Courses

In this collaboration between a music theorist and an ethnomusicologist, we explore musical structures from many world traditions, with emphasis on analysis of their rhythmic features. We teach the course together because we feel that the topic is significant to our respective fields, and because we want to benefit from each other’s insights and expertise. We also want to encourage you to cross boundaries and explore new repertoires.

Periodicity—that is, regularity, repetition, or recurrence—is a central, perhaps even definitive characteristic of music, and in previous years we have tried to touch on as many manifestations of it as we could in one term. This year we focus on music using repeating cycles. All cyclic music is periodic, but the reverse is not so. All cycles involve the continuous repetition of at least some sounding elements, but there is enormous variety in how this is achieved and in the degree of regularity. Cycles of the world range from brief figures to lengthy event-sequences, and they may be repeated exactly or transformed in the course of performance by almost as many techniques as there are musics. We will build analytical approaches to cycles that strive to represent how we experience repetition bodily and mentally as we perceive and track change in the music at many levels. We will consider a broad repertoire of musics and styles and variation processes, and consider dimensions of cyclicity beyond the narrowly musical, for example, dance and ritual.

From a music-theoretical perspective, the course considers how existing concepts and methods for analyzing rhythm and meter in Western music can be adapted and applied to other repertoires. From an ethnomusicological one, we want to understand how the terms and concepts we use to describe music, and how we perceive it, depend crucially on one’s historical and cultural position. Our goal is to find as much entente as we can between our fields.