{"title":"11-, 12-, and 13½-Bar Blues: Time and African American Country Blues Recordings (1925–1938)","authors":"Andrew Bowsher","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.21","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines commercially-issued recordings of African American country blues from the early twentieth century, and considers the politics of representation involved with these recordings related to the metric and structural orthodoxies of blues performance. Often featuring solo male singers performing with guitar accompaniment, the recorded country blues of the 1920s–30s are markedly flexible in their approaches to timing. Drawing upon recordings of important country blues artists including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Charley Patton, the chapter considers key issues such as the controversy over the speed at which Johnson’s records were recorded, the flexible approach musicians took to the standard 12-bar format, and the strictures that the three-and-a-half minute 78 rpm record side posed for artists’ songcraft. How these factors challenge musicological orthodoxies over conventional blues structures and historical insights into the practice of the blues is illuminated through the proposal that these recordings struggle with contentious narratives of primitivism, racial stereotyping, and authenticity, whereby canonical 78 rpm records are reified to fit a prevailing narrative of the country blues as atavistic and authentic.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116816868","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metrical Displacement and Group Interaction in ‘Evidence’ by the Thelonious Monk Quartet","authors":"R. D. Bruce","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.19","url":null,"abstract":"Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk is known for his rhythmically complex compositions and improvisations. His typical 32-bar AABA form pieces provide a framework of musical norms in terms of harmonic movement, and thus a point of reference for the harmonic rhythm to be displaced. ‘Evidence’ is exemplary of Monk’s displaced rhythms, which creates a sense of metrical shifts during the head arrangement. Composed c.1948 and a frequent piece of Monk’s performance repertoire into the 1970s, a transcription and analysis of the recording from Thelonious Monk Quartet Plus Two at the Blackhawk demonstrates a conflicting sense of metre between band members of the quartet. This chapter investigates how the musicians negotiated metrical discrepancies in the composed section and the saxophone solo in terms of group interaction. A mediation of time is demonstrated by a displaced metre in the drums and each musician’s performative response to the discrepancy by providing musical signals during the course of performance. Through analysis of this performance, the chapter examines the way in which the musicians arbitrated a decisive point of reference within a confounding performance of overturning the beat. This chapter contributes to understanding rhythm and metre through improvisatory processes, augmenting scholarship on jazz through its analysis of the temporal constituents of group interaction.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129342176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distracted Attention, Temporal Switches, and the Consolations of Performing","authors":"A. Gritten","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.4","url":null,"abstract":"Distraction is frequently blamed for interfering with the ergonomic production of capital, for encouraging substandard performance. Indeed, it is frequently configured as an impediment to timekeeping, a thorn in the side of consciousness, a drag on intentional action, and a brake on decision-making. Reality, however, is complex. While distraction can interfere with timing, anxiety, memory, error, and fatigue, it can also be exploited under controlled conditions to enhance performance by helping the performer to maintain an open cognitive and physical responsiveness to the world and a pragmatic mode of engagement with the task at hand. Indeed, distraction ensures that the performer is in close contact cognitively and socially with the full phenomenological plenitude of sound, thereby contributing to performance’s transformative value as a way of accumulating social capital in everyday life.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123533015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Timing in Palaran: Coordination, Control, and Excitement in Javanese Collaborative Vocal Accompaniment","authors":"Jonathan Roberts","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.25","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Palaran are elements within gamelan repertoire that are derived from the melodies used to recite texts written in Javanese poetic metres. When used as palaran within gamelan performance (rather than in their original form as poetic recitation, or macapat), these melodies are supported and constrained by a metrically fixed structure of core instrumental notes and surrounded by a web of spontaneous melodic accompaniment, involving multiple musicians. This chapter explores the complex ways in which musicians control, negotiate, and coordinate timing in this flexible yet precise form of musical interaction. It examines the rules of ideal cohesive performance, the transmission of strategies for successfully learning how to achieve this, and what can be learnt from occasions when palaran go wrong and the coordination of timing goes awry. It then argues that the sense of risk involved in managing timing in these ways is a significant part of what makes palaran one of the most popular elements within the gamelan repertoire.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134571884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Politicking Musical Time","authors":"C. Stover","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.5","url":null,"abstract":"Beginning with four irreducibly interrelated themes—that musical time is active, performative, relational, and political—this chapter develops a theory of musical time as an ongoing nexus of events that unfold between performing, listening, and sonorous bodies. It examines the temporal implications of how these different body categories relate affectively, how they co-constitute one another, and how musicking contexts are enacted through their intra-action. The theoretical framework draws upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of political enunciations or enactments and Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, reading these two conceptual apparatuses productively through one another.