This essay traces creative connections between recent African philosophy and aspects of musical structure and process in African musical contexts. Specifically, it traces the ways in which Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor put rhythmic concepts to work in his political philosophy. Putting into practice what I have recently claimed is a critical task for music theorists, to create concepts (Stover 2025), it draws seven conceptual themes from Senghor’s philosophy and ruminates on how they might be put to work to better understand music-temporal processes in what I call “timeline musics.” The concepts are (1) expression, (2) participation, (3) networks of “interacting forces” that flow in (4) “dynamic waves,” (5) call and response, (6) repetition, and (7) variation.
In the measured music of sub-Saharan Africa, time is structured in three types of units: • The beat, namely an isochronous yardstick, a series of equidistant points (often named “basic pulse”, “tactus level”, “regulative or reference beat”), which is equivalent to the medieval tactus. • The elementary durations (“pulse”, “fastest pulse”, “elementary pulse-unit”, “density referent”,) which indicate the subdivision modes – binary, ternary or mixed – of the tactus. • The cycle, highest level unit, within which a sequence of tactus acts as an armature and constitutes the framework of musical events characterized by repetition practices. In this context, I propose to conceive meter as the whole of these units. From the outset, it is important to note that the tactus is not subject to any regular hierarchical grouping (by 2, by 3, etc.). In other words, the system ignores the notion of a “strong” beat that would necessarily be opposed to one or more “weak” beats; between the tactus and the cycle, there are no metric intermediates. As a corollary, the notion of “measure” is therefore absent here. This term only makes sense in the context of music predetermined by this mold. However, it is clear that, despite this obvious fact, most music theorists, as well as ethnomusicologists, transcribe African music using time signatures and Western-style bars, and consequently use a terminology that is largely inadequate for their analysis. Many misunderstandings arise from this situation. However, they could easily be cleared up if we were to accept the tactus as the cornerstone of this metric system, and not the fast pulses that are still favored by the ethnomusicological community. Contrary to the majority of ethnomusicologists who consider the “fast pulse” as guiding the performance of traditional sub-Saharan music, I am convinced that it is the tactus that assumes this function. This is the first point that I will attempt to demonstrate with arguments. After that, I will try to answer the question of which concepts to use – or to banish – to describe this heritage without betraying the conception that those who practice them have.
This study explores aspects of timing in the performance of Jewish instrumental music from Eastern Europe, known as klezmer. Performance style is an essential aspect of the tradition; musicians today study historical recordings and teach the style in lessons and workshops. The paper thus dovetails with concerns of contemporary musicians who look back to historical sources as they continue to innovate. Three common timing features are documented: (1) variable timing within and between performances, (2) non-isochronous (unequal) beats in a genre known as the zhok or hora, and (3) a distinctive move-ahead-and-wait or accelerate-and-delay gesture that is a signature of the style more broadly and an inverse of a common timing profile in jazz (see Ashley 2002). I analyze historical recordings of a tune known as “Gasn Nign” by Jacob Hoffman with Kandel’s Orchestra (1923), Abe and Sylvia Schwartz (1920), and the Naftule Brandwein (1923). I then analyze a more recent recording of “Gasn Nign” by Alicia Svigals with Steven Greenman (1996) and a piece called “I Flow with Water Under the Ice” composed and performed by Cookie Segelstein with Joshua Horowitz (2019). Methodologies include close listening, transcription, score annotation, timing measurements using Sonic Visualiser, and customized forms of data visualization. Pedagogical materials, discussions with leading musicians, and information from workshops and lessons show how contemporary musicians understand and teach the timing features documented here. This study contributes to a growing field of timing studies in world music traditions, including the Southeastern European traditions that are closely aligned with klezmer. It contributes to the literature on aksak meters by documenting a long-short metric cycle with beats in a 3:2 ratio and by investigating the timing of rhythms that work with this cycle. It builds on London’s many meters hypothesis (London 2012), which suggests that metric and rhythmic cognition are deeply enculturated. This study further demonstrates how variable timing merges seamlessly into variable rhythm in oral traditions. Timing measurements are then valuable alongside transcription and annotation for the representation and study of performance practice.
