The Times are A-Changin’: Metric Flexibility and Text Expression in 1960s and 1970s Singer-Songwriter Music

Abstract

In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used a malleable approach to meter in performance that resulted in songs with extremes of self-expressive timing flexibility that cannot be accounted for by using a single conception of meter. As a solution, this article draws together theories of metric hierarchy, metrical reinterpretation, and metric process to develop the theory of flexible meter. This approach recasts meter as able to encompass the variety of metric scenarios presented by these singer-songwriters, from metric regularity to metric ambiguity and vacillations between these two possibilities. Performances by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens are discussed to investigate their levels of engagement with meter—the degree to which their performances are regular or ambiguous—and how the individual metric style of each artist contributes to the self-expressive singer-songwriter performance practice.

Metre, grouping, and event hierarchies in music: A tutorial for linguists

“…Where linguistic texts do dissociate from rhythmic groups, they are not particularly likely to align with any putative metrical ‘constituent’. These tendencies can be observed in complex textsetting in many Western genres (see examples in Dell, 2015; Duinker, 2021; Heetderks, 2022; Murphy, 2016; and Temperley, 1999), and they mirror the properties of rhythm‐metre mismatch in non‐vocal music.…”

Prelude to a Theory of Gestural Time, Proto-Geometry, and Music

“…Most music, indeed, is gestural in this sense, but there are more overtly clear examples that help us understand why a turn to gesture matters: the shifting metric flux of Hardanger fiddle music, the nuanced prosody of Mississippi delta blues singing, the gestural rhetoric of Gagaku court music, each of which very effectively resists notational representation. Nancy Murphy's (2023) recent work on flexible meter illustrates this vividly, if not precisely in these terms. What is phenomenologically important in this account takes us back to Godøy's work, and just what it is we are experiencing when we turn our attention to the gestural quality of any music, beyond or alongside any kind of purported isochronous representation that we might try to use to model our experience.…”