Conference Agenda

Senegalese philosopher, poet, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor offers a framework for thinking about subjectivity, temporality, knowledge production, and indeed ontology that begins with a periodic relational dynamics encapsulated in the word “rhythm.” For Senghor, rhythm is a “sensible” rather than a “material” thing. It is a form of “respiration that rushes or slows down, becomes regular or spasmodic, depending on the being’s tension, the degree and quality of the emotion.” Rhythm, in short, is “the architecture of being, the internal dynamism that gives it form, the system of waves it gives off toward Others, the pure expression of vital force.” This presentation maps some of Senghor’s ideas about rhythm onto musical contexts via three recent African philosophers who have developed a robust Senghorian conceptual trajectory: Sylvia Washington Bâ, Olusegun Gbadegesin, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. It begins with an overview of the role rhythm plays for Senghor, focusing on the following keywords: participation, complementarity, “dynamic waves,” liquidity, and the “interacting forces” of the title. It then considers some of the work each of these concepts does when we turn to musical contexts, focusing on extended excerpts from two musical examples: a Wolof halam (five-stringed lute) duo from Senegal and a batá (double-headed hand drum) performance from the Yoruba-derived Santería tradition in Cuba. In both analyses it works out from musical structures and processes, using transcriptions of recordings, to put Senghor’s concepts to work as a music-theoretical framework. Rather than problematically reinscribing rhythm as the foundational African musical index (as Kofi Agawu implores us to resist), I suggest Senghor and these later thinkers develop a rich metaphysics of anexact polyrhythmic relationality that carefully takes into account all manner of contextual and extra-contextual parameters as a heterogeneous “spirit-matter” (as Senghor puts it) unity. This has manifold implications for music theory, including considerations of expressive microtiming as essential rather than accidental musical qualities, building on Meki Nzewi’s concept of “melorhythm,” studies of timbre and texture, and especially analyses of interaction, improvisation, and their role in setting musical form and process in motion.

Although most scholarship on non-isochronous meters focuses on irregularity at the beat or subdivision levels, unaccompanied cantos de boga (rowing songs) from the Pacific region of Colombia often feature non-isochrony at the level immediately slower than the beat. Martin Clayton (2020) has called similar metric structures in North Indian music “long-form non-isochronous meters.” They contain isochronous beats, non-isochronous “groups” of beats (i.e., felt measures), and repetitive cycles that tend to last longer than the 5–6 second upper limit for metric perception (London 2012). Clayton argues that listeners can entrain to the non-isochronous measures only when they have prior theoretical knowledge, fostered by years of academic study and experience in listening and performance.

In this paper, I counter Clayton’s assertion regarding the conditions for entraining to long-form non-isochronous meters. I expand scholarship on these meters to include music from implicit music theory traditions (in which there are no explicit theories in the form of verbal or written information), and from structurally flexible traditions (in which, for instance, the number of beats varies greatly among songs from the same genre). In cantos de boga, the calls and responses found within each cycle are traditionally improvised by women singers (Birenbaum Quintero 2018). The resulting number of beats per cycle is not prescribed, and rather can vary widely from a metrically regular sixteen beats to prime cycles of thirteen and twenty-three beats. The diversity in the number of beats precludes prior experience from informing one’s entrainment, thus potentially complicating perception of long-form non-isochronous structures (which necessarily arise when the number of beats per cycle is a prime number greater than three).

I argue that entraining to these songs is still possible, despite the lack of an explicit and more prescribed music theory tradition. Repetition of the long, cyclic melodies found in cantos de boga triggers top-down processes of metric entrainment. As more iterations of the melody repeat in each song, even naïve listeners increasingly expect the same cycle to continue recurring. This allows them to gradually begin entraining to the series of changing meters—the non-isochronous level—found within the cycle.

After Kazakhstan’s integration into the USSR in 1920, the Soviet state sponsored publications of folk music to celebrate “the friendship of the peoples.” The Russian-born ethnographer Aleksander Zatayevich (1869–1936) was the first to collect and publish Kazakh songs. Among challenges in transcription Zatayevich mentioned that “the majority of songs allowed great liberty to free meter.” Zatayevich’s normalization of “free meter” resembles approaches to the music from the African continent (Clayton 1996, Locke 2010, Temperley 2010, Anku 2000, Tenzer 2011, and Agawu 2017). There is, however, a crucial distinction: while contemporary Western theorists treat metric complexity as creative ingenuity, Zatayevich ascribed “irregularity,” “non-squaredeness,” and “variability” of meter to biological inferiority. This paper argues that theories of meter by Soviet-trained scholars such as Nikolai Tiftikidi (1921–2014) illuminate the glaring presence of racialization in the allegedly anti-racist USSR.

I place Tiftikidi’s theory of Kazakh “irregular rhythmicity”—based on Zatayevich’s corpus—alongside Russian anthropological writings. Tiftikidi claimed that “irregular rhythmicity is deeply ingrained in the ‘flesh and blood’ of the dombra music,” linking this quality to the Kazakh people’s desire to mimic horse galloping. This claim echoes the racializing logic of anthropologists such as Aleksei Levshin who labeled the Kazakhs as “semisavages [...] who could imitate different sounds of nature better than ‘civilized men’” (Issiyeva 2020). To counter this racializing logic, I build on Kazakh metro-rhythmic approaches that prioritize the structure of language and prosody (Baigaskina 1989, Kozhabekov 2002). This paper ultimately shows that music-theoretical texts—beyond offering tools for analyzing metric organization—present evidence of racial hierarchies otherwise absent in the extant state-sponsored historical archives.

In classical prosody, still the dominant approach to the study of meter in English poetry, the meter of a poem is defined by the number and quality of its constituent feet—patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. Classical prosody thus fails to make distinctions that music theorists have learned to make: between rhythm and meter; between metric accent and phenomenal accent; between meter and grouping; between metrical levels. Classical prosodists look for meter in the properties of the English language, whereas music theorists think of meter as a mental construct in the mind of the listener, something inferred from a sound signal produced by a performance.

We offer instead an approach to meter in English poetry (specifically rhymed verse) that is grounded in music theory. We understand meter as an underlying, multi-level grid, operating independently of and conceptually prior to the vagaries of the rhythmic surface and its groupings. At each metrical level, there are evenly-spaced (isochronous) beats. A beat that coincides with a beat at a higher level receives a metrical accent, i.e., it is a downbeat of a measure at its metric level.

We demonstrate beat isochrony through an empirical study of recorded performances of poetry, following the music-theoretical literature on meter in recorded music. The performed beats are sufficiently isochronous to permit listeners to infer a robust metrical grid. We are thus able to produce multi-level metrical transcriptions in music notation of poetry performances, including both children’s rhymes and canonical verse.

We offer metrical analyses of poetry in multiple performances, including performances by the poets themselves, when available. These performances are surprisingly similar to each other metrically, following what are apparently consistent conventions that constrain poetic performance. While our study is primarily concerned with establishing a firm theoretical foundation for discussions of poetic meter based on music-theoretical principles, we also touch on associated interpretive issues, including the use of expressive timing in performance to enhance poetic meaning and the possibility of meaningful associations of words and ideas at higher metrical levels.