ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author particularly examines examples of changes of meter, metric displacement, rhythmic layers, polymeter, irregular accentual patterns, and nonmetric notation in the music of Stravinsky, Bartók, and Ives. He explains examples of rhythmic symmetry in Webern and serialized rhythm in Boulez and Babbitt. The author focuses on some highly innovative and idiosyncratic uses of musical temporality by three of these composers. In the late 1920s, Messiaen came across excerpts from a thirteenth-century Indian treatise, the Sangita-ratnakara, by Sarngadeva, which included a list of 120 rhythmic patterns from the provinces of India called desitalas (or “regional talas”). Nonretrogradable rhythms are symmetrical, palindromic rhythmic patterns that are the same whether they are read in original form or in retrograde. The term metric modulation refers to a process widely found in Carter’s compositions by which the music moves from one precise metronomic marking to another through a series of intermediate steps.
