AKSAK

( (Turkish: limping), ) also called Bulgarian Rhythm, variety of musical metre characterized by combinations of unequal units of beats, such as 2 plus 3 or 3 plus 2 and their extensions. Thus 3 + 3 + 2, or 2 + 3 + 3, produces 8/8 units quite unlike the 4/4 common to Western music. As non-Western music, as well as eastern European folk music, began to exert influence in the West, aksak rhythms found their way into the works of a number of 20th-century composers of Western art music, Bela Bartk and Igor Stravinsky foremost among them. The word aksak was borrowed from Turkish musical theory to replace the phrase Bulgarian rhythms that had been applied earlier to such rhythms by Bartk and by the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brailoiu.