A study in rhythm: rhythm as a culture
If everything is made up, then where does everything come from? We often get so bogged down in the complexities of life that we forget we are a part of a world of our own making. Nothing existed; time happened, and all of a sudden, everything existed. Some of it we don’t need. Some of it we couldn’t live without. Music falls into the latter.
Music is a part of our everyday lives. Wherever we go, sound accompanies us, and so we spend our lives ensuring that the sound we are subject to is something that we agree with. We form connections through music. It pulls us out of deep holes and has been a lifeline for people ever since its inception. But how did it ever actually come about? Like everything else in the world, music is made up, so how did we get to this point?
The origins of music are groggy, as they date back long before recording, both in terms of music and history in general. You can understand why it came about: You hear a bird singing, and it sounds pleasant; you’re subject to running water and are moved by it. Since the dawn of time, animals have been able to recognise sound as something that can move them, but when they decided to try and start making those sounds themselves, it is difficult to work out.
There are other aspects of music that we can trace back quite effectively, though; one of these is rhythm. We had music long before we had adequate means of travel, and therefore various continents, when they made up the foundation of what they wanted popular music to be, made up different rhythm structures. There were a number of factors at play when people came up with different rhythm structures, including modes of celebration, the layout of roads and religion.
All of these factors created a mindset within creative people that they inherently stuck to. The more rigid a society was, the more rigid its attitude towards rhythm and structure were. It wasn’t until people crossed seas and continents intertwined that rhythm and sounds started to be exchanged. Even then, because of the transatlantic slave trade and the racism and oppression that impacted so many people, rhythm from different cultures had to be enjoyed in secret and weren’t embraced on a large scale for a long time.
Europe was a very precise place; therefore, strict rules were devised for architecture, lifestyle, and music. The music that was made during this period was based on physics. For example, the notion of an octave came about due to logic. People knew that cutting a vibrating piece of string in half would make it vibrate twice as fast, leading to the same note but with a different tone. Seven and twelve-note scales were created due to said logic, and the rhythm over these notes was played and counted in twos and threes.
This was only one system, though. The Greeks created a system based on a ten-tone triangular system of harmony, which they called the “tetraktys”. Asian cultures were also different, as they divided the difference between octaves into scales of various steps. These steps started at five and went all the way up to 50.
African cultures took a more performative approach towards music. They had a much more complex attitude when it came to rhythm, which put two different phrases against one another. You’d have performances with varying signatures of time overlapping with one another. Songs would still use phrases of twos and threes, but they co-occurred, making for a much more haphazard style of music, making it easier for people to move to and submerge themselves in.
Different cultures had different approaches towards rhythm, and what we experience now, in a diverse world with overlapping cultures, is an amalgamation of all of these different types of music. However, if a European had heard African music before the continents became integrated, it would have been inherently wrong for them because the styles were so different. Where the Europeans would expect notes, the Africans would play them somewhere different. It was music which acted as one of many cultural barriers which led to the biggest period of oppression and cruelty in human history, the transatlantic slave trade.
During this inhumane and barbaric period, as Africans had their freedom and rights taken from them, so too did they have their concept of rhythm. Fragments of it slipped through the cracks and were passed down generations, but this awful period of human history impacted the development of music and rhythm, as anything performed outside the formulaic structure to which people were so accustomed was banned. It wasn’t until the early twentieth century that African cultures’ performative rhythm structure began to emerge again. It was known as “ragging”, which led to the development of ragtime, which evolved into swing music and the blues and has subsequently contributed to the contemporary music we enjoy today.
Rhythm now combines that rigid European style with the more free-flowing rhythm of African cultures, all working in unison.
