This paper contends with the incommensurable quality of global knowledge as revealed in the
metric device—banyan 板眼. Metric ideas from different times and spaces and of seemingly opposing
functions become blurred in this singular concept, resembling the palimpsestic surface of a “modern,
multiply mediated musical moment” (Daughtry 2019, 14). To illustrate, I discuss my interviews with
Zhuang Buchao and Huang Jianming, two lead Taiwanese opera percussionists who belong to the same
pedagogical institution and yet intuit different meanings in banyan. For one musician, banyan expresses a
poetically oriented metric system that supports the prosodic, fluctuating arrangement of accents and beat
groups—a metric interpretation that traces back to the Tang dynasty. For the other, banyan signifies a
predictable, periodic alternation between strong and weak beats—an association that emerged during the
twentieth-century influx of Western metric concepts into Sinophone musical curricula. It is thus
exceedingly difficult to arrive at a definition of banyan that aptly reconciles the range of its uses among
contemporary musicians.
In an effort to grapple with banyan’s unwieldy ontology, I turn to Jessica Bissett Perea’s provocation
that we resist being “overly preoccupied with the limitations of containment and measurement” (2021, 16-
7) and endeavor to practice what Stephanie Nohelani Teves calls an “acceptance of incommensurability”
(2018, 18). I make the case that it is not only futile, but counterproductive to reconcile the density of
banyan’s competing meanings and representations, for it is precisely its sustenance of multiple metric
priorities that enables its users to pivot with ease between the local and global discourses that together form
the contemporary Sinitic musicscape. I conclude by reframing banyan’s simultaneously poetic and periodic

commitments as an invitation to rethink how scholars might critically engage meter (and other music-
theoretical concepts) given their cosmopolitan, irreducibly plural constitution.