Stover 2025

AAWM Journal 13/No. 1 (2025)

Senghor, Rhythm, and Music Analysis: Some Musicological Implications of African Philosophy

Chris Stover

Rhythm, Léopold Senghor, African philosophy, expression, relational aesthetics

This essay traces creative connections between recent African philosophy and aspects of musical structure and process in African musical contexts. Specifically, it traces the ways in which Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor put rhythmic concepts to work in his political philosophy. Putting into practice what I have recently claimed is a critical task for music theorists, to create concepts (Stover 2025), it draws seven conceptual themes from Senghor’s philosophy and ruminates on how they might be put to work to better understand music-temporal processes in what I call “timeline musics.” The concepts are (1) expression, (2) participation, (3) networks of “interacting forces” that flow in (4) “dynamic waves,” (5) call and response, (6) repetition, and (7) variation.

Chris Stover is an Associate Professor in Music Studies and Research at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.

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The concepts we use to stage our music analyses, and the epistemological and political values that underpin and give shape to those concepts, matter. In this article I argue that the provenance of concepts—for example, the material, historical, and cultural contexts in which they arise—matter equally; that there is both epistemological and political value—indeed, urgency—in engaging concepts indigenous to the music-cultural practices themselves to the extent one is able (or, in many cases, invited) to do when, like me, one approaches a musical practice as a relative outsider. This is the underpinning for an essay I wrote for this journal a few years ago (Stover 2019), which draws upon some of the technical words used by Brazilian music practitioners to develop a range of music-theoretical perspectives that might shine productive light on the particular practices at hand.[1] Thought this way, theory can be said to flow from practice; as Stephen Blum (1992, 213) once wrote, “[m]usical analysis is the discipline we learn, above all, from musicians.” This is a crucial point music scholars of all stripes should never lose sight of. It’s equally important, though, to consider the counterbalancing dialectical trajectory: that theory feeds into and grows practice, for example through the ways a concept or technical apparatus—whether articulated verbally or made manifest in the embodied experience of practitioners—directs practice in one direction rather than another. Theory is everywhere, and every musician has the capacity to be a theorist through the ways they direct their own practice, in dialogue with collaborating peers.[2]

[2] This article extends this idea by turning from the words and concepts used (and actions enacted) by expert practitioners to streams of philosophical thought that have developed parallel to, and in dialogue with, artistic practices like music.[3] After briefly describing select issues and themes in postcolonial African philosophy, it focuses on concepts developed by Senegalese philosopher, poet, and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, especially a series of deployments of the concept of rhythm and a few related terms. By working to understanding Senghor’s philosophical (rather than strictly musical) utilization of the word rhythm across a number of interrelated resonances, I aim to modestly expand and enrich how we might think of the word’s manifold meanings across not only proliferating ranges of African music-making contexts but, perhaps, far beyond them: into future practices and across diasporic conjunctions.

[3] Postcolonial African philosophy remains a field in expansion, with ongoing debates around its boundaries, its aims, its modes of dissemination, and its relation with other discursive fields, including art practices.[4] One of the most important meta-theorists of African philosophy has been Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, who demonstrates—contrary to the story told in early European Africanist literature—how rigorous philosophical thought can be possible in oral traditions (Oruka 1990, 49–50) and how all philosophical thought emerges within particular cultural and historical contexts (rather than being products of objectively detached solitary thinkers). The significance of this last point is that, to the extent that we may put a concept like “African philosophy” to work (a fraught proposition, to be sure), it is only as an umbrella term for a broad coalition of local knowledges, many of which may overlap and impinge on one another but all of which are in a process of already escaping anything that might coalesce into an overarching “ethnophilosophy.”[5] Tradition, and the fiction of epistemic unanimity that accompanies it, is a colonial invention that flattens local difference in support of a binary narrative, which Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh critically counterpose with “modernity.”[6] As Dismas Masolo (2016) puts it, “Oruka insisted that, while rulers everywhere will always crave unanimity, thinkers thrive in dialogue and diversity of opinion” (§4). While the notion of thinking in dialogue may seem a stable Other that contrasts the European notion of the solitary philosopher at his (always his) desk, in reality it reinforces the reality that all thinking is collaborative and polyvocal. It sometimes takes stepping outside familiar practices to recognize the constructedness of many kinds of received myths.

[4] Oruka gave the names “sage philosophy” and “cultural philosophy” to the forms of knowledge production that arise within a particular culture, through specific locally-based thinkers in dialogue with their interlocutors. In other words, cultural-philosophical ideas are indeed the products of individual thinkers (the “sages” of Oruka’s formulation) but also arise within specific cultural conditions, weaving together and drawing upon myths and stories, first-hand experiences, beliefs and belief systems, song and dance, spaces and places, and more. They tend, therefore, to reflect basic underlying principles that according to Oruka and many other African philosophers are common across many diverse local cultural contexts (hence coalitional rather than universal). These include the principle of connection and interdependence, an agreement that ideas are not owned by individuals (even if they are expressed by them) but are “part of a larger context of information” (Binte Masud 2011, 881), the notion that philosophical thought is essentially purposeful and pragmatic, and perhaps most important, that ideas, like everything else, are ever in motion.

[5] A turn to (or identification as) cultural philosophy, therefore, has profound ethical and political implications. First, its strategic focus on locality can become a tool for provincializing Euro-American theoretical perspectives (Chakrabarty 2000), identifying and acknowledging their fundamental connection to time and place and resisting their generalizing impulses.[7] Second, the overlapping material domains and historical and contemporary lines of communication that constitute cultural philosophy’s multi-specificity speak to the possibility of coalitional rather than universalizing or singularizing theory-making (Mohanty 2003), as suggested just above. Coalitional theory-making (or any kind of coalitional practice) recognizes intensely local specificity while also attending to the different kinds of movements, overlaps, influences, and points of convergence (including possible future ones) that emerge in the intersubjective in-between.[8] Third, as I will suggest in the conclusion to this article, if, following Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019), Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018), Valentin Mudimbe (1988), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021), and others, we take epistemology to be one of the primary sites for decolonial action, then coalitional theory-making becomes one of the contexts within which power structures can be contested and taken apart and assumptions and generalizations of all sorts can be called into question. The concepts developed in this essay should, from this perspective, be put into dialogue with a vast range of theoretical and applied perspectives. And fourth, because cultural philosophy is largely a practice of putting into words (however awkwardly or incompletely) the frameworks and concepts that animate specific, local Indigenous knowledge systems, it affords the possibility of cross-epistemic dialogue that hinges less on the mediation of provincial European knowledge forms and assumptions.

[6] This article puts to work some ideas from Senegalese philosopher, poet, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor. Senghor would not be considered a cultural philosopher under Oruka’s definition. He studied in Paris, where he was deeply influenced by the process philosophy of Henri Bergson and the vitalist evolutionary theory of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[9] He called for a form of coalitional (if not universalist) pan-Africanism, dubbed négritude, and described what he felt to be essential qualities of Black African identity, attention to which would be crucial for the liberation of Africa and Africans from colonial oppression. Senghor’s emancipatory project involved revealing—and creatively inventing—the kinds of counter-narratives, knowledge orientations, and locally-grounded discursive forms that could resist European epistemic domination. Poetry, he felt, was a crucial site for this work: in alignment with contemporary thinker-practitioners in Africa and elsewhere, Senghor found in poetry the possibility of discursive forms able to escape semantic closure and remain open to new expressive conjunctions. He often referred to this fundamental affective openness as a play of “dynamic forces” expressed by a given culture. Senghor wrote in French, but as Senghor scholar Sylvia Washington Bâ describes, “[o]ne of the most outstanding features of Senghor’s poetry is his use of the nuances, subtleties, and sonorities of the French language” to communicate the “intensity and vitality” of what he understood to be the “fundamental values of Black African culture” and especially of different kinds of “meaningful relationships between man and his environment” (1973, 45). Poetic language was, then, a powerful delivery mechanism for the kinds of ethically and politically multivalent conceptual formulations Senghor was trying to generate, which aligns him aesthetically and politically with later thinkers like Black queer feminist theorist Audre Lorde, who insisted that “poetry is not a luxury” for minoritized people (Lorde [1977] 2007), that it is a powerful and necessary tool for revolutionary and recuperative thought and action.

