Rhythm in Music since 1900
November 17-18, 2019 | University of Colorado Boulder
Photo: Tirachard Kumtanom
Keynote (lecture-recital): Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist
Rhythm in Piano Repertoire since 1900
Invited speakers:
Kyle Adams (Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University)
“On the Rhythmic Dialogues of Hip-Hop”
Brian Alegant (Oberlin College Conservatory)
“How to Teach Complex Rhythms”
Jeanne Bamberger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
“From Action to Symbol: The Computer as Collaborator”
John Roeder (University of British Columbia)
“Processes of Grouping and Pulse in Free Post-Tonal Canons”
Rhythm in Music since 1900 remains a rich and fascinating field of inquiry. This conference brings multiple perspectives to bear on this field. It addresses repertoires ranging from jazz and popular music to world music and art musics, and topics from performance and pedagogy to cognition and theory. The keynote features renowned pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, acclaimed particularly for his interpretations of music of our time. In addition to his keynote lecture-recital, Aimard will also play a full recital on 19 November.
Questions should be directed to Daphne Leong.
Program committee
Daphne Leong (University of Colorado Boulder)
Mitch Ohriner (University of Denver)
Keith Waters (University of Colorado Boulder)
Local arrangements
Yonatan Malin (University of Colorado Boulder)
Philip Chang (University of Colorado Boulder)
Rebecca Hamel (University of Colorado Boulder)
Website
Clay Allen
The Music Theory Department gratefully acknowledges the support and partnership of
- Joan Braun and CU Presents; the Roser Visiting Artist Endowment; generous friends of the Music Theory Department; the College of Music of the University of Colorado Boulder—Dean Robert Shay, and the Keyboard, Percussion, Composition and Conducting departments.
To support the work of the Music Theory Department and events such as this, click here, or email or call 303-492-2869 for more information.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist
Widely acclaimed as a key figure in the music of our time and as a uniquely significant interpreter of piano repertoire from every age, Pierre-Laurent Aimard enjoys an internationally celebrated career. Musical visionary and a pioneer artist renowned for his revelatory insights, he was awarded the prestigious 2017 International Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in recognition of a life devoted to the service of music.
Aimard performs throughout the world each season with major orchestras under conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Eötvös, Sir Simon Rattle and Vladimir Jurowski. He has been invited to curate, direct and perform in a number of residencies, with projects at Carnegie Hall, New York's Lincoln Center, Vienna's Konzerthaus, Berlin's Philharmonie, Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, the Lucerne Festival, Mozarteum Salzburg, Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Tanglewood Festival and London's Southbank Centre. Aimard was the Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival from 2009 to 2016; his final season was marked by a performance of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux with the concerts programmed from dawn to midnight.
Born in Lyon in 1957, Pierre-Laurent Aimard studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Yvonne Loriod and in London with Maria Curcio. Early career landmarks included winning first prize in the 1973 Messiaen Competition at the age of 16 and being appointed, three years later, by Pierre Boulez to become the Ensemble Intercontemporain's first solo pianist.
Aimard has had close collaborations with many leading composers including Ligeti, Kurtág, Stockhausen, Carter, Boulez and George Benjamin. Recent seasons have included the world premieres of Harrison Birtwistle’s piano concerto Responses; Sweet disorder and the carefully careless, as well as Carter’s last piece Epigrams for piano, cello and violin, which was written for Aimard. Through his professorship at the Hochschule Köln as well as numerous series of concert lectures and workshops worldwide, he sheds an inspiring and very personal light on music of all periods.
On the Rhythmic Dialogues of Hip-Hop
Kyle Adams (Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University)
Rhythm is often considered the lifeblood of hip-hop music: in a genre that generally avoids large-scale melodic and harmonic trajectories, rhythm would seem to be the most salient, most active parameter. In the words of jazz drummer Max Roach, hip-hop’s primary characteristic is the employment of “rhythm for rhythm’s sake.”
And yet, for all the general agreement on the rhythmic vitality of hip-hop music, it proves surprisingly difficult to pinpoint where this vitality lies. The drumbeats and drum samples—where one would naturally look for rhythmic interest—are indeed highly syncopated, but repeat in four-beat cycles whose periodicity gradually diminishes their initial rhythmic energy. Where, then, is the celebrated “rhythm for rhythm’s sake” of hip-hop?
