On February 19th, 2018, our HIST 390 class discussed the strange story behind American music and the different perceptions of music worldwide. Basically speaking, American music distinguishes itself due to the African influences, as once Africans became more integrated into American society and culture, their traditions and culture slowly started seeping into everyday Americans’. How music is structured and how we, as listeners, clap to the beat were the examples in which we talked about and focused on that day. To put it simply, Europeans have had a culture where they clap to music at the first and third beats (1 and 3) while Africans have had a history of clapping at the second and forth beats (2 and 4). Apparently, different people with different cultures grow up in cultures that clap to different beats. This is made more evident whenever a musician who has lived their entire lives clapping to one type of beat performs in another country that claps to a different one. While this cultural discrepancy can easily be fixed by quickly adding one extra beat into the song, thus meeting the audience’s mismatched rhythm and ensuring the sanity and consistency of the performers, the irritation of the musicians and singers will likely be evident by the small, but significant and annoying, problem. For example, a musician, whether he is black or white, coming from New Orleans, which is a city deep and proud of their African culture and heritage, may perform in a venue in Europe, Europe being a population known for being mostly white, and will immediately become bothered when the Europeans clap to a different beat that he or she is not particularly used to. This isn’t because white people are incapable of keeping a beat, it’s because they were born in a culture where they were taught to clap at different intervals than other countries and cultures do. Fortunately, when African culture mixed itself into European and Western culture, they were able to mix their cultural beliefs into Western music as well, and with the wide-spread influence Western music has on the rest of the world, the disconnect when it comes to clapping to a song’s beat may have become less common.
This is one of those things that you never realize, but once it is pointed out to you, can’t exactly stop yourself from noticing ever again. It’s a very subtle aspect of life that most people will never really know or question, but when you really think about it, has always been a part of our lives, no matter how much some will probably wish to deny it. I’ve taken piano lessons and took a class in choir back when I was in middle school, and all this time, I just thought that clapping our hands to the beat was simply how it was supposed to be done, that when someone clapped their hands to a different rhythm, they were simply doing it wrong and the more musically inclined or learned had to teach them how to do it correctly. Who could’ve possibly known that even the “right” beats could’ve easily been “wrong” once upon a time? How crazy would it be to take a time machine and go back in time simply to change the way people clapped? It would have a wide-spread effect, and unlike changing something like, say, the causation of World War II, the effects would be both widespread and subtle. I would probably grin ear-to-ear with a stupid smile on my face every time I would get someone in this new timeline to clap to the beat of the music and knowing that the way that they were clapping was the way I had changed it to be and no one would be the wiser. What a wonderfully petty, yet power-hungry way to use time traveling technology! I may actually consider doing this if the ability to travel through time ever actually became a thing.