Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm: Asian, African, and Euro-American Perspectives

Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm offers new understandings of musical rhythm through the analysis and comparison of diverse repertoires, performance practices, and theories as formulated and transmitted in speech or writing. Editors Richard K. Wolf, Stephen Blum, and Christopher Hasty address a productive tension in musical studies between universalistic and culturally relevant approaches to the study of rhythm. Reacting to commonplace ideas in (Western) music pedagogy, the essays explore a range of perspectives on rhythm: its status as an "element" of music that can be usefully abstracted from timbre, tone, and harmony; its connotations of regularity (or, by contrast, that rhythm is what we hear against the grain of background regularity); and its special embodiment in percussion parts. Unique among studies of musical rhythm, the collection directs close attention to ways performers and listeners conceptualize aspects of rhythm and questions many received categories for describing rhythm. By drawing the ear and the mind to tensions, distinctions, and aesthetic principles that might otherwise be overlooked, this focus on local concepts enables the listener to dispel assumptions about how music works "in general." Readers may walk away with a few surprises, become more aware of their assumptions, and/or think of new ways to shock their students out of complacency.

Richard K. Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies at Harvard University, has been conducting ethnomusicological research on the musical traditions of South Asia for more than thirty years. A performer on the South Indian vina as well as a scholar, he is the author of The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India (2005) and The Voice in the Drum: Music, Language and Emotion in Islamicate South Asia (2014), editor of Theorizing the local: Music, practice and experience in south Asia and beyond (2009), and (with Frank Heidemann) The bison and the horn: Indigeneity, performance, and the state of India (2014). He is also General Editor of the series Ethnomusicology Translations, published by the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Stephen Blum taught courses and supervised research on a wide range of topics at four institutions from 1969 through 2016. He was founding director of an MFA program in "Musicology of Contemporary Cultures" at York University (1977-87) and initiated a doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1988. His publications include studies of sung poetry in Iran and survey articles on such topics as composition, improvisation, analysis of musical style, historiography of music in North America, and musical knowledge in the early centuries of Islam. He is an Honorary Member of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Christopher Hasty is Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University where he teaches music theory. His research centers on time and musical rhythm.