The Basic Clapping Patterns of Capoeira
In a recent phase of my life, I began to learn to play piano, read sheet music, understand music theory, and learn jazz piano improvisation. Just before this, I had been deeply immersed (while in graduate school) in learning about mathematical logic and number theory. Often, these two worlds never intersect, and the more I have learned about each, the more I became baffled as to why this was the case, given how much they overlap (number theory in particular). I have written about this before.
Shortly afterward, I started learning Capoeira, which (as most people who don’t know much about it are often surprised to learn) has a very prominent component of vocal and percussive music performance technique. Then, this year, I started learning and regularly training Batucada, an Afro-Brazillian percussive substyle of samba.
Jazz music is often taught with an emphasis on performance, music theory, and creative expression (improvisation). This approach often contrasts how classical piano is taught, where the focus is more on technical proficiency and the precise playing of the written music. Capoeira (from my brief but continuous two and a half years of doing it) is often learned with a heavy emphasis on vocal and instrumental performance technique but very little on formal music.
All three are a musical education process, but the approach and what is emphasized in each is very different. I have found many benefits to this contrast, mostly from my experience that learning processes that are non-overlapping in their areas of emphasis but common in the overall topic help me acquire a deeper understanding of the topic. Everyone learns differently, but this has been my experience.
However, there are downsides to this as well. As it relates to the Capoera musical education process, it suffers from not incorporating the basics of music that are common even to Jazz and classical piano education. Also, the way music is generally taught can benefit from leveraging how much of it is mathematical, despite how much it may seem like maths and music are from different universes.
So, where am I going with all this? I hope to write more later on the intersection of these topics. However, for today, I just wanted to try to explain the clapping rhythms of Palma de dois (“two clap”), Palma de Bimba (“Bimba’s clap”), and Palma de terreiro and how they line up with the Atabaque rhythm with the right amount of musical formality (a very tiny amount) and some mathematical concepts that I think might help with the conceptual difficulty I often notice during conversations about these rhythms and what beats they fall on.
In explaining Capoeira rhythms, what you label the first beat is not important. What do I mean by this?
Consider the standard face of a clock:
A clock is actually a system of modular arithmetics, a system where numbers wrap around after reaching a particular value. In this case, the value that causes us to wrap around is 12, which takes us back to 0, and then to 1, etc.
However, if we instead start at two and wrap around at 14, the operations of adding or subtracting an hour are still the same, but they end up at different numbers. You can conceptually think of them as the same clock with different labels at each point.
For this reason, being very particular about which is really the first beat in Capoeira is not constructive and only confuses things. You can start with a convention and stick with it. The numerical labels you give to the beats in non-percussive instrumental sheet music matter because the rhythm isn’t simply looped repeatedly. In Capoeira, the rhythmic pattern is mostly looped continuously except when you improvise (or add variations to the rhythm), but this is the exception. Also, the other instruments of the Capoeira roda have other patterns that emphasize notes on different parts of the repeated pattern, so what might make sense as the first beat for the atabaque might not make intuitive sense to be referred to as the first beat for the berembau and all of its many toques (rhythms).
So, if we want to place the basic atabaque rhythm (the one often taught to beginners and used during a Capoeira Angola roda) on a timeline and use the convention that the first regular tone (i.e., the sound made when we strike the edge of the drum head with our fingers held together) after the longer period where the drum is not played is the first beat, we have:
I have included the first beat at the end to visually capture the fact that this is a repeating pattern that returns to the beginning after the 4th beat in this particular arithmetic system. Thinking of the Capoeira rhythm as the continual repetition of four beats is natural as this is the rhythmic form of the most common musical time signature in (western) music: 4/4 time. I stress Western music because although that is only one form of music and Capoeira is from the family of music with sub-Saharan African roots with a very different rhythmic foundation, we are mostly educated in the Western conceptualization of music. But this is a complicated topic for another day.
We can add the standard Capoeira Atabaque rhythm to this:
Now, with this as a visual framework, we can overlay the Palma de dois and Palma de Bimba clapping rhythms on top of this, as these are simpler to visualize and understand:
These are straightforward because the claps occur exactly on the beats. The Palma de Bimba claps occur on the first three beats, and the Palma de dois claps occur on the first two beats.
You will notice that I have also added subdivisions between the beats labeled with numbers (the main beats). They aren’t important for these two rhythms since their claps occur on the main beats. However, they will be important for the slightly more difficult Palma de terreiro rhythm.
A common technique when teaching music is to have a student clap where notes should be played while counting the main beats (“one, two, three, four, one , two, [..]”). When notes have a short duration that only lasts as long as a subdivision (an eighth note, for example), they count with an ‘and’ in-between the main beats (“one, and, two, and, three, and, four, and, one, and, [..]”) to help the student know where to place these notes and how long they last.
Finally, we can add the Palma de terreiro rhythm.
The main thing to notice is that the second clap does not fall precisely on the third beat but occurs on the subdivision between the second and third beat. For this rhythm, it often helps to count the beats and their subdivisions (“one, and, two, and, three, and, four, and, one, and, [..]”) to help with the timing of the second clap.
This offset from the main beat is what is meant when this clapping rhythm is referred to as a syncopated rhythm.
The Merriam-Webster definition of syncopation is:
a temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent in music caused typically by stressing the weak beat
It causes the same rhythmic tension that is in swing rhythm, where the “pulse is divided unequally.” It also causes the same rhythmic tension in the huge family of African-inspired Latin American rhythms built on the danceable clave rhythmic pattern (Salsa, Samba, Rumba, etc.). So, it is not surprising that this conceptually more difficult rhythmic pattern, like swing music,
prompts a visceral response such as foot-tapping or head-nodding.
For a good video on these patterns, see: https://youtu.be/egMiiRIIyY4 (Palma de Bimba vs Palma de Terreiro)
Later, I plan to discuss how the Berembau toques (which determine which clapping rhythm should be used in a Capoeira roda) relate to this system. I would also like to explain the clave rhythmic pattern and its universality within Latin and sub-Saharan African rhythms. This universality is a powerful echo of the cultural migration and evolution the African slaves brought to the American continents and reflects how strong the connection to the music of their origin is.