[1] Danuta Mirka's Metric Manipulations is a welcome addition to the impressive body of work on rhythm and meter that our field has produced during the past few decades-welcome especially because it brings eighteenth-century theories of rhythm and meter more fully into the current discussion than do most earlier volumes. Like William Rothstein in Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music, a book to which she refers as of the most important catalysts of [her] study (xi), Mirka fashions an intricate counterpoint of eighteenth-century thought and more recent ideas.[2] She begins to weave this counterpoint in the first chapter (Musical Meter between Composition and Perception), in which she explains the hierarchical metric theories of Kirnberger, Schulz and Koch, then links these to the more recent hierarchical theories of Cooper and Meyer, Yeston, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff.(1) From these hierarchical models, she then turns toward dynamic, perception-based models of meter (a dynamic model being necessary for her later analyses of metric manipulations). Christopher Hasty's theories assume prominence here, but they are blended with those of Jackendoff-not the Jackendoff of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983), but of Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987); Mirka's analytical approach combines Hasty's idea of projection with Jackendoff's linguistics-inspired notion of a parallel processor.(2) Mirka's processor models listeners' metric perceptions by busily gathering information from a given musical surface and, on the basis of this information, selecting possible metric organizations. Being a multiple-analysis processor, it is prepared to fluctuate between conflicting metric interpretations when confronted with complex contexts. The Hasty-Jackendoff fusion is evident in Mirka's musical examples; under many of the score excerpts, one finds hierarchical dot diagrams, but the dots are joined by projective arrows, a la Hasty.[3] Having introduced her processor, Mirka puts it to work in the analysis of eighteenth-century music. She wisely chooses to focus on a circumscribed body of eighteenth-century repertoire-on two composers (Haydn and Mozart), on one medium (music for strings), and on a five-year span (1787-91). A wealth of wonderful music and, specifically, of metric complexities is included within her chosen limits; there is plenty of grist for the processor's mill. In Chapters 2-6, Mirka describes the workings and the results of the processor in a variety of metric situations. She begins each of these chapters with relevant excerpts from the writings of late eighteenth-century theorists, then presents numerous pertinent analyses of excerpts by Haydn and Mozart. Since the theoretical passages inform the subsequent analyses, one has the feeling that Mirka's processor models the perceptions not of just any listener, but specifically those of an eighteenth-century Kenner.[4] In the second chapter, she describes the types of metric information that the processor adduces during the meter-finding process at the openings of movements. This information includes numerous phenomenal accent types discussed by recent metric theorists, but also a variety of melodic and harmonic factors, parallelism, and streaming (i.e., the manner in which attacks partition into streams). The latter factor is especially relevant to the chosen repertoire; Mirka demonstrates how Haydn and Mozart often throw a monkey wrench into the meter-finding process by indulging in unusual interactions between the bass and upper-voice streams (59-69). The third chapter describes and illustrates the processor's workings once the initial meter-selection has occurred-its tenacious projective activity and the challenges that it encounters (such as missing beats, general pauses, fermatas and syncopations).[5] Chapters Four, Five, and Six deal with various methods of changing meter. As Mirka illustrates with excerpts from Koch and Riepel, eighteenth-century musicians were willing to acknowledge changes in composed meter, although the notated meter usually remained constant in the music of their time. …
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Oct 19, 2023
Tingting Zhao + 2
