RHYTHM over RHYTHMS
Normally we learn rhythm under the “regime” of the “beat”, the “measure”, the “counting” of a rhythm pattern, “waiting the one”. And we adapt to its order as it is told to be adopted, to how it is counted, how its “metric” units are structured, how it is subdivided, and so on. We understand little beyond that recipe brought on board on las Carabelas de Colón.
Rarely is the metric relationship explained to us from the point of view of the language of forms, arithmetic, space and time. As a consequence of this, we spent many years counting, “tapping” bits of time just like metronomes do, trying to synchronize perfectly with an imaginary and illusory time flow, printed in the dictates of the conventions.
Suddenly, we discover that the liveliest music and the most creative and expressive instrumentalists work beyond these territorial limits; and that his music expands in such a way that the sensation of time and space, in which the time is presented — as musical time — , as something that governs content, quality and matter, where musical figures and gestures live interdependently on the musician’s intentions, as they develop and evolve as invisible entities, biologically, molecularly and atomically in order to being to create, build, develop, to age and die; and finally they transcend the Present Tense.
When we carefully observe the rhythmic evolution of root-origin music, from Africa for example, we notice that notions of metricity only exist as parameters within the Western understanding, for studying and to explain ourselves the intricacies involved in the sonic experience we perceive; in some way, its polyphonic structure, its movement and its organizational state, are all a non-native image of percussive thought. Since in general, our auditory construct is subject to the limits of an education subject to the principles of “good and evil inherited in the same principles of the dogma of the white god commandments.
What derives from such a religious study is, in the words of György Ligeti in the foreword to Simha Arom African Polyphony and Polyrhythm (Musical Structure and Methodology):
«…the creation of structures which are both remarkably simple and highly complex. The formal simplicity of African music with its unchanging repetition of periods of equal length, like the uniform pearls of a necklace, is in sharp contrast to the inner structure of these periods which, because of simultaneous superposition of different rhythmic patterns, possesses an extraordinary degree of complexity. Gradually, through repeated listening, I became aware of this music’s paradoxical nature: the patterns performed by the individual musicians are quite different from those which result from their combination. In fact, the ensemble’s super-pattern is in itself not played and exists only as an illusory outline. I also began to sense a strong inner tension between the relentlessness of the constant, never-changing pulse coupled with the absolute symmetry of the formal architecture on the one hand, and the asymmetrical internal divisions of the patterns on the other. What we can witness in this music is a wonderful combination of order and disorder which in turn merges together producing a sense of order on a higher level».
It is this external / internal symmetry-asymmetry in musical periods that my study of percussive metricity is really about. And it is in repeated, unintended listening (because when we listen from such intention, we are already predisposed to listen to such a thing as we have learned to listen, and we cannot hear anything else beyond that but to what is already constructed in our memory, similar to spoken language); we discover that the deeper learning is as with the native language — which most people´s of the planet had lost and others are in risk of an accelerated extinction — , and that the linguistics and syntax of such languages emerge from the images that paint reality as it is lived and experienced individually and collectively; and it helps us to create, build, develop, evolve the thought and our own order of consciousness, like an unforeseen vision that we make and create out of the phenomena we have experienced in the past, experiencing in the present, and may experience into the future; so we not only use such a syntax to repeat what has already been said and written previously.
My work and study on metricity — as an art of meter — has been the basis for structuring rhythmic movement, going beyond the borderline principles of the colonial musical tradition including all its implications and divergencies, although I spent many years through this fascinating and tedious structural numerological transit, always counting and waiting the one; my consequent encounter with a greater rhythmic conception as a development of a critical analysis of the rhythms that organize singular and collective individuation, which ultimately has lead to a rhythmic analysis that can allow me to measure the world from different angles of percussive meaning and change; at the same time fluid, fragmented and as a place of new power possibilities, in which I have just entered and exited over and over through the process of rhythmatist. And it is through this sort of rhythmic analysis that I can imagine new forms of singular and collective subjectivation that needed as evolutionary beings.
Thinking of percussion, of the tamborileo element in human existence and its representations of the world in the world — couldn´t be more beautifully written that because the world is round in The Percussionist´s Art, by Steven Schick — , the drums is nothing more than an element-territory-field of the phenomenology of the percussive body, of it´s own roundness, since it is the rhythmic onticity of its natural biological becoming (embodied primarily as a vital organ -heart, viscera, nervous system, brain, kinesiological structural tissue, etc.) which makes all music exist from the sense of the body and as part of an encircled-cyclic language that gives it new senses within RHYTHM over RHYTHMS.