Turning the Analysis around: Africa-Derived Rhythms and Europe-Derived Music Theory

As Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (1993, 1) has emphasized, analysis is an activity that was developed as a way of examining chiefly Europe-derived works of music. Susan McClary and Robert Walser (1994, 77) have stressed further that the Europe-derived discipline of music theory has notoriously neglected rhythm in favor of abstract patterns of pitch and form. I feel that Europe-derived theory and analysis have not handled well the following topics, long and widely acknowledged to be important for Africaderived traditions: constant syncopation, off-beat phrasing, turning the beat around, backbeat, cross-rhythm, anticipation (as contrasted with retardation), constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures, the related phenomena of call-and-response phrasing, riffs, vamps, time-lines, particular additive rhythms, metronomic pulse (or approximately, what ethnomusicologists have referred to as the metronome sense)-all this grounded in the unique forward momentum of unflagging rhythms highlighted by Floyd (1991, 268, 279; cf. Floyd 1993, 1, 4). Attempted below is a technical account of Africa-derived syncopation that might serve as an alternative to orthodox, Europe-derived accounts. Rather than depicting syncopated rhythms merely as deviations from a four-square metrical hierarchy, I try to show how they can be portrayed as highly integrated wholes in their own right. Such wholes favor a different aesthetic imagery than has been usual in Europe-derived analyses of rhythm: specifically, (1) an imagery of complementation, long estab-