[7] Before turning in the second half of this article to how seven specific Senghorian concepts might be put to work to give shape to a music-theoretical apparatus, we should engage a broader range of relevant themes that will contextualize those concepts and demonstrate how they interrelate. I will begin with what is perhaps his most oft-quoted, controversial, claim and will continue by following the arc of this particular line of thought over the ensuing decades, before branching into a range of ideas and positions that afford compelling potential connections to musical inquiry.

 

Senghor’s Relational Aesthetics

 

[8] The early controversy around Senghor orbits largely around an infamously essentialist formulation that first appeared in the 1939 essay “What the Black Man Contributes,” where he suggests that “Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic” (Senghor 2003, 288).[10] Senghor’s claim, no surprise, has garnered a great deal of critique. While this is not the place to rehearse the array of critical responses to Senghor’s provocative framing, see Soyinka (1976), Gbadegesin (1991, 43–45), Serequeberhan (1994, 42–46), and Rabaka (2015, 208–214) for four important critical takes (the latter two quite forceful). It has also been defended by such influential African thinkers as Valentin Mudimbe (1988, 107, who emphasizes the strategic and reparative nature of Senghor’s formulation), and has been deployed in theoretically rich and productive ways, notably by South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose, who rejects the reason-emotion opposition, arguing for their ontological fusion in a complex “holonistic” system (2003, 275–276), and most comprehensively by Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne (see below).

[9] Senghor attempted to clarify, develop, and eventually repurpose his early claim in two ways: by strategically expanding the range of valences the latter term, reason, might potentially be able to encompass, and by exploring the role emotion plays in practices of relationally-oriented knowledge production. For example, in a 1952 essay we find the more nuanced formulation “Classical European reason is analytical and makes use of the object. African reason is intuitive and participates in the object.” (Senghor 1965, 34, emph. added). The Manichean binary—Europe versus Africa—is just as present, but Senghor’s new gloss begins to do some subtle political and ontological work. First, it casts “European” reason in starkly instrumentalizing terms—what can knowledge do for us; what’s in it for me? Second, as touched on above, it foregrounds what turns out to be one of Senghor’s main points, which is the participatory nature of knowledge production of, it will turn out, any kind.[11]

[10] Importantly, Senghor’s point resonates with a far-reaching range of Indigenous knowledge systems that share a resistance to the notion of the liberal, atomized individual subject—an invention of modernity and coloniality—in favor of ever-ongoing processes of relationally enacted subjectification. This conception has been theorized by many postcolonial African thinkers. A famous line from Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti, “I am because we are” (Mbiti 1989, 141; see also Hord and Lee 2016, 16), was taken up by Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee as the title of their influential reader on Africana philosophy; this line fully inverts the Enlightenment’s ontological trajectory, situating individual humans as emergent products of relational impingements. Masolo (1997) pushes against Mbiti’s too-easy aphoristic proclamation, suggesting it proffers a form of “subjectless unity” that reproduces the Western colonial notion of a “unanimity and sameness of all Africans” (291) that has made the dehumanization of Africans all too easy. Masolo works instead to construct a nuanced understanding of identity as both relationally engendered and reflective of “the social experiences of single subjects” (291), describing the relationship at one point as an “interactive discourse” (297) where, we should underscore, discourse is not only or even primarily linguistic.[12] Sabrina Binte Masud (2011) likewise posits a formative context that begins with connection and interdependence but which keeps individual humans at the center. Bâ describes a condition of “affective participation in a universe that is constantly acting on [one’s] senses” (1973, 77), which corresponds with Senghor’s characterization of intersecting layers of “life forces”: “[a]ll human activities down to the least daily act must be integrated into the subtle interplay of life forces: family, tribal, national, world, and universal forces” (Senghor 2016, 62). I’ll turn to this below. Perhaps the most sustained relationally-constituted account of “personhood vis-à-vis community” (Ikuenobe 2018) is Nigerian poet and philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti’s communitarian conception (Menkiti 1984), in which counterposed forces of “methodological holism” (which define communities, institutions, ideas and the like) and “methodological individualism” work continuously to co-construct one another. Like Senghor, Menkiti foregrounds the social constructedness of personhood—echoing Mbiti, one becomes a person in Menkiti’s account—while also acknowledge one’s individual agency as a participant in the social milieu.

[11] Senghor develops his participatory epistemology further still in his 1964 volume On African Socialism, where he asks us to

consider the Black African as he faces the object to be known…: God, man, animal, tree or pebble, natural or social phenomenon. In contrast to the … European, the Black African does not draw a line between himself and the object, nor does he merely look at it and analyze it…. Immediately, he is moved, going centrifugally from subject to object on the waves of the Other…. Thus [he] sympathizes, abandons his personality to become identified with the Other, dies to be reborn in the Other (Senghor 1964, 73).

[12] Compare Senghor’s words here to what he wrote a few years earlier, in his 1956 essay “The Black African Aesthetic,” in which he most trenchantly clarifies the target of his critique. According to Senghor, Black African

reason is not discursive; it is synthetic. It is not antagonistic; it is sympathetic. It is another way of knowing. Black African reason does not impoverish things, it does not roll them up into rigid schemes, eliminating sweat and sap; it flows through the arteries of things, it experiences all their contours to lodge in the living heart of reality (Senghor [1956] 1970a, 203).[13]

[13] This sweeping critique names, in a single intensive wave, Hegelian dialectics, Western scientific methodological practices, what I would call ‘taxonomy fetishism’ (still pervasive in music theory), mind-body dualism, and the very practice of abstracting away from the messy complexity of reality. Underlying what I’ll describe as Senghor’s “strategic essentialism” is an eschewal of all binaries (which might of course be surprising for those that cleave too literally to Senghor’s original formulation), for example, insisting “that the subject and the object are but two aspects of a single reality” and that a generalized “movement of ‘material’ realities” (Senghor 1964, 40) precedes anything that we might call a dialectical understanding (dialectics is wholly epistemological rather than ontological in Senghor’s reading).[14] In my estimation, then, this gets closest to the point Senghor was trying somewhat awkwardly to make seventeen years earlier. The point becomes less about an essentialized notion of ‘Africanness’ than about what decolonial theorists Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) and Françoise Vergès (2021) call epistemicide: the ways in which imperialist Enlightenment metaphysics (Mao 1937) have covered over, erased, or even obliterated forms of knowledge production in the colonized world. Nigerian philosopher Olusegun Gbadegesin (1991) makes a similar point, identifying how what Senghor calls “Hellenic reason” has worked to hide from view other knowledge forms and insist on the correctness of its own explanatory theories and orderings of the world. From this perspective, Senghor’s project is precisely to return, to the extent possible, to pre-coloniality and to imagine what kinds of knowledge trajectories might have been possible had history progressed differently.[15] As I’ve described elsewhere (Stover 2023a), this was Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist project as well, and the role of art for both thinkers (poetry and sculpture for Senghor; poetry and music for Sun Ra) should be kept well in mind. I might also draw upon Senghor scholar Souleymane Bachir Diagne, who suggests that Senghor is practicing what Gayatri Spivak (1988) calls “strategic essentialism”; “that is, essentialism as response and resistance” (Diagne 2019, 28) in order to construct a politically valent radical alterity by posing two forms of logic against one another. This, for Spivak and Diagne (and Senghor), is a pragmatic political tactic rather than theoretical or ontological determination.

