On the Problem of Inferential Ambivalence in Musical Meter
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2604782 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jan-Petter Blom, Tellef Kvifte (0000-0002-5605-9533) |
| Year | 1986 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 491 |
| Publication date | 1986-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnomusicology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0014-1836 • E-ISSN: 2156-7417 |
| Publisher | University of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/851591 |
| OpenAlex | W2325161134 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
ur paper concerns the extent to which one can expect that members of a musical culture will perceive the structure of their music identically. When posing such a problem however, a discussion of the researcher's inferential strategy for generating evidence about the limits of consensus in a local culture, seems unavoidable. Our joint effort in opproaching these and related questions is based on the utilization of our, presumably tentative, disagreement about certain aspects of method. Differences in viewpoints and interpretation of facts are therefore presented in the form of an open discussion consisting of two individual but interconnected papers and concluding comments. The discussion and musical analysis assumes that peoples' ability to produce, recognize and experience patterns of sound depends on the acquired perceptual structures of performers and listeners (Blacking 1973:10), and that important cues to structure and meaning are only partly, if at all, transmitted through the auditory channel. Examples are taken from the Hardingfele music of Norway, concentrating on one of the dance music genres, the gangar, commonly codified as a dance in % or 2 meter. The question is raised whether it is reasonable to suppose that melodic meter and dance meter always coincide, i.e., whether the performers of the tradition perceive the melodic meter as always coincident with the dance meter (see Kvifte's discussion). A tentative conclusion favors the view that the mentioned meters can in fact differ, and that there is reason to believe that even performers may not perceive meter in the same way. If, however, one digs deeper into the relationship between the variability of melodic-rhythmic patterns and the structure of movement flow in the dance, it seems possible to generate rules that account for what seem to be contra-metric performances, as representing commetric structures at a deeper level (see Blom's discussion). Are there then any theoretical and empirical reasons for suggesting that such rules are emic constructs which could account for musical communication within a local population, while the contrametric hypothesis only reflects the musical mind of the researcher? Obviously the solutions to this problem forms a central task in ethnomusicology
Ambivalence · Art · Metre · Musical · Physics · Visual arts · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.16 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2007 - 2014 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |