Abstract
A central issue for (mainly non-African) analysts of African music is the question of a regulative beat: does it exist, is it made manifest or merely assumed, and is there a single beat in ensemble performance, or are there multiple beats? Proceeding from the belief that what is now needed is not another grand, overarching theory of African rhythm but detailed studies of individual performances, this paper describes some of the factors that shape beat awareness in a handful of West and Central African repertories. I note the absence of a word for beat in many indigenous languages, along with the normative embodiment of meter by dancers. My main caveat is that beats are not intrinsic to the sonic material and so cannot be discovered by internal means; rather, beats are mental constructs of conventional origins brought to the music by acculturated listeners, drummers and dancers.
Bio
Kofi Agawu was born in Ghana, where he received his initial education before studying composition and analysis in the UK and musicology in the US. His work focuses on analytical issues in selected repertoires of Western Europe and West Africa. He is the author of Playing with Signs (1991), African Rhythm (1996), Music as Discourse (2008), The African Imagination in Music (2016), and On African Music (2023). His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal, the Guido Adler Award from the International Musicological Society (IMS) (2023) and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory (2024). He has served on the editorial boards of leading journals in musicology, music theory, African studies and ethnomusicology. A Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, he is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Honorary Member of the Royal Musical Association. He was Music Theorist in Residence for the Dutch-Flemish Music Theory Society in 2008-09 and George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2012-13. He is currently Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, CUNY.