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This chapter explores effects of repetition and motion in Schubert's songs, together with moments of rhythmic irregularity. Analyses focus on three songs from Winterreise (poems by Müller) and three early Goethe settings. The chapter's themes are introduced with notes on “Auf dem Flusse,” Winterreise No. 7. An unusual declamatory schema is then shown to contribute to the frenzied flight in “Rückblick,” Winterreise No. 8. Three songs—“Wandrers Nachtlied I,” D. 224, “Die Nebensonnen,” Winterreise No. 23, and “Schäfers Klagelied,” D. 121—illustrate moments of rhythmic irregularity, speech rhythm, and the emergence of a reflective, deeply feeling self. The chapter concludes with an extended analysis of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” D. 118. Gretchen's shifting psychological states are shown to leave their trace in the flow and articulation of her poetic syntax and in the phrase rhythm and hypermeter of Schubert's remarkable setting.

Musicologists have acknowledged the importance of speech rhythms to black music from the blues forward, but the focus of the analysis has not explained their primacy. The obscurity of the hymns—despite their affinity to the spirituals that have been reinvented as a concert form—typifies the hidden significance of speech to black music. Proceeding from an English tradition that was no less oral in derivation, the performance tradition of Dr. Watts hymns brought to an African oral inheritance a heightened awareness of English poetic meters and rhyming patterns, along with a racialized theology, which slaves revitalized and subverted as their own voice of liberation. As sermons unfold the scriptures in black worship, hymns and songs freight spoken symbols with the burden of human thoughts and feelings. This chapter examines the musical implications of words as shapers of pitch, rhythm, and timbre.

The first illustration in Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, by Richard Powell, is of a late-seventeenth-century slave drum whose unchanging appearance is significant because African rituals and music making were legally suppressed after the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina. A century later, ministers taught slaves to turn from their own “heathenish” songs to the hymns of Isaac Watts. The continuity of unaccompanied congregational singing in congregations where Dr. Watts remains vital suggests the importance of lining out to subsequent genres and forms. Lining out became the primary slave model for Standard English-language singing in Christian worship. The history of Dr. Watts hymn singing balances between persistent African continuities and the perpetual change factors—such as migration and especially language contact—that have shaped the practice of Christianity among African Americans. Although the consistent importance of speech rhythms to black music is clear at least as far back as nineteenth-century congregational singing, the specifics of the African and Anglo-American origins of speech rhythms are not as clear.

This chapter evaluates the self-organization in cognition and the control of behavior. The study of the intricate control of limb movement, and even aspects of language such as speech rhythm and syntax, have revealed features that would seem to have physics as their natural home. This chapter illustrates that locomotion exhibits striking symmetries. It shows that gait and speech rhythm involve the coordination of intricate behaviors by the central nervous system. It reveals that sentence structure is a striking instance of magnification symmetry in biology. This chapter also must be restrained in reflecting on higher cognitive processes by a healthy fear of overgeneralizing.

Throughout his career, Talib Kweli has been called an “off-beat rapper.” Despite that highly derogatory comment, this chapter connects Kweli’s non-alignment with the underlying beat to earlier Afro-diasporic rhythmic practices. Kweli’s voice moves away from the beat through four distinct processes: phase shifting, swinging, tempo shifting, and deceleration. The last of these, while a hallmark of the rhythm of speech, has little relationship to the rhythm of music with a mechanically regulated beat. By documenting the non-alignment between flow and beat in a particular track (“Get By”), the chapter shows the novel way in which Kweli inserts rupture into the flows of his verses, extending the aesthetic values of hip hop into the rhythms of his flow itself.

This chapter examines Pines Songs by Daniel Asia. It explores how Asia’s music is intrinsically American in flavour, displaying striking individuality and sureness of touch. With winning fluency, his work references a kaleidoscopic mix of styles with strong jazz overtones. Here, the mordantly pithy poems are complemented by elaborate piano writing, with lengthy solo passages that illustrate and amplify the poems’ imagery. Words are set in a highly personal way and rhythms are always lively. The composer often embellishes and extends phrases with melismas and hummed musings. Satisfyingly expansive lines use the voice's full capacity, and intricate details never impede the music’s natural flow.

Summation is powerful and mature statement, but as an organizing principle for poetry in English it has regained, long after the modernist detours around it, at best an intricately defended, half-confident status. To modify a phrase from a late poem by Wallace Stevens in “The Course of a Particular,” there is a resistance involved. Thom Gunn excelled in skillfully neutralizing that resistance from the outset of his career. As for chthonic power, that phrase represents something common in literary thinking since writers began to reassess Romanticism in the wake of the depth psychologies and the ongoing demolition of traditional metaphysics. Gunn hardly walked in fear of the category, though it seems that he never employed it. His flexible style is one of the most conceptually discerning in the twentieth century, and also one of the most mature in exploring the adventures of instinct (“adventure,” a term he takes from Robert Duncan). The two terms in the title to this chapter, especially given Gunn's experience with hallucinogens, point to several dimensions.