Large-Scale Metric Conflict in the Early Vocal Music of Benjamin Britten

Stuart Duncan, Yale University

2013, the centennial year of Benjamin Britten's birth, was a good year in the conference and concert halls for the composer's music. While historical and biographical views on Britten's life and music have seen renewed focus, analytical and theoretical angles have been less fruitfully explored. Although important analyses by David Forrest in his "Prolongation in the Choral Music of Benjamin Britten" and Philip Rupprecht's "Tonal Stratification and Uncertainty in Britten's Music," have begun to explore Britten's large-scale compositional thinking in regards to prolongation and registral disposition of pitches, other salient features of Britten's music have yet to be considered.

This paper will consider Britten's use of meter in his early vocal music. The research here draws on recent work in the developing field of metric theory. This burgeoning field, based on the work of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, has seen sustained analytical payoff in the works of Haydn and Mozart by Danuta Mirka, the piano music of Schumann by Harald Krebs, the German Lieder of Schubert by Yonatin Malin, and the symphonic music of Brahms by Richard Cohn. Through a shared understanding of meter as residing in the listener rather than the notated time signature, Metric theory offers a cleary-defined framework for the analysis of rhythm and meter.

With metric theory in mind, Britten's music reveals a dramatic development in terms of metric conflicts from Our Hunting Fathers (1936), for voice and orchestra, to The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Bernard (1943), for male choir and piano. An examination of both of these pieces, in addition to several folksong arrangements during this period, will demonstrate how Britten develops his approach to meter, large-scale structure, metric conflicts, and text between the 1930s and 1940s.