[14] One more point, before moving on to music. A lot of the ideas that follow have also been the purview of process- and new-materialist philosophers (not to mention phenomenologists) in the Euro-American metropole, and I have drawn upon many of these latter sources extensively in my own work. But like many among us, I have been very carefully practicing resistant forms of citational politics—what Sara Ahmed dubs a “citation rebellion”—in recent years. I have become increasingly sensitive to what Canadian education theorists Mathew Arthur and Reuben Jentink (2019) call “citational erasures of indigeneity,” which foregrounds (as does Zoe Todd [2015] in her powerful critique) how many of the biggest ideas to come out of the postmodern episteme—the ‘ontological turn’, the Anthropocene, critical posthumanism—have been richly and irreducibly present in Indigenous knowledge systems, well, forever, and until recently have been so seldom cited as to be functionally absent from even very progressive Euro-American academic discourse. Now to be clear, to turn to the Sorbonne-educated Senghor, deeply influenced by the philosophies of Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Hegel, and Marx, is hardly a radical turn to Indigenous epistemology! But this is not precisely an essay on Indigenous knowledge systems, so much as an engagement with one particular form of philosophizing among many that could help bridge the gap between diverse expressions of “more than human” modes of thinking, doing, and being.

[15] This essay does not draw significantly on either the productive force or the problematic implications of Senghor’s conceptualization of Black African subjectivity and epistemology, although some of its underlying claims—knowledge as dialogic and distributed; the epistemic value of feeling, emotion, and affect; the deconstruction of subject-object binaries through a methodological “reason-embrace”—are operating in the background of what follows. But perhaps the next most well-known Senghorian concept is his ontological deployment of rhythm, to which I will turn for the remainder of the article. Senghor’s usage contains some valuable ideas for developing a music-analytic framework. This article will remain in the domain of theory; future work will follow on analytic applications.

 

Rhythm-a-ning

 

[16] Rhythm, for Senghor, is something “spontaneous and lived.” It is a relational force continuously produced through dynamic communication between co-constitutive actants. Here are three quotes to lead us into Senghor’s conception. First from his seminal 1956 essay “The Black African Aesthetic”:

What is Rhythm? It is the architecture of being, the internal dynamism which gives it form, the system of waves which it emits in order to address Others, the pure expression of Vital Force. Rhythm is the vibratory shock, the force which, through the senses, seizes us at the root of being (Senghor 1970a, 211–212, emph. in original).[16]

Then ten years later, from his 1966 essay “Négritude: a Twentieth-Century Humanism”:

Rhythm is simply the movement of attraction or repulsion that expresses the life of the cosmic forces; symmetry and asymmetry, repetition or opposition: in short, the lines of force that link the meaningful signs that shapes and colors, timbre and tones, are (Senghor 2016, 63).

And then from the 1939 essay we began with, “What the Black Man Contributes,” referring to an “ordering force” that produces life through relational conjunctions,

This ordering force … is rhythm. It is the most sensible and least material thing. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the primary condition for, and sign of, art, as respiration is of life—respiration that rushes or slows, becomes regular or spasmodic, depending on the being’s tension, the degree or quality of the emotion…. It is not a symmetry that engenders monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free (Senghor 2003, 296).

[17] A number of key concepts are staged in these three brief passages. Rhythm is a wave, meaning it operates as a particular kind of doubly-directed motion, characterized at one point as an attraction/repulsion oscillation and at another as respiration, but one itself constantly in variation. This movement is enunciatory—it “addresses others”—and what it expresses is the array of “vital” or “cosmic” forces that give it shape in any instantiation. The “shock” of any given rhythmic event is where those forces reveal themselves: through their effects, we might say, which are mediated by the capacities of participating bodies—their relative “tension” and receptiveness to the “quality of emotion” that inheres in the event. The ongoing process is what orders life, producing an “architecture of being.” This is not quite rhythm as interonset durations!

[18] Before continuing, it is important to acknowledge Kofi Agawu’s (2003) important critical work on the invention of “African rhythm” in the Western scholarly and popular imagination, which among many other things forcefully calls into question the centrality of rhythm over and above other co-constitutive musical parameters.[17] To continue to foreground rhythm can be seen as the repetition of all manner of chauvinistic and essentialist ideas about what matters in African music and where we ought to be turning our attention as listeners, participants, and analysts. I wish to make clear that I am making no claim about the primacy of rhythm for African music. I am not even really suggesting that Senghor is doing so; or rather, I am not especially concerned about the degree to which he might be. In contrast, I hope to reveal some aspects of Senghor’s conceptual apparatus that could be used to help us respond to a more subtle phenomenological question, working to understand what rhythm is like and what role it plays in musical processes, but also to pull some of Senghor’s rhythmical ideas precisely into other, intricately interrelated, musical parameters. In other words, the way I’m staging this aspect of Senghor’s project is not to center rhythm ontologically, but simply to consider the nature of rhythmic processes from the perspective of one influential theorist’s conceptual apparatus. Or perhaps it is, provisionally, to do so—but under an understanding of rhythm in a radically enlarged sense, the terms of which will be illuminated below. And perhaps to think about what that framing can do to help us better understand the rhythmic processes themselves, within the context of their social production.

[19] Here I should also acknowledge one Anglophone study of African rhythm that engages Senghor, if briefly, with which this project should be thought of as a dialogical extension but which does in its own way reproduce the idea that rhythm is the primary site of musical interest in African music. In his influential “African Rhythm: A Reassessment,” ethnomusicologist Robert Kauffman (1980) extrapolates from earlier scholarship an array of technical features which, taken together, “probably brings us close to an adequate understanding of African rhythm” (400). The list includes “[t]he existence of a density referent, some type of patterning based on the density referent,” and the persistence of cross-rhythms, as well as, often, hemiola, the presence of a timeline, and what he calls “timbral patterning.” But as Kauffman suggests, any analytic perspective that focuses exclusively on these kinds of features, even in combination and in nuanced ways, is insufficient for understanding Senghor’s ontological framing of rhythm as a generative force. Equally important, for Senghor, are movement and gesture: “the rhythm of steps and gestures of narrators,” as Kauffman puts it (402). Kauffman takes these potent and provocative ideas in mostly trivial directions, but his study of African rhythm remains a valuable theoretical contribution, even if in the end his engagement with Senghor is only cursory.

