Odd Times: The Uses of Odd-Factored Time Signatures in the Works of Thomas Adès and Brian Ferneyhough

Abstract

Time signatures have conventionally been used to denote a piece’s metre. However, in recent decades, following the early innovations of Henry Cowell and others, composers have developed new families of time signatures to manage and notate a wider variety of tempo relationships and rhythmic proportions, sometimes of great complexity. This practice differs significantly with each composer. In some cases, the novel time signatures still retain metric significance, in other cases they facilitate rhythmic practices that attenuate or even abandon metric sensation. In traditional time signatures, the denominator is always a power of two. In this project, we study time signatures in which the denom..