Times A-Changin': Flexible Meter as Self-Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music

By Nancy Murphy

In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used malleable metric settings alongside other features of self-expression in performance. This resulted in songs with extremes of self-expressive timing flexibility that cannot be accounted for using a single conception of meter. This book proposes a theory of flexible meter that recasts metric structure as encompassing the variety of metric scenarios presented by the self-expressive performance practice of singer-songwriters, from metric regularity to metric ambiguity, and vacillations between these two possibilities. Author Nancy Murphy explores performances by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens to investigate the individual metric style of each artist and how their flexible metric techniques contribute to the self-expressive rhetoric of the singer-songwriter performance tradition.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0197635210
• ISBN13: 9780197635216
• Release Date: August 2023
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 9.6"