[20] As is becoming apparent, rhythm is a rich and multivalent word for Senghor. It connotes intensity of expression and behavior, as Bâ (1973, 45) gleans. It operates at thresholds—for example, at “the critical threshold of the noosphere” (Senghor in Bâ 1973, 64), where unity, participation, periodicity, and “the word” (the expressive utterance itself; see just below) come into productive contact. Rhythm is “spontaneous, lived” (Senghor 1970b), a sign of the movement of forces; conversely, life operates as a “network of rhythms functioning within the framework of the primordial rhythms of cosmic couples” (Bâ 1973, 111). Rhythm describes a process of vibratory exchanges, of liquidity, of expressive couplings, of being “born into the Other” (“con-naissance”), of what Bâ characterizes as “the perpetual flux and reflux of cosmic forces” (128). As Nigerian playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka describes it, “[t]he poetry of Senghor is propelled … by the pulsating energy of the traditional griot, a leaping rhythm of self-surmounting ocean waves that is brought to the service of a variety of themes and subjects” (1998, 730). And much more: rhythm is omnipresent in Senghor’s sizable collection of prose and poetry; Diagne describes this as a “metaphysics of rhythm” and a “rhythmic attitude” that pervades Senghor’s thought (Diagne 2011, 55, 86).

 

Seven Senghorian Themes

 

[21] Drawing on all this, here is a rough sketch of seven key concepts from Senghor’s writing that might be productively deployed as the foundation for a provisional African philosophy of music and, by extension, a methodological starting place for analysis of African musics and far beyond.[18] The concepts are (1) expression, (2) participation, (3) the functioning of a “network of interacting forces,” (4) “dynamic waves,” (5) call and response, (6) repetition, and (7) variation. While each of these is to some extent posed as a discrete term doing specific theoretical work, they are manifoldly interconnected—in the spirit of inseparability that all African (and many other) philosophies seem to share—and I will start to consider below how they can be brought into dialogue on the ground of music analysis. Note that none of these obviously signifies “rhythm” in any conventional musical sense—this fact is important for understanding Senghor’s more expansive use of the term and how we might do the same.

 

1. Expression

 

[22] The first concept is expression, a turn away from the syntactic or empirically-there aspects of an utterance and toward the way in which it is expressed. Senghor distinguishes between two semiological parameters: parole, or that which is uttered, and verbe: “the active uttering of the parole,” in Sylvia Washington Bâ’s terms (Bâ 1973, 63). Verbe is the meaningful term for Senghor, which he describes as “the word sung and made rhythmical” (Bâ 1973, 63–64; Senghor in Guibert 1962, 152–153). His usage of “rhythmical” is important: as suggested above, it encompasses all number of expressive implications beyond duration, including at one point expressive features like “sudden falls, inflections and vibrati” in poetic prosody.[19] In other words, the quality or ‘style’ of the expression is just as meaningful—perhaps more so!—as its abstract semantic content. As Senghor writes of poetry, “it is less the theme than the style, the emotional warmth that gives life to the words, that transmutes parole into verbe” (Senghor in Sartre 1948, xxix). In other words, any utterance “signifies the force it engenders” (Bâ 1973, 63, extrapolating a theme from Senghor’s 1945 Chants d’Ombre), meaning that meaning is being produced through the act of expression, rather than the expression merely putting to work meaning that was already present ahead of time. This exemplifies Senghor’s “sensible” versus “material” framing, which will recall for some readers the performative turn in a lot of recent music analysis: for example Rink (2015), in which musical structure is shown to inhere in a performer’s gestural relationship with their instrument rather than (or in addition to) the notes as inscribed in a score. It also speaks to what is lost when, for example, we try to render played music into fixed notation, even if there are other pragmatic benefits to doing so. Senghor’s conception marks a crucial intervention into the music theory that engages expressive timing by underscoring—beyond the simple durational data of sounded musical gestures—how inflections and other expressive factors are themselves rhythmic concepts, since they involve changes over time in a given sound’s constellation of expressive qualities.

[23] It’s important to note a subtle distinction between Senghor’s formulation and the structure of the langue/parole relation in Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1983) semiotics. Senghor elides the langue side of Saussure’s structural dyad, instead locating parole as the relatively unmarked structural node in a system that begins with action and expression before settling into a syntactical schema. This is extremely important: the abstract structure of language, prior to expression, is absent from Senghor’s formulation: there’s the word uttered and the setting into relational expression of the word, without recourse to an underlying structural principle. Might this be a more appropriate semiological starting place for aural/oral linguistic traditions?[20] Again, what follows is that expression is built into syntactic structure, not added later: there is no unmarked abstract version that then gets expressively manipulated. The example of musical microtiming helps clarify this point: in many musical traditions, microtemporal elasticity is built into the structure of the music and, importantly, is learned from the very early stages. This was my experience learning to play, for example, the Brazilian pandeiro, the support drums (rumpi and lê) of Candomblé, and Cuban rumba guaguancó, not to mention the variable time-feel of jazz and other Black US musics. The expressive orality of any music—including, importantly, score-based music from Western Euroclassical contexts—operates similarly: there is no sung “word” that exists prior to its utterance, even if the existence of score-scripts (Cook 2014) obscures this fact.

[24] Among other things, this means for music analysis a refusal to break musical utterances into discrete parameters; for example, focusing on pitches or durations at the expense of articulation or gestural quality.[21] “Sudden falls, inflections, and vibrati” become primary musical characteristics, in addition to their status—as temporally-unfolding phenomena—as contributors to rhythm events.[22] The expressive work a musical utterance does folds irreducibly into a structural analysis. There is no inside or outside of musical expression in such a reading.

 

2. Participation

 

[25] The second concept is the role participation—“vibrant participation in life,” as Senghor (1956a, 116) puts it—plays in constituting the nature of rhythms in any given instance. For Senghor, rhythm is a tool for understanding the world by relating to it: “relat[ing] to … life through rhythmic modes of expression” (Bâ 1973, 113). As Bâ describes it, “in order to engender, participate in, appropriate, and direct a life force, one has to generate rhythmic vibrations consonant with those of the force in question” (113).

[26] An art practice, in this sense, “is a social activity, a technique of living,” and a means of setting into motion and/or regulating a “harmonious interplay of life forces” (Senghor 2016, 62). Keep in mind that “social” refers to concentric relational circles of affective connections (the “family, tribal, national, world, and universal forces” named above) as well as relationships across temporal trajectories and with non-human participants (animals, the land): “man is not the only being in the world. A vital force similar to his own animates every object which is endowed with a sentient character, from God to a grain of Sand” [Senghor 1956c, 53]). An art practice, then, functions both as a microcosm of larger kinds of relational-social interchanges and as a nexus where particular kinds of participatory interchanges transpire; hence the role music and dance play in traditional African societies for rites of passage, harvests and hunts, divination, and communication with ancestors and spirits. This reinforces the notion that art practices are themselves modes of knowledge production.[23] For Senghor, this is itself a form of collaborative rationality—the “reason of touch, the reasoning-embrace” (Senghor 1964, 74, emph. in original); an “intuitive participatory reasoning,” to turn back to Senghor’s staging described above.

