Commentary

The five essays in this issue are noteworthy not only for their focus on Non-Western music, but also for the fact that they involve detailed accounts and analysis of performances and performance technique, both qualitative (Locke, Burns, Scherzinger) as well as quantitative (Polak, Butterfield).This focus on performances, and in many cases the particulars of drumming technique, foregrounds the problems of trying to forge a one-to-one mapping between a series of actions, the sound(s) those actions create, and analytic representations of those sounds.For example, Polak makes useful observations on the timing distinctions between two separate rhythmic events articulated by two hands on a drum, versus a flam that essentially is one "musical object"-and notes that there is a gray area when the flam vs. two-note articulation is not at all clear.Polak, Burns, and Locke also pay close attention to the ways in which timbre plays a crucial role in the definition of particular rhythmic patterns.Thus these five essays cut along many edges.[2] While I would have enjoyed commenting on all five papers, I will limit my remarks to just two, those by Butterfield and Polak, as they most directly engage my own work and make substantial use of empirical methods of analysis with which I am familiar.[3] In "Variant Timekeeping Patterns and Their Effects in Jazz Drumming" Matt Butterfield gives a detailed analysis of Steve Davis's performance of "Tune Up," taken from a Jamey Abersold recording.Butterfield's analysis exhaustively catalogs all of the ride cymbal figures Davis uses in this recording and notes their relative distribution against a family of variants of the basic "ding-CHICK-a-ding" pattern.Butterfield's taxonomy of basic patterns is itself of interest, for he both lays out the range of rhythmic possibilities for the ride pattern and analyzes the different motional qualities of each variant.In so doing he is able to do more than just note the relative distribution of each pattern (and pattern families, as per his Table 1); he is also able to discuss how Davis uses different patterns, with their different propulsive qualities, at different points of the composition

Art · Music Technology and Sound Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Neuroscience and Music Perception

• Hearing in Time

  Justin London•Hearing in Time•2004

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