Hearing Durational Process in A Huli Song

Christopher Hasty's Meter as Rhythm describes the experience of music as a richly varying flux of concurrent promises perceived, fulfilled and denied. Resisting conventions of notation and serialism, it treats duration not as a fixed property of an event, given at its onset, but as a process of ‘dynamic becoming’ or accumulation which listeners measure based on judgements they are making (consciously or otherwise) about immediately past durations (Hasty 1997, p. 13). Its key concept is ‘projection’: the process by which a listener takes a just-completed duration as a measure for the becoming of what immediately follows (pp. 84–95). A projection is said to be ‘realised’ if the following duration is judged to replicate it, possibly somewhat late or early. At each fresh beginning, a listener decides whether it continues a previously begun duration or, as a ‘dominant beginning’, initiates a new referential projective duration (p. 104). Dominant beginnings need not occur regularly as do strong beats in a more traditionally conceived metre, and continuations which occur late in an anticipated realisation and so point to a next beginning have a special quality of anacrusis. Although Hasty's theory draws on some abstract philosophies of time, it supports substantive music analysis. The concept of a realised projection comports with theories of segmentation, by helping to account for the sense of completion of a short group of events. The theory can explain precisely why motives, or even single events, can be heard to have a different rhythmic effect when they recur in different projective contexts. Also, for polyphonic textures, it can express how one might hear the rhythms of different voices functioning and interacting variously as beginnings, continuations and anacruses during longer realised projections (see, for example, Hasty 2019, pp. 41–7, and Roeder 2014). My locutions ‘may hear’ and ‘sense’ stress that Hasty's theory centres flexibly on the individual listener. Eschewing crisp objective measurement, it allows different interpretations of the same passage. Thus, it serves as a conceptual framework, a language, for communicating fleeting sensations, rather than as an objective model of musical structure. Its intensive focus on short timespans, manifest in how projections fluctuate with each successive beginning, makes the theory especially well-suited for analysing the irregular rhythms of modernist European–American music. Hasty's own applications engage passages by Pierre Boulez, Claude Debussy, Salvatore Sciarrino, Anton Webern, Stefan Wolpe, and others. But the experiences of duration and time he describes are afforded also by traditional musics, especially those in ‘free rhythm’ which lack an explicit coordinating beat. Such music is by no means exceptional or rare: free rhythm has been identified as an ‘essential genre-defining characteristic’ across a wide swathe of North Africa and Asia (Frigyesi 1993, p. 59), and there exist dozens of musical genres ‘apparently without pulse’ (Clayton 1996, p. 323). These include performances by soloists who need not synchronise with other musicians, such as of Iranian sung poetry and North Indian ālāp (Blum 2019 and Roeder 2019, pp. 66–70, respectively), but also some ensemble genres which synchronise through other means besides a shared beat, such as visual cues. For all these, Hasty's theory offers the possibility of appreciating the special experiences arising when a rhythm of varying durations, not a uniform hierarchy of pulses, is taken as a fluctuating measure of its own becoming. To demonstrate this potential and to consider some associated issues, this analysis explores sensations of durational projection and dominant beginning afforded by a brief intense song by Mabu, a member of the Huli people on the island of New Guinea. It was recorded in 1978 for the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and is posted on a public website.1 I wish to emphasise that I do not regard my hearing as definitive of the identity of this song, the intentions of the musician, or its aesthetic and social purposes in its culture. Rather I aim to describe, in Hasty's fruitfully restricted terms, how the song engages my own senses of temporality and its features which I hear as characteristic and distinctive. Despite its limitations, however, I believe this account can serve as a first step towards reaching a more intersubjective appreciation. Hasty's concepts and their graphical representations are enlisted in Fig. 1, which demonstrates my time-proportional transcription of the song along with analytical symbols and commentary. The performer alternates brief sung utterances with whistles on a small single-pitched flute (pilipe). At the end of most of the breaths, indicated by dashed vertical lines, is a whistle preceded by an extended vocal syllable (always approximately D5), which itself is often preceded by a rapid succession of syllables starting from a nearby but variable pitch I will call an ‘incipit’. The sequence of events <fast syllables, D5, whistle> repeats immediately and persistently, establishing cyclical expectations. But the cycles vary in duration, and neither a sounding beat nor regularity of timing affords hearing a regular continuous pulse. In that sense, this rhythm could be called ‘free’. But that does not mean that no durational repetition at all can be heard or that durational reproductions must be regarded as haphazard. To the contrary, the unbroken and dashed arcs in the analysis denote opportunities to hear durational projection and realisation.2 Numbers on the arcs indicate the clock time (in milliseconds) they span, and the percentages show how (in-)exactly the projections are realised. One may infer from Hasty's discussions that a judgement of projective realisation need not be strictly quantitative but can function as an interpretation which may take subjectively varying perceptions of phenomenal accent and parallelism into account (Hasty 1997, p. 93). Accordingly, the clock timings do not determine my analysis; they merely provide some post hoc support. At various points in the figure, projective durations are shown to begin from different events in the cycle, either an incipit, the D5, or the whistle. I do not hear these three types of events as having fixed roles in the becoming of the song's durations. Indeed, my changing impressions of their functions in the realised projections form the basis of my hearing an intelligibly shaped flux of changing temporal qualities, which Hasty's theory provides the concepts to describe. I hear the flux proceeding in four phases, corresponding roughly to the four systems in the figure. Each phase is defined by the establishment of a fresh metre-as-rhythmic consistency which is eventually disrupted. The song opens provocatively: despite the whistle's assertive beginning, the projective potential of its duration dissipates because the duration is not immediately reproduced. In the subsequent events, instead, I