In this talk, I will argue that the rhythmic vitality in hip-hop comes not from a single parameter, but from the interactions of multiple parameters with the underlying metrical grid. I characterize these interactions as dialogues, and will describe three of the most important such dialogues and how they create the charged rhythms of hip-hop music. These are: the dialogue between rhyme and meter, the dialogue between motive and meter, and the dialogue between pitch and meter. Through close reading and analysis of these dialogues, we will uncover the forces behind the celebrated rhythms of hip-hop music.
His bifocal research agenda involves music of the sixteenth century and hip-hop music. In sixteenth-century music, his work deals with tonal structure; to that end, he has published articles on the modes of polyphony and on Renaissance chromaticism in Theoria and in the Journal of Music Theory. Adams’ hip-hop research attempts to model the musical and rhythmic aspects of rap lyrics and how they relate to the underlying beat. He has published on these topics in Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop.
In addition to his research and teaching, Adams continues to work as an accompanist, primarily for singers and brass instrumentalists.
How to Teach Complex Rhythms
Brian Alegant (Oberlin College Conservatory)
This presentation advances a pedagogical platform for teaching complex rhythms in an undergraduate curriculum. I begin with a summary of some best practices I’ve used to teach post-tonal musicianship over the past several years, chief among them backwards designand universal design. I outline the principles used to design a module on contemporary rhythm, and share my observations and experiences with implementation, repertoire, assessment, analysis, and student engagement. And I share a number of strategies for helping students learn how to rehearse and internalize challenging material. My aims are twofold: to highlight the advantages of a repertoire-based and skills-based approach, and to provide a toolkit and a conceptual framework for instructors to craft their own modules on rhythm.
Brian Alegant is Chair of the Music Theory Department at the Oberlin College Conservatory, where he has taught since 1996, and the CASE and Carnegie Foundation 2015 Professor of the Year. His research interests include pedagogy, twelve-tone music, and analysis and performance, with a particular enthusiasm for contemporary music. He has served as editor of Intégral and Music Theory Spectrum, authored The Twelve-tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola and over two dozen essays in journals and books, and premiered and recorded two works by the noted American composer Robert Morris. He is also the current chair of the Publications Committee for the Society for Music Theory.
From Action to Symbol: The Computer as Collaborator
Jeanne Bamberger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
In this paper I trace the work of Laf, an 8-year old boy, as he travels between his own body actions in clapping/drumming, to his design of numeric-symbolic computer procedures that re-generate his body actions in virtual sound space. Confronting the tension between hisknow-how in action, and know-about as expressed in symbolic form, he pursues a path into the mathematics of ratio, and proportion.
Laf’s journey starts from his participation in the group clapping of a 2:1 rhythm. This leads him to exploring the meaning of 1’s and 2’s as played by the computer’s drums and finally to the design of a whole table of equivalent ratios. I argue that the process is an example of spontaneously confronting and learning from the often troublesome tension between continuous body action and discrete static symbol.
Jeanne Bamberger is Professor Emerita of Music and Urban Education of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches music theory and music cognition. Her interests include musical development and learning, in particular aspects of representations among both children and adults. She was a student of Artur Schnabel and Roger Sessions and has performed extensively as piano soloist and in chamber music ensembles. She attended Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley receiving degrees in philosophy and music theory. Her recent books include (1995) The mind behind the musical ear (Harvard University Press), and (2000) Developing musical intuitions: A project based introduction to making and understanding music (Oxford University Press), and (2013) Discovering the musical mind: A view of creativity as learning (Oxford University Press).
Processes of Grouping and Pulse in Free Post-Tonal Canons
John Roeder (University of British Columbia)
Musicians often analyze canons as solutions to the problem of achieving exact imitation under a style-dependent set of constraints. This systematic view suits Renaissance polyphony, imitative tonal music, and less codified styles in which imitation controls textural density, involves “dissonant counterpoint,” or is subject to serial designs. However, it does not apply to canons with unknown constraints; it provides little basis for explaining deviations from exact imitation; and it does not address listeners’ dynamic experience of canon, particularly of meter and grouping. This paper aims to enrich the analysis of canon by addressing all three limitations together: it examines how canons and “free” deviations from exact imitation in seemingly unconstrained post-tonal music create formative and expressive processes of grouping and meter. Its method draws upon recent temporally oriented theories concerning the formation of segments, the varying salience of pulse, and durational projection.
