Name: Department of Music Lecture: Mariusz Kozak
Start: 2022-10-14T15:00:00
Location: Music Classroom Building

Washington University in St. Louis Department of Music

In this talk, I will develop a functional definition of meter as a form of culturally situated bodily inquiry and discovery about the sonically afforded, reliably repeatable, and transferable possibilities for a particular kind of emotional and bodily affinity with members of a social group. To illustrate this perspective, I draw on progressive metal, a genre known for its rhythmic and metric complexity. With its creative handling of musical time, undergirded by a powerful link between the bodies of its practitioners and the driving force accorded to the backbeat, progressive metal affords acculturated listeners the opportunity to enact certain kinds of agency, affirming membership within a group but also pushing against social expectations. Normative movements to this music, such as headbanging and fist pumping, are an expression of kinesthetic knowledge, or the knowledge of “how music goes.” It is this knowledge that underlies musical meter.