This paper presents a comparative recording analysis of the seminal work for solo percussion Rebonds (Iannis Xenakis, 1989), in order to demonstrate how performances of a musical work can reveal—or even create—aspects of musical structure that score-centered analysis cannot illuminate. In doing so I engage with the following questions. What does a pluralistic, dynamic conception of structure look like for Rebonds? How do interpretive decisions recast performers as agents of musical structure? When performances diverge from the score in the omission of notes, the softening of accents, the insertion of dramatic tempo changes, or the altering of entire passages, do conventions that arise out of those performance practices become part of the structural fabric of the work? Are these conventions thus part of the Rebonds “text”?

The notion of a musical repertoire's "sound" is frequently evoked in journalism and scholarship, but what parameters comprise such a sound? This question is addressed through a statistically-driven corpus analysis of hip-hop music released during the genre's Golden Age era. The first part of the paper presents a methodology for developing, transcribing, and analyzing a corpus of 100 hip-hop tracks released during the Golden Age. Eight categories of aurally salient musical and production parameters are analyzed: tempo, orchestration and texture, harmony, form, vocal and lyric profiles, global and local production effects, vocal doubling and backing, and loudness and compression. The second part of the paper organizes the analysis data into three trend categories: trends of change (parameters that change over time), trends of prevalence (parameters that remain generally constant across the corpus), and trends of similarity (parameters that are similar from song to song). These trends form a generalized model of the Golden Age hip-hop sound which considers both global (the whole corpus) and local (unique songs within the corpus) contexts. By operationalizing "sound" as the sum of musical and production parameters, aspects of popular music that are resistant to traditional music-analytical methods can be considered.

MCs (rappers) such as Cardi B, Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Big Sean and Young Thug use triplet rhythms in their rapping, a practice that is known as triplet flow. This paper argues that the prevalence of triplet flow is one of the most aurally salient features of contemporary hip hop, and exemplifies the popularity and influence of the Atlanta-centred genre of trap music through its sparse, slow beats. Three types of triplet flow are defined – mixed, phrasal and total – and are used to explore how various songs and artists active in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided the stylistic blueprint for triplet flow's recent explosion in popularity. With the aid of a 50 song mini-corpus, the paper concludes with a general survey of stylistic characteristics common in many songs featuring triplet flow, and further analysis of two of these songs in order to illuminate the creative, rhetorical and virtuosic potential that underpins this ostensibly simple style of rapping.

This article proposes a theory of flow (the rapped vocals of hip-hop music) segmentation, phrasing, and meter that considers the way linguistic, syntactic, articulative, and corporeal aspects of rapping engage with vocal rhythm and its grouping structures. While flow is organized into phrases, hip-hop beats (the sampled or instrumental accompaniment) typically express a periodic, looped, highly repetitive metric structure against which these flow phrases operate. The patterns of metric alignment and non-alignment generated between flow and beat layers imbue hip-hop music with nuanced variety, especially at sub-sectional formal levels.

This paper investigates harmonic progressions built around two major chords and one minor chord, all related by step. In many pop/rock songs, these chords can be analyzed as Aeolian progressions—VI, VII, and i—(Moore 1992; Biamonte 2010; Richards 2017a). Recent songs by Bon Iver, The Chainsmokers, and others, however, use chord loops where the harmonies can be interpreted as IV, V, and vi, which I call the plateau loop for its plateau-like activity: a constant hovering above Roman numeral I or i tonic chords, while retaining an overall consistent pitch-based topography. I interrogate the tonality of these songs, advancing the notion of a hybrid tonic. Hybrid tonics occur when a song or song section lacks a salient Ionian or (less often) Aeolian tonic on which both the harmony and melody concur. Instead, IV or (less often) VI or vi chords can function rhetorically as tonic, especially when the chords sound simultaneously with a melodic ".fn_scaledegree(1)." and occur in a metrically strong position, or initiate a plateau loop. The paper defines plateau loops and hybrid tonics, and explains the theoretical framework that supports them, consulting work by Harrison (1994), Nobile (2016), and Doll (2017) that decouples scale degree from harmonic function. Song examples by The Chainsmokers, Bon Iver, Jónsi, Astrid S., and M83 show how hybrid tonicity operates in varying degrees of prominence in popular music, and can also be contextualized with Spicer’s (2017) theory of fragile, emergent, and absent tonics. By building on prior scholarship, this paper aims to stimulate further inquiry into how tonal structures of recent popular music subtly differentiate themselves from conventions of common-practice tonality.