Speakers
Scott Murphy
Scott Murphy is a professor of music theory at the University of Kansas, where he has taught for twenty years. He is a recipient of both the Emerging Scholar Award and the Outstanding Multi-Author Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory, both for publications on the music of Brahms. Although he enjoys writing about Brahms and his other primary specialization—recent popular film music—he also loves to tinker in his publications with ideas in a wide variety of other areas of music, such as pitch design in post-tonal compositions, canon in common-practice counterpoint, and pop-music rhythm. This is his first foray into progressive rock research, so please go easy on him.
A Regularity of Long Asymmetrical Meters in Progressive Rock
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Scott Murphy
The use of asymmetrical meter is one of progressive rock’s defining characteristics. However, is it possible to define this characteristic more precisely? In other words, are some types of asymmetrical meters more common in this genre than others, beyond isolated consistencies such as Rush’s preoccupation with 7/4 (typically 2+2+3)? This presentation makes a case for an affirmative answer by building on two recent publications in Music Theory Online: Gregory McCandless’s 2013 article about additive rhythms in Dream Theater and Scott Murphy’s 2016 article about asymmetrical meters in recent popular multimedia. Both recognize in their respective repertoires a general preference for suffixing a shorter destabilizing “add-on” to a longer and stable groove when creating an asymmetrical meter. McCandless focuses on longer formal ramifications, demonstrating how Dream Theater’s particular placement of short “add-ons” often generates a statement-departure-restatement-conclusion structure (Everett 2008). Murphy focuses mostly on relatively short (quintuple and septuple) metrical categories restricted to successions of 2s and 3s, noting, for example, that 7/4’s bias toward the 2+2+3 subdivision (and away from 2+3+2 or even 3+2+2) holds not only in music for mainstream movies but also in other forms of popular or commercial music. While adopting Murphy’s limitation to 2s and 3s, my study otherwise moves beyond his purview by exclusively examining relatively long asymmetrical meters in the music of progressive rock/metal of the last thirty-five years, including Dream Theater, Symphony X, Riverside, and Haken, footnoted by tangential precedents from musicians as disparate as Julius Eastman and Slint. Among the more eclectic distribution of longer asymmetrical meters used by these bands, a significantly large number still conform to the same bias that Murphy recognized for shorter asymmetrical meters. I hypothesize that these rhythms open one entrance to a musical “Goldilocks zone” (Osborn 2017), in that they achieve a balance between innovation/distinctiveness and accessibility/convention.
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Keywords: progressive rock, asymmetrical meter, style typology, Dream Theater, Symphony X, Riverside, Haken, “Goldilocks zone”