Porteurs de pays à l’air libre : jeu et enjeux des pièces asymétriques dans la musique traditionnelle du Québec
There are numerous examples of asymmetrical tunes in Québécois traditional music repertoire. Familiarly called “tounes croches” (crooked tunes) by musicians, those melodies do not respect the dominant square model consisting of 16 or 32 beats per section of a tune. Without being exclusive to the Quebec tradition, the performance of crooked tunes raises several ethnomusicological questions. The main objectives of this research were to study the musical “dialect” found in asymmetrical tunes, and to look at various issues concerning the performance of asymmetrical tunes by contemporary Québécois traditional musicians. After a chapter that presents an overview of the history, repertoire, playing styles, and performance contexts of Québécois traditional music, asymmetrical tunes are analyzed as a musical object. The comparison of square and asymmetrical versions of tunes, taken mainly from the historical recordings available on the Virtual Gramophone, yields a typology that considers three main categories of asymmetries: syntactical; morphological; and pulsative. Syntactical asymmetries include about twenty different types, all involving a lengthening or a shortening at various positions of a section. Asymmetries at the end of a section are the most common. Morphological asymmetries concern the macrostructure of tunes such as the playing order of sections or the number of their repeats. Asymmetrical tunes in the repertoire of other musical traditions from Europe and North America are also analyzed. This allows us to confirm the existence of a coherent asymmetrical musical system that is partly distinct in the case of the Québécois tradition. Origin, identity, aesthetic, and performing issues are next studied based on the results of a survey done among 18 traditional musicians. Those surveyed explain the origin of asymmetrical tunes by cognitive, choreographic, and artistic reasons. Their discourse indicates that the performance of asymmetrical tunes touches several dimensions of their identity such as national, regional, generational, contextual and individual. An aesthetic choice, a desire for freedom in creation, a link to the past, and a need of distinction from a standardized traditional music repertoire motivate contemporary Québécois traditional musicians to perpetuate and to enrich the repertoire of asymmetrical tunes.
Tounes croches Traditional music Quebec Repertoire Asymmetry Identity Aesthetic Origin Crooked tunes