Is analytical uncertainty an appropriate way to convey an ambiguity that frequently stumps enculturated performers? Conversely, does analytical confidence inherently erase the difficulties musicians and analysts may confront when performing or theorizing about a piece? What responsibility does the analyst have to represent these challenges? In this paper I address these questions through the case study of the Luchazi dance music of Mungongi. In the cultural region spanning northwestern and western Zambia, eastern Angola, and southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Luchazi and related communities perform Mungongi in several settings. It is the preferred music for certain makishi (manifest ancestral spirits), accompanies graduation from traditional initiation ceremonies, and is a royal dance of conquest at festivals. Despite Mungongi’s importance, performers from this cultural zone often have difficulty executing its drum patterns and dance steps. Some of these performance challenges (especially those related to the primary timeline instrument, the mikakaji) provide evidence of emic metric ambiguity. Performers often disagree on the number of fastest pulses that structure this music. These discrepancies make notation and analysis of Mungongi challenging. Throughout my studies of this genre, I have oscillated between representing its meter with three different time signatures: 6/8, 2/4, and 5/8. In this paper, I recount my shifting perceptions of the metrically ambiguous Mungongi by outlining the ethnographic data (collected through extensive field research) that has led me to seemingly conflicting conclusions about its meter. I consider the implications of dance steps, vocables, variations in supporting drum parts, song, lead drum phrases, the larger Luchazi musical repertoire, and performance on instruments not traditionally used for this genre. Acknowledging that any analysis is inherently shaped by its analyst, I also consider the role my own positionality has played in informing my understanding of Mungongi. This autoethnographic section closes with an explanation of why I feel most comfortable mapping this piece onto a 5/8 structure consisting of non-isochronous beats. The paper concludes with commentary on the practice of analysis. I ruminate on the positives of uncertainty, embrace ambiguity, contemplate the possible colonial undertones of this venture, champion embodied knowledge, advocate for attention to performers’ errors, and question our tools of analysis.
Choreomusical approaches to timing and coordination provide the opportunity to analyze the ways in which proprioceptive, haptic, and visual modalities interact and inform the production of sonic phenomena. The Greek-Macedonian vareis horoi (heavy dances) of the zourna/daouli tradition offer intriguing insight into the dynamics between movement and sound in musical performance, as choreographic events in this style are central to sonic onset synchronization and the long-term coordination of performance structure. To analyze how musical time is structured, coordinated, and embodied in this style, I first describe its general metric progression and how this form is realized in a specific dance-song Daoular Tsalar. I then demonstrate the choreography to a particular recording of this song and present a beat-level interonset interval (IOI) analysis of its sonic onsets. I contextualize these quantitative findings in the dynamics of live performance and conclude with implications for theories of entrainment through a critique of Clayton et al.’s (2020) Theory of Interpersonal Musical Entrainment.
Ko Gyi Kyaw is one of the most revered nats (spirits) in Burma (Myanmar), and the dance of this powerful spirit, who is considered to be a womanizer and a drunkard, is one of the most anticipated moments in a nat kana pwe (private spirit ceremony). At particular moments during a pwe, the devotees join the dances, calling and embodying, among others, the nat Ko Gyi Kyaw. While indulging in the consumption of alcohol and cigarettes, they experience the presence of the spirit: supported by the intense music of the nat hsaing (drums and gongs ensemble), they dance to the sound of many nat chins (spirit songs), celebrating the drunkard nat. This paper investigates the performance of a popular spirit song, Do Ko Gyi Kyaw. Focusing on a particular performance by the Kyi Lin Bo’s nat hsaing ensemble from Yangon, the paper discusses the performative strategies adopted by the musicians to interact with the possessed dancers. Through different analytical strategies and transcription methodologies, and drawing on the discourse of the performers themselves, this paper reveals the function and meaning of the ritual sounds; it analyzes how the structural elements of the song Do Ko Gyi Kyaw are adapted to the performance of the ritual dances. Looking at the song’s vocal and melodic elaboration, rhythmic interlocking, metric expansion/contractions, and changes in tempo/dynamics, this paper discusses how the hsaing sounds contribute to triggering, supporting, and controlling the spirit possession dances of the devotees, making the nat Ko Gyi Kyaw come into presence.
