African music, on the other hand, has less emphasis on harmony and much greater emphasis on beat. African music is propelled forward by the very complex rhythmic structure of the music itself. No matter what instruments are played, the rhythmic drive is still there. This was carried into America during slavery. While African slaves in America learned less and less of the old African songs and more and more of the white man's folk and dance music, they synthesized a new musical form. While African music is polyrhythmic—that is, having several beats in different time signatures playing simultaneously—this could not be fit into a European framework. So these African-Americans began to syncopate European structures to achieve a pseudo-polyrhythmic beat that gives the listener a jumpy feel. We call this distinctive syncopation that drives the music with its own internal rhythm as "swing". Ragtime and its descendant, jazz, were born. Both are swing and so is bluegrass—originally an African-American musical form and which has an amazing rhythmic drive despite a complete absence of a single percussion instrument in most bluegrass ensembles. African-American gospel harmonies are also unique. Clearly not from Africa and clearly from the European tradition, African-American choral harmonies are also completely unlike anything found in Europe. The harmonies are truly and distinctly African-American.

The music of the Far East has a whole different take on beat. Japanese music is about 90% drum music. Even today, Japanese bands such as Kodo (whose name means "Heartbeat" incidentally) rely mostly upon drums to convey meaning. In music that did not require drums or percussion, beat crept in in another way. In earlier posts, I spoke of the Pythagorean comma that forced musicians to adopt tuning systems and strategies that would give us the purest major 3rds or the purest 5ths without causing other intervals to develop "beats". When two notes not in harmony but close are played simultaneously, they resonate off one another producing a beat in the attempted harmony. This has also been a no-no in the West but the Japanese, for example, make use of it.

Matsuda Michihiro is a Japanese-born luthier (guitar-maker) now living in the U.S. Japanese music, says Matsuda, often utilizes uneri. Uneri or "wave" are the same beats that Europeans have so long complained of in their attempt to construct a harmonically perfect octave. Matsuda writes:

"Uneri is the dynamic of growth and diminution of sound that follows when two notes are at slightly different pitches, and this tonal effect is desirable in traditional Japanese bells. Even in Japanese traditional vocal music, some singers intentionally shift their pitch to produce an effect that to a Western listener would sound off-key. While in Western music the presence of beats usually denotes a musical problem, in Eastern music it signifies a solution. In the East, dissonance is considered a form of harmony and is part of the music." (Acoustic Guitar, August 2004, Vol. 15, #3, Issue 140, p. 28)

At the risk of oversimplifying, among the European and Euro-American peoples, beat is something external to us that we all dance to. To the African peoples, beat is something built into us and that is why we dance to it. There is a similar mode of thought among the American Indians. To the Asian peoples, beat is something that exists in anything and is the hidden, underlying dance of existence. We don't dance to the beat, we are the dance and the beat.