Merriam 1982

Merriam brings up many controversial arguments in this chapter and tries to explain the reasoning behind them.  He talks about how researchers go about analyzing music; whether they seek meaning through the players and culture through which the music is distilled or from a more analytic, western approach, breaking music down into information and other categories such as melody, harmony, form, rhythm, etc.  It is these two ideas that conflict with each other.  In this chapter, he focuses on African rhythms and time-reckoning.  Western rhythm is derived on the notion of equally spaced beats, organized into a meters with equally spaced down beats.  It is an infinite, constant, linear stream of pulses that provide the structure to all music.  From an outside perspective African music has a steady beat, an “inherent pulse,” underlying the music, which is normally expressed by a large drum, gong, or handclapping.  Time reckoning from an Africans point of view is different than ours.  To them, time cannot by counted, measured, or discerned at any point during the day, instead it is based on natural phenomenon and social activities.   It is nonlinear and discontinuous.

I was interested in the opposing viewpoints of how to interpret foreign music and agree that neither is right.  A researcher tries to conceive order from a different interpretation of music through the assumptions of his own culture.  Even a combination of both ways of thinking causes something to be lost in the meaning.  As for the idea of time reckoning, time provides us with a way to structure our lives around, gives us a sense of urgency.  Time is a man-made concept, but music is natural one.  Merriam provides much insight into the different ideas of time, questioning how African music has rhythm when their concept of time provides no scaffold to build upon it and provides some answers.  But I muse whether time and rhythm are the same things?  Does one require time in order to conceive rhythm or is it a natural, instinctual feeling?