Linguistics Seminar Talk - Jonah Katz

Title:  Phrasing, templates, and parallelism in early hip-hop

Abstract 

This talk describes the setting of lyrics to musical rhythms ('flow') in mid-1980s hip-hop. I argue based on the distribution of musical and linguistic features that the genre makes use of abstract templates, but that these templates are fundamentally different from metrical verse. Halle & Keyser (1971) propose that metrical poetry involves a mostly-invariant, abstract template of strong and weak metrical positions grouped into constituents of various sizes, and that metrical variation within a form stems from correspondence rules governing which linguistic materials may appear in which positions in the template. There has been significant disagreement about whether musical textsetting also involves such templates, and whether and how they might differ from poetic ones. For instance, Hayes and various colleagues (e.g. Hayes & MacEachern 1996, Hayes 2009) develop a model of folk-quatrain chanting and songforms where linguistic representations interact directly with musical meter and no abstract template mediates the relationship. Kiparsky (2006) argues that this quatrain form requires abstract poetic templates of the Halle & Keyser (1971) type to mediate between linguistic representations and musical meter. And Dell (2015) proposes, based on French song, that while textsetting does rely on templates, those templates are not abstract poetic ones: they instead encode information specific to musical tonality, rhythm, and meter.

The current study offers evidence from hip-hop that tends to support Dell’s view broadly, but also requires significant extensions to his theory of representations. I show that this genre uses templates to enforce local parallelism, that the templates encode multiple hierarchical levels of prominence and constituency, and that the mapping of these rhythmic templates to musical metrical positions is partly arbitrary in ways that can’t be captured by global constraints on linguistic-metrical correspondence. All of these properties are analogous or identical to general features of music, including music without words (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983). I therefore propose that musical textsetting be modelled with Lerdahl & Jackendoff’s hierarchical template formalism (‘time-span reduction’) for music.