[27] There is much at stake in Senghor’s location of participation as the site of intuitive reasoning. African philosophy—like so many Indigenous and subaltern knowledge systems—nearly uniformly rejects the liberal idea of the atomized human subject, instead understanding very well the extent to which we are shaped by our relations and environments as well as the many ways in which our subjectivities extend far beyond our material bodies. Senghor’s characterization of participation as rhythmic does at least three things. First, it underscores the pragmatic nature of learning in aural/oral traditions: one learns by doing, with others, through a kind of pedagogical call and response. That’s too simple, of course, but it is no accident that explicitly participatory, dialogic forms of teaching and learning are also tenets of US Black feminist pedagogy (Collins 2000). Second, it emphasizes the iterative nature of the relational process, whereby meaning is engendered through periodic repetition. And third, turning specifically to music, it illustrates how rhythm is itself participatory: rhythms (sequences or patterns of durational onsets) are meaningful only in relation to one another, or to virtual legislating forces like metric cycles or timelines. The multiple rhythmic strata, hemiolas, cross-rhythms, and micro-rhythms present across so many African and Afro-diasporic musical traditions speak to this crucial relational point: a cross-rhythm is only comprehensible as such—and thereby meaningful as a cross-rhythm—in its participatory context. This is why, for example, the specific shape taken by any representational system—like transcription into this or that visual notation—matters, because the degree to which a representation reflects the fundamentally participatory nature of a musical passage is tantamount to the representation’s very ontological facticity, to put it somewhat clumsily. This is precisely what is missing in, for example, transcriptions that segment musical phrases into odd-meter groupings (Brandel 1961), or that fail to recognize the orienting role that shared cycle beginnings play (Chernoff 1981), or that cling to the notion that barlines (a visual aid) equate to phenomenal accents (Arom 1991 and many others; see Stover [forthcoming]): all of these fall short because they insufficiently attend to the fundamentally relational principles that animate the musics being studied.

[28] Participation and expression, therefore, are intricately conjoined. Expression, we might say, is produced through a double movement of individuation—the becoming-verbe of parole—and of participatory action—for example, the way many parts come together to produce a compound melody or to articulate any given iteration of what Meki Nzewi (1997) calls the “ensemble thematic cycle” of many drum-dance musics. Anyone who has played West or Central African drum or horn ensemble music, or diasporic musical derivations, knows this: a single drum part is both an individual expression and part of a cohesive whole, necessarily so. Senghor celebrates the non-contradictory nature of this.

 

3. “A Network of Interacting Forces”

 

[29] What follows from all this is a constellation of concepts Senghor puts to work to describe rhythm as “a network of interacting forces.”[24] As he puts it, rhythmic forces are spontaneous, lived and always in flux. This crucial point is what animates my theory of beat span (Stover 2009; Danielsen, Johansson, and Stover 2023), which characterizes expressive musical microtiming as the product of an always ongoing interplay of forces set in motion as played gestures and virtual legislating processes push and pull on one another, thereby staking out the microtiming and gestural terrain of a given performance. I’m drawn to two oft-cited quotes in microtiming theory: first from Charles Keil, “the matrix is not stable” (Keil 1994, 106): the grid itself is in flux, which is why it is imperative that we resist conceptualizing microtiming as deviations from fixity. And second from Justin London, paraphrasing Bruno Repp, “lengthenings and shortenings are not deviations from the norm—they are the norm” (London 2012, 179; see Repp 1998).

[30] Far more important, though, than the simple fact that flux is constantly present, is the question of why that is the case. This is what my own theory of beat span attempts to at least partially reveal: there are active and passive forces that work to pull the various events that comprise a complex, ongoing, improvisatory musical fabric in different temporal directions (Stover 2018). Senghor’s characterization of this process in vitalist and indeed social terms speaks to the agential character of both human and non-human participants (for example, musical sounds and structural scaffoldings) which, from the perspective of a participatory ontology, find their own subjectivities always in the process of being constituted by and within the contexts of their relational conjunctions. Gbadegesin underscores the monist philosophy at work here: “If one believes that the world is composed of life forces in complementary relations and that they all emanate from God to fulfill its purpose, then one would see each object, person or thing as a necessary link in the chain of the universe” (1992, 40).

[31] For Senghor, the very notion of being is the product of interacting forces. Those forces are rhythmic; as Diagne summarizes, “the harmonious combination of rhythms … depends on a force/rhythm which orders the whole into an indivisible unity” (2011, 86). The parallels to affect theory—which suggests that bodies produce affective forces that are caught up by other bodies, transforming their capacities to re-related in each new event, in an ever-ongoing relational process; see Stover (2018; 2021b)—are highly compelling, as is Senghor’s characterization of the movement of forces as a “sympathetic” process of being born ever anew in the Other.

 

4. “Dynamic Waves”

 

And from the earth surges the rhythm, sap and sweat,

a wave that smells of wet soil. (Senghor 1956b)

[32] Senghor describes this movement at several junctures as “dynamic waves”; my fourth theme. He writes, for example, in a 1945 essay on the poetry of Langston Hughes:

on the wave of duration, all the rhythmic groupings in the context of the total duration are both starting and terminal points. They are simultaneously the thrust toward realization and actual realization in the totality of the moment. (Senghor 1945b, 112)

[33] I read this in conjunction with the theme of interacting forces, as the dynamic stage upon which those forces are acting. A wave signifies continuous movement, every point along the way both beginning and ending. It is also cyclic, which plays into the way in which most African drum/dance music unfolds, as a cyclic repetition of fundamental musical materials that, through their expressive enactment, are “sung and made rhythmical”; that is, transformed from parole into verbe. But there’s more to the wave metaphor. I’m especially drawn to the Brazilian concept of “balanço do mar,” the equilibrium-in-motion that the sea produces, which capoeira players put to work to characterize the differently-directed, participatory force relations at play in their interactive, improvisational practices. Importantly, movement and touch are both critical aspects of capoeira’s performative rationality (its “reason-embrace”). That Senghor finds these kinds of dynamic movements at work in the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance speaks to the richness of potential diasporic connections in African and Africana studies.

Example 1. The standard pattern timeline interpreted as a dynamic wave.

[34] Wave-like motions are ever-present in timeline musics. Example 1 shows a “wave” interpretation of the well-known “standard pattern” timeline in its triple or 12-cycle orientation.[25] As shown in the example annotations, the pattern begins in alignment with the metric cycle, syncopates alongside the cycle halfway-point (in other words, silence occurs at that point), and then returns to alignment with the next cycle beginning. In Senghor’s terms, the raw morphological data, for example the sequence of longs and shorts that describes how it unfolds from one event onset to the next, are less important than two different kinds of directed motions (two different qualities of expressions) at work in each half cycle. The first moves ‘away-from’ the cycle beginning as an intensification of energy, manifest in the temporal acceleration of two longs followed by a short (shown as the on-beat initiated L-L-S in the first cycle half). The second starts ‘off beat’ and repeats the long-long-short gesture but this time pointing back to alignment (shown as the off-beat L-L-S in the second cycle half). The temporal acceleration of the second gesture returns us to the next cycle beginning; as Senghor puts it, the “actual realization in the totality of the moment.” This process repeats continuously through any given performance, and I would argue that it is these differently-directed motions more than the empirical data of their onset profiles that legislate how other performed layers transpire.[26] This calls back to the phenomenological question posed above: to attend to what I call “timeline music” is less a process of apprehending what kinds of events are empirically there at any given moment, but rather what kinds of affective implications those events inspire; what it ‘feels like’ to be caught up in them, and what next actions they inspire.