The music of Bulgaria is an excellent example of a complex musical tradition which combines Middle Eastern makams (modes), regional microtonal structures, pentatonic scales, diatonic modes, and major/minor collections. This article analyzes “Bulgarian Suite,” an accordion piece written by the living Bulgarian composer Petar Ralchev. “Bulgarian Suite” is a trend-setting piece incorporating mixed asymmetrical meters, modal harmony, dense ornamentation, improvisation, folk motives from various regions of Bulgaria, and influences from Western music styles. Stylistically, “Bulgarian Suite” exemplifies Bulgarian concert wedding music from the 1990s, which became popular worldwide through the performances of Ivo Papazov and his Trakiya (Thrace) orchestra. The analysis of “Bulgarian Suite” focuses on Ralchev’s compositional techniques and his innovative approaches to combined metric groups (several asymmetrical meters recurring periodically), heterometric rows (meters which do not follow a particular pattern), and modal/makam-based harmony. Ralchev’s primary compositional idea in “Bulgarian Suite” is to establish balanced asymmetry at the beginning of the piece and gradually progress towards more traditional and symmetrical structures. Due to the improvisatory nature of Bulgarian wedding music, “Bulgarian Suite” should not be considered a fixed composition. Rather, as seen from other recordings of the same piece, Ralchev uses the suite structure as a flexible framework that is varied to a great extent in different performances. In addition to analyzing and adapting Western analytical tools to a particular non-Western piece, this article also introduces a new, comprehensive model of inquiry which could be applied to repertoire from other Eastern European countries exhibiting levels of metric and harmonic complexity similar to those found in Ralchev’s “Bulgarian Suite.”
American ethnomusicologist Andrew Toth spent decades in Bali, studying and documenting music of various styles. One of his most ambitious projects was to measure the precise tunings of every key and gong-chime of 49 gamelan gong kebyar, a popular form of bronze gamelan. However, his death in 2005 at the age of 57 prevented him from publishing a comprehensive analysis of his research. His tuning measurements included representative samples of gamelan from across the island, a treasury of data gathered as part of his multi-decade research with gamelan makers, tuners, and musicians. Seven boxes of his letters, photographs, concert notices, course notes, and computer printouts of tuning frequencies are now stored in the Special Collections & Archives of the Wesleyan University Library. This paper presents a first analysis of this tuning data, which comprises more than 8000 individual frequency measurements (approximately 150 for each of the 49 gamelan, plus five more sets of tuning data we commissioned). We utilize a unique way of visually representing the information, developed by Toth, that displays both the individual intervals of the musical scale as well as the distinctive tunings of the octaves of each scale degree. We call these Toth Plots, and describe in detail how the plots are drawn, now using modern computer graphics, and the kinds of information they help visualize. We have made the raw tuning data available by transcribing it into spreadsheets (machine and human readable), and will post the data in a publicly available location to encourage others to explore it. Based on Toth’s writings and data, we interpret several key tuning concepts relating to regional styles, interval models (such as begbeg-tirus) and octave treatment strategies. We also analyze geographic variations in the tuning measurements, which were taken in seven of the eight regencies of Bali at the time, and trace the evolution of the tuning of five of the gamelan from the 1970s to the present.
This article discusses the state of music theory in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan, where musicians were invested in finding ways to map theories of traditional Japanese music and those of European tonality onto each other. By focusing on two theorists from the late nineteenth century (Isawa Shūji and Uehara Rokushirō) and one from soon after World War II (Koizumi Fumio), I demonstrate the coexistence of many contradictory ways of analyzing much of the music that came out of this period and afterward. My analysis of their various types of mapping draws out the cultural implications and goals that lie behind their strategies, which reflect the different ways in which they were hoping to situate Japanese music in a wider global context, whether as part of nineteenth-century nation-building or postwar reemergence. Through analysis of several pieces written between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I suggest that the most effective lens is one that freely borrows elements from various theorists and traditions to create analyses that are as hybridized as the pieces themselves. Examples are drawn from a wide variety of genres—children’s songs, wartime soldiers’ songs, enka (nostalgic popular music), and film music—to demonstrate the wide reach of these hybridized tonal systems. By extension, analogous models could also be applied to musical traditions elsewhere in the world that blend Western tonal and non-Western elements.
