Towards

a Social Theory of Rhythm

Peter Nelson

Reid School of Music
Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh
12, Nicolson Square
Edinburgh, EH8 9DF, UK

p.nelson@ed.ac.uk

In, Leroy, Jean-Luc. 2012. Actualit des Universaux musicaux/Topics in Universals in Music.
Paris: ditions des archives contemporaines. (in press)

Abstract

Thinking about rhythm has been dominated by two strands of enquiry: the investigation
of the notion of pulse, and of the timing constraints on the repetition inherent in ideas of
pulse; and the investigation of rhythmic patterns, from the cataloguing of the poetic feet
of ancient times and the transcriptions of ethnomusicology, to the hierarchical patterns
proposed by notions of musical grammar.
A number of writers, from different disciplines and from different perspectives, suggest
another, crucial, defining property of rhythmic practice: social functionality.
Developmental psychologist, Colwyn Trevarthen,1 posits what he calls the intrinsic
motive pulse as the glue of communication between mothers and infants, and thus at the
heart of both music and language. Similarly, ethnomusicologist, Simha Arom, in his
investigation of African polyrhythms,2 gives a detailed account of the way different
rhythmic streams function as a whole, while giving each participant a unique and
indispensible role to play. Yet neither of these writers goes on to investigate the
rhythmic apparatus of the social roles they constitute as bound together by rhythm.
This chapter seeks to show how social roles in rhythmic practice are important for both
performers and listeners in the processes of music making. It attempts to show how a
theory of rhythmic practice, based on social determinants, might account for aspects of
pulse, pattern and synchronization. It also draws on discussions of the perception of
time by Lefebvre3, Bachelard4 and Bourdieu5 to try to account for some of the
phenomenological affects of rhythm.

1 Trevarthen, C. Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: evidence from human psychobiology and infant

communication. Musicae Scientiae (Special Issue 1999-2000), 155-215.

2 Arom, S., trans. M. Thom et al. African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: musical structure and methodology.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

3 Lefevbre, H. rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life, trans. S. Elden & G. Moore. London:

Continuum, 2004.
4 Bachelard, G. La Dialectique de la Dure. Paris: Boivin & Cie , 1936.
5 Pierre Bourdieu, trans. R. Nice. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

Introduction

When Claude Lvi-Strauss suggests that, Linguistics occupies a special place among
the social sciences, to which it unquestionably belongs,6 he seems to be attempting two
things. On the one hand, he wants to give to sociology and anthropology a rigorous
scientific method, which he finds in contemporary work in linguistics the key insight
of Lvi-Strausss early writing. The study of language and the study of music have
always been curiously intertwined, and this first of Lvi-Strausss suggestions - that a
specific scientific approach and set of insights, developed in linguistics, can be applied
elsewhere - has had considerable impact on the study of music, not least through the
structuralist programme developed first by Ruwet, Nattiez and others. When David
Lidov asks, Is Language a Music?, his attempt to reformulate Lvi-Strausss insight
points to a wealth of subsequent, detailed research in psychology, cognitive science and
neuroscience which not only proposes that linguistics might have for music the
renovative role Lvis-Strauss proposed it might have for sociology and anthropology,
but actually places language and music tantalisingly in the same bracket.

On the other hand, however, and more simply, Lvi-Strauss wished to assert that the
seemingly abstract and technical discipline of linguistics is rightly a social science; that
is, in itself, a contribution to the study of social interactions, rather than simply a
description of words and grammars. This has some interesting implications. If language
and music are so closely intertwined, is music also unquestionably among the social
sciences? By this I do not mean to refer to the sociology of music, which, through the
discipline of sociology, has contributed much to our understanding of what music is and
how it functions. Rather I wonder what a specifically social theory of music would have
to offer, and what such a theory would look like.

