End Accents in Other Cultures

Question

Disclaimer: It's difficult mixing terminology between Western and non-Western musics, but I'll try to make my question as clear as possible.

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Western Classical music most often has an accent at the start of a given metrical unit; we call it the downbeat. Although there may be an anacrusis, the metrical accent nevertheless typically aligns with the beginning of a barline. In contrast, the metric structure of Gamelan uses metrical accents to mark the ends of these metrical units.

As an oversimplified example, imagine a string of 16 sixteenth notes. In Western Classical music, a typical metric hierarchy would look something like

x
x                       x
x           x           x           x     
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16

where the number of "x"s indicate the strength of metrical accent.

In Gamelan music, however, a typical metric hierarchy looks more like

                                             x
                     x                       x
         x           x           x           x
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 11 12 13 14 15 16

(Note that throughout I'm talking about metrical accents that define the meter. I'm not talking about rhythmic or phenomenal accents like syncopations, etc.)

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The Question

What other cultures metrically accent the ends of units?

And a bonus question, if this even exists: are there cultures that metrically emphasize something other than the beginning or end?

Answer 1

Rock, pop, and rhythm and blues often emphasize the second and last beat. This emphasis also serves as a backdrop to funk (more below). Reggae has an even heavier emphasis on the same beats often accompanied with an offbeat emphasis.

Regarding the bonus question, jazz emphasizes the offbeat and in the jazz "subculture" the band leader typically counts in by snapping the fingers of one hand on the offbeat. In contrast, funk emphasizes the first beat together with "in the pocket" usually expressed as a few select notes from a shuffle pattern while leaving out (some) dotted notes. It might be a stretch to say that these examples belong to a specific culture, but all these genres are ultimately of African-American origin.

What these examples have in common is often multiple layers of emphases from different instruments. In this regard, these modern genres are rather polyrhytmic than homorhythmic. In postclassical contemporary art music, polyrhytms take this concept to the extreme. They are most common in minimalistic (or more specifically "postminimalistic") works, which originated mainly in New York during the 1960s.