Diverse musical practices constitute Basque music. Most melodies collected in the nineteenth century—when the study of Basque music began—were tonal, with the majority in a major key, but about twenty-five percent were modal. The most popular dance-song type, zortziko ‘made of eights
’, whose name refers to the eight steps of the dances it accompanies, has a meter consisting of two different asymmetric patterns—a duple one (2 + 3)/8 and a triple one (2 + 3 + 3)/8—whose combination creates an even...