A possible model is provided by Henri Lefevbres late work, rhythmanalysis: space,

time and everyday life, which proposes a study of rhythm, including musical rhythm,
from a clearly sociological perspective. The third chapter of this work, Seen from the
Window, has been the most influential and gives the clearest indication of Lefevbres
undertaking. This is an account of the action of rhythm in the social sphere:

Rhythms. Rhythms. They reveal and they hide. Much more diverse than in music,
or the so-called civil code of successions, relatively simple texts in relation to the
City. Rhythms: the music of the City, a scene that listens to itself, an image in the
present of a discontinuous sum. Rhythms perceived from the invisible window,
pierced into the wall of the faade But next to the other windows, it is also
within a rhythm that escapes it

6 Lvi-Strauss, C. Structural Anthropology trans. C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf. Oxford: Basic Books, 1963:

31.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

Rhythms here are observed, and the social aspect concerns the medium of the
rhythmic operation: shoppers, tourists, schoolchildren, traffic, commerce, capital. The
action of observation is explicit:

A balcony does the job admirably, in relation to the street, and it is to this putting
into perspective (of the street) that we owe the marvellous invention of
balconies, and that of the terrace from which one dominates the road and
passers-by.
Despite its many insights, however, this rhythmanalysis only grasps occasionally at a
theory of rhythm itself. It does not just presuppose such a theory, but when the
concepts of rhythm are discussed Lefebvre moves away from the social to a more
logical, unitary approach: rhythm is always out there, observable, a function or
attribute of a phenomenon in terms of its apparent repetition of measures. In this,
Lefebvre is only following the normal theoretical approach, but he does sometimes
reveal an instinctive awareness of its deficiencies. Thus he proposes:

to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let
oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration. In order to grasp
this fleeting object, which is not exactly an object, it is therefore necessary to
situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside.
This echoes Curt Sachs7 account of the earliest attempts to theorise rhythm, where
he notes Aeschylos, who has the captive Prometheus, chained to a rock, exclaim,

I am bound here in this rhythm.

echoing a fragment from Archilochos (from two hundred years earlier, around 700
B.C.), where he strives to,

understand the rhythm that holds mankind in its bonds.

These assertions of the grasping or binding nature of rhythm come before any
notions of pulse, repetition or regularity, and they point clearly to the fundamentally
connective operation of those properties: in the social sphere between living beings, as
well as between living beings and the world that surrounds them. Thus a social theory
of rhythm ought to look, not at the actions of rhythms within social settings, but at the
actual binding operations that rhythm effects, their purposes and the ways in which the
systematic relations of these binding operations account for the generation of meaning.

Why a Social Theory?

Although, historically, rhythm could be seen to have been rather neglected in

theoretical considerations of music, in the European tradition, work in ethnomusicology
from the end of the 19th century, and then more recent work in psychology and

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

neuroscience have gone some way to redressing the balance. This thinking about
rhythm has been dominated by two strands of enquiry: the investigation of the notion of
pulse, and of the timing constraints on the repetition inherent in ideas of pulse; and the
investigation of rhythmic patterns, from the cataloguing of the poetic feet of ancient
times and the transcriptions of ethnomusicology, to the hierarchical patterns proposed
by notions of musical grammar.

The substantial work of Simha Arom, Kofi Agawu, John Chernoff and others in
understanding the rhythmic structures of music in African traditions has had an
enormous impact on the understanding of rhythm in general. Similarly, the recognition
that rhythm is subject to categorical perceptions,8 and has a significant role to play in
many cognitive functions has led to considerable and ongoing investigation on the part
of psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. However, while noting the social,
integrative operations of rhythm, the sociological implications of these integrative
operations are seldom fully addressed. Rhythmic structures and processes are seen as
lodged in the neural, perceptual capabilities of the human mind/brain, whereas a social
theory might hope to account for the meanings and bindings which arise when those
capabilities interact with one another in the cultural milieu; to join the physiological and
cognitive with the sensations of community and aesthetic understanding provoked, for
example, by actual music (among other things).

An interesting indication of how a social theory rhythm of rhythm might arise is

evident in a recent paper by Ivana Konvalinka et al, Follow you, follow me: Continuous
mutual prediction and adaptation in joint tapping.9 This begins with a truly social
account of a well substantiated observation:

Human beings have an extraordinary ability to align their goals, intentions, and
actions in order to achieve highly flexible interactions Whether engaging in a
discussion with others, performing in a symphony orchestra, dancing tango, or
working together towards simpler goal-directed tasks, people are capable of
coordinating their movements with one another quickly and with little apparent
conscious effort.
The subsequent experimental data demonstrate a truly social phenomenon:

In a jointly coordinated tapping task, there is no evidence for the emergence of

a leader-follower strategy, but rather a continuous mutual adaptation on a short,
millisecond timescale. These finding show that it is possible to achieve good
synchronisation with a partner that is unpredictable but responsive compared to
a partner (i.e. computer) that is predictable but nonresponsive.

