Let us begin with a look at the music of Steve Reich, specifically one his seminal works, Drumming (1970-71). The piece was composed over the course of roughly one year following Reich's return from Ghana, where he studied drumming with Ewe master drummer Gideon Alorworye2. Reich recorded each lesson with Alorwoye and afterward played the tapes back at a slow enough speed so as to be able to transcribe the individual patterns. By doing so he noticed that different instrumental patterns present in Gahu music, although rhythmically compatible either by a simple or polyrhythmic relationship, were not bound by any sort of attachment to the first downbeat of each measure.
The way in which Reich has established the measure lines for each pattern in his transcription is a clear indication of his perception of meter in this type of music. Rather than simply dropping all of the patterns into 4/4, Reich maps the relationship between each instrument in a polymetric, albeit very closely related, way. The top gong gong line is an eight quarter note long phrase, whereas the rattle part directly below is exactly half the length at four quarter notes. The third line, a one quarter note long kagan pattern, is basically the tactus of the whole piece but displaced by one eight note. The bottom three lines are all four quarter notes long but displaced by one and a half quarter notes (kidi), one quarter note (sogo), and a sixteenth note (agboba), respectively. This rhythmic displacement is where we start to see the influence of Reich's time in Africa on his compositional approach to Drumming. The variability of the displacement is crucial to our understanding of Drumming and how the underlying process of rhythmic phasing works.
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| Midi transcription of 'Drumming' |
The sense of becoming fixed in time (to paraphrase Gretchen Horlacher) frequently goes hand-in-hand with the sense that two separate motives are actually fused into a single pattern. Put another way: because displacement dissonances do not challenge our sense of metrical periodicity (though they may challenge our sense of downbeat), two ostinati that form a grouping dissonance are far more likely to be differentiated as separate motivic strains than are two ostinati that form displacement dissonances. By intermingling these two types of metrical dissonance — often willy-nilly — Adams projects a freer relationship between two textural lines. This is one feature that sets his minimalist technique apart from that of Steve Reich or Michael Torke, who generally don’t oscillate between metrical dissonance types quite so readily.
The Sonic Illusion of Metrical Consistencyin Recent Minimalist Composition - Michael Buchler Florida State University 2006
Titles to check out:
Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter by Justin London
Meter as rhythm by Christopher F. Hasty New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
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