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131009987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music as Time, Music as Timeless","authors":"Kristina L. Knowles","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.3","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter presents a framework for parsing differing conceptual and analytical positions on time in music, focusing specifically on two contrasting ideologies. The first perspective views music as an art form that exists only in and through the unfolding of time; the second views music as capable of evoking a static temporality, referred to by many scholars as a sense of stasis or timelessness. Discussions on the relationship between time and music typically engage with a subset of overlapping and interacting positions on time. Time is sometimes analysed as external and objective, but can also be construed as internal and subjective. Finally, time is also understood to be created or represented by music, an idea encapsulated by the term ‘musical time’. References to timelessness in music engage with these latter two views on time, specifically music’s ability to represent temporal concepts associated with specific structures (musical time) and perceptual mechanisms related to certain musical features that result in a subjective experience interpreted as timelessness. Using the dual lenses of psychology and philosophy, I argue that timelessness is an inherent part of the multiple systems of temporal production and perception that underlie the way we experience and discuss time in music.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115363771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Temporalities of North Indian Classical Listening: How Listeners Use Music to Construct Time","authors":"Chloё Alaghband-Zadeh","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.23","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how ethnography with musical listeners can illuminate relationships between music and time. While much existing scholarship equates musical temporalities with qualities of the ‘music itself’, this chapter addresses the need for research that considers the diverse ways listeners use music to engender experiences of time. Alaghband-Zadeh focuses here on rasikas, connoisseurs of North Indian classical music. She shows how rasikas construct and experience North Indian classical performances as sites of leisurely temporality: this is both an ethical practice, aligned with ideas of virtue, and also a means for rasikas to position themselves as set apart from a world they view as increasingly characterized by speed. Alaghband-Zadeh argues that music is a powerful temporal resource: a means through which people cultivate ways of inhabiting time. Moreover, the immediate temporalities of live performances contribute to the production of broader, public temporalities of modernity, changing social formations and imagined histories.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"196 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132064676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Making, Not Filling Time’","authors":"F. Schuiling","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.28","url":null,"abstract":"Improvisation and notation are frequently opposed in terms of transience versus permanence, an opposition that reflects broader Eurocentric ideas of orality and literacy. Confronting such binary distinctions, Schuiling describes the use of notation by three groups of improvising musicians, showing how notations mediate their understanding of time. This forms the basis of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s influential account of social interaction in musical performance. Schuiling argues that Schütz’s distinction of an ‘inner time’ of music and an ‘outer time’ mapped by the score remains tied to a work-centred musical ontology, and fails to attend to the making of time in the course of performance. Drawing on his fieldwork, Schuiling reconsiders the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the primary target of Schütz’s argument. Rather than understanding music as an object of inner contemplation, Halbwachs provides a view of music and temporality as a way of opening up to the world.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125554525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Timescales and the Temporal Emergence of Musicking","authors":"Juan M. Loaiza","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.15","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this chapter is twofold: to present a new way of mapping timescales of musicking, and to elaborate an explanatory approach that overcomes philosophical reductionism and allows interdisciplinary conversation. It proposes that the emergence of organizational properties in musicking is best understood by looking at the relations between timescales, using the heuristic of inter-scale relationships within temporal ranges. The chapter argues that simpler models of timescales have limited explanatory use and do not naturally capture the experiential richness of musicking. In contrast, the mapping of temporal ranges highlights the relations between many processes that mutually enable and constrain one another across timescales, and across brains, bodies, and environment. The map guides research into the complexity of musicking without sacrificing disciplinary focus. It consists of three domains of organization—sensorimotor, social life, and person/Self—interweaving ecological-enactive concepts of embodiment, self-organization, participatory systems, attunement, normative constraints, habits, and sense-making.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115246958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time","authors":"A. Bonus","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190947279.013.16","url":null,"abstract":"Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.","PeriodicalId":166254,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131156765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}