7 Sachs, C. Rhythm and Tempo: a study in music history. London: Dent, 1953.
8 cf. Desain, Peter & Honing, Henkjan. The formation of rhythmic categories and metric priming,

Perception, 32(3), 2003: 341-365.

9 Konvalinka, Ivana, Vuust, Peter, Roepstorff, Andreas and Frith, Chris D. Follow you, follow me:

Continuous mutual prediction and adaptation in joint tapping, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental
Psychology, iFirst, 2010: 1-11.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

As will be seen, this observation is paralleled by other investigations of human

interactions, at a larger scale, but already it gives an indication of what it might mean to
grasp a rhythm: to abandon conscious control (leadership) to the physical
engagement of the body with sound (responsiveness), which is always, inevitably
engagement with another body (interaction).

This account of rhythmic tapping begins to get at notions of community and

social interaction, endemic in rhythm, but it does not yet lead us to the wider issues of
emotional and aesthetic binding. These are the sorts of social attachments which Tia
DeNora documents in her account of Music in Everyday Life, and the notion of the
everyday here clearly resonates with Lefebvres rhythmanalysis. How can these sorts of
observations and theorisings be joined up, to start to constitute a social theory of
rhythm?

Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

One approach to thinking about these issues is provided by the French

psychologist, Gaston Bachelard, in his book, The Dialectic of Duration10. Bachelard is a
follower of the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson, and this book attempts to
show that the perception of duration, one of Bergsons main themes, is subject to a
dialectic or duality. Since Lefebvre characterises the binding of the hearer to rhythm as
an abandonment: one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its
duration, how might the dialectical nature of duration affect the meaning of such an
abandonment?

Bachelard identifies Bergsons philosophy as what he calls, a philosophy of

plenitude time and experience for him are full. Bachelard argues for a sort of
psychological duel within our experiencing of time: a duel between fullness and
emptiness, where the moments of fullness have special meaning for us, as we have to
work to fill them: .. la dure, cest une oeuvre .. [duration is work]. However
Bachelard is concerned not just with the internals of individual psychology but also with
the connections and social implications of communal perception, and moments where
we have a communal sense of fullness. The interesting passage is as follows:

(But) the equalisation of timing is already one of the great tasks of relational
psychology. When one has effected this synchronisation, that is to say, when
one has put precisely together two superpositions of two different psyches,
one sees that one has almost all the attributes of physical adhesive bonding.
The time of thought marks thought profoundly. Perhaps one is not thinking
the same thing, but one thinks something at the same time. What a union!
And then about rhythm itself,

10 Bachelard, G. La Dialectique de la Dure. Paris: Boivin & Cie , 1936.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

The beat acts as a signal, not as a mere duration. It binds into coincidences,
binds rhythms into instants that will stand out.11
This last comment is so striking that Simha Arom uses it as an epigraph for his chapter
on western rhythmics, and its strange he doesnt really pick up on its implications for
his discussion of accentuation. If the beat after the barline of Western music cannot
really be a moment of stress, or accent, it is clearly the moment for performers at which
we know we are together. Perhaps .. not thinking the same thing, but (thinking)
something at the same time. - the mutual coordination of the responsive partners of
Konvalinka et als tapping experiments.

It seems to me to be not at all a radical step to reverse the notion of rhythm

engaging or grasping us, mentally and physically, and say that we use, or even need
rhythm in order to effect interpersonal, social engagement. So Colwyn Trevarthens
definition of what he calls, the intrinsic motive pulse gives a hugely convincing account
of the beginnings of this situation in mother-infant interaction. Just to rehearse the
discussion of the rhythmic fundamentals of pulse, beat and accent, it is worth
remembering exactly what Trevarthen says:

Pulse is the regular succession of discrete behavioural events through time,

vocal or gestural, the production and perception of these behaviours being
the process through which two or more people may co-ordinate their
communication, spend time together, and by which we may anticipate what
might happen and when it might happen.12
This seems to accord, roughly speaking, with Bachelard, and although the word regular
gives more than a nod towards clock-time measurements, the communicative priority
tied into rhythmic activity seems to give us a basis for the slight change in perspective I
have been discussing. The act of, spending time together is truly social, and perhaps at
least a part of what Lefevbre means when he says that rhythm grasps us.