 

5. Call and Response

 

[35] The fifth theme draws together the first four, as the particular kind of dialogic or rhetorical form through which they are envoiced. As such, it calls back to Senghor’s suggestion that rhythm is a sensible rather than material thing, a movement of differently-directed energies or an expressive shaping of gestural material. This could be thought of as another way of putting the parole/verbe transformation to work. But I would like to take it in a slightly different direction, to consider what many (Floyd, Jr. 1995; Agawu 2016) have considered to be the foundational African musical concept (or trope) of call and response through the lens of Senghor’s notion of “participating in the object.” Senghor’s wording here is reminiscent of how Brazilian education theorist Paulo Freire (2005) positions an object of inquiry as the locus of participatory problem-solving dialogue; I think it is pedagogically valuable to keep this connection in mind. In the aforementioned 1966 essay, Senghor ruminates on this notion, culminating in a powerful suggestion: “The call is not the simple reproduction of the cry of the Other, it is a call of complementarity, a song: a call of harmony to the harmony of union that enriches by increasing being” (Senghor 2016, 63). This is an important framework for thinking about the dialogic aspects of musical syntax: call and response co-constitute one another in a continuous ongoing exchange. Furthermore, there are many call–response trajectories at work in any given collective musical utterance. In conjunction with the first four themes, then, we are starting to paint a compelling picture of Senghor’s transindividualist philosophy, which reflects a double commitment to his understanding across diverse coalitional African epistemic trajectories and the process philosophy of Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and others.

[36] What do call and response have to do with transindividualist philosophy? Call and response, in its most basic sense, is a form of dialogue: a compound utterance with two dependent parts; the response is shaped by the call; the call is defined as such, and made meaningful, by the response. As a frequently named foundational trope in African and Afro-diasporic rhetorical practices, music included, call and response manifests in many ways. If (1) we lean in to the idea that calls and responses are co-constitutive, and if (2) we recall the ways in which, for Senghor, expressive and participatory logics—the first two themes above—also mutually inform one another, and if (3) we understand how multiple non-discrete strands of call-response trajectories are continuously operating through the unfolding of any given performance (I am thinking specifically of a performance within the broad range of improvisationally-grounded practices I call timeline musics [Stover forthcoming], rather than in all possible African musics), then we have a rich beginning-point for analysis that engages the music in its very dialogic complexity. We might think of this as something like an n-dimensional Markov chain where individual event-strands are able to fold or even blur into one another, set in motion by the ways in which individual participants respond in one of many possible ways to any of a number of co-occurring calls or call-complexes currently constituting the musical fabric. Those possible ways can involve melo-rhythmic gestural content, microtiming or feel, tone quality or amplitude, or multiple interwoven parameters. Recall Senghor’s point about prosody and expression: that timbre, tone, expression, and shape are, fundamentally, part of rhythm. And a response can be mimetic or otherwise complementary, can enact different kinds of gestural continuation, or even starkly contradict some aspect of the call (like a respond that pushes toward the “front end” of a beat span following a “laid back” call) if the affective conditions of an ongoing performance seem to suggest such a response-relation to a given player.

Example 2. Two interdependent ways of construing the call-response relation: as the call’s protensive ‘throwing-forward’ of a range of possible response-implications and the resulting response that actually transpires (schematic 1) and as the response’s expression of manifold call implications that determine its capacity for being in one way or another (schematic 2).

[37] Consider the two schematics shown in Example 2. In the left-side “schematic 1,” we see a call throwing forward a range of possible response-implications, some constellation of which are taken up by the actual response in the event of its occurrence. The actually-occurring response, therefore, is but one of a range of possible responses that could have been, and the others continue to exist as virtual potentialities, there having an effect on what might come. In the right-side “schematic 2,” then, we see how that response expresses a complex genealogy of manifold call-implications, which might be different ‘parameters’ of a single call or an admixture of elements from multiple ongoing calls or constellations of calls. The arrows point backward in this case, reflecting how the present expression actualizes specific past implications, thereby transforming the past by transforming their affective capacities.[27] These schemata are greatly simplified, of course. But importantly, they are co-occurring and concatenated: as soon as a response occurs it becomes a new call-candidate, to be potentially taken up by a response to follow. We can characterize any given call-response interaction as an event, as the hyper-local site of participatory action and as—perhaps another way of saying the same thing—a dynamic conjunction of specific force-relations. In this way, each call-response interaction operates as a time-space in which arrays of earlier and possible later events are expressed in an ongoing dialogic process.

 

6 and 7. Repetition and Variation

 

[38] This leads, then, to the last two themes, repetition and variation. Senghor writes about what might be perceived as the monotony (his word) of some African rhythms; for example the support drum parts that seem to repeat over and over without directly contributing to the improvisational flux of the music. But Senghor’s ear is keenly attuned. “Monotony,” he writes, “is only a first impression…. [T]he basic rhythm … covers the singer’s syncopations and variations in the case of the inattentive listener; where, within the same melodic phrase, delicate variations are introduced, perceptible only to delicate ears” (Senghor 1970c, 338; also in Bâ 1973, 121). Variation, Senghor observes, is omnipresent and baked into the fabric of the repetition itself. Bâ expands on this point, explaining how

Black African rhythm is dynamic in that the repetitions can be slightly varied…. Though it is possible to anticipate the fundamental beat, the polymetric variations and improvisations create a complexity of rhythm, each of which offers freedom within the basic rhythm. Each rhythmic pattern has its own value, which is guided by the basic rhythm but to which it is not subordinate in the way that [Western] harmony is subordinate to melody and melody to time signature (Bâ 1973, 122).

[39] By “basic rhythm” Bâ seems to be referring at times to the music’s metric structure and at times to gestural prototypes that precede their expressive variation, but to which variation is not necessarily reducible.[28] The contradiction, as elsewhere above, is intentional, which again reinforces how we need to be practicing being comfortable living and thinking within the excluded middle. The possibility that individual rhythmic expressions have their own value, not fully reducible to an underlying prototype, again speaks to the way in which these ideas resist certain kinds of Western assumptions about, for example, primary and secondary musical characteristics (Meyer 1989).

[40] The interplay between repetition and variation is therefore crucial for Senghor’s conception. Dramatic interest is born from repetition, “[b]ut there is almost always the introduction of a new element, variation of repetition, unity in diversity” (Senghor 1970a, 213).[29] As Diagne, one of the most sensitive interpreters of Senghor’s philosophy, suggests,

[f]ar from ignoring variety, [Senghor] adopts an approach in which variations meld together, which means he can ask the right questions that then arise: what is the reason for this art of disproportion, and for those geometric shapes that converge rhythmically to bring out the ‘compelling force’ by which they are linked?” (Diagne 2020, 101).

[41] To turn back to the movement of force-relations: it is precisely the impingement of one shape on another that engenders “this art of disproportion.” The specific shape a repeated gesture takes in any particular iteration is a product of how it interrelates with other ongoing gestures. Cyclic repetition is ever-present, but as Senghor puts it,

It is not a [repetition] that engenders monotony; rhythm is alive, it is free. For reprise is not redundancy…. The theme is reprised at another place, on another level, in another combination, in a variation. And it produces something like another tone, another timbre, another accent. And the general effect is intensified by this, not without nuances (Senghor 2003, 296).

Later in the same essay Senghor describes how the always ongoing flux of a musical performance “is composed of constancy and variety, of tyranny and imagination, of waiting and surprise, which explains how [one] can delight in the same musical phrase for hours, for the phrase is not the same” (298).

[42] Example 3 provides a sketch for a schematic that brings all seven themes into one space, modelled after a clockface representation of the standard pattern cycle, staged as seven different kinds of relational perspectives on a given musical event. If we imagine a musical event in the center, then we can use each of these nodes, alone or in conjunction, to thematize what is transpiring as the music unfolds. Conversely, we can consider how the music is enlivening one or more themes. Several of the themes work well together in pairs: repetition and variation, of course, and as suggested above, interacting forces and dynamic waves. Expression and participation also form a productive pair, as the dialectical interplay between individual and group that I framed in transindividualist terms above. Call and response is an outlier in this particular rendering, but it is also the engine that drives everything, so perhaps it makes sense that it ought to stand somewhat alone. But again, there is no excluded middle here: each of these themes functions both alone and in conjunction, and not just in the provisional range of conjunctions I’ve suggested here: the combinatorial possibilities are promiscuous.