The miḻāvu is a huge pot drum that was, until a few decades ago, exclusively associated with Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ Sanskrit theater. Its history, language, and repertoire have been fashioned upon the performance of Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ dramas enacted in Brahmanical temples of Kerala for the exclusive benefit of a privileged elite. During several centuries of association with these temples where rituals were performed according to Tantric procedures, Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ was heavily charged with ritual elements. Due to these audience restrictions, Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ remained almost unknown to the rest of the world until the 1960s, when radical political changes produced a revolution in the social organization of Kerala that had a significant impact on this theatrical art form and temple arts in general. A new phase in the history and evolution of the art started in 1965, when a department of Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ was introduced at the dance and theater academy Kerala Kalamandalam. There the art of Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ was redefined and refined and then recognized, in 2001, as a World Intangible Cutlural Heritage by UNESCO. Today, Kūtiyāṭṭaṃ is a highly complex art form that includes elements and procedures inherited from the ancient Sanskrit theatrical tradition—adjusted to meet and suit the needs and likes of contemporary audiences—as well as elaborated rituals maintained with unquestioning respect. In fact, the sequence of ritual music and dance compositions (puṟappāṭu) introducing dramas is generally considered meaningless by contemporary performers, and almost none of them acknowledge the contribution of Kerala Tantric tradition to it. Contrasting with the performers’ view, the analysis of musical and visual content of the ritual compositions of the miḻāvu shows that they are heavily imbued with Tantric concepts. On the basis of the cluster of ideas, symbols, stories, and rites that have been associated in the Brahmanical temple tradition of Kerala with the miḻāvu and its ritual compositions as well as with the ritual songs and dances preceding the drama, this essay suggests a novel interpretation of the entire puṟappāṭu sequence, arguing that it is a symbolical re-enactment of a sonic cosmology according to Tantric theories.
The Swiss-Alsatian qānūn virtuoso Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss (1953-2015) belonged to the most prominent performers of maqām music on the world music stage. During the 1980’s, he moved to Aleppo and founded the Al-Kindi Ensemble with which he would deliver many key interpretations of the historical repertoire. An outspoken critic of Western equal-semitone temperament, he invented a tuning system in just intonation and constructed several qānūn prototypes with extended pitch supply in order to encompass the characteristics of various regional contexts. Despite Weiss’s international fame, the future of his legacy remains uncertain: Due to the Syrian war, most of his estate has been destroyed while his hand-written notations have never been catalogued. My analysis explores his last composition, Spiritual Journey/Sinfonia Sacra, a suite of more than twenty minutes and the most time-consuming project of his career. It was premiered in 2011 at the Beiteddine Festival in Lebanon and completed until Weiss’s death, partly with my assistance. As a curious amalgamation of influences from the Ottoman repertoire, Iran, and India, the score expands the maqām principle towards a novel concept of prolongation, symmetry, and implied polyphony. Although Weiss’s qānūn was built to reproduce many different customs of traditional tuning, most of the score’s material originates from the Turkish-commatic system and could thus easily be adopted by the specifially Turkish line-up of the Al-Kindi Ensemble after his move to Istanbul. Comparable to his famous teacher, Munir Bashir, Weiss both respected and redeveloped the tradition. Some of his decisions, such as a number of unusual combinations of modal genres, may appear rather experimental in regard to the Ottoman repertoire to which he referred. However, besides offering a unique insight into his concept of seyir (i.e., the outline of a makam with all its related modulations), Spiritual Journey introduces a highly original method of organization by means of small, permutable cells. By tying pitch relationships and metric symmetry together as intrinsic unity, Weiss created an extensive, cohesive structure within a continuum of large rhythmic cycles—an architecture of foreground-background relationships unprecedented in makam music. My analysis includes the entire score which is published for the first time for further scrutiny.
The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of invited responses to Andrew Killick’s article “Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis.” While Andrew Killick has been developing global notation since 2016, the present article stems from his presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music in Thessaloniki in 2018. The presentation generated lively discussion at the conference, and when Killick subsequently submitted the paper to the journal, one of the peer reviewers recommended publishing responses alongside the article. In compiling these responses, we have sought to include perspectives from scholars with a range of backgrounds and identities in terms of academic discipline, area of expertise, race, gender, age, and nationality. The set of responses does not fully live up to these goals insofar as the majority of respondents are men, are white, and are based in the US, Canada, or the UK. The fact that most of the women and Black, Asian, and Latinx scholars whom we invited were not able to spare the time to contribute responses may partly reflect the pervasive inequities within and beyond academia that have only been deepened by the ongoing public health crisis. In any case, our failure to attract a more diverse group of respondents should not reflect on the responses themselves, which offer thought-provoking and creative commentaries on the promise and challenges of Killick’s innovation to music notation, and we are grateful to all respondents for their contributions to the project. The responses are linked below in alphabetical order by author’s name.
