Papers by Christopher Hasty
The Sound of Writing, 2024
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Meter as Rhythm, 2020
This chapter presents the term “projection” in discussing the process in which a mensurally deter... more This chapter presents the term “projection” in discussing the process in which a mensurally determinate duration provides a definite durational potential for the beginning of an immediately successive event. Projective potential is the potential for a present event's duration to be “reproduced” for a successor. This potential is realized if and when there is a new beginning whose durational potential is determined by the now past first event. Projective potential is not the potential that there will be a successor, but rather the potential of a past and completed durational quantity being taken as especially relevant for the becoming of a present event. The chapter then argues that projection is nothing other than meter—that projection and meter are one.
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Conference "Harmonie und Gesellschaft, Univ. Leipzig, 2022
Asking how music theory might productively interact with Whitehead's version of process philosoph... more Asking how music theory might productively interact with Whitehead's version of process philosophy presupposes a more general question: how might music and philosophy interact? Or, for that matter, any art and philosophy? Keeping this broader question in mind will help us focus on the contribution process philosophy might make to music and music to process philosophy.
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Conferenz, "Harmonie und Gesellschaft," Univ. Leipzig, 2022
Zu fragen, wie Musiktheorie gewinnbringend mit Whiteheads Variante einer Prozessphilosophie inter... more Zu fragen, wie Musiktheorie gewinnbringend mit Whiteheads Variante einer Prozessphilosophie interagieren kann, setzt eine allgemeinere Frage voraus: wie könnten Musik und Philosophie miteinander interagieren? Oder, was das betrifft, jede Art von Kunst und Philosophie? Wenn man
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The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, 2020
This chapter identifies the opposition of succession and duration as a central obstacle to granti... more This chapter identifies the opposition of succession and duration as a central obstacle to granting a “real” time in which events are always being created. Within music, this opposition reaches into a nexus of categorical oppositions (unity–multiplicity, continuity–discontinuity, internal–external) that make it difficult to imagine the ongoingness of musical experience. Indeed, musical melody has often been proposed, by thinkers such as Whitehead and Čapek, as an experience that calls such oppositions into question. In this chapter, the challenge of musical “melody” (understood as inseparable from rhythm and measure) offers opportunities to think anew about fundamental categories of succession, event, duration, rhythm, metre, and measure. Following an introduction to the theory of “projection,” a musical-speculative engagement with Beethoven’s Op. 132 provides a laboratory for exploring these concepts. The movement from general to particular argues for the renewed relevance of music...
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The Philosophy of Rhythm, 2019
Chapter 15 treats rhythm as the shaping of events and their succession, rather than as a pre-exis... more Chapter 15 treats rhythm as the shaping of events and their succession, rather than as a pre-existent or transcendent order of isochronous division or fixed pattern. Although “rhythm” has come to imply the regularity of a repeated unit or pattern, the author argues that it also evokes the dynamic, temporal connotations of flow conceived not as of a homogeneous substance (“time”) but rather as a fluid, active, and characterful creation of things or events. The chapter thus prioritizes a living, subjective sense of rhythm over a non-vital, objective concept. The author relates this concept to poetry through a reading of the opening of Keats’s “Hymn to Pan,” from Endymion, analyzing the continuing “life” of the vocal impulse along the lines and through the word-sounds taken as “mouth events”—a reading after the manner of M. H. Abrams.
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This chapter undertakes an exploration of rhythmic practices in twentieth and, especially, late t... more This chapter undertakes an exploration of rhythmic practices in twentieth and, especially, late twentieth-century European-International modernist music, focusing on attempts to reduce or eliminate durational projection and taking into account the role of notation in crafting experiments with a newly emancipated rhythm. It is suggested that this emancipation of rhythm is at least as significant as the “emancipation of dissonance” and, indeed, far more significant if “rhythm” is given a properly broad scope. Principal examples are taken from Morton Feldman’s De Kooning (1963), Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree for percussion (1981), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Muro d’Orrizonte (1997).
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This chapter argues for a construction of the word “rhythm” that might contribute to ways of thin... more This chapter argues for a construction of the word “rhythm” that might contribute to ways of thinking and speaking about music that would validate the activity, the on-goingness, and the actuality of musicing. If discourse about music is connected to music, and if nothing—neither words nor concepts—escapes time, then talk of rhythm is itself not without or outside rhythm. Following an exploration of several allied terms (“event,” “duration,” “dimension”), the argument turns to sonic examples and concludes with a detailed analysis of the first phrase of the “Pleni sunt coeli” from Josquin des Prez’s Pange lingua mass.
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Formen raumzeitlicher Organisation in den Künsten
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Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie [Journal of the German-Speaking Society of Music Theory], 2010
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Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, 2020
This chapter identifies the opposition of succession and duration as a central obstacle to granti... more This chapter identifies the opposition of succession and duration as a central obstacle to granting a “real” time in which events are always being created. Within music, this opposition reaches into a nexus of categorical oppositions (unity–multiplicity, continuity–discontinuity, internal–external) that make it difficult to imagine the ongoingness of musical experience. Indeed, musical melody has often been proposed, by thinkers such as Whitehead and Čapek, as an experience that calls such oppositions into question. In this chapter, the challenge of musical “melody” (understood as inseparable from rhythm and measure) offers opportunities to think anew about fundamental categories of succession, event, duration, rhythm, metre, and measure. Following an introduction to the theory of “projection,” a musical-speculative engagement with Beethoven’s Op. 132 provides a laboratory for exploring these concepts. The movement from general to particular argues for the renewed relevance of music in understanding duration, succession, and time via an approach that might be called a “speculative phenomenology.”
Keywords: time, rhythm, duration, succession, event, measure, projection, Milič Čapek, Alfred North Whitehead, Beethoven Op. 132
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Abstract: This chapter is about Rhythm, focusing on in its quantitative or "metric" aspect - how ... more Abstract: This chapter is about Rhythm, focusing on in its quantitative or "metric" aspect - how long, how much duration. Here I mean "aspect" seriously; although we may conceptually and for practical purposes separate the "length" of an event from the actual event as a quantity detached from all quality, the actual (actuel), felt rhythmic event knows nothing of this separation. In my formulation of Rhythm's measuring, I will attempt to make room for an experiential complexity that would deny an ultimate separation of quantity and quality. I will begin with a brief assessment of the current state of thinking about Meter as quantity and consider the risks and promises various perspectives present. Following this review, I will attempt a "rhythmic" view of meter and then try out this concept in a process- or event-based analysis of rhythm in the opening of Beethoven's String Quartet Op. 132.
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Journal of Music Theory, 1981
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Journal of Music Theory, 1984
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Music Analysis, 1988
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Music Theory Spectrum, 1999
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Music Theory Spectrum, 1981
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Journal of Music Theory, 1987
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The Philosophy of Rhythm, 2019
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Papers by Christopher Hasty
Keywords: time, rhythm, duration, succession, event, measure, projection, Milič Čapek, Alfred North Whitehead, Beethoven Op. 132
Keywords: time, rhythm, duration, succession, event, measure, projection, Milič Čapek, Alfred North Whitehead, Beethoven Op. 132