Early documentation of non-isochronous meters in traditional Bulgarian dance music (Stoin 1925; Hristov 1967) has positioned this tradition as an often cited example of “metric irregularity” within musicological and music theoretical literature (Singer 1974; Bartók 1976; London 2012; Polak 2020). Contemporary performances of traditional music, however, frequently draw upon performance practices of institutionalized folklore of the socialist period and post-socialist fusion-oriented trends in wedding music through rhythmic experimentation. Addressing the gap between the initial folkloric documentation of non-isochronous meters and their performance nearly a century later, this paper analyzes cases of “metric reorganization” in contemporary Bulgarian folk music performance.

I analyze two pairs of cases in which professional folk musicians utilize metric reorganization, defined here as a regrouping of a meter’s internal subdivisions that differs from its traditional subdivision grouping. First, I analyze two cases in recent village dance events that exhibit metric reorganization. In one case, clarinetist Angel Malakov repeats a melodic group of four notes in a ruchenitsa (7/8 2-2-3), and in the other, clarinetist Petur Voinikov repeats a melodic group of five notes in a pravo horo (6/8 3-3). This repetition creates tension subsequently released through realigning the melodic line with the dance meter’s original subdivision grouping. Second, two in-studio recordings are considered. Zhivko Vasilev in his recording Paidushko 5/8 (2-3) metrically recontextualizes fragments of melodies through subdivision groupings of threes and fours. In another recording, Pletenitsa by Peyo Peev, Peev explores the possibilities of a relatively long traditional dance meter Yovino [18/8 ((3-2-2)-(2-2-3-2-2))] through regrouping subdivisions isochronously in six groups of three and in groups that descend by one (7-6-5).

Literature on subdivision regrouping (Benadon 2024: 237) and displacement dissonance (Krebs 1999; Mirka 2009) find resonance with this technique, yet lack culture specific metric frameworks necessary to analyze the relationship between displacements and subdivision groupings within the context of Bulgarian traditional meters. My analysis thereby synthesizes music theoretical concepts of displacement and regrouping, the framing of Bulgarian traditional meters, and the specificities of performance context, to elucidate how techniques of metric reorganization function in a variety of contemporary performance contexts.

This paper focuses on metrical patterning in a tradition of instrumental performance for the two-stringed Central Asian lute called dutar, as cultivated by a lineage of musicians in south-central Turkmenistan. A few Turkmen musicians dually trained in indigenous and western music have transcribed works from the mostly oral tradition of Turkmen dutar instrumentals for about the past 50 years. Their highly detailed transcriptions often feature shifting time signatures as they strive to capture the rhythmic dynamism of their music within the limits of staff notation’s “grid.” Such moments attest to the frequent metrical ambiguity or irregularity of the music. This presentation examines several such instances in order to argue that regular meter, clearly established within stable passages of vamping on held notes, operates as a point of departure and return for melodically dynamic passages that can become metrically unstable. Illustrating this phenomenon through annotated transcriptions and analyses of onset timing data, I offer a series of hypotheses about what accounts for this form of metrical irregularity in the music. While such hypotheses are difficult to prove, I identify a set of musical and social factors that clearly establish the conditions of possibility for such metrical ambiguity. These include a lack of percussion instruments; a musical system in which fixed melodic passages are strung together by vamping that can vary in duration; the use of non-isochronous meters that can become difficult to track during highly embellished melodic passages; a musical model that involves rhythms calculated in terms of precise sequences of strums whose timing can be nonetheless expressively manipulated; and dutarists’ additional experience as accompanists in a bardic tradition where established meter is often suspended during stretches of parlando vocal delivery. Finally, I highlight a social factor that reinforces the situation: while the tradition’s norms emphasize the detailed preservation of orally transmitted compositions as inherited from previous masters, they have not motivated efforts to “correct” apparent deviations from metrical regularity, taking these rather as core aspects of the melodies that one must preserve.

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two Holi songs—one from North India and the other Indo-Caribbean community of Trinidad and Tobago—examining how asymmetrical meter and melodic practice are articulated and transformed across homeland and diaspora. Both performances use a seven-beat cycle corresponding to rupak tāl (3+2+2) and feature a gradual accelerando culminating in a shift to a 4/4 bhajan-derived groove before returning to seven beats at the conclusion. In large-scale design, this shared metric trajectory suggests continuity across geographically and historically distinct contexts.

Close transcription, however, reveals distinct regional treatments of asymmetry. In the North Indian example, phrase structure aligns consistently with the tāl’s internal divisions, reinforced by cadential returns to 'sam' and durational proportionality across cycles. Even as tempo increases, the seven-beat framework remains structurally stable; the transition into 4/4 functions as a sectional contrast rather than a transformation of the cycle itself. By contrast, the Trinidadian performance exhibits a distinctive phenomenon not present in the North Indian example: a progressive contraction of the seven-beat cycle immediately prior to the emergence of 4/4. Successive iterations of rupak subtly compress in duration, producing a perceptible “shrinking” effect that intensifies forward momentum. Rather than maintaining proportional stability, the cycle becomes elastic, its internal divisions condensed until asymmetrical organization effectively resolves into symmetrical quadruple meter. This contracting cycle regionally characteristic within Indo-Caribbean practice and functions as a bridge between metric systems.

Melodically, the two performances share important continuities. Both draw on rāga-derived pitch frameworks typical of North Indian Holi repertory, outlining recognizable scalar and motivic profiles while incorporating expressive grace notes and inflections that momentarily depart from strict rāga grammar. These non-scalar embellishments heighten textual affect and devotional intensity, positioning rāga less as a codified classical system than as an emotive and flexible resource. In both cases, the aesthetic orientation aligns more closely with participatory folk practice than with art-music orthodoxy: melodic nuance supports communal celebration of Holi rather than professional concert performance.

