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Takt och Otakt

The theme of the song Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman and the song It’s Halloween by The Shaggs has something in common when it comes to how the different instruments relate rhythmically to each other. I would call it a musical quality that could be described as a feeling of ungraspability. I had this quality in focus during a process of listening to music, writing music and playing music. To describe the cause of this quality I felt the need to define two concepts I named 1) rubato structures; rhythmic structures that aren’t based on, nor establish a steady pulse, and 2) tempo structures; rhythmic structures that are based on and establishes a steady pulse. Throughout the project I identified the cause of the quality, to be combinations of rubato structures and tempo structures, however my understanding developed during the project to a more specific definition which was layers of rubato structures and tempo structures. In the 6 compositions that this project resulted in, I created a number of musical situations with my group, which all had these elements. When listed, these situations rather systematically go through ways of combining structures in regards to different parameters. When listened to, at least for me, several of them give rise to the feeling of ungraspability I had in focus. My attempts to describe and analyze the many inspiring examples stretching from Charles Ives to Swedish contemporary vocal folk music, helped me to develope tools for making music of my own, rather than resulting in some objective truth, or a system for describing and analyzing music that would work objectively. One thing I would consider objectively true, however, is that there are a lot of different ways of creating rhythmic complexity, where some ways are very tedious and difficult for the musicians. With rhythmic layers of rather simple structures, containing rubato structures, I can create rhythmic complexity beyond the quantifiable, just by putting the human impulses in control. Takt in Swedish could mean many things, such as beat, meter, bar, measure. Otakt is often used as a negative word to describe a failed attempt to play in time, but is also linguistically the negation of takt (thus meaning no beat, no meter, no bar, no measure). Takt och (and) Otakt is therefor a play with words, since otakt relates to things in this study that is embraced rather than avoided. / <p>Bilaga: CD</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kmh-3081
Date January 2019
CreatorsGahrton, Daniel
PublisherKungl. Musikhögskolan, Institutionen för jazz
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageSwedish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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