, taking cues from the music of Morton Feldman and others, add a fourth word—scale—a field in which (under certain conditions) even longer timespans have to be apprehended, and in which (maybe) form is no longer possible.