Three analytical examples, instancing a variety of post-tonal styles, demonstrate these processes. In Reich’s Tehillim, a varying imitative delay between voices produces a succession of pulse streams that differentiate the text phrases. In a Kurtág song, “Vyelikaya byeda,” there is no tactus, but the variably timed voice and cimbalom trade leading and following roles in ways that promote a dramatic reading of the text. And in a tempo canon from Adès’s Lieux retrouvés, the different concurrent projective metric functions of the cello and piano parts are coordinated to articulate large-scale form.
As a music theorist and analyst, John Roeder describes ways that people conceive of music, and how music is heard to organize time coherently, expressively, and meaningfully. Roeder concentrates on music of special relevance today: recent works by contemporary composers in the Western art-music tradition, and the “world music” that globalization is now bringing to everyone’s ears. He has also directed graduate-student research in popular music, jazz, Renaissance polyphony, phenomenology, and spectral music.
Roeder is especially interested in rhythm, meter, musical transformations, mathematical and computational approaches to music, issues of semiosis and representation, and processive approaches to music. From 2000-2007 he directed research into strategies for preserving digitally created information, including music, as a member of the InterPARES project. He has held grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to study Transformation in Contemporary Art Music, Periodicity in Music, and Approaches to the Analysis of Musical Time (the latter two in collaboration with my ethnomusicologist colleague, Michael Tenzer).
Roeder served on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music , Music Theory Spectrum, and Journal of Music Theory. He has been active in the Society for Music Theory, chairing, for instance, the Publications Committee. In June 2003 he conducted a Workshop at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory on “Transformational Approaches to Contemporary Music,” and in November 2008 led a seminar on “Analyzing Contemporary Music” for the Graduate Student Workshop Program of the Society for Music Theory.
Sun 17 November 8:30 am – Mon 18 November 9:30 pm
Pierre-Laurent Aimard full recital Tues 19 November, 7:30 pm
* = lecture-recital
Saturday 16 November
8:00 pm Drinks (Carelli’s: cash bar)
Sunday 17 November
(all Sunday day events in Grusin Hall, Imig Music Building;
evening session at the home of Jan Burton)
8:30 am Registration, coffee
9:00 am Welcome (Dean Robert Shay and Daphne Leong)
Symbol and Action
Chair: Keith Waters (University of Colorado Boulder)
9:10 am Anton Vishio (William Paterson University)
Networks of Polyrhythms
9:40 am Scott Murphy (University of Kansas)
Applications of Duplex Syncopation Classes and Spaces to Western Popular Song
10:10 am Jeanne Bamberger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
From Action to Symbol: The Computer as Collaborator
10:55 am Daphne Leong, David Requiro, and Michael Tetreault (University of Colorado Boulder)
* Collaborating on Rhythm in Wuorinen’s Grand Union
11:35 am Lunch (C4C)
Pedagogy and Practice
Chair: Mark Arnett (University of Colorado Boulder)
1:30 pm Brian Alegant (Oberlin College Conservatory)
How to teach complex rhythms (in a way that is enjoyable for you and your students)
2:15 pm John Gunther and Michael D’Angelo (University of Colorado Boulder)
* Rhythm aerobics and metronome games
2:55 pm Keith Waters (University of Colorado Boulder), Brian Levy (New England Conservatory), Brian Casey (University of Northern Colorado), and Michael D’Angelo (University of Colorado Boulder)
* Comping Structures in Jazz Practice
3:35 pm Coffee
Composing and Performing
Chair: Philip Chang (University of Colorado Boulder)
4:00 pm Marcel Zaes (Brown University)
* Resisting the Grid: Performing Asynchrony
4:40–5:20 Concert
About Time: three mini-premieres
Introduction: Carter Pann (University of Colorado Boulder)
"The Stars in Their Eyes" (2019) – Isabel Goodwin
Curtis Sellers, oboe
