Look harder and longer. This simultaneity, up to a certain point, is only apparent: a surface, a spectacle. Go deeper, dig beneath the surface, listen attentively instead of simply looking, of reflecting the effects of a mirror. You thus perceive that each plant, each tree, has its rhythm, made up of several: the trees, the flowers, the seeds and fruits, each have their time. […] In place of a collection of fixed things, you will follow each being, each body, as having its own time above the whole. Each one therefore having its place, its rhythm, with its recent past, a foreseeable and a distant future.
Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 41
I am interested in escaping anticipation and control (of individual reactions) of political strategies, by finding ways of becoming less predictable. “There is an inextricable link between power and rhythm. What power imposes in the first place is a rhythm (rhythm of everything – life, time, thought, discourse)”, Roland Barthes wrote. I am suggesting to rather consider the link between power and meter and to look at how meter emerged as a transversal concept across the arts, poetics, philosophy, and social science. For me, the meter subjugates, not rhythm, and I see the notion of polymeters and polyrhythms as a way to abolish the hegemony of meter that is imposed upon us as constraint and for becoming more unpredictable through that. It is important to first shortly explain the three basic modes of temporal organization in music – pulse, meter and rhythm and I mostly refer here to the important book The rhythmic structure of music by Cooper. Pulse is one of a series of regularly recurring, precisely equivalent stimuli. Like the ticks of a metronome or a watch, pulses mark off equal unites in the temporal continuum. Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between regularly recurring accents. Within meter pulses become beats; accented beats are strong, unaccented beats are weak. Rhythm is the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in relation to an accented one. In most compositions, we find a hierarchy of metric organization and some rhythmic groupings are more difficult to realize within a given meter. Aspects of temporal organization which measure are metric. And Foucault writes: “The mechanisms introduced by biopolitics include forecasts, statistical estimates and overall measures.” Crucial is, that pulse is necessary for the existence of meter, bur rhythm can exist without meter! Rhythm is independent of meter and theoretically even of pulse, it can happen in any type of metric organization. Henri Meschonnic proposes to get back to the ancient meaning of rhythm: Rhutmos (rhéin to flow and –(th)mόs a way, a manner) is the pattern of a fluid element (a letter, a peplos, a mood), an improvised, changeable form.
Bojana Cvejic wrote a summary of our thoughts and discussions we had in her course at P.A.R.T.S., where I mentioned my ideas for the first time: “When rhythm is wrested from the established notion of measure in music, a perplexing diversity of terms, instruments and practices unfolds, situating it between a manner of flowing (ruthmos) and an order of movement, proportioned figure (metron), in “the gray gap between black beats” (Nabokov).” The consolidation of the bar line and therefore the introduction of the hegemonic meter seems to have become a part of music only during the 17th century. (Simultaneously with the emergence of capitalism especially in Holland and England?) For example, also the blues used to be an open form with the duration needed for the story a musician was about to tell and did not necessarily have the now common 12 bars. Composer Girard Grisey worked on the relationship between change, predictability, order and disorder. “One can also imagine an oscillating rhythm in which the meter itself would fluctuate constantly.” Link to Tempus ex Machina by Girard Grisey Grisey denies the periodic considered as an ideal point of reference, the basis of a hierarchy which is for him linked to “maximum predictability” and order. He refers to Abraham Moles that says “the notion of rhythm is linked to that of expectation (1966)” and I personally think that the fulfillment of the expectation is linked to metric control and metronomic pulse. (notes from a class with Bojana Cvejic). “Sunny Murray and Albert Ayler did not merely break through bar lines, they abolished them altogether.”, John Litweiler. I had to think of Free Jazz and Swing while working on this paper. As written in the chapter 6 Innards of Time of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration”: “The swing is one of those subcutaneous rebellions against the tyranny of the bar line.” To swing means to fluctuate between 2 and 3, to be in 2 and 3 at the same time. Breaking down all rhythmic elements into ‘twos and threes’ (8th notes, 16th notes and triplets) has its roots in nearly all folkloric traditions from Gnawa music of North Africa through the Balkan to Colombian Bata. Drummer Milford Graves: “(…) but if you’re counting like a metronome and everything is like Bamp, Bamp, Bamp just like the second hand, that is extremely dangerous. That means your body is not responding. It must respond. You cannot walk across the street in military march, you know on the beat per second on a major highway where traffic is coming. (…) your tempo is going to change. That’s what the body expects. (…)“. I need to explain, that polymetrics, as I am using the term in this paper, allow not only for different simultaneous rhythms but for the possibility of shifting and changing time and restraints. I am not suggesting to get rid of meters as it is important for the possibility of communal organization and collectivity, but of its hegemony. We do not need one meter that keeps a measured amount of beats controlled, but to share a pulse that allows for interdependency through the possible plurality of polyrhythmic shared within polymetric space and time.* To this thought I want to add beautiful quotation of Osip Mandelstam (“Government and Rhythm” 1920): “Solidarity and rhythm are the quantity and quality of social energy. Only the collective can have rhythm. (…) Rhythm demands a synthesis, a synthesis of the spirit and the body, a synthesis of work and play.(…)” I wonder- how do we free ourselves from the prison of meter opposed on us in order to be more easily controlled through the therefore established possibility of expectancy? What would it mean to live in a polymetric society? On a society based on polymetrics and the resulting less predictable poly-dictability? How would it influence the power of dictator’s unpredictable acts upon us? Would it? “The dictator must never be predictable“, Sue Prideaux in Dictators: the great performers. We still are. But we can start forgiving.
I want to end this paper with another quotation of the book “Flow, gesture, and spaces in free jazz : towards a theory of collaboration” of page 52. Guerino B.Mazzola and Moreno Andreatta conclude the first part of chapter 6 with the following: “So the new thing about time was that it made the move from facticity to the level of making: time became a thing to be construed from scratch. No more tyrannic clocks, no more eternal lines, no lines at all. We make time, we are the new hands, and the clock, and the gestures, which mold time. Not surprisingly, such expressive making also changed the time’s stature: physics’ anorexic timeline was transmuted into a voluminous body of time as shaped by the powerful hands of working musicians.“
“These intimate and predatory forms of exploitation are introducing calculation through rhythms into new arenas of every day life. The question is therefore how to bridge—analytically and politically—the relationship between newer and older(re)configurations of rhythm, power, and everyday life.” Intersectional rhythmanalysis: Power, rhythm, and everyday life by Emily Reid-Musson.
*I very clearly make a differentiation between polymeters and polyrhythms, which in music is not always the case, and not in this way as I am doing it for this paper.
Swinging Max Roach
2 and 3 at the same time- swinging La Réunion!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOm3lqhvvRI
Archie Shepp – Free jazz
Ari Hoenig- Polymetrics / Polyrhythms
Conlon Nancarrow born in the US, lived most of his life in Mexico. He is one of the most important composers of our time and forerunner of contemporary music, but somehow strangely unknown. He mostly composed music for player piano. “One reason for working with the player piano was my interest in temporally dissonant relationships. Temporal dissonance is as hard to define as tonal dissonance.”
Rhythm Study No. 1 (1951) is a polyrhythmic composition with over 200 changes of meter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mKfQYzfduY