Timeline Spaces

Timeline Spaces explores the interwoven contexts of a range of African and Afrodiasporic musical practices, which the author refers to as timeline musics. These musical practices are tied together by several shared characteristics. Most prominent among these are timelines: repeated asymmetrical gestures that musicians, dancers, and listeners use to orient themselves within often dense and ever-changing soundscapes and which have a legislative function within their musical contexts, suggesting different kinds of improvisational affordances. It situates timelines amongst a range of ongoing musical strata, all of which mutually inflect, support, and otherwise co-constitute one another. In order to adequately understand the temporal and relational contexts of timeline spaces and the implications of how relational orientations and impingements unfold in them, Chris Stover engages a wide and deep range of African and Africana philosophical perspectives--theories of liminality and relationality, Africana phenomenology, tidalectical approaches, and more--often drawing these into communication with theories of musical process from Anglophone music theory in order both to form coalitional connections (to challenge what Stuart Hall calls "the West and the rest" narratives) and to address some conceptual limitations in the latter. Through close engagement with musical contexts from Brazil, Central African Republic, Cuba, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and elsewhere, Stover introduces a number of new music-theoretical concepts as well as new deployments of existing ones, including rethinking concepts like syncopation, call and response, microtiming, entrainment, and circularity.