In African music, the rhythmic aspect occurs in two basic metrical schemes: triple meter, and duple or quadruple meter.
The triple meter scheme is represented by the alternate division of the measure into three and two. In 6/8 time, this would be notated as three quarter notes followed by two dotted quarter notes, or three eighth notes followed by two dotted eighth notes (or in the reverse order). Examples of both are found in Debussy's Les Collines d'Anacapri (from Preludes for piano, book one), mm. 49-65, especially mm. 57, 61, 62-63 and 64-65. The first dotted quarter is often replaced by an eighth rest and a quarter note; this is a common ostinato in African and African American musics. At the rapid tempos of traditional African music, this latter form is almost indistinguishable from the first quadruple meter form described below.
The duple/quadruple meter scheme can be notated in 4/4 time as a two dotted quarters and a quarter note in the first measure and a quarter rest followed by two quarter notes and a quarter rest in the second measure. Alternately, the first measure may consist of a dotted quarter note followed by an eighth note and two quarter notes; this is the famous habanera rhythm, and as is frequently the case, the second measure is omitted entirely.
Our form of musical notation does an injustice to African music. (Actually, it does an injustice to European classical music, as can be heard in too many performances.) Particularly when performed as an ostinato on a cow bell or other type of gong or on the wooden claves of Latin American music, this pattern could be notated completely differently, and with complete indifference to the bar lines of our notation. (In Latin American music, it is almost always notated as described above, but African music, and much African American music, is traditionally taught by demonstration and involvement, not notation.)
The distinction between the triple-meter and quadruple-meter schemes is not always rigid. The Debussy example quoted above is similar in rhythm and meter to a tango, a Latin American dance in 2/4 or 4/4 time. (A certain Tango in D by Albeniz comes to mind.) The characteristic rhythm of the Baroque chaconne, repeating the first two beats in triple meter, has its quadruple meter counterpart in a dance popular in the United States in the 1920's, the Charleston, in which the word "Charleston" is repeated to the rhythm of a dotted quarter followed by an eighth in 4/4 time.
African and African American music is always polymetric, every rhythmic idea being heard or danced or felt against a contrasting metrical scheme. The characteristic rhythm of the Charleston, for example, was felt and danced against a strict even division of the measure into two or four beats. In the Debussy example, one never hears 6/8 or 3/4 by itself; both are always present simultaneously. In medieval European music, this was called hemiola. Its frequent appearances in Baroque music probably relate to medieval and renaissance antecedents as do the more self-consciously historical usages of Brahms. This, also, is an African influence: as documented in Henry George Farmer's Historical Evidence for the Arabian Musical Influence and in Julian Ribera's Music in Ancient Arabia and Spain, medieval European music was heavily indebted to African influences.
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