Example 3. Seven Senghorian themes staged around an ongoing musical event, with one of many possible ways of productively conjoining themes emphasized with connecting arrows.

[43] The event expresses and is expressed by all seven themes. For example, the event might be the moment of conjunction of call and response, the call projecting the conditions for the nature of the response, the response expressing its genealogical commitment to the call. The “call and response” node in this case establishes a new provisional center, with the remaining node-conduits moving into conceptual orbit around it. What flows from call to response, and vice versa, are the networks of interacting force relations that enact a change in each’s capacity to re-relate in next events (the call, once uttered, is not fixed: it changes in the sense that its meaning for next call-response conjunctions changes). This particular call-response conjunction, then, is one in an ongoing series, a repeated process each iteration of which varies according to the ways in which force relations have impinged on it. There are many such series co-occurring: call-response relations may be unproblematically temporal (call-then-response), but they also may be transversal (a response to an ongoing call, still in progress), and all manner of different aspects of the music may vary: a rhythmic or microrhythmic profile, a gestural quality, a timbre or amplitude intensity, and so on. All parameters participate in the ongoing flux of the performance, which unfolds as a continuous flow of dynamic waves of directional impulses. The way I have characterized it in this brief account begins (from the perspective of inquiry, not ontology) with call and response, but we can enter at any point, and each adumbration will produce new perspectives on how the music unfolds.[30]

[44] This is only a preliminary study: there is much more to work through, including a development of the interplay between binary and ternary structuring forces in many African musical contexts, an understanding of how a basic rhythm affords “more intricate contrapuntal effects” (therefore suggesting multiple syncopation trajectories), and an enthusiastic celebration of the nuances of musical feel. Diagne describes the creative process at play “in the composition of rhythms, in building a rhythm from units, which are themselves rhythms, by repeating them without repeating them exactly and by making them respond to each other through contrast and inversion” (2011, 68). Bâ writes of a “liquid, continuous effect that frees the rhythm from the regularity of … even-numbered groupings” (1973, 133). Senghor, in turn, locates in syncopation and off-beat rhythms the kind of force-relation that “expresses life more than any other” (Senghor 1970b, 281). And in one effusive moment Senghor sings of the joy of microtiming flux, proclaiming simply “le swing, le swing, oui le swing!” (Senghor 1945a, 28).

[45] It is also important to recognize the limitations of an approach like this. Not all African culture valorizes or puts into action a participatory ontology in the way Senghor and others named above suggest. Africa is a big, intensely diverse place with complex (and complexly intertwining) histories of movement, conflict, power struggles, and much more, not to mention the untold damage centuries of colonialism, slavery, underdevelopment, and expropriation, theft, and genocide have wrought. It’s important not to romanticize or credulously promulgate even broadly applicable aspects of African philosophy, even when they suggest fruitful corrections to existing essentializations or to positivist appeals to empiricism. To repeat, then, these Senghorian concepts form a small constellation of nodes in a vast, motile network of ways of thinking and doing in and around African music-making practices. It’s similarly important to underscore the modest focus of a study like this one, which, to repeat a point made above, attempts to show a few ways in which conceptual relationships between musicking practices and philosophical thinking in Africa can unfold as richly as has been demonstrated in European epistemes.

[46] I will close with two points touched on in the early pages of this essay. The first is on coalitional theory-making. How can we be positioning ourselves (the readers of this journal, most of whom are themselves music analysts or at least have keen interest in music analysis, and some of whom are practitioners besides) to be theorizing from the ground up, in participatory dialogue with practitioners? How can we be working to keep open and alive the dialectical movement between local specificity and nuanced interconnectivity, resisting reproducing the colonialist modern/traditional binary by acknowledging histories of connections, evolutions, movements and migrations, and more that give shape to musical practices, while also letting those practices speak for themselves to the greatest extent possible? (Importantly, Analytical Approaches to World Music—the journal and the conference series—continues to clear a promising way forward.) Senghor’s philosophical concepts don’t exactly emerge from the ground up (although Oruka’s do, in large part). But they do function in dialogue with local knowledges and, especially, art practices, working to thematize what Senghor saw, heard, and felt as the animating “vital forces” that shape thinking and doing in African societal contexts. While this is not an essay about, for example, the embodied knowledges (and embodied forms of knowledge dissemination) that practitioners rightfully and crucially lay claim to, it begins to develop a conjunctural point of view that can triangulate with such practices in order to better mutually understand and grow one another; in doing so, underscoring how forms of dialectical cross-fertilization between theory and practice are always taking place.

[47] More important still is the question of to what end we direct projects like music analysis. It is no accident that Senghor’s five volumes of collected writings were given the name Liberté. Can music analysis (and music scholarship more broadly, in dialogue with practice) point to emancipatory outcomes? A simple example might be how music analysis affords a transformation of one’s listening capacity, enlarging and (hopefully) enriching one’s ability to hear from different perspectives, to hear more detail, to hear more ethically (Stover 2020). An analytic focus on participatory and expressive aspects of music invites thoughtful consideration of the participants and their utterances, and a focus that works to resist the subject-object schism by considering how one is “born into the Other” through relational conjunctions has powerful humanist, transhumanist, and posthumanist implications that we should take seriously.

 

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[1]. That study stemmed from fieldwork I performed in Brazil in 2015 and 2016. The question of attending carefully and sensitively to the words of expert insiders is, of course, extremely important to ethnomusicologists too: I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for reminding me to make this explicit.

[2]. See Stover (2025), especially Chapter 5, for more on this notion.

[3]. The influence of philosophical thought on how particular Western music theories have taken shape has been accounted for by many scholars. For just two examples, see Korsyn (1988) and Parkhurst (2017) on the influence of Kantian metaphysics on Heinrich Schenker’s theory or Salley (2015) on the relationship between Arnold Schoenberg’s compositional theory and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time. There are, of course, many more examples, including philosophers like René Descartes (1961) and Theodor Adorno (Adorno and Paddison 1982) who were themselves music theorists in some important way. The point here is to stage a way of thinking about global music practices that similarly draws connections between philosophical thought and musical praxis, which Michel Foucault (1970) would frame in “epistemic” terms. I’m especially indebted to Lewis Rowell’s (1979) groundbreaking work in this regard.

[4]. Importantly, considerations in African philosophy of what we might in another context call “aesthetics” take a deep back seat to urgent ethical philosophical concerns (especially in postcolonial and imperialist contexts) around political agency, community and subjectivity, liberty and emancipation, and economic and social justice. When art practices are engaged—for example Aimé Césaire’s or Léon Damas’s developments of African surrealist poetry in the 1930s (Césaire 2017; Damas 2018)—it is nearly always as a path toward one or more of these critical liberatory ends. This is why engagement with, for example, musical concepts as they occur in African philosophical writing are important far beyond their implications for music theory and analysis, as I will turn to in the conclusion of this article.