Anoushka Divekar, clarinet
Ethan Shuler, bassoon
"Density Table" (2019) – Drake Rutherford
"Off-Kilter" (2019) – Ben Morris
Ben Morris, piano
Matt Smiley, bass
Michael D'Angelo, drums
“Saëta” from Eight Pieces for Four Timpani (1950) – Elliott Carter
Mike Tetreault, timpani
“Third Construction” for percussion (1941) – John Cage
Steve Hearn
John Kinzie
Mike Tetreault
Lee Vinson
5:45 pm Dinner (home of JB)
Chair: Steven Bruns (University of Colorado Boulder)
7:30–8:20 Hsing-Ay Hsu (University of Colorado Boulder) with Don Traut (University of Arizona)
* Stravinsky’s Rhythmic Play in the Concerto for Piano and Winds
Monday 18 November
(Monday day events in Grusin Hall, CASE E422, and N1B59)
evening session at the Koenig Alumni Center)
8:30 am Registration, coffee
9:00–10:15 Keynote: Lecture-recital (Grusin Music Hall, Imig Music Building)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, pianist
Rhythm in Piano Repertoire since 1900
Armenia, Turkmenistan, and India (CASE E422)
Chair: Yonatan Malin (University of Colorado Boulder)
10:30 am Scott C. Schumann (Central Michigan University)
Rhythmic Cycles and Ostinati as Formal Process in the Music of Tigran Hamasyan
11:00 am Dave Fossum (Arizona State University)
Microtiming in Traditional Turkmen Music
11:30 am Peter Asimov (University of Cambridge)
Rethinking Messiaen’s Rhythms, ca.1935-1950
12:00 pm Lunch (Dushanbe Teahouse)
2:00 pm Piano masterclass: Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Grusin Hall)
2:50 pm Coffee
Canon and Motive (N1B59, Imig Music Building)
Chair: Daphne Leong (University of Colorado Boulder)
3:15 pm John Roeder (University of British Columbia)
Processes of Grouping and Pulse in Free Post-Tonal Canons
4:00 pm Ronald Squibbs (University of Connecticut)
The Presence of Absence: Gapped Mensuration Canons in John Luther Adams’s Among Red
Mountains (for solo piano) (2001)
4:30 pm Daniel Cox (Yale University)
Motivically-Directed Meter: A Listener-Oriented Approach to the Irregular Pulse
5:00 pm Michael Schutz (McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind)
Inside Steve Reich’s Drumming: Exploring the Gap between Theoretical Structure and
Performance Practice
6:00 pm Dinner (Koenig Alumni Center)
Hip-Hop and Electronic Music (Koenig Alumni Center)
Chair: Mitch Ohriner (University of Denver)
7:30 pm Kyle Adams (Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University)
On the Rhythmic Dialogues of Hip-Hop
8:15 pm Anabel Maler (University of Iowa) and Robert Komaniecki (Appalachian State University)
Rhythmic Techniques in Signed Rap
8:45 pm Lloyd May (Dartmouth College)
Jittered Grooves: Micro-timing Burial’s “Archangel”
9:15 pm Farewell
Tuesday 19 November
7:30 pm Concert: Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Beethoven the Avant-gardist (Macky Auditorium)
Program:
Messiaen: VI. L’alouette-lulu from Catalogue d’oiseaux
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 (“Moonlight”)
Messiaen: V. La chouette hulotte from Catalogue d’oiseaux
~ Intermission ~
Sweelinck: Fantasia à 4: Echo d3, SwWV 260
Benjamin: Shadowlines
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101
Date: Tues, Nov 19, 2019
Time: 7:30 pm
Presented by: Artist Series
Venue: Macky Auditorium
Macky Auditorium Concert Hall
Boulder, CO 80309
Tickets will be available to conference attendees at a special group rate.
“Aimard’s prodigious technique allows you to hear not the work behind the work of art but its poetry… his performance had extraordinary power and clarity.” —Chicago Tribune
Hailed as “a brilliant musician and an extraordinary visionary” (Wall Street Journal), world-renowned pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is as recognized for his unparalleled, powerful technique as he is for his sensual interpretations of music from every age.
Program: Beethoven the Avant-gardist
Messiaen: VI. L’alouette-lulu from Catalogue d’oiseaux
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2 (“Moonlight”)
Messiaen: V. La chouette hulotte from Catalogue d’oiseaux
INTERMISSION
Sweelinck: Fantasia à 4: Echo d3, SwWV 260
Benjamin: Shadowlines
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101