After the Bridge…the Chorus?
Music theory treats meter, or the measurement of time, hierarchically: elements can either be divided into smaller parts, or organized into larger groups.
Here is a metrical diagram of a pop/rock chorus.
The small boxes represent beats, which are grouped 4 at a time into a measure, which are grouped 4 at a time into a hypermeasure, of which two comprise this chorus. Besides their similar groupings of four, measures and hypermeasures also share the same accent pattern. The four beats of a measure are considered strong-weak-strong-weak, and the four measures in a hypermeasure are considered strong-weak-strong-weak.
In a typical verse-chorus-bridge pop song, what often occurs after the bridge is a return of the chorus. This tends to be a fairly exact copy, since the chorus is the most memorable section of a song. The chorus helps the song stick in our head, so we stream it again, add it to a playlist, or perhaps purchase it. Since this return is a copy of the chorus, not only do we expect the lyrics, melody, and instrumentation to be the same, it will probably also begin as it did earlier, on the beat colored red.
This location is not only the downbeat of the measure, but also the hyperdownbeat of the hypermeasure. So in a sense it’s doubly accented to draw our attention.
If our expectation of the chorus’s return is fulfilled, we hardly notice it. But when songwriters and composers play with this expectation, the effect can be surprising and delightful.
The song “Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift comes from her 2022 album Midnights. In this audio example, you’ll hear the lead up and entry of the chorus twice, to familiarize yourself with it, and then the return of the chorus after the bridge. Compare the way “It’s me/Hi/I’m the problem…” shows up.
In its original configuration, the chorus starts on the word “me” and is metrically set up like Example 2. Example 3 shows what happens after the bridge. Swift sings the chorus’s melody and lyric, but all the instrumentation is withheld until the downbeat of the second measure, on the word “I’m.”
The chorus, launched from the end of the bridge, floats over a silent gap: we might feel a bit confused because the hyperdownbeat doesn’t occur where we expected it. When the instrumental support crashes in, the music satisfyingly lands back on familiar ground. The feeling of suspension and drop matches the same sensation as the build up and drop in electronic dance music (EDM). It might be significant that the producer of this album was Jack Antonoff, who has also worked with more dance-pop-oriented singers like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sabrina Carpenter.
Fooling with listeners’ assumptions isn’t new at all. Here is an example in the same spirit by W.A. Mozart from around 1790. This is about the main theme of a menuet (K. 355), though, not a chorus.
As a menuet, each measure comprises three beats. But the hypermeasures still consist of four measures. The expected start is diagrammed in Example 4.
In this audio example, you’ll hear the beginning of the menuet twice, and then its altered return.
Although there’s no pop/rock percussion, we can still tell that when the theme returns, it’s not exactly the same. Like “Anti-Hero,” the texture isn’t as full as it was, and the theme is reharmonized. It’s not until the third measure that we hear the original setting, and that resumption might elicit something like a sigh of relief.
The key factor for both these examples is the expected recurrence of material we’ve heard before. When that arrival happens only partially, we feel apprehension: something’s not right, what’s the delay? And when all the parts return—in a structure that frames our expectations—we feel satisfied at the restoration of the familiar.
Selected bibliography:
Huron, David. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Larson, Steve. 2012. Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphors, and Meaning in Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Meyer, Leonard B. 1956. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Solberg, Ragnhild Torvanger. 2014. “‘Waiting for the Bass to Drop’: Correlations Between Intense Emotional Experiences and Production Techniques in Build-Up and Drop Sections of Elecronic Dance Music.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 6/1: 61–82.
– Philip Chang
Student News
M.M. Theory Updates
Alumnus Jacob Eichhorn, who completed his M.M. Theory in 2019, is currently a Ph.D. student at the Eastman School of Music. Jacob received the 2025 Dorothy Payne Award for best student presentation at the Music Theory Society for the Mid-Atlantic conference. His paper, “Twelve-Tone as Topic: Satire, Politics, and Postwar American Concert Music,” proposes that midcentury tonalist composers—Samuel Barber, Irving Fine, Walter Piston, Alec Wilder, Leonard Bernstein—deploy twelve-tone melody amidst a tonal landscape for the purpose of topical signification. Jacob examines numbers from Bernstein’s Candide and West Side Story to show how twelve-tone acquires markedness within a new context and an emergent social meaning, namely a shift in political and cultural sentiment toward nationalist music during the Cold War.
