Our theories and practices of musical time reflect disciplinary traditions, creative innovations, and internal skills. They reflect the cultural habitus within which we move and the philosophical approaches that we assume. To break across the invisible lines of theory and practice, concept and embodiment, this issue of Revue musicale OICRM convenes composers, performers, and scholars to share insights on rhythm in music since 1900. The resulting essays, interviews, performances, and reports cast light on musical and conceptual developments from the last century onwards. We gain the “thickness or dimensionality” that comes from different ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling rhythm—from the “multiple ways of knowing” embodied in these contributions. Such dimensionality can take many different paths. The idea that one can understand and feel something through practice and analysis, through mathematical modeling and sound, through empirical investigation and style, through text and musical rhythm, through notation and performance, through internal pulses and ensemble awareness, through rigorous theory and sonic effect, through careful measurement and bold intuition—these threads run through this issue on Rhythm in Music since 1900, reminding us that the balance of holding different perspectives at once creates new knowledge. To bring together ideas from our contributors—both expected and unexpected in their pairings—we offer the following. Andres Orco brings the perspectives of fifteen leading jazz musicians to the analysis of metrically complex contemporary jazz, linking naturally with Miles Okazaki’s exploration of the balancing, in time, of distinct simultaneous interpretations of a particular groove. Jason Yust uses simple periodic functions to shed light on non-isochronous rhythmic cycles in music from timeline or clave traditions to rock to Ligeti to jazz; Richard Cohn, on the other hand, offers “Pressing rhythms”—a particular class of non-isochronous patterns—for the analysis of South Korean p’ungmul (folk drumming). For Sean Smither, the performance of jazz standard melodies shades between expressive timing and metric displacement, creating in the latter case thematic transformation, while for Daphne Leong, metric notation in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto signals the transformation of a lyrical theme. In the backbeats of five renowned rock drummers, Ralf von Appen and David S. Carter find distinctive microtiming and tempo patterns; Ben Reimer nods to the history of drumkit performance in the note accompanying his performance of Nicole Lizée’s Katana of Choice. Nicole Lizée’s conversation with Ben Duinker highlights the starring role of “glitch” (timing ‘aberrations’ inspired by malfunctioning and outmoded technology) in her oeuvre. Playing an equally central role are idiosyncratic hypermetric constructions in Aidan McGartland’s view of Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For practical tools, Fabrice Marandola demonstrates the power of paradigmatic analysis for a performer’s preparation and interpretation of Xenakis’s solo percussion music, while Jacqueline Leclair conceptualizes rhythmic self-entrainment as enabling a musician’s mental and musical health. Tiffany Nicely’s report from the 2023 conference Rhythm and Meter in World Musics presents wide-ranging approaches to musics from five continents, while José Oliveira Martins’s overview of the 2023 conference Interdisciplinary Approaches to Musical Time demonstrates its ambitious program spanning work from music theory, cognitive science, ethnomusicology, philosophy, performance, and digital humanities. These views from theory and practice, more than deepening our understanding of time in music, also demonstrate the creative, cognitive, cultural, and many more dimensions with which our contemporary mind has become resolutely interdisciplinary. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, rhythm has found new expressions and functions not only in musical composition, but also in musicology, music theory, and performance practice. These fields have profoundly and lastingly expanded their epistemological apparatus, notably by drawing on an ever-growing variety of disciplines and promoting new encounters and genuine mutual enrichment between them. Such …
