The concept of “emic” and “etic” cultural data, deriving from the terms “phonemic” and “phonetic” and referring respectively to culturally salient knowledge and empirical information, has a long history in the humanities. The idea of a strict emic/etic binary is difficult to uphold, given that the views of cultural insiders can change over time, and that an outsider analyst likely brings their own culturally conditioned perceptual habits to their interpretation of empirical data. However, the acknowledgment that there will be differing perspectives on the “insider-outsider continuum” (Nettl 2015, Ch.11) can be a productive one.
This differentiation of perspectives can be useful in the study of musical cycles, especially when culturally determined categories of duration appear to differ from empirical timing data (Kvifte 2007). The importance of accounting for insider perspectives (when available) is highlighted in Martin Clayton’s argument that culturally shared knowledge can contribute to the cognitive processing of musical meter (2020). Insider cultural knowledge can also help in identifying cyclic musical structures that may not be obvious to an outsider analyst; as Richard Wolf notes in the context of South Asia, there are principles for organizing drum patterns that do not depend on cycles with a fixed number of pulses, and are structured instead according to the number of stressed beats, repeating motives, tone-melodies, verbal formulas, or in relation to the movements of dancers (2014). Accounting for such insights (and other cultural homologies) can help the analyst select the most appropriate analytical framework(s) for studying a piece of music, using structural and cultural analysis (see Agawu 2006) as complementary modes of explanation.
An empirical outsider perspective – particularly a comparative one – can bring new insights to the study of musical cycles, highlighting noteworthy structural phenomena and noting unsuspected connections between musical traditions. However, such descriptive theorizing can also have an unforeseen prescriptive effect: the histories of global musics attest to many instances where theorizations of rhythm (often by elite intellectuals) have in turn informed the subsequent development of the musical genres themselves. In this light, the work of the analyst comes with an ethical responsibility to not impose inappropriate analytical frameworks upon musical styles – thereby making them seem underdeveloped or lacking, and (when possible) to represent musical structures in ways that highlight the conceptions of performers and other culture-bearers. [Eshantha Peiris]
Case Study: Emic and Etic Perceptions of Cycles in Bulgarian Folk Music
Contextualized in the broader discourse of cycles, the durational processes of most cycles in Bulgarian folk dance music are similar to those in ‘grooves’ of popular music, falling within the span of the perceptual present. These short cycles are the primary method of temporal organisation in Bulgarian folk dance music. Following Justin London’s (2012) categories, the short cycles would be considered metric, and then further dichotomised as isochronous or non-isochronous.
However, an isochronous vs. non-isochronous dichotomy is not an emic categorisation of meter in the case of Bulgarian music. Rather, subdivision, beat, tempo, and regional characteristics are used to differentiate between different cycle forms. Musicians confirm the existence of beats and subdivisions, but usually in more implicit ways—preferring to demonstrate configurations of short and long beats, rather than actually using the word “beat”. Going back more than a century, Bulgarian musicology has catalogued meters by their number of subdivisions (even though folk musicians in the early 20th century did not conceive of meter as such). Contemporary professionally-trained folk musicians also recognize this level of meter as a consequence of the institutionalization of folk music after 1944. For example, musicians will describe how ‘short’ and ‘long’ beats consist of two and three subdivisions respectively. (See Meter in Bulgarian Folk Music for an expanded discussion)
Other types of cycles such as non-metric cycles and cycles whose durations exceed the perceptual present can be found mainly in vocal music that does not feature a choreographic dimension, such as Shop diaphonic singing (e.g. Tri Mi Zvezdi). In this tradition, musicians make timing judgments through syllabic accentuation, shared expectations of the syllabic structure of Bulgarian folk poetry, familiarity with their partner’s singing style, and perhaps breath length. [Nathan Bernacki]