Quality and Quantity in Rhythm
Exploring African influences with Olivier Tarpaga and Kofi Agawu
Olivier Tarpaga
“There is nothing like pure rhythm from an African standpoint, rather, rhythm almost always incorporates melody or timbre…”
Kofi Agawu
Last week I wrote about Sō Percussion’s collaboration with Olivier Tarpaga on a new quartet. On Friday at Princeton we performed a workshop premiere of two of the movements. One is a translation of dun dun patterns onto toms and slats of wood. In the other he composes balifon melodies on the 5-octave marimba that remind him of music he heard in his grandmother’s village as a child.
Since Olivier composes and teaches his music by rote, I have been documenting the creation process using video and music notation. Along the way, I have grappled with whether recording methods like notation serve Olivier’s intentions and capture the spirit of his music. I sheepishly asked him for permission to write the music down, and his answer surprised me: “please do, it shows me that you care about it!”
But I realized that notation never really serves the music fully. It is a constant variation on the old formula of “the map is not the territory:” you always need to understand the values and priorities of the music.
While rehearsing the dun dun movement last week, I experienced a small epiphany about Agawu’s quote from above: the rhythms are melodies and the melodies are rhythms. Even though I was only playing one drum and one block, Olivier was happiest when each was played as if being sung. The more I loosened my body to enjoy the rhythm, and the more expressively I sang the rhythms in my head, the better my part sounded.
A Theoretical Framework
We teach a course on rhythm for undergraduates at Princeton with Olivier. The course is meant to introduce multiple perspectives on rhythm that will enrich the students’ sense of it. At the beginning of the semester we start them by learning patterns on the djembe with Olivier by rote.
To explain different concepts coherently, we have compiled a reading list about rhythm from excellent scholars such as Kofi Agawu, Vijay Iyer, and especially from the variety of authors represented by Russell Hartenberger’s compilation “The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm,” to which I also contributed.
Agawu is a legendary musicologist and music theorist covering both western classical music and African music. He encouraged the growth and development of percussion and African music at Princeton, and was instrumental in bringing Olivier onto the faculty. He published an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2006 that has become foundational to my understanding of how to approach African and African-influenced musical ideas without defaulting to western modes of understanding.
The article is entitled “Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Competing perspectives on the ‘Standard Pattern’ of West African Rhythm.” Say that five times fast. It is written for a specialized audience, but his writing is so precise and compelling that it is worth studying carefully. I have read it several times, but I revisited it recently after working with Olivier to see if some of my experiences in practice contributed to insight on the theory.
The main thrust of Agawu’s argument is that the efforts of western scholars over the years to document, catalog, and understand African music have often revealed a bias towards what he calls “quantitative” thinking, i.e., the kind of analysis you do when you are used to representing music on paper as a series of numbers and symbols. In contrast, the “qualitative” approach hews closer to singing, movement, and embodiment.
Here is his definition of the two mindsets:
“Qualitatively oriented approaches engage rhythm as a supremely temporal and complex process; they seek its patterns in life, language, and forms of embodiment. Quantitatively oriented analytical approaches, on the other hand, assign numbers to elements to establish identity, and then exploit a series of operations (adding, dividing, and multiplying) to construct patterns of association among rhythmic elements and groups.”
I struggled with understanding this distinction for quite a while, and I think it’s because the practice of counting and dividing is so embedded in my concept of music-making. From as early as I can remember, I was reading music along with performing it, which means that the first piece of information I gleaned from the top-left corner of the score was a fraction (2/4, 3/4, etc).
In our course at Princeton, which does not require reading music as a prerequisite, I once attempted to explain the peculiarities of rhythmic notation to a non-music-reading Princeton engineering major. This talented student, who presumably did more advanced math daily than I would ever encounter, grew frustrated as I tried to explain how the symbols related to each other to represent quantitative relationships.
But this strange system governs the way I process what I hear. I see its symbols in my mind when I hear music. It is an effective means of transmitting and documenting some information about music, but it can also hem you into thinking about music in limited ways.
Learning in Olivier’s mode
Olivier is not teaching us how to play any traditional music, but he is composing music influenced by the drumming and balifon playing of Burkina Faso. When he demonstrates a new idea he expresses it as a phrase with both rhythmic and melodic components (even on a drum), and does not make reference to separate elements, to the pulse reference, or to meter. He simply sings and plays — slowly if needed — until you get it.
Taking either rote instruction or notation as your mode of learning affects the way you perceive mental musical objects. In the purely embodied, rote version, the phrase is inseparable from the movement associated with executing it: there is no abstract mental symbol which represents the music, but just the movement of the music itself. When you start with quantified notation, it provides the advantage of conveying much more information quickly, but potentially at the expense of embodiment, a perennial problem that Emil Dalcroze start a whole pedagogical movement to fix.
Here are a few bars of my transcription of the dun dun movement. The drum is the filled-in note-head in the middle, the block is the x note-head on the top. Other than the accents, the notation doesn’t capture any of the shading of phrasing that Olivier performs when he teaches us the music, nor his unique feel, which isn’t as studiously even as ours is.
After three days of learning this music completely by rote without writing it down, I was surprised at what it looked like on the page. Some phrases seemed longer in my mind because they had more notes. Others were more difficult to memorize because of tricky syncopated timings, and looked deceptively simple on the page once written down. I realized that the phrases were developing their own character in my mind as I learned them, and they seemed disappointingly flattened once organized on the page.
I wondered whether it would be possible to learn this music starting from a score and capture its essence properly. I think it could, but a great deal of context from practice would be needed.
An element that simply can’t be captured (this is a familiar problem in jazz notation), is the feel of the rhythms. One of Olivier’s rhythmic layers is a pattern on a guiro-like metal instrument which lies between notated sixteenth notes and triplets. There are no points awarded for almost getting the feel right. Even if a more microscopic and precise notation tried to capture it accurately, the resulting mess on the page would do nothing to convey its buoyant character. You have to imitate somebody who is playing it correctly, and wait patiently until they say you’ve got it.
Multi-modal thinking
Ultimately, the richness of different ways of working can reinforce each other. One of the paradoxes of the qualitative approach is that so many mathematically satisfying structures lie within the phrases that Olivier composes. He frequently creates what we might call hemiola patterns — twos within threes or threes within twos — with enough persistence that they suggest new meters within the prevailing one. He will also fill or accentuate ends of long phrases with brief polyrhythm flourishes. As with the guiro-like patterns mentioned above, the feel for these flourishes frequently lies in a liminal place between notated polyrhythms.
Agawu’s paper recommends that analyzing these structures on paper and making sense of them in quantitative terms is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we don’t try to re-configure or re-contextualize the music’s meaning in those terms (there is a heavy dose of de-colonization involved in maintaining this awareness). In this case, if Olivier is interested in other groups performing his quartet, I will probably package transcriptions along with videos, recommending a process of rote learning from the videos which is complemented and reinforced by score study.
We are touring Burkina Faso and other parts of west African with Olivier in December. I will write in this newsletter about our experiences there. Until then, we finish the other two movements and look forward to the premiere at Carnegie Hall on December 2nd!