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Peter Cheyne Andy Hamilton Max Paddison The Philosophy of Rhythm Aesthetics Music Poetics
Peter Cheyne Andy Hamilton Max Paddison The Philosophy of Rhythm Aesthetics Music Poetics
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List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
5. Dance Rhythm
Aili Bresnahan
23. Leaving It Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic
Tradition
Will Montgomery
Index
Illustrations
8.1. Sulzer’s Schlagfolge 127
8.2. Koch’s Schlagreihe 128
8.3. Koch’s Schlagreihe with resting points (Ruhepuncten) 129
8.4. Model of the drift from rhythm to punctuation 129
8.5. Koch’s schema of a sonata-form exposition 133
8.6. Mozart, String Quartet in C major, K. 465, “Dissonance,” bars 23–6
135
8.7. Mozart, bars 67–97 136
8.8. Introduction, bars 1–4 137
9.1. Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean,” cabasa, drums, bass guitar, and
synthesizer, timing c.00:20–00:24 144
9.2. The double backbeat 146
11.1 Kanizsa triangle, organized array (left panel); disorganized array
(right panel) 172
11.2. Beat interpolation in the opening theme of Brahms’ Symphony No.
4 in E-minor, Op. 98 177
11.3. A “metrically malleable” melody notated in (a) 4/4, and (b) 9/8,
showing alternate listening construals 178
11.4. The “Standard Pattern” (or “Bell Pattern”) timeline found in many
styles and genres of African music. Upper system: construed as a
three- (or six-) beat pattern. Bottom system: construed as a four-beat
pattern 178
15.1. Keats, “Hymn to Pan,” first stanza (from Endymion, Book 1, lines
232–46), annotated. 236
15.2. The two sides of “projection” 242
15.3. One version, among many, of the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”
as an illustration of the determinacy of tetrameter (and also as an
example of the pattern long-long-short-short-long) 244
15.4. The first line said as strict iambic pentameter (five isochronous
beats each of the form “weak-strong”) in obvious violation of the
line’s complexity 245
15.5. The first line said as five more or less isochronous beats, but now
allowing for complexities of “weak” and “strong” 246
15.6. The first line said as five “flexibly isochronous” beats whose
flexibility or variability is determined (or “controlled”) by higher
levels of complexity 246
15.7. Beat-to-beat projections in which each new event is focally aware
simply of its immediate predecessor 249
15.8. A representation of projective complexity showing the resistance of
a five-beat line to the determinacies of four, or rather two, beats
(Attridge’s “doubling”). NB: this diagram is not meant to represent
the complexity of most “pentameter” lines where a reduction to two
is not an issue. (Indeed, in some “pentameter” nine- or ten-syllable
lines there are four beats, but these situations are hardly “square.”)
250
18.1. Husserl’s structure of time-consciousness 297
19.1. Sonia Delaunay, Rythme coleur n° 1076 (1939). Centre national des
arts plastiques. © Pracusa S.A./Cnap/Photograph: Yves Chenot 310
19.2. Dactyl illustration (Creative Commons) 313
19.3. Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1515–16), bodycolour
over charcoal underdrawing, mounted on canvas, 320 x 390cm,
Victoria and Albert Museum. © The Royal Collection, HM The
Queen/Victoria and Albert Museum, London 314
19.4. Nicholas Dorigny, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1719),
etching and engraving on paper, 51 x 65cm, Victoria and Albert
Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 316
19.5. Joseph-Marie Vien, St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (1767), oil on
canvas, 660 x 393cm, Église Saint-Roche, Paris. © The Art Archive
322
19.6. Ten percent of all saccades of forty viewers (twenty art experts and
twenty non-experts) beholding Vien’s painting for two minutes each.
Adapted version © Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art
History, University of Vienna 323
19.7. Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation
clusters for Vien’s St. Denis Preaching in Gaul (average of forty
viewers, twenty art experts and twenty non-experts, whilst viewing
for two minutes each). Adapted version © Laboratory for Cognitive
Research in Art History, University of Vienna 324
19.8. Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation
clusters for Doyen’s The Miracle of St. Anthony’s Fire (average of
forty viewers, twenty art experts and twenty non-experts, whilst
viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version © Laboratory for
Cognitive Research in Art History, University of Vienna 325
21.1. Opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose in
David Charles Bell and Alexander Melville Bell’s Standard
Elocutionist (London, 1878), 426 352
21.2. Graphic record of various rhythmical sounds, from Edward Wheeler
Scripture, Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902),
509 356
Abbreviations
bpm beats-per-minute
EDM electronic dance music
fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging
HKB Haken–Kelso–Bunz [equation]
OED Oxford English Dictionary
Notes on Contributors
1. Historical Considerations
3. Outline of Chapters
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays (New York, 2012).