hear pairs of durations initiated by vocal D5s, each pair constituting a projection which is realised slightly early, giving the impression of reiterated acceleration. The orientation towards D5 dominant beginnings is supported by realised projections even when rapid notes are interpolated at the beginning of each utterance. When a group, labelled γ, repeats almost precisely, I am given the opportunity to hear longer realised projections either from the D5 or from the γ incipits themselves. At the end of the second γ, though, the <D5, whistle> event pair takes so much more time that the shorter projections lapse into hiatus, a moment of metrical indeterminacy. To the extent that I hear the γ duration reproduced, I hear the onset at the beginning of the second system as ‘on time’. Now comes a series of four utterances, all expanded γ groups, of longer but nearly equal duration and similar but slightly varied content. On each breath, the number of incipit events grows. At first, they seem anacrustic to the vocal terminus D5, but, as more enter each time, the durations they begin gather projective potential, offering two alternatives for hearing beginnings of projection, as revealed by the arcs above and below the system. As part of this reproduction, the vocal D5-then-whistle gesture also takes on a very consistent duration, as demonstrated by the dotted boxes. This equality is not projective in Hasty's sense, because the reproduction is not immediate, but I can recognise it, and I can understand it functioning to set up a pattern which will be disrupted later. The γ durations here are longer than the first durations I heard; they sit at approximately the two-second limit beyond which it is difficult to compare durations (Hasty 1997, p. 86), but the reproduction is still strikingly exact. Compared to the more variable projections on the first system, this consistency makes the second system sound like a new phase of the piece. Whether I orient my hearing to the incipit or to the D5 of each utterance, the events at the beginning of the third system seem early and the <D5-whistle> gestures shorter. The utterances continue to cycle, and with each reiteration the number of brief events varies considerably. At first the durations are not reproduced, as shown by lack of arrows. Then a projection is realised, but only between vocal incipits, not at all between the terminal D5s. This clarification of beginnings is a departure from the ambiguity of the previous phases. This phase concludes, as did the first phase, when the projections are again disrupted by hiatus caused by the utterance of the longest γ yet, almost 2.2 seconds. Although these three phases are fairly evident, the song still feels somewhat haphazard, but now some remarkable events suggest hearing an overall design. For the first time since the opening phase, γ returns with exactly the same sequence of events and the same duration as the first iteration. Will it repeat again exactly? If I expected that, I would be inclined to hear it gathering projective potential. But it does not repeat; rather, the singer reverts to his very first actions, alternating D5s and whistles with no preceding fast notes. As the dotted arc suggests, it is possible to hear the γ duration reproduced with an acceleration, but which happens at the moment of the greatest surprise yet. Instead of singing D5, the singer whistles twice on the pilipe. Then he briefly alternates singing and playing, setting up a duration which is reproduced exactly by two successive whistles. These break the alternating pattern of voice and instrument, and then the song ends abruptly. Because this is the first time that a duration initiated by the pilipe has been reproduced, it seems to me that the pilipe has taken control of time and silenced the vocalist. This technical observation – that the role of providing dominant beginnings passes from voice to flute – might be read as expressive when considering the context of the song. The Huli people reside in the southern highlands of New Guinea along with many other peoples including the Kaluli, the subject of extensive ethnomusicological research by Steven Feld. Feld highlights a Kaluli song in which a repeating descending pitch/rhythmic gesture mimics the song of a local bird species (Feld 1982, pp. 21–34). He links the mournful affect which the listeners attribute to the song to their metaphorical associations with the bird. Given the proximity of the Huli and Kaluli peoples, and the latter's propensity to borrow from nearby cultures (Feld 1982, p. 35), it seems plausible that the Huli might also derive their music from bird song and attribute similar affect to it. Indeed, there is a bird native to the Huli region, the brown sicklebill, whose call strongly resembles the contour and rhythm of the cycle in this song: it begins with a rapid series of similar pitches, varying slightly in number, then ends with a leap to a longer pitch followed by a more sustained lower pitch.3 The text of the song comprises a series of ‘metaphorical expressions concerning an unfaithful wife, whom the singer wishes would return to him’ (Zemp 1996, p. 154). Miming the incessant call of a bird seeking a mate seems like an appropriate plaint for a cuckold, and my analysis of the durational process supports this metaphor. At first (after the introduction), every whistle can be heard to continue a duration initiated by the voice. By the end, however, as the pilipe takes over the role of providing dominant beginnings, its whistles sap the singer's metrical initiative, and finally displace his voice. This perceived action, along with the whistles’ constant pitch and duration, gives the pilipe a stony implacability which underscores the futility of the singer's pleas. Speculations about affect aside, this account demonstrates how Hasty's concepts of projection and dominant beginning underwrite an analytical mode of discourse about ‘free rhythm’ in traditional world music as well as of the Western modernist repertoire. That discourse entails a processive conception of form. This cyclic music does not segment into discrete sections, but still affords a sense of temporal flux when events in one cycle assume projective functions identical to or different from those of the corresponding events in previous cycles. In this way, the experiences of long passages of time as varying phases of projective stability and instability can be attributed directly to processes which are sensed over the brief timespans from each beginning to the next. John Roeder is a Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. He studies rhythm, mathematical and computational models of music, contemporary art music, and the analysis of traditional music from across the world. With Michael Tenzer he edited Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (Oxford, 2011). Currently he leads a theoretical and analytical inquiry into cyclicity in world music, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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