Just now my wife noted that a song playing on the radio was repetitive. It was one of those numbers from the earlier days of rock and roll when lots on musicians with no background in African-American music were imitating the rollicking rhythms of Black music, often not too successfully. Notice you seldom hear this music as background music; almost any Muzak aka elevator music uses music from the 60s and 70s, but it is usually by Black artists other than Credence or Santana or the Young Rascals (both Santana and the Rascals were so-called “ethnics”, the former Mexican-American and the later were Italian-Americans).
What always strikes me about such music is the lack of what Gunther Schuller calls forward propulsive rhythm, that inner rhythm that takes you over and, in a religious setting, can result in spirit possession. It is a wonderful feeling and led me to the conceit that perhaps musicians of the Diaspora generally carry with them a sense of tapping into the Infinite or some such, what the Polynesians call Mana.
However, I have also noted that this Diasporan music tends, not tends to something, just tends, i.e. it has directionality, or, to use a superfancy term: telicity, it is telic, it has a direction if not a goal, an end point it is tending toward or trending toward. It is very hard to put into words such a subjective feeling, but my wife’s term repetitive gets to it, it just goes over and over with no direction, an endless, boring loop. Which is why the music feels boring if you are looking for that directionality, that telicity.
I’m going to have to think a lot more about this.
Pat’s Polemics
On-going brilliance