By foregrounding asymmetrical meter and melodic nuance as structurally and socially embedded processes, this study argues that diasporic continuity operates through adaptive transformation rather than preservation alone.

Ethnomusicologist Philip Yampolsky concluded his comments on Ngerangkau—a ritual gong music called from East Kalimantan—like so: “[its] rhythm has a curious limping quality” (1998:20). His fieldnotes (1995) transcribe a 12/8 rhythm, but he scribbles out potential hearings and leaves it hanging with a question mark, likely due to the fact that some beats are consistently longer than others. Since then, Vincenzo Della Ratta recorded the repertoire again in a few different villages. He prefers to hear it as belonging to some kind of 13-pulse grid, and even ventures an interpretation in 14, due to a “hesitation” he hears in some versions (Della Ratta 2018). All of these hearings suggest that one or another grid fails to accurately capture the actual rhythmic proportions.

Measuring the uneven onsets reveals a complex but remarkably consistent 8-element duration pattern that forms a stable ~3s cycle. With some aural squinting, one can hear it as comprised of two durational categories, but measurement and statistical evaluation show there is at least a short, medium, and long. This yields a lumpy rhythmic contour that evades hierarchical interpretation—at no level do these pulses configure to create proportional/hierarchical relations of durational values (e.g., 2:1, 3:1 etc.) found in most music typically thought of as “metric.” Curious and limping, indeed.

Recent theoretical studies of microtiming offer a wealth of possible interpretive frameworks (e.g., Johansson 2017; Polak and London 2022; Morford and David 2023; Danielsen et al. 2023, 2024; Benadon 2024). These theories inform an analysis of Ngerankau’s durational categories, cycle orientation, and pulse grouping and hierarchy. Statistical interpretation and gestalt perspectives are also brought to bear. The ultimate aim is to answer the question “what kind of microtiming is this?” Is it expressive? Structural? Swing-based? Non-isochronous? If so, at how many levels and how does it compare to other non-isochronous musics with clearer pulse hierarchies? These questions help to situate Ngerangkau within meter, rhythm, and timing theories, offering a fringe example where precise ensemble timing may be achieved by means not captured by metric models based on hierarchical, periodic fluctuations of neurons (London 2012).

In many world music traditions—ranging from Hindustani tala to Eastern European dances—genres are defined by their musical meters. Even in literary-musical forms, such as Puerto Rican jíbaro décima, poetic structures are often improvised over one predetermined meter (Bofill Calero 2022). Yet, in cantos de boga—unaccompanied rowing songs from Colombia’s southern Pacific coast—different performances of the same song often feature contrasting metrical structures.

Drawing on transcription and timing analysis of ethnographic, archival, and commercial recordings, I argue that cantos de boga are based on a few melodic schemas with octosyllabic subphrases, whose rhythmic relationships between syllables are not prescribed and instead emerge during performance, as the poetry is musicalized.

For instance, “Panguito Lándo” (1978) and “Oío Bando” (1963) are melodically quite similar, featuring the same contours, scale degrees, and number of octosyllabic subphrases. Yet, metrically, they develop differently: “Panguito Lándo,” is in a consistent 11/8 meter throughout the piece. In contrast, however, while the first line of “Oío Bando” seems to be in 11/8 like “Panguito Lándo,” by the second line, one of the syllables is elongated relative to the earlier line, resulting in a 12/8 meter, which is subsequently maintained. Through the change between the first and following lines of “Oío Bando,” one can observe the gradual metrizication of the piece, negotiated by the improvising singers.

In addition to the stretching out and contracting of individual syllables, other examples expand or truncate musical material with non-lexical falsetto cries (inessential to the octosyllabic structure), or play with the total number of octosyllabic subphrases (which do not affect the overall octosyllabic structure). Overall, the variations within and between performances highlight the essential and inessential aspects of musical structure in this understudied genre, highlighting the primacy of the poetic structure and the malleability of the resulting meter.

Irregular meters figure prominently in the traditional musics of the San and related groups in Botswana. They exhibit a diversity of odd-number cardinalities and length that is potentially unique among smaller, older traditions of the world. In sub-Saharan African ethnomusicology they are widely known for stylistic links to geographically distant Aka (and other pygmy) peoples who, like the San, are of the pre-Bantu population stratum (England 1995, Olivier 1999). This has led some to propose a shared phylogeny (Rouget and Grimaud 1957; Furniss and Olivier 1999; Grauer 2006). The cited sources, however, address characteristic polyphonic singing style and mention neither similarities nor distinctions among metric types.

John Brearley’s collection of thousands of recordings made in Botswana in the 1980s and archived in the British Library, are the source for two selections considered in this paper: a recording of four iterations of a 47-beat cycle sung by plurivocal choir with accompanying handclaps, the other multiple repeats of a 23-beat cycle played monophonically on what sounds to be a pluriarc. Unfortunately documentation for Brearley’s recordings is scant, though one of his two articles lightly describes some songs in odd-count meters (Brearley 1984, 1989)

IIn this presentation the recordings are played then discussed with three purposes: 1) to illustrate how pitch focus and rhythm grouping expectations interact in each of the two examples, and how these long, prime number cycle counts (with limited tessituras and 4- or 5-tone scales) create distinctive attentional conditions and structural ambiguities; 2) to address how these and other selections may contribute to refinement or refutation of the historical and cultural connections mentioned above; and 3) to address the music theory-related problematics of working with archival materials of musics that are now rare, dying, or transformed in light of cultural dislocation, hence likely inaccessible to future ethnographers. What would we like to know, and how far can we presume to go with recordings only?