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Katherine Williams, Times A-Changin’: Flexible Meter as Self-Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music. Nancy Murphy, Music and Letters, Volume 106, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages 155–157, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcae108
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In Times A-Changin’: Flexible Meter as Self-Expression in Singer-Songwriter Music, Nancy Murphy proposes that metric flexibility within performances by confessional songwriters of the 1960s/1970s is an unexplored parameter for self-expression. This is one of those delightful musicological arguments that seems so logical and irrefutable that one has to wonder why it has not been made before. She sets about doing so, with panache.
Murphy explains that while audiences are familiar with the self-expressive importance of singer-songwriter lyrics, and might expect the vocal production techniques utilized in this style to amplify intimacy and break down barriers between performer and listener, metric flexibility is an underexplored area of expressivity. On the whole, her argument is thoroughly thought through, and supported throughout with rigorous analytical theory and diagrams.
She opens chapter 1 by explaining her focus on five proponents from this era: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens, and suggests a spectrum of flexibility in micro-rhythmic variation, or flexible metre. Her first example is Mitchell’s ‘The Fiddle and the Drum’, and she explains with an accurately pitched but gestural rather than beamed temporal notated figure how elasticity of timing enabled Mitchell to lend greater emotional and contextual meaning to her music and words:
