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Re: [microsound] sgnidroceR esreveR
Hi Martin,
I don't dispute for a second what you're saying. I didn't say there's
no such thing as structure, just time signatures. It's all in my
thesis too!! What the author of that book proposes is that the
patterns do come together, and can be layered in multiple
"time-signatures", because of a basic underlying pulse which unites
them all. (The other structural aspect which he also acknowledges,
which you mention, is that the patterns are learned in relation to one
another - one pattern defines another. Also that many musicians find
it hard to play one pattern without having someone play the other one
too).What you say about a pattern that every drummer knows and that
holds it together, even if it's not being played, is exactly the idea
of the "Metronomic sense", that the musician requires a subjective
pattern or pulse underlying the ones that are actually played. To link
all of the last few posts beautifully together, Ligeti writes in the
foreword of that very book I'm referencing now that the overall
pattern is not actually played by any one individual musician - it is
the combinations that give a subjective super-pattern from the
components.
What I'm talking about, I suppose, is the impression that many early
ethnomusicologists got that they perceived that each individual part
had its own time signature, and that all of the time signatures were
happening at the same time. Which they couldn't understand. The
answer, I hope you'll agree, is not multiple time signatures, but
actually a combination of the subjective pulse which I mentioned above
and the understanding of the relationships of patterns to one another
that you mention, which I left out last time!
One of the other authors who had studied for many years in Ghana
before writing his book made the very good point that most African
music is, as you say, in 4/4 or 6/8, because 7 is hard to dance to! ;)
Tony
On 9/7/06, Martin Slawig <martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Am 07.09.2006 19:51 Uhr schrieb "tony higgins" unter
<tony.higgins2@xxxxxxxxx>:
> But... on those two quotes above: "combining completely different
> track"[with different "meters"] is exactly how the majority of African
> music works, from what I've discovered during my research. The ability
> to do this arises out of the fact that there's no such thing as time
> signatures or meters in traditional African music - all that matters
> is the pulse.
Hi Tony and sorry, but I cannot agree to that!
From my experiences as a percussionist playing west african and afro cuban
rhythms (which came originaly mostly from yoruba people/ nigeria, benin,
congo) i say that there is a really strong feeling of time structure in west
african music ( and I would say in most of african music). It is different
from our european based structure, and it is a lot more than only pulse.
Every rhythm i know to play and i listened to is structured by a basic
pattern, which can often be heared as a bell pattern or pattern of a
supporting drum, sometime nobody is playing it but every drummer nows where
it is.
Most common and well known is this
+--+--+---+-+--- in 4/4 or
+-+-+--+-+-- in 6/8 rhythms.
Every drummer is orientating on this timeline with his own pattern which do
not start on our '1' but on a fixed point at this basic pattern. You don't
play so much whith the beat but more with phrases connected to the basic
pattern, but take care, if you start your phrase on a different point you
will be cicked out of the band emediately.
Best
Martin
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