Simha Arom describes the phenomenon thus:

emergent music takes place when a mother seeks to pacify a crying baby,
During those brief intervals in which the baby catches its breath, the mother
punctuates its crying with a meaningless syllable, an o. Little by little , a
dialogue is set up between cries and responses, This also represents a sort
of unconscious musical socialisation, the first stage in the future musicians
apprenticeship thus beginning at the earliest possible age.13
The communicative, to-and-fro rhythmic alternation of mother and infant is an
interesting backdrop to Simon Friths comprehensive discussion of music as a form of

11 quoted in: Arom, S. op. cit.
12 Trevarthen, C. & S. Malloch. Musicality: Communicating the Vitality and Interests of Life in Malloch, S. &

C. Trevarthen (eds) Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
13 Arom, S. op. cit.: 9-10.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

communication and social integration, working through rhythm14. If Bachelard

celebrates the social unanimity achieved through the beat as signal, Frith makes clear
that what rhythm is for in the making of music is altogether more subtle and
sophisticated. One might indeed make some kind of distinction between kinds of
cultures, based on their rhythmic practices. So in his discussion of African musical
culture, Frith, citing the work of the ethnomusicologist John Chernoff, notes that in
polyrhythmic music the social participants, resist the tendency to fuse the parts, or
more precisely,

The music is perhaps best considered as an arrangement of gaps where one

may add a rhythm, rather than as a dense pattern of sound.
This is a sort of opposite of the beat as signal for unanimity, where the rhythms of
each participant as in the mother/infant interactions I just described leave spaces
for the presence of others.

Here I want to fully disclose a change of emphasis I have come to value. In all the
discussions of mother/infant interaction in which I have been involved, music has been
called on as an explanation, or a means of describing and accounting for certain
phenomena. After all, musicians know how to talk about rhythm, and music is a
fundamental human trait. But it is only now that I am beginning to see what the reverse
is; the implications this has for music and how we perceive it.

If pulse can be configured as socially constructed instants which stand out, what
of the space between those instants, to which Lefevbre says we must abandon
ourselves? Bachelard presents a dialectic where durations are either full or empty, but
what could they be full or empty of? This dialectic makes little sense to a clock-based
theory of rhythm, where the concern is simply with the measurement of a duration,
rather than with its quality or affect. Yet we know from Trevarthens detailed
descriptions of mother-infant interactions that the temporal spaces between sounds or
actions, the actual flow of the rhythmic narrative, are pregnant with meaning, and
minute alterations can have huge significance. The sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, in his
book, The Logic of Practice15, gives some clues as to what could be going on here.

In a chapter entitled, The Work of Time, Bourdieu gives an account of the

temporality involved in ritual practice. It seems to me that this account shows, in large
scale, what sorts of things fill the rather smaller spaces between rhythmic events in
music. His examples concern first the ritual exchange of gifts, and it is only a small
imaginative step to characterise the alternation of sounds, movements and facial
expressions in Trevarthens accounts of the interactions between mothers and babies,
or the ensemble co-ordinations amongst musicians, and between musicians and

14 Frith, S. Rhythm: Race, Sex and the Body and Rhythm: Time, Sex and the Mind, in Performing Rites.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

15 Pierre Bourdieu, trans. R. Nice. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

audiences as an exchange of gifts. Bourdieu begins:

In every society it may be observed that, if it is not to constitute an insult, the

counter gift must be deferred and different, because the immediate return of
an exactly identical object clearly amounts to a refusal. Thus gift exchange is
opposed to swapping
In this example we begin to understand what effects time can have on the significance of
social actions and reactions. Again Bourdieu, talking about giving and receiving gifts:

It is all a matter of style, which means in this case timing (and choice of
occasions ) To abolish the interval is also to abolish strategy.
This suggests that rhythmic practice can be strategic; that is meaningful with respect to
its timing. This is the point at which a resistance to the norm of social bonding begins to
creep into the picture; an impulse of energy to assert style and presence through the
filling of the gaps between events with a sort of pregnancy; the guiding of events
themselves towards the uncovering of temporal meanings aside from those of ordered
regularities.

