Measuring a Measure: Absolute Time as a Factor for Determining Bar Lengths and Meter in Pop/Rock Music

Example 1. Three readings of meter and bar lengths for "Norwegian Wood" (The Beatles, 1965)(click to enlarge and listen)Example 2. Kick and snare configuration for a standard rock drum beat[1.1] When analyzing a pop/rock song, how much music constitutes a measure? For example, the Beatles song "Norwegian Wood" has been analyzed by Beatles experts as being in (Pollack 1993), (Covach 2006), and (Everett 2001), with each of these three possible meters engendering different measure lengths (Example 1). Like almost every song in pop/rock music, there is no official score for "Norwegian Wood," so we have only our conception and perception of rhythm and meter to guide us. Is one of these time signatures more appropriate than the others?[1.2] The prevailing approach to meter in pop/rock music, generally speaking, has been to base bar lengths on the standard rock drum beat, whenever possible. This is the general rule suggested by Moore, and Stephenson espouses a similar methodology.(1) The standard rock drum beat, as shown in Example 2, delineates a bar of with a kick on beats 1 and 3 and a "backbeat" snare on beats 2 and 4.(2) The actual drum part in a song might not hew to this exact pattern, of course, and other timbres such as hand claps might substitute for the snare or kick.(3) But accounting for these sorts of variations, it is this drum pattern that is taken to be the primary model for assessing measure lengths. (Examples of this approach in practice can be found in the analyses below.)[1.3] Inherently, an approach based on the standard drum beat does not offer much guidance in dealing with songs that are not in or do not have a clear drum beat, such as "Norwegian Wood." It seems reasonable to presume that time signatures other than --such as or --are useful in describing the rhythmic organization of some pop/rock songs. But while recent research on rhythm in pop/rock has explored complex and mixed meters (e.g., Butler 2001, Pieslak 2007, Osborn 2010, McCandless 2013, Osborn 2014, Biamonte 2014), relatively little has been written about the more basic task of meter identification. Even pedagogically-oriented work on meter in popular music (e.g., Rosenberg 2011) does not discuss how to choose the best time signature.[1.4] Part of the issue may be that, although a number of landmark works on rhythm and meter have been published in the past few decades, most take bar lengths and time signatures for granted. In Western classical music, we have an expert listener--the composer--who has already determined how much music should constitute a measure and in what meter it should be conceived; traditional theories of rhythm and meter are thus not forced to tackle these sorts of concerns. For example, one finds no index entries in Lester 1986, Rothstein 1989, Hasty 1997, or Krebs 1999 for the terms "measure" or "bar," and none of these works give detailed guidelines on how to determine measure lengths or time signatures in the absence of a score. (Cohn 2015 highlights many of these lacunae in music pedagogy, more broadly.) Perhaps the most systematic approach to meter, and thus measure lengths, can be found in Temperley 2001, but his preference-rule system does not offer any advice on how to select between a variety of well-formed, hierarchically-congruent meters, such as those we find in the various published analyses of "Norwegian Wood."[1.5] Some readers may feel that the choice of how much music constitutes a measure hardly matters.(4) The choice of time signature, one might argue, serves only to facilitate the communication of rhythmic organization, which can be represented in a variety of equally valid ways. I strongly disagree with this mindset. In popular music, formal prototypes are often predicated on specific bar lengths. The 12-bar and 16-bar blues, for example, are standard units of form, as is the 32-bar AABA. Additionally, some authors have built theories of form around specific bar lengths. …