ABSTRACT
Imagine a seventeenth century sailor crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a galleon full of Aztec and Inca gold, on the regular run from the port of Havana in Cuba to the port of Seville in Spain. Let us assume that this sailor was brought up in a village where the popular music always incorporated rhythms that used a 16-pulse cycle. One day, some freed slaves from sub-Saharan West Africa show up on the ship, with drums and an iron bell, and they play the fume-fume rhythm [x . x . x . . x . x . .]. Since this rhythm is so similar to the clave son [x . . x . . x . . . x . x . . .], it is quite possible that our sailor would perceive it as being the clave son. To more accurately compare these two rhythms, it helps to put them together on the same clock diagram so that both complete cycles take the same amount of real time. For this, it is convenient to use a clock with a number of pulses that is divided evenly (without remainder) by both 12 and 16. e smallest such number is 48: it is equal to 4 × 12 and 3 × 16. Figure 12.1 (le ) shows the son and fume-fume rhythms embedded on such a 48-pulse clock. e son is indicated with the larger white circles on pulses 0, 9, 18, 30, and 36, whereas the fume-fume is made up of the smaller black circles on pulses 0, 8, 16, 28, and 36. As pointed out in Chapter 10, the rst and last onsets of both rhythms are in unison. e second onsets dier by 1/48th of a cycle, and the other two onsets dier by 1/24th of a cycle. If we assume that the entire cycle lasts about 2 s, it means the second onsets dier by 1/24th of a second, and the two others by 1/12th of a second. us, even in absolute terms, the rhythms may be considered to be quite similar in terms of their corresponding onset alignments.