[5]. For an overview of some of most trenchant critiques of ethnophilosophy, see Masolo (1994), 159–172. Among the perspectives Masolo summarizes is that of Camaroonian philosopher Marcien Towa, who lodged a sustained and important critique of Senghor’s ideas about Black African identity and rationality. What links these perspectives is a shared concern that the ethnophilosopher, in pursuit of objective or generalizable truth in the European epistemological manner, removes themself from the cultural conditions and Indigenous worldviews that ought to be the proper starting place for their study. According to Eritrean philosopher Tseney Serequeberhan (1994), this “occludes” what Oruka refers to positively as African “cultural philosophy.” What these thinkers characterize as ethnophilosophy is slightly different than the ethnotheory Kofi Agawu ([2017] 2023) criticizes, which focuses on ascriptions of essential cultural difference by (usually well-meaning, if naïve) Western researchers; as Agawu puts it, “[t]he assumption … that other people are intrinsically different; therefore that their way of thinking must be naturally different from ours.” See also the chapter “Contesting Difference” in Agawu (2003). For a recent, nuanced development of Agawu’s critique that also suggests some ways to move beyond the more problematic aspects of ethnotheories, see Díaz (2024).

[6]. See Mignolo and Walsh (2018) for a rich development of this point. As Walter Mignolo writes, “tradition appears in all its clarity as a term invented in the process of building the very idea and the imaginary of modernity” (118).

[7]. Chen Kuan-Hsing puts this point very well: “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas. European experiences were their system of references. Once we recognize how extremely limited the current conditions of knowledge are, we learn to be humble about our knowledge claims” (Chen 2010, 4).

[8]. There are also vectors of divergence, impingement and subsumption, power grabs, and more, which need to be carefully accounted for.

[9]. See Diagne (2019) for an in-depth investigation of the influence of these two thinkers on Senghor’s philosophy.

[10]. The original French version, “Ce que l’homme noire apporte,” was published in a volume titled L’Homme de couleur and was reproduced in Senghor (1970).

[11]. Several of Senghor’s concepts, including this one, can be read as what Juan Diego Díaz calls “tropes of Africanness” (2021, 30). Like Díaz, I recognize how these can be deployed toward productive political ends while also acknowledging the essentializing work they can do. More important, I’m arguing here that Senghor also recognized that, which is why I’m insisting on a reparative reading of the problematically essentialist themes that many have identified in his writing.

[12]. Masolo draws in part on Appiah (1992) for these ideas. Like Senghor, Masolo and Appiah engage both African and European philosophical traditions to render their ideas, which speaks to another controversial theme in Senghor’s work about the possibility of productive residues of colonialism; for example foregrounding an “awareness, defense, and development of African cultural values” while also “welcom[ing] the complementary values of Europe” (Senghor 1996, 49). The influence of European philosophical traditions on many of the most influential philosophers in postcolonial Africa (most of whom studied in Europe or the US, and many of whom have taught or teach there) remains a contested terrain.

[13]. Translation mine. Senghor repeats and recontextualizes this passage in another 1956 essay, “The Spirit of Civilisation, or the Laws of African Negro Culture,” which was published (in English) in Présence Africaine: Cultural Journal of the Negro World alongside papers by Jacques Rabemananjara (then president of Madagascar) and Paul Hazoumé, Dahomeyan deputy to the French territorial assembly, followed by a transcription of an extended discussion on all three papers. See Senghor (1956c), 52.

[14]. Olusegun Gbadegesin (1991, 32–34) unpacks Senghor’s complex and subtle relationship with dialectical thought, including especially the latter’s critique of what he understood to be an overly objective and deterministic stream in Marx and Engels’s theory (in which he otherwise finds great value). In hindsight, we can recognize this as more of a contemporaneous (“vulgar”) Marxian thought than of Marx and Engels per se. (Senghor’s understanding of the role movement plays in Marx’s dialectics is impressive and trenchant.) As Senghor suggests, “the method of ‘scientific socialism’ still falls short of the contemporary method of knowledge, i.e. knowledge by confrontation and intuition, which is Negro-African knowledge” (Senghor 1964, 72; Gbadegesin 1991, 34). Senghor’s “African socialism” (1964) was intended as a theoretical and practical corrective, although it has also drawn substantial criticism (see Rabaka 2015).

[15]. Decolonial theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (2019) describes this as “rewinding” to the moment of possibility just before colonial incursion, as a fabulatory strategy.

[16]. Translation mine. In original, “Qu’est-ce que le rythme? C’est l’architecture de l’être, le dynamisme interne qui lui donne forme, le système d’ondes qu’il émet à l’adresse de Autres, l’expression pure de la Force vitale. Le rythme, c’est le choc vibratoire, la force qui, à travers les sens, nous saisit à la racine de l’être.”

[17]. See Munro (2010) and Díaz (2021) for related critiques of what they call “rhythmicity.”

[18]. In a presentation of an earlier version of this study, a question was asked about the applicability of these ideas for music beyond African or Afro-diasporic contexts. The answer ought to be “very applicable”: the point is not to single out African musics as a special case of musicking practices, thereby repeating the whole history of essentializing claims that Agawu and others have worked to contest. Rather, it is to engage an ongoing series of specific case studies—as a coalitional praxis—in order, ultimately, to “uncover” the epistemological veil that Eurocentric forms of rationality have set in place. The conceptual framework that follows should be able to be put to work to engage music of any kind at all. This includes, perhaps obviously, “African music” of any kind, but I should make clear that the specific focus of my own research is on what I call “timeline musics”: collaborative music-making contexts that include, among an array of co-constitutive temporal-relational strata, the asymmetrical cyclical patterns often referred to in Africa and beyond as timelines. See Stover (forthcoming).

[19]. Senghor (1970a), 214. Translation mine; the original passage reads: “D’où la place accordée au rythme, aux chutes brusques, inflexions et vibrati; la préférence accordée à l’expression sur l’harmonie.”

[20]. See Sandoval (2000) for a related argument.

[21]. See Stover (2023b) for a consideration of how the gestural quality of a short series of (very fast) played onsets, identified in Malian jembe music by Rainer Polak (2010), might supersede anything we might say about the cognitive perceptibility of distinctions between their durational values.

[22]. Meki Nzewi’s (1997) concept of “melorhythm” starts to get at this point, but we can take it much further than he did.

[23]. Senghor makes this foundational artistic-research claim explicit: “Art is not … imitation of appearances or diversion, but a means of knowledge—the most efficient means” (Senghor 1971, 278).

[24]. For an overview of how Senghor understands the constitutive power of interacting forces, see Diagne (2011), 84–86. One source for Senghor’s theory of forces is Bergson’s élan vital; see Diagne (2019), 44–45.

[25]. Timelines are present in many, but far from all, African and Afro-diasporic contexts. My specific research focus is a broad coalition of “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993) practices that I refer to collectively as “timeline musics” (Stover forthcoming). The boundaries around what the category includes are porous and ever in flux.

[26]. For more on the gestural rather than quantitative nature of this, see Stover (forthcoming) for several examples of morphological transformations that occur when a timeline is expressed in its 12-cycle, 16-cycle, or liminal versions.

[27]. See Stover (2018) for more on how this process unfolds.

[28]. Bâ is a poet and poetry scholar, which means her use of technical musical concepts and terms is not especially precise. Nonetheless, her analysis of rhythm in Senghor’s work and thought has rich and productive implications for music studies.

[29]. Translation mine. In original: “Mais il y a, presque toujours, introduction d’un élément nouveau, variation de la répétition, unité dans la diversité.”

[30]. By invoking the term “adumbrations” I wish to deliberately emphasize the phenomenological nature of this kind of inquiry, which should never stray from a thick experiential account of what is ascertainable from the music and its manifoldly interrelating contexts.