The liturgical music of the Jewish Ashkenazi tradition has remained a practice without a theory for many centuries. For most of its history this tradition has been transmitted orally, and to a significant degree it still is. This liturgical performance is characterized by extemporization or improvisation, but the practitioner’s freedom to improvise has been regulated by what we may reasonably suggest are implicit guidelines that provide a set of parameters for creating this music. Even with the appearance of written music, mainly in the nineteenth century, we find no documentation of how, in addition to the music itself, a convention that governs the semi-improvised aspect of this discipline has been transmitted. The underlying premise of this discussion is that this convention can be conceptualized and articulated by “translating” its implicit guidelines into a model of music theory. Moreover, viewing this discipline in music-theory terms is the key to unpacking it, and to understanding its inner workings. Over the last 150 years some sporadic attempts were made, primarily by insider practitioners, to create such a theory. All of those endeavors incorporated a traditional nineteenth-century concept of “modes” as chiefly scales or modal scales. I argue that a theory befitting the phenomenology of this practice has to adopt a different paradigm that does not necessarily identify scalar structure as the primary defining feature of this system. The new paradigm must also take into account the interconnections among different musical variables as well as integrating a variety of built-in extra-musical factors that govern performance. Above all, the new paradigm must recognize that all of these constituents operate within a variety of degrees of freedom. The primary basic building blocks of this musical tradition, therefore, comprise a more flexible set of constituents—motif-types—that likewise accommodate these degrees of freedom. To illustrate how a new paradigm might better enable us to describe and explicate Ashkenazi liturgical music, I examine one of the traditional “prayer modes,” “Adonai Malach.” The paper does not encompass all of the variables that determine a particular performance that utilizes this mode. Rather, it focuses on motif-types and the degrees of freedom in which they express themselves, their interconnections with textual elements and the structure they create, norms of performance, time factors, and the liturgical calendar.
The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of invited responses to Andrew Killick’s article “Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis.” While Andrew Killick has been developing global notation since 2016, the present article stems from his presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music in Thessaloniki in 2018. The presentation generated lively discussion at the conference, and when Killick subsequently submitted the paper to the journal, one of the peer reviewers recommended publishing responses alongside the article. In compiling these responses, we have sought to include perspectives from scholars with a range of backgrounds and identities in terms of academic discipline, area of expertise, race, gender, age, and nationality. The set of responses does not fully live up to these goals insofar as the majority of respondents are men, are white, and are based in the US, Canada, or the UK. The fact that most of the women and Black, Asian, and Latinx scholars whom we invited were not able to spare the time to contribute responses may partly reflect the pervasive inequities within and beyond academia that have only been deepened by the ongoing public health crisis. In any case, our failure to attract a more diverse group of respondents should not reflect on the responses themselves, which offer thought-provoking and creative commentaries on the promise and challenges of Killick’s innovation to music notation, and we are grateful to all respondents for their contributions to the project. The responses are linked below in alphabetical order by author’s name.
A general lack of higher-order regularity in temporal organization is one important feature that differentiates qin music of the Chinese literati from most other genres of traditional Chinese music, but this has seldom been discussed in scholarly circles. To fill this gap, the present paper provides a systematic discussion of the freedom in metrical structure characteristic of qin music. Because rhythmic elements in qin music are not notated in the tablature score, and fine nuances arising from a variety of fingering techniques can affect the perception of phrasing and hierarchies of pulsation, studying the metrical structure of qin pieces is an act of interpretation and depends on a thorough grasp of traditional performance conventions and common melodic patterns in the music. Both authors being experienced qin players, this study is based on our interpretation of music of important qin players of the present and previous generations. Categories of temporal organization without higher-order regularity identified by the authors include "changing meter," "metrically ambiguous," and "free rhythm," as well as the particular category of "pulsation with interpolated half-beats," forming a continuum where each category merges into the next. Our case study of a representative example of the last category demonstrates an accelerating basic pulsation interrupted irregularly by interpolated half-beats. Such a feature has not been well described in traditional non-Western music, and defies the usual binary division of musical time organization in world music studies into categories with or without a basic regular pulse. This interpretation is confirmed by measurement of inter-onset intervals and linear regression analysis. With the irregular interruption, the listener is sometimes not sure whether certain notes are “on a beat” or are syncopated. Together with irregular interruptions to periodicity at higher levels, the metrical structure can be very ambiguous. The performer might have wanted to create an effect of syncopation or hemiola, but was not concerned with maintaining an overall regular pulsation or any higher-order regularity. The freedom in metrical structure in qin music demonstrates the importance of contextual factors in shaping musical characteristics. The distinctive aesthetic and philosophical perspectives of qin players are particularly important in developing this freedom, which we regard as a Daoist conception. The temporal organization in qin music, and in particular, the category "pulsation with interpolated half-beats," should provide useful insights into future work on temporal organization in world music, and indeed toward future work on the typology of temporal organization in music in general.
