amantes (lovers), 2020 -
In 2020, I make a video with two horses – one older and slower, the other younger and fitter. The video records our shared responses to the Afro-Cuban son clave: a highly specific rhythmic pattern that is ostensibly not from my cultural background nor that of the horses. This practice begins during the first Covid-19 lockdown when, starved of bodily company, I play Tito Puente’s Take Five through my headphones when I am working and moving around the horses. Although they can’t hear the music, the horses seem relaxed with the rhythm my body is responding to. They stand still as I move close to their chests, around their hindquarters and under their bellies.
I order a pair of clave sticks and beat a 4/5 time signature as I walk down the lane to the barn where the horses doze in the unseasonably hot weather. Long, clear sounds emanate from the claves as I learn to strike their hollow cavities more sweetly. They reverberate around the tree branches overhanging the lane and ring out over the river as I cross the bridge. When I arrive, the horses are animated, ears pricked, up on their toes. Their body language tells me they want to go out, to move. We walk up the lane. I try to encourage them to go before me so that I can hold the claves and film at the same time but they stand still and wait for me. We move on together. Normally the younger one pulls forwards and the older one lags behind, stretching my arms tautly between the two lead ropes. This time the rhythm seems to hold us together: the older one is vitalised; the younger one keeps step. When we reach the end of the lane and the horses go off to graze, I realise that I have managed to hold my recording phone, the two horses’ lead ropes, and the beating claves without issue or anxiety, and with complete focus on the rhythm.
I wonder if the horses’ positive reactions to the son clave are predicated upon their innate responses to a rhythmic pattern that closely correlates to the sound envelopes of their own hoof beats. For four legged animals, perhaps the 5/4 time signature has the effect of stressing the energetic renewal of each 4 beat cycle, rather than a monotonous plodding drone of undifferentiated footfalls. Or does their affinity to the beaten time signature also depend upon their pre-existing bond to each other and to me - with whom they share a daily habitual culture and high levels of familiarity and trust? In 2021, I continue to film in response to these questions when I introduce the claves to a fearful horse who is wary of humans.
In describing the autopoiesis of self-referring living systems, which respond either positively or negatively to outside stimulus or perturbation, Humberto Maturana stresses the importance of attraction or amans (love) to spontaneous coherence - or structural coupling - between organisms and their niches.(1) If rhythmic attraction can be described as amans, we are amantes: lovers of rhythm.
I intuitively mash up Tito Puente’s Latin jazz version of Dave Brubeck’s (1959) jazz classic, Take Five, with a BBC Cymru archive film, Tradition of the Mari Lwyd (1966), and I am obscurely gratified when the Welsh singing and the Latin rhythms synch. In the Mari Lwyd folk ritual, a party of men lead a hooded man with a horse skull mask around the neighbourhood to sing improvised rhyming battles with householders. I know that my great-grandfather practiced this custom keenly. In the 1966 archive film, the men lead the Mari Lwyd with the practiced body language of those who work with horses. I imagine that my grandfather, a renowned horseman, encountered these men at sheep sales down the valley.
In a 2009 YouTube interview, Dave Brubeck describes how his upbringing on a cattle ranch in California led to the ‘game-changing’ 5/4 time signature of Take Five: “We started talking about Take Five with a horse. It’s one, two and three, and four, five … If you’re on a 45,000 acre ranch and you’re sent to pump water someplace, you ride miles before you get to the engine and the water tank … Instead of just being bored, I would listen to all the different rhythms around me. The gasoline motor was one source, the horse was definitely a source, cause you put another rhythm against the horse’s beat – gait - against the gait of the horse.” In the sleeve notes to the Brubeck Quartet’s album, Time Outtakes (2020), however, his son, Dan Brubeck, also notes that drummer, Joe Morello, used to ‘play around with 5/4 rhythms’ at soundchecks. Furthermore, the five beat rhythm that sounded so radical to late 1950s jazz audiences corresponds to the typical Afro-Cuban son clave of West African origin. Musing on jazz in relation to his African-American heritage, Ralph Ellison (1955) recalls the ‘ecstasy of rhythm’ of his Oklahoma youth: ‘when water-melon men with voices like mellow bugles shouted their wares in time with the rhythm of their horses’ hoofs.’(2)
The polyrhythmic nature of ecological systems is described by ecologists T. F. H. Allen and Thomas B. Starr, drawing on the work of Arthur Koestler.(3) Each point of two-way information between an organism and its environment (holon) has a rhythm, a natural frequency or cycle time, which is the time taken for equilibrium to be restored following energetic input. Rhythms exist in a hierarchy of scale, with longer cycle times oscillating more slowly: a rock for example, a forest, or a river, as opposed to a tiny insect, a biological cell or even a human life cycle. In ecological systems this means that the faster cycling time of an organism might play polyrhythmically against the slower cycling time of its niche. Similarly, if the video, Amantes (Lovers), is played in a loop against the longer YouTube playlist, Amantes (Lovers), then the faster cycling video will play polyrhythmically against different sections of the slower cycling playlist.
(1) H. R. Maturana, S. R. Munoz, X. D. Yanez, Cultural Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our Evolutionary Natural Drift as Autopoietic Systems, Foundations of Science, 21(4), 2015.
(2) Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s jazz writings, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, New York, Random House, 2001: 5-6, 9, 13.
(3) T. F. H. Allen and Thomas B. Starr, Hierarchy: Perspectives for Ecological Complexity, Second Edition, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1982, 2017: 46-7, 99.
Extracts adapted from my visual essay, Amantes (Lovers): Investigating autonomy, autopoiesis, and polyrhythm with horses, published in Research in Arts Education Vol. 2023 No. 1 (2023): Thematic Issue on Animals, Plants, Bryophytes, Lichen, and Fungi in Contemporary Art and Research Vol. 2