Tenzer

AAWM JOURNAL VOL. 1 NO. 1 (2011)

Temporal Transformations In Cross-Cultural Perspective: Augmentation In Baroque, Carnatic And Balinese Music

Michael Tenzer

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Abstract:

To advance any cross-cultural musicology we could do worse than to refine our perspectives on temporality. Yet labeling qualities of musical time–as if such qualities were static–locks in counterproductive essentializations, since old categories like linear and nonlinear time emerged from obsolete distinctions between the West and “the rest” and are based on misleading analogies to the physical world. Such polarized distinctions now seem insufficient. Indeed, any sense of stability in a temporal category is illusory, since even in musics of strict repetition, time and its perceivers are always moving. Thus it may be more productive to typologize temporal transformations, as a way to focus on unfolding process. This article begins to address the question of how many ways musical time can transform. Choosing the culturally and structurally weighted process of temporal augmentation as a case study, I focus on analysis and comparison of examples from Europe, South India and Indonesia. Explanations are sought for how a culturally informed listener perceives the unfolding of augmentation, and in so doing comes to reevaluate the sense of orientation in the music’s time.

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Contributor Information:

Michael Tenzer is Professor of Music at the University of British Columbia. He is active as performer, composer, educator and scholar. He is editor of Analytical Studies in World Music (Oxford 2006) and co-editor (with John Roeder) of that book’s companion volume, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (Oxford 2011, in press). In 2009 New World Records released Let Others Name You, a CD of Tenzer’s compositions since 2003.

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