Goldberg

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 7 NO. 2 (2019)

What’s the Meter of Elenino Horo? Rhythm and Timing in Drumming for a Bulgarian Folk Dance

Daniel Goldberg

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Abstract:

The meters of numerous Bulgarian folk songs and dance pieces are understood to include beats with two categorically different durations, short and long. Commonly performed dance types bear conventional time signatures that index particular sequences of unequal durations, and many Bulgarian musicians know these time signatures. Yet in the case of one popular dance type, elenino horo, performers and published sources express considerable uncertainty and differences of opinion about the durational sequence and time signature. This lack of consensus serves as the starting point for a study of meter in elenino horo as performed on the tŭpan, a large, double-sided drum that is considered the time-keeping instrument in many Bulgarian folk music ensembles. To examine the meter of elenino horo, I put musicians’ statements and my participant observations in dialogue with existing metric theory and quantitative analysis of rhythm in my field recordings. My primary objective is not to settle the debate about elenino horo—though I do take a position about which time signature fits most current performances—but rather to consider what this point of contention suggests about how meters with unequal durations can be structured and how Bulgarian musicians conceptualize meter. I interpret the metric organization of elenino horo in terms of cognitive theory of meter, arguing that the meter of the dance type contradicts current assumptions about constraints on metric structure. I corroborate my perception of durations in the music by analyzing timing in a sample of recordings. In the second part of the article, I turn to musicians’ conceptions of meter in the form of rhythmic templates that many Bulgarian percussionists use instead of time signatures or notation when demonstrating dance types. By examining frequencies of rhythmic patterns and drum strokes in recordings, I show that these templates approximate drummers’ process of generating rhythms in performance, and I identify ways in which commonly used rhythmic patterns communicate meter to listeners and reflect stylistic differences among performers.

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Keywords: meter, rhythm, cognition, timing, dance, Bulgaria, tŭpan, elenino horo

Contributor Information:

Daniel Goldberg is Assistant Professor in Residence of Music Theory at the University of Connecticut.

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