Timing and Meter in Mande Drumming from Mali

This paper focuses on two pieces, “Ngòn Fariman” and “Bire,” representatives of two ethnically and regionally specific styles of Mande dance music from Mali, Bambara and Khasonka drumming. After introducing their performance contexts, instrumentation, and the basic roles of each part in their respective ensembles (i.e., the core metrical accompaniment, the piece-determining “hook,” and the improvising and regulative lead drum), timing data from several performances of each piece are analyzed, providing evidence of discrete categories of beat subdivision (Long vs. Short) as well as evidence of expressive variations within each category. The effects of a large-scale structural acceleration, characteristic of Malian drumming, and the presence of performer-specific microtiming patterns are also assessed. The implications of subdivision timing in Mande drumming for more general theories of metric well formedness are discussed, and we argue that such theories require a broader sense of (a) how non-isochrony may be integrated into a metrical framework, and (b) how metric theories need to reflect level-specific aspects of well-formedness. We also posit that the timing of beat subdivisions in Mande drumming have analogs in other music, most notably the “swing ratio” in jazz.