Department of Music Lecture: Mariusz Kozak

Mariusz Kozak, Associate Professor of Music, Columbia University

Abstract
In this talk, I will develop a functional definition of meter as a form of culturally situated bodily inquiry and discovery about the sonically afforded, reliably repeatable, and transferable possibilities for a particular kind of emotional and bodily affinity with members of a social group. To illustrate this perspective, I draw on progressive metal, a genre known for its rhythmic and metric complexity. With its creative handling of musical time, undergirded by a powerful link between the bodies of its practitioners and the driving force accorded to the backbeat, progressive metal affords acculturated listeners the opportunity to enact certain kinds of agency, affirming membership within a group but also pushing against social expectations. Normative movements to this music, such as headbanging and fist pumping, are an expression of kinesthetic knowledge, or the knowledge of “how music goes.” It is this knowledge that underlies musical meter.

Bio
Mariusz Kozak is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University and the author of Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music. His research centers on the relationship between music, cognition, and the body. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, and Music Theory Online, among others. In 2020 he was one of the featured speakers at the Plenary Session of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory. His current projects include meter and rhythm in progressive metal, the role of musical affect in creating interpersonal relationships, and a book on the history of the cognitive science of music in the twentieth century.