Ben Work is currently finishing his Master’s Thesis on Modern Jazz Fusion, studying under Dr. Keith Waters. At the same time, he is studying in classes with Dr. Daphne Leong working on rhythm and meter in modern “indie” music, and studying theory pedagogy with Dr. Leah Frederick. This semester, he is also hoping to submit and workshop an analysis paper on Ruth Crawford’s Piano Prelude No. 9 for publication, should time allow.
Our Certificate in Music Theory Students
Josie Arnett is a 4th-year undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Music Composition with a certificate in Music Theory. Her primary focus ranges from film music to educational music. Her project compares the different pedagogical and performance techniques of classical piano and jazz piano techniques. Her studies will result in several short compositions to teach specific techniques across both piano traditions, as well as techniques excluded from classical and jazz piano pedagogy. Thus the pieces will range from introductions to improvisation, classical rhythmic ideas, pedaling, electroacoustic music, meditative music, understanding groove, and more. This project will expose student pianists to a diverse range of music and help develop more well-rounded pianists.
Sharon Hui currently studies with Dr. Jennifer Hayghe in pursuit of a B.M. in Piano Performance, while also seeking her certificates in music theory and music technology. Her project analyzes Tōru Takemitsu’s “Romance,” composed during 1949 in post-WWII Japan. This dark and mysterious “Romance” is not a lover’s serenade, instead featuring mournful harmonies and themes derived from the Japanese in scale pitches. This project sheds light on one of Takemitsu’s earliest works, written for piano. Sharon’s performance of the “Romance” can be found here:
Isaac Johnson, a Ph.D. Historical Musicology student, completed his certificate in Music Theory last year. Some of the results of his lecture-recital have been published as the article “Olivier Messiaen’s Prelude pour orgue: The Development of the Young Composer’s Harmonic Language” The American Organist (Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 54-65). Isaac proposes that the posthumously-discovered and rarely-performed Prelude is an early work of Messiaen’s, featuring alternating use of Messiaen’s nascent modal language and a chromaticism reminiscent of late Parisian romanticism. The article also examines the manuscript of the work alongside impressions of the published performing edition and offers interpretive suggestions for organists who wish to perform the work.
Laura Klein, M.M. Piano Performance and Pedagogy, Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (Music Teachers National Association), is a third-year Ph.D. Musicology pre-candidate completing her graduate certificate in Music Theory this semester. Faculty at Colorado Christian University in Denver and a Graduate Part-Time Instructor for the College of Music at CU Boulder, she is an active performer, pedagogue, and musicologist. Her research investigates 18th-century keyboard performance practices in England and impacts from continental Europe. Her certificate project focuses on 21st-century arrangements of 18th-century British art and folk songs through a study of figured bass and improvisatory practices.
Joshua Carter Maynard is a BM Composition major who specializes in choral music. He is the president of the Renova New Music Ensemble and has led the charge in increasing collaboration between choral musicians and composers at CU Boulder. He will begin his graduate studies this fall, seeking a Masters in Choral Conducting. For his research project, Joshua is assembling a guide for composers new to contemporary choral composition, gathering useful examples from modern repertoire to guide their writing approach. Through his work with Renova, Joshua is documenting the process of composing for and workshopping with vocal ensembles, identifying key features of successful projects and collaborations.
Ohad Nativ is a doctoral student in historical musicology researching the life and works of Max Reger, the British New-Complexity movement, and intersections of neurodivergence and music. Ohad also has comprehensive background in classical piano, actively teaching and performing in the Denver area. Ohad’s theory certificate project overlaps with his chief musicological research topic of Max Reger’s music, whose structuralist and complex compositional approach implicates a music-theoretical communicative idiom encapsulating issues of German identity and formalist musical philosophy pre-WWI. Through this project Ohad hopes to add to the American corpus of academic research on Reger’s music, and to spark modern-day reestablishment of a Regerian performance tradition. Earlier in April, Ohad was the graduate student winner of the College’s annual Concerto Competition, performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in G Major, Op. 55.
Eli Pouliot is an undergraduate violinist currently studying with Alex Gonzalez. With a main interest in chamber music (as a performer and theorist), he is exploring performing elements such as instrumentation, bowing, and tuning, and how they relate to harmony and form. Eli’s project concerns tuning approaches for Schubert’s later string ensemble works. Schubert often moves through seemingly unrelated harmonies with highly smooth transitions that cycle back to their starting point. These cycles force performers to make decisions on how to play these passages, as a theoretically “perfect” (just) tuning can end up startlingly off! Here is an example from Schubert’s 8th Quartet, which would end 41 cents sharper than it starts:
Eli’s work examines performing solutions to these problems, and how decisions about tuning can serve a musical function.
Header image by Kobby Katalist.
