Name: Department of Music Lecture: “Freestyle Skateboarding and Entrainment: Expressing Metric Layers through Tricks”
Start: 2022-10-28T15:00:00
Location: Music Classroom Building

Washington University in St. Louis Department of Music

Corporeally expressing music’s metric structure is a fundamental characteristic of freestyle skateboarding routines. In preparation for contests, freestyle skateboarders must choose a piece of music, choreograph a two-minute routine to that piece, spend many weeks or months practicing, and perform their choreographed routines in an arena with multiple judges and audience members. The process of internalizing and expressing meter, known as entrainment, requires the listener to coordinate between different layers of periodicity. In this paper, I argue that freestylers articulate a taxonomy of periodic layers—subdivision, tactus, and phrase—through particular classes of maneuvers. I will focus on the music selections and performances by Yuzuki Kawasaki and Mike Osterman—the highest-placed freestylers at the 2019 World Round-Up Freestyle Skateboarding Championships.