The anthropologist, Charles Keil, proposes and explains the crucial

significance of this situation when he writes,

The power of music is in its participatory discrepancies, 16

In other words, in making music it is more interesting not to play with exact
synchronicity, but in order to do this one must be aware of where in time the
synchronicity is. One must be able to think something at the same time, in order to
act at a time of ones choosing. This is the double nature of rhythm, allowing both
pulse and style. As Keil asserts, provocatively:

Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be out of time

and out of tune.
Of course this remark presupposes a culturally acquired knowledge of both timing
and tuning which render such judgments both possible and meaningful. It shows
how the act of rhythmic bonding is subject to the impact of culturally nuanced and
individual stylistic imprints, and allows us to separate out the moment of thinking a
beat from the moment of participation in a rhythmic enterprise. Keil explains this
when he says,

It is little discrepancies within a jazz drummers beat, between bass and

drums, between rhythm section and soloists, that create swing, and invite
us to participate.
This is evident, for example on the track, A Little Max from the album, Money Jungle, in

16 Keil, C. Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music. In Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 2/3, 1987:

275-283.

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

which drummer, Max Roach, bassist, Charles Mingus and pianist, Duke Ellington never
play a downbeat together, though they are clearly playing both in time and as an
ensemble.

It is interesting that Bachelard proposes the moment of social cohesion as,

thinking something at the same time. This is not a visual or a tactile event. There need
be no sound involved to think one at the same time as another person. If one simply
substitutes the notion of pulse as a sort of theoretical clock measurement with
Bachelards notion of the beat as signal, one can happily theorise the socially
integrating effect of different kinds of pulse practice acquired in different cultural
milieus. In Greek and other Eastern traditions, for example, musicians maintain that
what theorists would regard as an unequal pulse short, long; or short, short, long is,
for them, a fundamental regularity. When Curt Sachs Egyptian friends maintain that the
music played by the nightclub orchestra is not really music17, it is because, for them,
the thinking together which constitutes the beat as signal is simply expected at a
different moment. The rhythmic practice to which they are atuned is subject to exactly
the same regularities of memory and protension as that of the western orchestra, but
within a social, culturally defined environment. In this reading, even foot-tapping
becomes not a natural physiological function, but a social physiological function,
capable of different meanings and different inclinations to the purpose of the beat.

Conclusion

What this discussion has tried to show is how a social theory of rhythm might be
put together in a way that could account more fully for some of the fundamental aspects
of human rhythmic practice, in particular social cohesion, synchronisation, alternation,
and style. It has also tried to show that the mechanism of bonding between individuals,
and groups of individuals, which seems to be at the heart of rhythm, has a social as well
as psychological and physiological dimensions, and that this mechanism has to operate
within radically different cultural environments. These cultural environments are not
just assemblages of events, objects and practices, but involve our intimate and innate
responses to the moments at which things occur. As Bachelard says, The time of
thought marks thought profoundly. Bourdieu, Keir and Trevarthen all demonstrate
how social transactions involving time can have powerful meanings for us, mediated by
deeply held cultural understandings. The innate foundations of our rhythmic practices
seem to go beneath those socially constructed transactions, and we must look to a
multi-discipinary combination involving sociology, musicology, anthropology,
psychology and neuroscience, working together, for a better understanding of the
nature and implementation of those foundations.

17 cf. Sachs, C. Rhythm and Tempo: a study in music history. London: Dent, 1953:

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 Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm

Bibliography
Arom, S., trans. M. Thom et al. 1999. African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: musical structure and
methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bachelard, G. 1936. La Dialectique de la Dure. Paris: Boivin & Cie .
Pierre Bourdieu, trans. R. Nice. 1996. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Desain, Peter & Honing, Henkjan. 2003 . The formation of rhythmic categories and metric
priming, Perception, 32(3): 341-365.
Frith, S. 1996. Rhythm: Race, Sex and the Body and Rhythm: Time, Sex and the Mind, in
Performing Rites. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Konvalinka, Ivana, Vuust, Peter, Roepstorff, Andreas and Frith, Chris D. 2010. Follow you, follow
me: Continuous mutual prediction and adaptation in joint tapping, The Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology, iFirst: 1-11.
Keil, C. 1987. Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music. In Cultural Anthropology, Vol.
2/3: 275-283.
Lefevbre, H. trans. S. Elden & G. Moore. 2004. rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life,
London: Continuum.
Lvi-Strauss, C. trans. C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Oxford: Basic
Books.
Sachs, C. 1953. Rhythm and Tempo: a study in music history. London: Dent.
Trevarthen, C. 2000. Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: evidence from human
psychobiology and infant communication. Musicae Scientiae (Special Issue 1999-2000), 155-215.
Trevarthen, C. & S. Malloch. 2009. Musicality: Communicating the Vitality and Interests of Life in
Malloch, S. & C. Trevarthen (eds) Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human
Companionship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10