Conference Agenda

Thomas Adès’ Piano Quintet (op. 20, 2000) defies temporal predictability at every turn. Near-omnipresent mixed meter and polymetric textures stem from the work’s temporal centrepiece: irrational time signatures. As tuplets written into the meter, these time signatures render the underlying pulse mercurial; juxtaposed and superimposed, they generate multiple temporalities and result in a constantly fluctuating tempo. Notwithstanding the growing body of analytical literature on Adès’ oeuvre, focus on temporality is limited; analyses of the Quintet (Venn 2015; Stoecker 2014; Gallon 2013; Wörner 2013) similarly leave its highly irregular metric processes underexplored (excepting Sullivan 2021).

In this paper, I develop a theory of temporal contour to trace the evolving relationship between forces of temporal unrest in the Quintet. My interpretation of the Quintet engages three theoretical strategies. At the background level, Roeder’s (2006) transformational paradigm of (dis-)continuity aids in understanding and contextualizing Adès’ tendency to establish and unexpectedly break compositional patterns. Secondly, Krebs’ (1999) categories of metric dissonance provide a useful framework for parsing the dynamic between volatile and settled temporal elements. Thirdly, I develop a theory of temporal contour to analyze the relationship between long-range temporal spans. Borrowing Friedmann’s (1985) theory of pitch contour I employ his +/– binary to indicate relative lengths of long-range temporal spans. I further introduce the notion of four contour types: oscillation, expansion, contraction, and equal expansion/contraction.

I analyze four excerpts that bookend the Quinet’s sonata-form exposition and recapitulation, to demonstrate the temporal trajectory of each formal unit. I consider two analytical levels: the metric surface, which often contradicts formal expectations of stability and instability; and larger temporal spans, which contrastingly reinforce these same expectations. By the recapitulation, temporal contour becomes a unifying device: beneath a metrically chaotic surface, the durational continuity and instrumental stability that define the exposition are traded for a more abstracted temporal-contour unity, where contour types align between parts in a final push towards structural-temporal consolidation. These highly irregular, fluctuating metric processes thus necessitate the combination of multiple theoretical constructs to meaningfully interpret its modes of temporal instability, contrasting stability, and passages that traverse the spectrum between these polarities.

What specific attributes in a musical texture “Make It Funky”? This paper examines funk music from the 1960s and 1970s as dynamically developing texture. A methodology integrating Christopher Hasty’s projective model of meter shows how funk performers collaborate in projecting metrical levels, as metrical dissonances arising in one part are supported and stabilized in another answering part. Funk musicians mobilize pentatonic figurative schemas to form a web of collaborative counterpoint, building from a pentatonic-referential base to form expansive and rhythmically complex blues-inflected, diatonic, and chromatic textures. Exploring funk as a broadly influential musical practice, the inquiry extends beyond “classic” funk works of the early 1970s, including earlier and later works that have been described under various labels including soul, funk, R&B, and disco.

The study of projective metrical levels is useful in examining how parts kinesthetically index to the body as properties in the funk texture emerge over time. The paper establishes that pentatonic-referential figures appearing simultaneously at multiple metrical levels are a distinctive feature of the improvisatory counterpoint that permeates funk textures. Binary moves in funk guitar strumming and fretboard positioning stabilize the characteristic accentual patterns in sixteenths, the smallest unit of metrical division, often encountered in funk textures. Embodied engagement with funk music enlists both the cyclic-projective energy of the autotelic groove and an emergent expressive trajectory of dynamically developing texture. Contextualizing syncopation in funk through an examination of metrical levels, the study integrates previous work on groove and swing timing, highlighting process-based metric qualities that are integral to performance practices in funk.

A focus on developing texture serves in framing the analysis as a study of organized musical actions, probing the inherited legacy of musical figures through which performers articulate an embodied knowledge of “funky” rhythm, texture, and expression. The paper briefly highlights how the multilinear textures of funk contribute to implications of virtual social agency, musically modeling an ideal collaborative space. In this way, the funky groove carries ideological weight, engaging the political and musical imagination as it provides for embodied pleasure in movement.

The second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, Pathétique is nearly universally identified as waltz despite its irregular time signature of 5/4. An informal survey of the repertoire found no other art music examples of such waltzes.

Prototypical features of the waltz as it appears in Western art music are well-defined in topic theory: triple meter, moderate tempo, an oom-pah-pah accompaniment, and a lilting feel. The literature generally agrees topical identification requires both a holistic sensation of topicality and the composite of probable musical features; however, movement topics — including the waltz — are frequently described with parametric requirements, likely for the strong relationship between music and the body in dance as well as topical reference to it. Temporally mediated musical features critically define the native contexts of movement topics and shape the sensation of that movement through the body. In addition to its identifiability as a waltz, Pathétique displays many of these topical waltz features but critically lacks the requisite triple time. Therefore, I ask whether Pathétique invokes the waltz topic.

To address this question, I turn to the five-step waltz, a social waltz in 5/4 time danced in the mid to late 19th-century in Europe and America. From extant dance instruction manuals, I devise a categorization system for five-step waltz dance figures based on two features of the waltz pattern: periodicity and balance. Further, these categories reveal the waltzes’ 5/4 meter as either expanding one three-beat half-figure or compressing one six-beat full-figure. Analogous 5/4 waltz music categories and 3/4 feature modification are readily found in extant scores for music to which these dances were danced.

An analysis of the Pathétique reveals the presence of such patterns in the waltz-like sections for a clear correlation between time signature-independent features referencing vernacular waltz music and the sensation of waltz in the movement. The referentiality is twofold: five-step waltz music is evoked in these 5/4 waltz figures, which themselves evoke 3/4 waltz figures, independent of the five-step waltz and the music to which it was danced. This suggests the decorrelation of topic and time in Pathétique.