Aristides Quintilianus, On Music (c.350?), tr. R. P. Winnington-Ingram, in Greek Musical Writings II:
Harmonic and Acoustic Theory, ed. Andrew Barker (Cambridge, 1989).
Aristotle, Poetics (c.335 bc), tr. Malcolm Heath (London, 1996).
Bachelard, Gaston, The Dialectic of Duration, tr. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester, 2000).
Clayton, Martin, Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre and Form in North Indian Rag Performance
(Oxford, 2000).
Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, 1960).
Hasty, Christopher, Meter as Rhythm (Oxford, 1997).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols (1889), tr. Richard Polt (Indianapolis, 1997).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883–92), tr. and ed. Adrian
del Caro, co-ed. Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge, 2006).
Miller, Elaine P., “Harnessing Dionysus: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint,” Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, 17 (1999), 1–32.
Plato, The Republic (c.380 bc), tr. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete Works, ed. John
M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997).
Plato, The Laws (c.360 bc), tr. Trevor J. Saunders, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, 1997).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Rhythm” (1765), The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative
Translation Project, tr. Valerie Porcello (Ann Arbor, 2005):
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.491.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Dictionnaire de la musique (Paris, 1768).
Schelling, F. J. W., Philosophy of Art (1802–3; published 1859), tr. and ed. Douglas W. Stott
(Minneapolis, 1989).
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Presentation, tr. and ed. Richard E. Aquila (London, 2008).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
Spitzer, Michael, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago, 2004).
Zuckerkandl, Victor, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, tr. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, 1956).
1
Plato, Republic, Bk 3, 397a–401a; Laws, Bk 7, 798d–802e; Laws, Bk 2, 665a.
2
Aristotle, Poetics, 3–4.
3
Aristides, On Music, Bk 1, Ch. 13.
4
Rousseau, Dictionnaire.
5
Rousseau, “Rhythme.”
6
Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 17.
7
Schelling, Philosophy of Art, 110–11.
8
Elaine P. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysus.”
9
Schopenhauer, Will and Presentation, 306.
10
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 10 (“Epigrams and Arrows” §33).
11
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 29.
12
Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 124.
13
Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music.
14
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm.
15
Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 69, further discussed at 243–59.
16
Clayton, Time in Indian Music.
17
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 14.
18
Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292.
19
Aristotle, Poetics, 34.
PART I
MOVEMENT AND STASIS
1
Dialogue on Rhythm
Entrainment and the Dynamic Thesis
Andy Hamilton, David Macarthur, Roger Squires, Matthew Tugby, and Rachael
Wiseman (compiled and edited by Andy Hamilton)
Dramatis Personae
Summary
SKEPTICUS: Good morning, Dynamicus! I hope you are enjoying the fine
weather today. What brings you to Palace Green so early this spring
morning? Though surely there is no pleasanter time of day, or more
delightful season of the year.
DYNAMICUS: In fact, my thoughts were taken up with the philosophical
problem we discussed recently, and I found it hard to sleep. I decided to
take some early morning exercise—perhaps its rhythmic nature
prompted further ideas.
SKEP: Yes, these issues are absorbing. I find myself in sympathy with your
philosophical humanist approach, that treats music both as a sounding,
vibrating phenomenon, of changing patterns of intentionally produced
sound in time, and a performing art or entertainment. Like you, I want
to reject both an abstract, Platonic conception, and also the sub-personal
standpoint of neuro-philosophy. I want to insist, with you, that rhythm is
essentially a felt person-level phenomenon.
DY: Yes, a humanistic approach has important implications for the
understanding of rhythm. So you agree with my view that rhythm is
intentional, while creatures or artifacts that do not have or express
intentions can produce only proto-rhythms?
SKEP: Not entirely, Dynamicus. My view is that while a rhythm might be
experienced as if it were intentional and meaningful, it may, in fact, be
either non-intentional or intentional, meaningful or meaningless.
Musical rhythm is intentional and apparently meaningful. But it seems
obvious to me that there are non-intentional meaningless rhythms, such
as a train running on a track, a heartbeat, or the drip of a leaky tap. We
might call these natural rhythms and distinguish them from human
rhythms like music and dance, without denying that making rhythms is
natural to us.But let me turn to your argument that in the case of music
or poetry, rhythm is imparted by performers, and “imaginatively
projected” by listeners.5 Music, poetry, dance and human bodily
movement are paradigms of rhythm, you say, understood as the
“imposition of accents on sequences of sounds or movements, creating
non-periodic phenomena usually within a periodic repetitive (metrical)
framework.”6 And you stress that rhythm is humanly-produced—a
genetic claim about a sound’s causal origins that, I take it, may not be
evident to a listener.
DY: I would qualify what you are saying, Skepticus. I am not claiming that
all rhythms are humanly-produced. A drum machine produces rhythms,
and these are only indirectly humanly-produced—if they’re sampled, or
given that the machine itself is humanly-produced. I meant rather that
human producers of rhythm, and the human practices of music, poetry,
and dance in which rhythm is embedded, draw on and incorporate
natural sounds, and later mechanical and electronic sounds—often
regarding these sounds as in themselves proto-rhythmic, or rhythmic.
SKEP: I see. However, I take your more fundamental point to be that rhythm,
in its primary manifestations, is an intentional phenomenon. And as you
say, the rhythms associated with music, dance, and poetry constitute “an
intentional order.”7 An immediate emendation is to limit the realm of
rhythm to intentional bodily movement rather than bodily movement in
general.
DY: That might be acceptable, Skepticus.
SKEP: Let us say that, on your view, rhythm is primarily an intentional
phenomenon, whose expression we can and often do perceive in various
human activities. It is thus an aspect of the human world—a claim that
seems to fit well with your humanist inclinations. Rhythms produced by
inanimate things, such as a dripping tap, you call “proto-rhythms” and
treat them as secondary phenomena.
DY: Yes, that is my view.
SKEP: Now, turning to the question of projection, you seem to want to
distinguish perceiving intentional or “true” rhythm, from projecting
“proto-rhythm,” the latter being a phenomenon of natural or non-
intentional orders of stressed and unstressed accents in time, such as a
heartbeat, waves on the shore, or a horse’s gallop. Indeed sometimes
you speak of rhythms themselves as both being perceived and projected.
DY: “Pulse” would be an alternative term, to capture what you are calling
“stressed and unstressed accents.”
SKEP: But what we must remember is that the data for philosophizing here
involve a range of experiences of rhythm in both human and natural
phenomena. So I do not find the distinction between rhythm and proto-
rhythm helpful. Perhaps it has this to be said for it: the intentional case
structures both non-intentional and intentional rhythm at the level of
phenomenology. Rhythm, however it is produced, can often seem
intentional and meaningful, even where it is not. But for present
purposes, let us follow your restricting the term “rhythm” to human-
produced phenomena. We can therefore ask, is “projection” needed to
explain our experience of rhythm?
DY: You believe it is not?
SKEP: Indeed. Your account appeals to projection principally to explain how
we hear rhythm in “proto-rhythmic” phenomena—heartbeats, waves,
trains. You argued that in these non-intentional, naturally recurring
patterns of stressed and unstressed sound, we cannot avoid projecting
rhythm—as I recall, citing La Monte Young’s composition “ ‘X’ for
Henry Flint” (1960), where the performer has the impossible task of
producing an absolutely uninflected pulse without meter. You said that
this piece shows both how the performer cannot help creating rhythm,
and how the listener cannot avoid projecting it.
DY: Yes, that is a good summary.
SKEP: Well, there is a problem I believe, with the idea that rhythm is
“projected.” Projection presupposes a something that one projects onto.
This can happen literally: images are projected onto a screen from a
film-reel, or sounds are projected into a space from a source; or
figuratively: as when one’s joy is projected onto the world at large. In
the case of perceived rhythm—something experienced as a feature of
bodily movement or sound—projection implies one has access to some
subjective state of mind whose “projection” can plausibly account for
our experience of it as “in” the movement or sound. But what is this
inner something that we experience as outer?
DY: I am not sure there has to be an “inner” something—but pray continue.
SKEP: There does if the notion of projection is to make any sense. Perhaps
the idea is that rhythm is like color in this respect. Color is often thought
by philosophers to be a mental projection onto an essentially colorless
world. But I reject the coherence of this way of thinking. We have no
genuine explanation of color in projective terms insofar as we have no
coherent idea of how color could be a feature of the inner realm from
whence it is supposedly projected. The failure of projectivism here—
one rarely noticed in projectivist discussions of color in modern
philosophy—is attributable to our having no coherent definition of what
we might call, pleonastically, a “color sensation.”
