Keith Potter

Perception of Rhythmic Similarity is Asymmetrical, and Is Influenced by Musical Training, Expressive Performance, and Musical Context

Rhythm is an essential part of the structure, behaviour, and aesthetics of music. However, the cognitive processing that underlies the perception of musical rhythm is not fully understood. In this study, we tested whether rhythm perception is influenced by three factors: musical training, the presence of expressive performance cues in human-performed music, and the broader musical context. We compared musicians and nonmusicians’ similarity ratings for pairs of rhythms taken from Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. The rhythms were heard both in isolation and in musical context and both with and without expressive performance cues. The results revealed that rhythm perception is influenced by the experimental conditions: rhythms heard in musical context were rated as less similar than those heard in isolation; musicians’ ratings were unaffected by expressive performance, but nonmusicians rated expressively performed rhythms as less similar than those with exact timing; and expressively-performed rhythms were rated as less similar compared to rhythms with exact timing when heard in isolation but not when heard in musical context. The results also showed asymmetrical perception: the order in which two rhythms were heard influenced their perceived similarity. Analyses suggest that this asymmetry was driven by the internal coherence of rhythms, as measured by normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI). As predicted, rhythms were perceived as less similar when the first rhythm in a pair had greater coherence (lower nPVI) than the second rhythm, compared to when the rhythms were heard in the opposite order.

The pursuit of the unimaginable by the unnarratable, or some potentially telling developments in non-developmental music

I would like to dedicate this paper to the British composer and writer, Tim Souster, who died on 1 March 1994. An ‘avant-gardist’ with distinct — and distinctive — ‘experimental’ leanings, he also had a terrific sense of humour, not least concerning the ‘compositional condition’. This paper takes the definition of ‘experimental music’ as propounded by John Cage and Michael Nyman as the starting point for some deliberations on ‘the future of music’. The possible connections between this ‘experimental music’ and various notions of postmodernism are explored. The question of narrativity is specifically addressed as an important issue, and several musical examples are discussed.

‘New Chaconnes for Old?’: Steve Reich’s Sketches for Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards, with some thoughts on their significance for the analysis of the composer’s harmonic language in the late 1970s

This article begins by locating Steve Reich’s Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (1979) in the context of a growing interest in the 1970s, both by Reich himself and by other composers, in working with a variety of approaches to the chord sequence as a compositional determinant. An outline of what sources are available to investigate the composer’s compositional process at this period, and short discussions of the strategic and methodological concerns behind this research, precede a brief account of the musical materials of Variations as they are found in the published score. The main part of the article is devoted to a discussion of some of the sketches for Variations, focusing on the early period of the work’s conception, showing the extent to which issues of harmonic language and tonality in Reich’s development were affected by the decision to use a chaconne-style chord progression as the basis for a whole composition. Finally, some harmonic analysis of Section I of Variations is offered, outlining a possible strategy to allow comparisons between the approaches to tonal functionality illustrated in the sketches and that to be found in the finished composition.

Mapping Early Minimalism

When writing the New Grove entry on minimalism for this dictionary’s 2001 edition,1 I thought it best to restrict myself to the narrower definitions and interpretations of the term ‘minimalism’ stemming from the narrative set in motion by the ideas and work of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass in the 1960s – even though to do so was to allow these figures a hegemony in this area that some would find unacceptable. And as the author of Four Musical Minimalists, published the year before, I confined any broader excursions into this territory along purely musichistorical lines to two matters. Some investigation was attempted of the first uses of the description ‘minimal’ in a musical context, by Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson, as applied, respectively, to compositions by Henning Christiansen (1932–2008), the Danish composer and member of Fluxus, and Alvin Lucier (b. 1930), the American pioneer in exploring acoustic and psycho-acoustic phenomena as the basis for making music: two composers who could well provide alternative starting points for ‘mapping minimalist music’. And the emergence was noted of musical minimalism out of what Nyman (again), following John Cage, called ‘experimental music’; which meant, basically, pursuing another USA-based story in which Cage himself is the major

Introduction: experimental, minimalist, postminimalist? Origins, definitions, communities

This volume surveys and critiques the current state of research in this area, and offers a cutting-edge and up-to-date examination of this important field, written by an international team of scholars and performers. In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo PA¤rt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.

The Current Musical Scene

These days the only justification I can see for embarking on a new composition is that it must be founded on a radically new idea, and must explore as many of the implications of this idea as possible. By ‘new idea’ I don’t mean writing a fugue with the answer at the tritone instead of the dominant, or using a ten-note row instead of a 12-note one, but something much more fundamental.1