Cakewalk - Cakewalk As A Musical Form

Cakewalk As A Musical Form

Most cakewalk music is notated in 2/4 time signature with two alternate heavy beats per bar, giving it an ooompah rhythm. The music was adopted into the works of various white composers, including Robert Russell Bennett, John Philip Sousa, and Claude Debussy. Debussy wrote "Golliwogg's Cake-walk" as the final movement of his Children's Corner suite (1908). The Cake Walk was an adapted and amended two-step, which had been spawned by the popularity of marches, most notably by John Philip Sousa.

Cakewalk music incorporated polyrhythm, syncopation, and the habanera rhythm into the regular march rhythm. Schuller considers the syncopation of the habanera rhythm to be "an idiomatic corruption, a flattened-out mutation of what was once the true polyrhythmic character of African music". However, the figure known as the habanera is one of the most basic duple-pulse rhythmic cells in sub-Saharan African music traditions. The "habanera rhythm" is found in the oldest known traditional music of the Ewe of Ghana, Togo, and Dahomey, to name just one ethnic group. It is heard in traditional drumming music, from Mali to Mozambique, and from Senegal to South Africa. The rhythmic figure is also prominent in popular African dance genres such as afrobeat, highlife, and soukous. Although its duple-pulse structure is identical to common time in European-based meter, the pattern of attack-points of the habanera rhythm possess a true African polyrhythmic character, or more precisely, a cross-rhythmic character.