DY: This is very interesting, my dear Skepticus. However, you seem to
assume that my view is like Schütz’s well-known position. He argues
that communication rests on a “mutual tuning-in relationship” in which
individuals come to share their experience of “inner time.”8 In his view,
rhythmic coordination is prior to any collective agreement. This is not
my view. The “inner” in “inner time” is redundant. I favor instead
Clayton’s view of rhythm emerging spontaneously in individuals and in
interactions between them, and so being both natural (physiological)
and social in origin.9 This is the currently popular concept of
entrainment, discussed by music psychologists in this volume, which I
think captures the idea that rhythm is essentially a felt phenomenon.10 I
differ from Clayton and colleagues, however, in insisting that
entrainment is an elucidation, not a scientific explanation.
SKEP: Pray enlighten us, Dynamicus.
DY: I agree with the psychologists that entrainment is essential to music,
and that one responds to rhythm by getting in sync. So rhythm is
essentially social. What I object to is their view that natural processes
themselves entrain. I also object to their apparent denial that a human
being can initiate rhythm, on the grounds—they say—that one always
entrains to something inner. Entrainment is no more fundamental than
rhythm itself.11
SKEP: Be that as it may, I still maintain that projection is an otiose
explanation of genuine rhythm and an unnecessary explanation of proto-
rhythm. Suppose, Dynamicus, we follow you and say that the primary
experience of rhythm is as intentional temporal movement—leaving
aside for now the question of what distinguishes mere temporal ordering
from rhythmic movement. On the view under discussion, rhythm is
constituted, not merely caused, by intentional stresses imposed on
sequences of sound. It is a genuine feature, a perceptible order or
pattern that characterizes a range of human bodily movements and
sounds—one that allows for ignorance, error, and discernment. But as
you argued concerning “ ‘X’ for Henry Flint,” the explanation of our
experience of rhythm is over-determined: the performer “cannot help
imposing rhythm and . . . the listener cannot avoid projecting it.”12 Is it
not redundant to say that one apprehends the rhythm created and
imposed by the performer, and that one also projects it?
DY: You have correctly characterized my view, Skepticus, though I’m not
sure there is over-determination.
SKEP: Surely all we need to say is that the performer cannot help imposing a
rhythm, an (apparently) intentional ordering, on the basic pulse for
which they are responsible. We can translate your infelicitous claim that
we cannot avoid projection of rhythm onto pulse, as the inevitability of
experiencing rhythm in a pulse even when there was no intention of
producing a rhythm.
DY: I am not entirely persuaded, Skepticus. I would say that in the case of
proto-rhythm, there is projection. By “projection,” I mean just that
rhythm is not entirely an intrinsic feature of the sounds, but also of how
they are heard. However, rather than using the metaphor of projection, I
would be happy to talk of the listener interpreting or hearing-as—a
metaphor that does seem more appropriate in the case of rhythmic or
metrical ambiguity, where there is genuine rather than proto-rhythm. An
excellent example is Debussy’s “Des pas sur la neige” from his
Preludes.13 I understand hearing-as on the model of Wittgenstein’s
seeing-as, and Wollheim’s seeing-in.14 But can I propose an
adjournment of our discussion to a nearby café?
3. Meaningful order
SKEP: Good morning, Dynamicus and Analyticus. I trust you are both eager
for further debate.
DY: Indeed we are, Skepticus. Can we begin by considering the
phenomenon that we touched on earlier, which psychologists call
entrainment—the tendency of a subject to align their movement to an
external auditory pulse? Psychologists define it as two rhythmic
processes adjusting towards and eventually “locking in” to a common
phase or periodicity.38 Psychological research generally assumes a
dynamic but non-humanistic conception of rhythm, I would argue—
focusing on bodily rhythms such as heart-beat, blood circulation,
respiration, secretion of hormones, and menstrual cycles.
A humanistic conception denies that entrainment in these internal
cases is continuous with entrainment on the personal level—rather, they
are distinct phenomena with interesting affinities. On the humanistic
view, individuals adjusting their speech rhythms to match each other in
conversation, or entraining in musical performance, are categorially
different from convergence in circadian or menstrual cycles. Moreover,
naturalistic accounts of entrainment offered by psychologists involve a
misconception—they mistakenly regard entrainment as more
fundamental than, and explanatory of, rhythm.
ANA: I agree, Dynamicus. The misconception here is comparable to how
psychologists and scientistic philosophers of mind explain human
memory through memory traces; we are able to remember, it is claimed,
because we store knowledge and information. However, “store” in the
relevant sense is itself a memory-concept, co-defined with “remember”;
it cannot explain the operation of memory.
