Le 1er juillet 2017
de 9h30 à 10h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3208
Séance - Analytical Issues in Ethnomusicology
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Gérard Guillot
The analysis of performances pertaining to the corpus of Afro-Brazilian music reveals a musical organization generally composed by recurrent temporal patterns, called fundamental traits or “characteristic devices”, which could reveal specific ways of structuring the musical time coming from Bantu and/or Yoruba cultures. At least one of these kinds of temporal organization doesn’t exist in the Western music. It is constituted by a complex structure composed of simultaneous “rhythmic lines”. Some of them, isochronous, are embedded in the dance movements. The others work as implicit “time-line patterns” for instrumental and vocal performance and can be considered as “non-isochronous meters”. This work puts forth the hypothesis that the whole network of these isochronous and non-isochronous rhythmic lines forms a polymeter. But such an hypothesis induces analytic and didactic issues: from on a analytical point of view, Agawu denies the existence of polymeter for African and Afro-Diasporic music. On their side, didactic issues emerge when some Afro-Brazilian music is taught to Western student: their study opens a path to a cognitive-oriented understanding of how some Afro-Brazilian traditions are organized on a metrical plan. Based on 3 Afro-Brazilian widespread music traditions (samba, maracatu de baque virado and coco), this paper proposes to analyze each Agawu’s criterion (“own metric frame, metric dissonance, metric polyphony”, “coexistence/cooperation”) and its respective relevance in front of recent literature. The related concepts of “polycentrism” and “cometricity/contrametricity” are discussed.