The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of invited responses to Andrew Killick’s article “Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis.” While Andrew Killick has been developing global notation since 2016, the present article stems from his presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music in Thessaloniki in 2018. The presentation generated lively discussion at the conference, and when Killick subsequently submitted the paper to the journal, one of the peer reviewers recommended publishing responses alongside the article. In compiling these responses, we have sought to include perspectives from scholars with a range of backgrounds and identities in terms of academic discipline, area of expertise, race, gender, age, and nationality. The set of responses does not fully live up to these goals insofar as the majority of respondents are men, are white, and are based in the US, Canada, or the UK. The fact that most of the women and Black, Asian, and Latinx scholars whom we invited were not able to spare the time to contribute responses may partly reflect the pervasive inequities within and beyond academia that have only been deepened by the ongoing public health crisis. In any case, our failure to attract a more diverse group of respondents should not reflect on the responses themselves, which offer thought-provoking and creative commentaries on the promise and challenges of Killick’s innovation to music notation, and we are grateful to all respondents for their contributions to the project. The responses are linked below in alphabetical order by author’s name.
The editors of Analytical Approaches to World Music are pleased to present the following set of invited responses to Andrew Killick’s article “Global Notation as a Tool for Cross-Cultural and Comparative Music Analysis.” While Andrew Killick has been developing global notation since 2016, the present article stems from his presentation at the Fifth International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music in Thessaloniki in 2018. The presentation generated lively discussion at the conference, and when Killick subsequently submitted the paper to the journal, one of the peer reviewers recommended publishing responses alongside the article. In compiling these responses, we have sought to include perspectives from scholars with a range of backgrounds and identities in terms of academic discipline, area of expertise, race, gender, age, and nationality. The set of responses does not fully live up to these goals insofar as the majority of respondents are men, are white, and are based in the US, Canada, or the UK. The fact that most of the women and Black, Asian, and Latinx scholars whom we invited were not able to spare the time to contribute responses may partly reflect the pervasive inequities within and beyond academia that have only been deepened by the ongoing public health crisis. In any case, our failure to attract a more diverse group of respondents should not reflect on the responses themselves, which offer thought-provoking and creative commentaries on the promise and challenges of Killick’s innovation to music notation, and we are grateful to all respondents for their contributions to the project. The responses are linked below in alphabetical order by author’s name.
The meters of numerous Bulgarian folk songs and dance pieces are understood to include beats with two categorically different durations, short and long. Commonly performed dance types bear conventional time signatures that index particular sequences of unequal durations, and many Bulgarian musicians know these time signatures. Yet in the case of one popular dance type, elenino horo, performers and published sources express considerable uncertainty and differences of opinion about the durational sequence and time signature. This lack of consensus serves as the starting point for a study of meter in elenino horo as performed on the tŭpan, a large, double-sided drum that is considered the time-keeping instrument in many Bulgarian folk music ensembles. To examine the meter of elenino horo, I put musicians’ statements and my participant observations in dialogue with existing metric theory and quantitative analysis of rhythm in my field recordings. My primary objective is not to settle the debate about elenino horo—though I do take a position about which time signature fits most current performances—but rather to consider what this point of contention suggests about how meters with unequal durations can be structured and how Bulgarian musicians conceptualize meter. I interpret the metric organization of elenino horo in terms of cognitive theory of meter, arguing that the meter of the dance type contradicts current assumptions about constraints on metric structure. I corroborate my perception of durations in the music by analyzing timing in a sample of recordings. In the second part of the article, I turn to musicians’ conceptions of meter in the form of rhythmic templates that many Bulgarian percussionists use instead of time signatures or notation when demonstrating dance types. By examining frequencies of rhythmic patterns and drum strokes in recordings, I show that these templates approximate drummers’ process of generating rhythms in performance, and I identify ways in which commonly used rhythmic patterns communicate meter to listeners and reflect stylistic differences among performers.