DY: Indeed. To argue that human rhythmic abilities arise from an ability to
entrain, is to make the same kind of mistake. Entrainment stands to
rhythm as storage stands to memory. The capacity to entrain does not
explain our rhythmic behavior, but is part and parcel of it; just as
“storage” is part and parcel of “remembering.” Indeed, as remembering
involves more than storage—it also involves retrieval—so rhythmic
behavior involves more than entrainment: it also involves a capacity to
initiate rhythm. Only a subject unacquainted with rhythmic behavior—
such as a paralyzed, sense-deprived individual—could not create a
rhythm spontaneously. But one who is familiar with such behavior can
create new rhythms, just as a competent language-user can create novel
sentences.
ANA: That seems right, Dynamicus.
DY: A humanistic conception treats rhythm as essentially a human
phenomenon, conditioned by the natural organic phenomena addressed
by researchers on entrainment. For humanists, people begin to
experience waves on the shore as rhythmic as they begin to create music
and dance. The humanistic claim is not that all rhythms are humanly-
produced, but rather—to reiterate—that rhythm came into being with, or
at least is part and parcel of, human practices of music, poetry, and
dance. The producers of music, poetry, and dance drew on and
incorporated natural sounds—and in later eras, mechanical and
electronic sounds.
ANA: The contrasting naturalistic view—that these sounds already were
rhythmic, and that humans developed the capacity to mimic them, thus
creating their own rhythms—also has plausibility, Dynamicus.
Conceptual integration of music and life is plausible, because you
classify rhythm as essentially musical and stress ubiquity and
ineliminability of rhythm in everyday life.
DY: I agree that this opposed view has some plausibility—I favor the
humanistic stance, but it is an achievement just to locate the most
fruitful dialectic. That is a deep issue. Can we instead pursue the claim
of the psychologists that rhythmic ability partly depends on, or arises
with, entraining to natural rhythms? This claim seems right, as does the
psychologists’ assumption that the musical world is a social one, where
rhythms are emulated; rhythmic or metrical behavior involves a
common, social response. However, the psychologists are wrong to
deny that an individual can produce a rhythm spontaneously, without
entraining to anything. Entrainment, as psychologists conceive it,
prioritizes responding over creating, and indeed almost makes the latter
impossible. Londinium claims that “meter is related to, and may be a
complex form of, entrainment behavior.”39 But entrainment and meter
are interdependent concepts, and metrical behavior cannot just be a
form of entrainment.
ANA: Indeed.
DY: Londinium commented to me that “creating rhythms outside of a social
setting is a degenerate case of entrainment—one half of the two-
oscillator system that entrainment requires.”40 When I make rhythms by
myself, he argued, entrainment occurs here too, by a coordination of
“central timekeeper” and external rhythms.
ANA: I don’t understand why Londinium regards initiating a rhythm as a
“degenerate” case of entrainment. Talk of “oscillation” sounds like a
mechanistic account of what it is to grasp a rhythm.
DY: Yes, Analyticus. Entrainment cannot yield a complete explanation of
musical rhythm. So against the assumption that nothing relevant in the
music moves literally, I would develop Skepticus’ earlier suggestion
concerning entrainment, and argue that something relevant does literally
move. Performers and listeners move to the music, sharing a rhythmic,
dance-like response. This is not a merely causal connection, but a
manifestation of musical understanding and involvement—an internal
relation between music and movement. As Ezra Pound writes, “music
begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance . . . but this
must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all
poetry lyric.”41 The connection is not just with dance, but with human
rhythmic activities of all kinds—marching, laboring, rocking a cradle—
which music accompanies and informs.Thus we see that music, dance,
and poetry arise as an integrated practice, and form a conceptual holism
or circle of interdependent concepts. This implies a dynamic conception
of rhythm. Except at the least dynamic end of the spectrum, as in
plainchant, music creates an urge to move in response that shows that
one recognizes it as music, and recognizes the rhythm.
SKEP: You admit, then, that since there is no coherent notion of a literal non-
spatial movement, music involves no such thing.
DY: I have retracted that claim, or modified it to say “There is something
relevant that moves literally—the listener or performer moving to the
music.” I am arguing that music, dance, and rhythmic bodily movement
(leaving aside poetry and prose in the current discussion, though
perhaps they could be included too) belong to an order of movement a
stronger claim than that made by proponents of metaphorical accounts
such as Scruton. I am suggesting that to make and respond to music is to
be disposed to move rhythmically.
