Department of Music Lecture: Richard Cohn, Battell Professor of the Theory of Music, Yale University

"Syncopation as Zerteilung, and the Analysis of Metric Complexity"

"Syncopation as Zerteilung, and the Analysis of Metric Complexity"

Modern metric theory partitions metric dissonance into displacements and grouping dissonances, whose respective prototypes are the Renaissance pre-­cadential suspension and the Baroque pre-­cadential hemiola. But the two categories frequently conjoin to form more complex hybrids: many pre-­cadential hemiolas are inserted inside displacements, and the Brahmsian hemiolic cycle inserts a displacement inside of a hemiola. These hybrid formations are related to the formal category of parenthesis usually traced back to Koch (1792), but they have a more historically distant origin, in a 14th-­‐century conception of syncopation: as a dialectic not of displacement (Verschiebung) and restoration , but rather of fragmentation (Zerteilung) and reassembly. This paper suggests that this older conception of syncopation provides a framework for theorizing a variety of complex metric formations. Examples are provided from music of Brahms, Dvorak, and West African drum ensembles.