Efrain Toro

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Efrain Toro is a Puerto Rican percussionist and music educator. He has written numerous books on rhythm.

His main argument is that the Western form of musical notation of rhythm is a misunderstanding of the nature of music; he believes that western music's use of fixed spaces between notes does not allow for the true perception of music as frequency. Toro states that rhythm is a natural element of the universe that is a priori, existing in the very first moments of the birth of the universe, and manifesting as pulses that we hear as beats up to frequencies that we perceive as light and beyond. He posits that the overtone scale is the blue print for the natural order of rhythmic progression: the first beat being the tonic, followed by the upbeat which is the octave, followed by a triplet which is the fifth, and so on until all rhythmic equivalents of the harmonic progression are included in that order. Cultural style of groove is thus based on the way that these relationships are perceived.

Efrain believes that the first perceivable rhythmic pattern is 2 pulses against three and that 2 naturally flows from 3 and not the other way around; hence all rhythms are either waltzes or polkas. One of his main points is that drums have been absent in European culture, notably the church, for many centuries, and that the military is the only institutional place for drums in the West. The legacy of the military's "fixed space approach" to music is prevalent in the West today, he states, and current Western popular music is the inheritor of this tradition.