SKEP: This is the entrainment issue we discussed some time ago; I think it is
a condition of understanding musical rhythm, not just a matter of what
one is disposed to do.
DY: To speak of “understanding musical rhythm” makes it seem too much
like a conceptual matter, but it might not be: infants respond at a very
young age to rhythm, emotionally and physically—is that a matter of
understanding? However, it looks like we agree on what I will call the
movement criterion. The movement involves bobbing one’s head,
tapping fingers or feet, gestures such as punching the air or leaping, as
well as dancing. Inconsolable grief or sexual arousal can dispose people
to move rhythmically, but although neither requires musical
accompaniment, they invite it.
ANA: What do you make of this objection to the movement criterion: that
the disposition can be overridden by social convention, in classical
concerts, or church services? Such prohibitions result in what may be
called motionless moving, analogous to silent speech. At a certain point
in history, silent reading became the norm; similarly, perhaps,
motionless moving became the norm for listening to certain kinds of
music.
DY: Indeed. The movement criterion is illustrated by children’s unlearned
movement to music—marching to martial music, for instance. There are
no societies where one is brought up to understand music without
understanding dance, or vice versa. It would be absurd to say that dance
might have evolved independently of music. The contrary claim might
be tempting, because of how modern concert music has evolved—but
this too would be mistaken, even if certain forms of music are now
evolving independently of dance. An individual might be forbidden to
move to music, or to dance—but a whole society? Maybe under the
Taliban—though such societies do not endure. Someone who says, “I
am able to move in time with the music, but I never feel like doing so”
is someone who does not understand it—medical conditions and
syndromes excepted. An example of the latter is the jazz trumpeter Tom
Harrell; blowing and valving movements aside, he is almost immobile
when performing. This striking phenomenon results from treatment for
schizophrenia.42 We mentioned kinds of music and poetry to which
the criterion seems not to apply. Plainchant tried to exclude the human
body from music—it is unmetrical, though not unrhythmic. Children
would not move spontaneously to it, as its rhythm is not dance-rhythm
—though if asked to move, they might do so appropriately.
ANA: But what disposition or inclination is involved then, Dynamicus?
Might we say, more correctly, that someone who grasps a rhythm could
make tracking moves? “Disposition” is ambiguous. “She is disposed to
shed tears when listening to music” cites a relative frequency. “She is
disposed to jeer at Mick Jagger when she attends his performance
tonight” is about her possible intentions on a particular occasion. This is
the sense in which a person can feel disposed or inclined to do
something; what is done will be intentional behavior, which is not
implied by the frequency sense of “disposition.”
DY: Doesn’t it have to be a disposition, Analyticus? There is a third sense of
disposition in addition to relative frequency and possible intention—
viz., “a response that amounts to a criterion.” An injured person is
disposed to exhibit pain-behavior—such behavior belongs to an
indefinite list including crying out, clutching the affected part of the
body, moaning, and so on. This is stronger than the statistical or
frequency claim, but weaker, perhaps, than intention. Similarly with
music, where defeating factors include social prohibition or stigma,
feeling tired, and so on.The movement criterion shows that something
relevant does literally move—the listener and performer—as they
respond to the music. And given that such a response is a criterion of
understanding, the movement criterion brings together my emphasis on
movement, and your emphasis on understanding.
SKEP: It is surely not enough to say that most music naturally inclines one to
dance to it, given that we are now interested in explaining how dancing
to music contributes to understanding music.
DY: I am not sure that there is such an explanation—it seems more like a
conceptual elucidation. I would add that most music naturally inclines
one to dance—the use of “incline” does not seem to be a philosopher’s
weasel-word. But that claim does not express the conceptual connection
between music and dance, that I am trying to elucidate. It’s interesting
that proponents of entrainment also make this connection, and that here
also it seems to be contingent. For instance, Theodorus Gracykus, in our
volume, argues that “The centrality of entrainment explains our near-
universal propensity to interpret music as human gait and
comportment”: “we grasp the music’s gait in a preconceptual
recognition process. Knowledgeable listeners feel the beat. [The listener
who sits] still in the concert hall will entrain to the occurrent music,
anticipating how to move to it.”43
Moving to the music is a kind of entrainment—but, to reiterate,
entrainment is an elucidation and not, as psychologists suppose, an
explanation of the movement. If someone taps their feet to music, no
explanation is required—“Why are you doing that?” would be the kind
of question someone high on the autism spectrum or a Martian visitor
might ask.
