In 1960s and 1970s singer-songwriter music, some artists used malleable metric settings alongside other features of self-expression in performance. This resulted in songs with extremes of self-expressive timing flexibility that cannot be accounted for using a single conception of meter. This book proposes a theory of flexible meter that recasts metric structure as encompassing the variety of metric scenarios presented by the self-expressive performance practice of singer-songwriters, from metric regularity to metric ambiguity, and vacillations between these two possibilities. Author Nancy Murphy explores performances by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Paul Simon, and Cat Stevens to investigate the individual metric style of each artist and how their flexible metric techniques contribute to the self-expressive rhetoric of the singer-songwriter performance tradition.

Nancy Murphy is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, previously teaching at the University of Houston and the University of Chicago. Her research studies singer-songwriter music, metric flexibility, self-expression, vocal production, and transcription. She has published articles and reviews in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Online and serves on the editorial boards of Music Theory Online, Indiana Theory, and Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy (Associate Editor). She has reviewed journal submission for multiple peer-reviewed publications including Music Theory Spectrum, Popular Music, Music Theory Online, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Engaging Students, and Indiana Theory Review.