Syncopation

I have a whole lot of explanatory writing about rhythm in the pipeline, and thought it would be good to have a place to link the word “syncopation” to every time it arises. So here we go. Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony. A syncopated rhythm has accents on unexpected beats. In Western classical music, syncopation is usually temporary and eventually “resolves” to simpler rhythms. In the music of the African diaspora, syncopation is a constant, in the same way that unresolved tritones are constant in the blues.

Syncopation is not just a subjective quality of music; you can mathematically define it. Before we do, it helps to visualization a measure of 4/4 time, the amount of time it takes to count “one, two, three, four.”

A syncopated rhythm has accents on unexpected beats or subdivisions. In Western classical music, syncopation is usually temporary and eventually “resolves” to simpler rhythms. In the music of the African diaspora (including Anglo-American pop), syncopation is a constant, in the same way that “unresolved” tritones are a constant in the blues.

To understand syncopation, you need to know what “strong” and “weak” beats and subdivisions are. The more times you have to subdivide the measure to get to a given beat or subdivision, the weaker that beat or subdivision is. When you accent weak beats or subdivisions, you get syncopation.

  • The strongest beat is the downbeat. You don’t subdivide the bar at all to get there. The downbeat is accented just about always, if only implicitly.
  • The next strongest beat is halfway through the measure, beat three. It’s sometimes nicknamed “the invisible barline” because you can think of it as the downbeat of a half-sized sub-measure.
  • Next come the quarter notes. These are the beats you count “one, two, three, four” on. Beats two and four are called the backbeats. You accent the backbeats in blues, country, rock, jazz, funk, reggae, R&B, hip-hop, and pretty much every other form of African-descended popular music.
  • Next come the eighth notes. When you count “one and two and three and four and”, the “ands” are the eighth note offbeats. These are pretty weak, and when you accent them, your rhythm will start getting interesting.
  • Sixteenth notes are smallest subdivisions in common use. When you count “one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a”, the “es” and “as” are the sixteenth note offbeats. Accenting these can potentially create a very complex and interesting groove.

In theory, you could keep subdividing to get even weaker beats. Current hip-hop and dubstep songs use thirty-seconds, and even sixty-fourths. But these are exotic cases.

You can get even greater metrical dissonance when you divide up the bar by bigger prime numbers. Dividing in thirds (or sixths or twelfths) gives you various flavors of three-against-two polyrhythm. The effect isn’t so much rhythmic dissonance as it is a sense of multiple simultaneous meters. The harmonic analogy would be polytonality. Even greater metric ambiguity can be found when you subdivide by five, or higher primes still, but this is not common practice in Western music.

Syncopation is an objective quality, but metric dissonance is subjective. If you repeat a syncopated groove long enough, it starts sounding “consonant”–you come to expect those accented weak beats. In fact, once you’ve established your syncopated feel, you can create rhythmic dissonance by unexpectedly accenting strong beats instead. Ellington and Monk are particularly good at this. In rhythm as well as in harmony, dissonance is a function of context and expectation, like food spiciness. Instead of dissonance vs consonance, we’d do better to think in terms of predictable vs surprising.

Nicole Biamonte wrote a fascinating paper, Formal Functions of Metric Dissonance in Rock Music. In it, she describes two different kinds of metric dissonance. Displacement dissonance is a shift of the beginning of a rhythmic phrase a slot earlier or later than expected. Rock uses this technique in just about every song. There’s also grouping dissonance, where events are grouped together in unexpected ways that destabilizes your sense of the meter. The classic example of grouping dissonance is  hemiola, which is ubiquitous in both Afro-Cuban drumming and jazz.

Biamonte also has a useful term for devices like the backbeat, syncopations that are such a central part of the groove as to become completely expected.

Because it is an essential component of the meter, functioning as a timeline—a rhythmic ostinato around which the other parts are organized—I consider the backbeat in rock music to be an instance of displacement consonance rather than dissonance…

[T]he backbeat is contextually consonant because it is a basic rhythmic unit that typically continues throughout the song, with no expectation of a resolution to a consonant pattern. A pitch-based analogy is the consonant status of the dominant 7th chord in the context of the blues: it is the basic harmonic unit, which does not resolve. Just as the tension of the dominant function in blues is often expressed through alterations or extensions of a dominant 7th chord such as raised or lowered chord fifths or ninths, temporal dissonance in rock music is typically expressed by patterns that create tensions against the underlying backbeat.

See all these concepts in action in my collection of interesting beats.

Finally, we can’t talk about African-descended musical practices in American music without touching on some racial politics. In August of 1921, Ladies Home Journal published an essay, “Does Jazz Put The ‘Sin’ In Syncopation?” Spoiler alert: yes, it does.

The human organism responds to musical vibrations. This fact is universally recognized. What instincts then are aroused by jazz? Certainly not deeds of valor or martial courage, for all marches and patriotic hymns are of regular rhythm and simple harmony; decidedly not contentment or serenity, for the songs of home and the love of native land are all of the simplest melody and harmony with noticeably regular rhythm. Jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad.

It’s easy to sneer at this, and we should. But we should also ask ourselves how much these sentiments are still present in our musical culture. We’ve embraced syncopation-heavy grooves in the pop charts and everywhere else, but do we respect them the way we respect the complexities of European harmony? Not as much as we should.

2 thoughts on “Syncopation

  1. As always, a very informative and interesting post. Your blog is a treasure. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

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