Help me understand ethnic rhythms

It would depend on how you are counting it, and what unit you would use to make the metre. In general terms and being a musician from the Western tradition African music is syncopated.
I am sure that an African musician would have a different phrase for it, but when translated to where I come from it is syncopated.
If you listen to Zouk music or any of the South African music when written down it is mostly in a refular metre, and appears syncopated. The effect is also of syncopation. So if it looks like it and sounds like it.............
Besides any exam board I have dealings with say it is syncopated. Can't go filling their little heads with rubbish can we.
You have also confused metre (what time signature music has) to tempo. I don't believe I said anywhere that African music changes speed. In fact I may be wrong but I don't think many cultures have music that varies widely in tempo.

 

What's refular metre?

I think I can see where Joel is coming from with the there is no syncapation tact.

Syncapation, I'm guessing, is a western term and when we write down and decompose say African rhythms for example, it fits in with our understanding and syncapation helps to arrange or compartmentalise into subdivisions that we understand. Maybe this is one idea which complicates our understanding of other cultures music i.e. by trying to make it fit in with our musical systems of understanding, rather than approaching it from the other culture's point of view.

This bring us back to my original question again... I guess what I'm trying to ask is, how do the musicians from each ethnic tradition see and perform their music. After all, the type of music under discussion here is what we usually term as folk music isn't it, which usually means it is normally performed by ordinary people rather than say very highly trained musicians like what we might get in our classical orchestras in the west.

 

The only written musical tradition current that I know of is the Western tradition. Your ethnic rhythms will have been passed down aurally, from one master to his trainee..
This is by far the best way to learn music IMHO.

 

In West Africa, there is a caste of professional musicians known generally as "griots". The griot lineage (again in West Africa - other parts of Africa have totally different traditions) is patrilinear. They play for births deaths, weddings, funerals, to praise "big men" and to damn them. They are professional musicians, but also historians and keepers of the myths and legends.
In many parts of Asia, music is very much the province of a professional caste, too. Of course in many places, there are no professional musicians and no castes, but you do tend to find music running in familys and being made by those with more talent and inclination (again, there are exceptions).
A lot of the chants and dances that we (well, me) would call music, are actually nothing of the sort - they are ritual and are quite distinct from music in the minds of the practitioners.
Anyway, while looking for the work of professor Nketia on the web, I did stumble across this
Another Theory of African Music
It's good. Enjoy

 

Keep it up lads, although I feel I can not add all that much to this thread I'd like you to know I very much enjoyed reading it. It is not all that often the word "griots" is used outside of a Rdio 3 world music or World Service program.

I for one would welcom other such educational threads on differing types of music.

Auric