peculiar. And a missed opportunity. Ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes has questioned how and why it is that “particular musical forms, styles, processes, sounds, rhythms, and metrical practices traverse national cultural boundaries” (2004, 65). And what is it about certain musics that compels people—who may have little or no connection to the genre’s origin—not just to listen to but also learn to perform such genres? Do some genres have a more user-friendly entry point than others? Like Stokes, I believe that there are indeed musical (as well as political, social, and economic) reasons as to why particular cultural practices circulate (Stokes 2004, 68).
Although many studies of global musics consider how music has traveled via structures of Western imperialism, the widespread diffusion of media technologies, and resistance movements, very few have actually engaged in trying to understand the musical reasons as to why certain musical practices move with apparent ease. The exceptions include Ingrid Monson’s study of “riffs” (defined as short, repeated segments of sound, deployed singly, in call-and-response, in layers, as melody, accompaniment, and bass line) and her exploration of how these “pervade African-American musics and various world popular musics, especially those of the African diaspora” (1999, 31). Monson is interested in how riffs, repetition, and their composite grooves circulate within and between cultures, and how these musical devices can tell us something about musical circulation.3 Timothy Taylor’s work on global pop and world music markets, and music and globalization—while posing provocative questions about the larger political and economic structures that shape the circulation of music—also attends to the ways in which musical form and style can reveal social and political transformations (1997). And Jocelyne Guilbault’s multi-sited and multifaceted study of the popular music genre known as zouk chronicles (partly through musical analysis) how this genre developed and spread throughout the Caribbean (1993).
Like these examples, this book also emphasizes a music-centered analysis. I contend that a genre’s global reach often has much to do with the kinetic appeal of the music itself and its ability to connect with people. I take the term “dynamic”—a word that is often used to describe samul nori—and develop this as an analytic to assert the accessibility and portability of rhythm-based forms in global circulation. Anthropological work on circulation as a cultural process provides a framework for me to interrogate an aesthetic form as it travels, performs, and transforms across boundaries (Lee and LiPuma 2002, 2004; Novak 2013). As Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma suggest, “circulation” should be viewed not simply as processes that transmit meanings, but as constitutive, performative acts in themselves (2002, 192). By thinking of circulation as a site for cultural analysis, I am able to examine some of the reasons for samul nori’s ability to travel or circulate—from the particularities of its rhythm-based form to how it is taught to individuals around the world.4
THINKING ABOUT FORM
In her recent publication Forms, literary theorist Caroline Levine revives a debate on formalist analysis and issues a call to expand our understandings of form and to think of form’s functions in broader social contexts (2015). Levine builds on the concept of affordance theory that was adapted for design studies by Donald Norman (1988, 2013). An affordance refers to a relationship between the properties of an object and a person; this relationship affords or furnishes an opportunity for a certain kind of action to be performed by the person. Psychologist James J. Gibson first coined the term in 1977, and later expanded on his theory of affordances in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979). Gibson’s original formulation of affordance considered the relationship between the environment and animals: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill…. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (1979, 127). Gibson moves from describing ecological niches and terrestrial surfaces to objects such as “sheets, sticks, fibers, containers, clothing, and tools” that afford manipulation. The focus on objects (and the affordances provided to humans) eventually became a point of interest and departure for Donald Norman, who then applied the ideas to design theory. With a background in electrical engineering and cognitive psychology, Norman refined his usage of affordance to the potential uses or actions latent in materials or designs.5 A chair is for support, and affords sitting. Glass affords transparency, and a doorknob affords turning, pushing, and pulling (2013, 10–13). Norman also took care to explain that an affordance is not an inherent property of an object, but rather a relationship between the qualities of an object and the abilities of the agent or user that is interacting with the object (11). This distinction is key.
Levine applies affordance theory to form—and uses the tools of formalist study to investigate how forms (broadly construed) organize not only art, but also society. She is interested in “both the particular constraints and possibilities that different forms afford, and the fact that those patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across time and space” (2015, 6). Levine investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and she proposes new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. For rhythm, Levine takes an expansive view. One example looks at the cycles of time that are essential to the endurance of institutions. Patterns of repetition and recurrence—which are used to impose order on courses, curricula, conferences, and scholarships—suggest to Levine that institutions preserve forms. These repetitive rhythms afford stability, which is essential to the work of institutional organizations. While I find Levine’s reappraisal of forms a compelling one, Levine’s reading of “rhythm” is unsatisfying to me—namely because she does not address a more literal, or rather a more granular understanding of rhythm. In this book, I take up Levine’s proposition by engaging in a musical analysis of rhythm in tandem with long-term, multi-sited ethnography. By doing so, I consider the affordances of samul nori’s rhythmic form in its global journeys and encounters.
When thinking about form in relation to music, there are a few things to consider—especially for readers unfamiliar with Western music theory and musicology.6 First, some definitions. The Oxford Dictionary of Music defines musical form as the “constructive or organizing element” in compositions (Whithall 2001). Next, based on the specific repertoire of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, music theorist William E. Caplin introduced form as a “hierarchical arrangement of discrete, perceptually significant time spans, what has been termed the grouping structure of the work” (1998, 9). And more broadly, theorist and composer Wallace Berry described form in music as “the sum of those qualities in a piece of music that bind together its parts and animate the whole” ([1966] 1986, xiii).
Teaching musical form is often a part of the musicologist’s and music theorist’s stock-in-trade. Instructors of a Western music history or a “Form and Analysis” collegiate course will introduce basic musical forms such as ternary, rondo, sonata, theme and variations, and strophic. In fact, learning to identify musical forms may be one of the first sets of musicological skills that nonmusicians (or non-music majors) will take away from a Western music survey course. Forms can be useful pedagogical tools; they provide students with concise models to understand how certain musical works are organized.
Yet, formal analysis in music can also be fraught. As musicologist Mark Evan Bonds reminds us, musical form is merely an abstraction. Forms are reductive schemas; they “function as a priori ideal types to which a given work can be compared” (Bonds 2010, 265). The study of musical form, as music educator Edward Brookhart put it, has often been approached from the standpoint of deriving “conventional, static structural patterns” from the works of the “great” composers of Western music (1964, 91). Graying musical textbooks present patterns or models that have become reified and endowed with a fixity that students may view in uncritical terms. Thus, the practice of formal analysis in music—excavating form as object—concomitantly raises thorny issues surrounding the value that is arbitrarily placed on formal exemplars, the hierarchies in Western art music, and the implication that Western music is superior to other kinds of musical traditions from around the world.
But other questions soon follow. What is the standard upon which an “ideal form” is based? And when a musical composition deviates from an idealized