Efrain Toro

Efraín Toro ( ) is a Puerto Rican percussionist and percussion teacher at the Musicians' Institute Los Angeles. He has written numerous books on rhythm.

Performance and Recordings

He has performed and recorded with many artists including Crosby Stills and Nash and Emil Richards[1] And arranged music for Alex Acuna on Los Hijos del Sol.[2]

Teaching philosophy

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.

Books

References

  1. ↑ Modern drummer: MD. 2002- Volume 26, Issues 1-6 - Page 29 "There Goes The Neighborhood Emil Richards has a new album out called luniana Afro Cuban Jazz with Joe Porcaro on drums and a bunch of wonderful percussionists including Francisco Aquabella, Luis Conte, land Efrain Toro "
  2. ↑ Heidi Carolyn Feldman Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the ... -- 2006 - Page 255 "The recording featured a range of Peruvian styles of music (Andean, criollo, Afro) and popular tunes, arranged by a Puerto Rican musician and close friend of Alex's, percussionist Efrain Toro."

External links

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