SKEP: I most certainly grant this claim! Indeed I formulated a version of it
independently of Gracykus. The truth in your intuition of a deep link
between music and dance is not that the experience of music disposes
one to dance—that is causal and non-normative. Rather, it is that unless
one dance or move to the music—a capacity of following the music,
entraining to its rhythm—then one does not know what the music is,
one cannot identify it as the music it is. That’s a conceptual, normative
notion—just what your humanistic account of rhythm requires.
DY: That is well put, Skepticus—I see that I was wrong to insist that the
movement criterion involves a disposition rather than a capacity. We
agree that there is a deep conceptual connection between music and
dance—yet to return to my earlier claim, you want to say that “rhythm,”
as it appears in “musical rhythm” and “dance rhythm,” is ambiguous?
SKEP: It is not ambiguous. For a start one could hold, as you yourself once
did, that rhythm is disjunctive, characterizing music in one way
(accenting sounds, which do not literally move) and dance in another
(accenting bodily movements, which literally move): Rhythm is “order
in movement . . . viz. the imposition of accents on sequences of sounds
or movements, creating non-periodic phenomena usually within a
periodic repetitive (metrical) framework.”44 This definition of rhythm
as “order in movement” is disjunctive, in my view, because it applies to
phenomena either literally (dance) or figuratively (music).
DY: I do not agree that this definition is disjunctive—but pray continue.
SKEP: I respect the intuition behind your definition: namely, that there is no
requirement to reduce the phenomena of rhythm to a unity. Clarification
can be achieved by expansion. Thus rhythm involves hearing or
otherwise perceiving accents in sounds—speech (which is not mere
sound), non-intentional phenomena (heartbeat)—and in movement—
natural objects (cycles of the moon), artifacts (movement of second
hand of a watch or of a train), intentional movement (dance, walking
gait).But we can go further, and say that rhythms in music and dance, as
well as natural rhythms, have this in common: they are all patterns of
changes of qualities in time. That is, a dynamic pattern, if one uses the
word “dynamic” to connote change rather than movement—which is
not how you use it, Dynamicus. Dewey was right, rhythm is “order in
change”45—though as we have seen in the discussion of meaningful
order, that is not the end of the matter.
DY: The account that you suggest is certainly not the one I intended. My
account aims to be unifying and not disjunctive. A genuinely disjunctive
account, such as McDowell’s account of perception, finds little in
common between the disjuncts. But we are due to meet our colleague
Vitalia shortly, and I think we should ask her how she views the debate.
5. Human Movement
Works Cited
Anscombe, G. E. M., “The Question of Linguistic Idealism,” Collected Philosophical Papers, vol. 1
(Minneapolis, 1981).
Boghossian, Paul, “On Hearing the Music in the Sound: Scruton on Musical Expression,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60.1 (2002), 49–55.
Budd, Malcolm, “Musical Movement and Aesthetic Metaphors,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43.3
(2003), 209–23.
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C12.
Clayton, Martin, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will, “In Time with the Music: The Concept of
Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology,
11 (2005), 1–82.
Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, 1960).
Cowling, Sam, “Instantiation as Location,” Philosophical Studies, 167.3 (2014), 667–82.
Dewey, John, Art as Experience ([1934]; New York, 1980).
Funkhouser, Eric, The Logical Structure of Kinds (Oxford, 2014).
Gracyk, Theodor, “Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C10.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: An Almost Entirely Neglected and Major Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
Hamilton, Andy, “Review: Koktebel Jazz Party, Crimea” (2014):
http://www.jazzjournal.co.uk/magazine/810/review-koktebel-jazz-party-crimea.
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Movement: Music, Metaphor and Dance,” Midwest Studies in
Philosophy (forthcoming).1
Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful, tr. Geoffrey Payzant ([1854]; Indianapolis, 1986).
Harman, Gilbert, Change in View (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014).
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter ([2004]; 2nd edn, Oxford,
2012).
London, Justin, “Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C11.
Malina, Frank J. and Pierre Schaeffer, “A Conversation on Concrete Music and Kinetic Art,”
Leonardo, 5.3 (1972), 255–60.
Messiaen, Olivier, Music and Colour: Conversations with Claude Samuel, tr. E. Thomas Glasow
(Portland, 1994).
Mumford, Stephen and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford, 2011).
Nussbaum, Charles, “Musical Perception,” in Mohan Matthen, ed., Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
of Perception (Oxford, 2015), 495–514.
Plato, The Laws (c.360 bc), tr. Trevor J. Saunders, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper
(Indianapolis, 1997).
Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading ([1934]; London, 1961).
Schütz, Alfred, On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings, ed. Helmut R. Wagner
(Chicago, 1970).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
Scruton, Roger, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
Scruton, Roger, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London, 2009).
Simons, Peter, “The Ontology of Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds,
The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C3.
Winch, Peter, Simone Weil: The Just Balance (Cambridge, 1989).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations ([1953]; 2nd edn, Oxford, 1958).
Zuckerkandl, Victor, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, tr. Willard R. Trask
(Princeton, 1956).
1
Hamilton “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40.
2
Budd “Musical Movement,” 209–23; Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm”; Scruton, Aesthetics of
Music.
3
Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.
4
This issue arises with other contributions in this volume, such as Gaiger and Durà-Vilà.
5
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29: “A humanistic account treats rhythm as an order distinctive
of human movement or movement-in-sound, an order imaginatively projected onto processes that do
not literally possess it.”
6
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 38, 26.
7
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 30.
8
Schütz, On Phenomenology, 212.
9
Clayton, “Entrainment.”
10
Clayton, “Entrainment”; London “Metric Entrainment.”
11
Further discussed at Section 4.
12
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 34.
13
Discussed in Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 171–4.
14
See Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Ch. 4, sec. 5.
15
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 29, 40. Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol, 292 refers to
movement in a more or less Kantian space more fundamental than, and comprehensive of, the space
of geometry and that of physical objects.
16
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 40.
17
Boghossian, “Music in the Sound”; Budd, “Musical Movement”; Scruton, “Thoughts on
Rhythm.”
18
Similarly, Zuckerkandl argues that music moves in a metaphysical, Kantian sense of space,
even though nothing relevant in the music physically or geometrically moves.
19
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 41.
20
Thus Cowling, “Instantiation as Location,” 673, n. 16, advocates “locationism,” treating
change as motion through quality-space; he assumes realism about quality space, so the “motion” he
speaks of is understood literally. See also Mumford and Anjum, Causes from Powers, 23.
21
Funkhouser, Logical Structure, 25.
22
Cowling, “Instantiation as Location”; Mumford and Anjum, Causes from Powers.
23
See Nussbaum, “Musical Perception.”
24
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26, 29.
25
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 37: “movement is the most fundamental conceptualization of
music.”
26
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §527.
27
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, Introduction and Ch. 4.
28
Harman, Change in View.
29
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.
30
Anscombe, “Linguistic Idealism”; Hamilton, “Rhythm and Movement.”
31
Anscombe, “Linguistic Idealism”; Hamilton, “Rhythm and Movement.”
32
Scruton, Understanding Music, 61.
33
e.g. Malina and Schaeffer, “Concrete Music and Kinetic Art”; Scruton, Understanding Music,
5–13, 22–3, 30–2, 58; Brian Kane, Sound Unseen, passim.
34
Plato, Laws, Bk 2, 665a.
35
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 29.
36
Messiaen adds that the definition is “incomplete,” though he doesn’t explain why: Messiaen,
Music and Colour, 67.
37
Schütz, “Fragment on the Phenomenology of Rhythm,” in On Phenomenology, 21.
38
Clayton et al., “In Time with the Music,” 2.
39
London, Hearing in Time, 12.
40
Email communication.
41
Pound, ABC of Reading, 14.
42
Hamilton, “Review: Koktebel Jazz.”
43
Gracyk, “Musical Expressiveness.”
44
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26.
45
Dewey, Art as Experience: “Because rhythm is a universal scheme of existence underlying all
realization of order in change it pervades all the arts, literary, musical, plastic and architectural, as
well as the dance” (150); “There is a rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music
exist” (147).
46
The idea of an order of movement can be developed through the ideas of Simone Weil,
explicated by Winch, Simone Weil, esp. Ch. 4.
2
Rhythm and Movement
Matthew Nudds
The second involves hearing a single chord as sad. A minor chord by itself
sounds sad. According to Peacocke, the relation of the perceived minor
chord to its (unheard) major is perceived metaphorically as an instance of
the relation sadness has to a non-sad state of mind: sadness is experienced
from the inside as subdued; an ordinary state of mind is not subdued. The
relation of states of mind is isomorphic to that between minor and major
chords. Sadness enters into the content of the metaphor, which helps specify
the content of the auditory perception of the minor triad.
This account can explain how our experience of music and rhythm can
have metaphorical content concerning movement. There are relationships
between musical tones that are sufficient to sustain an isomorphism of the
kind Peacocke describes between music and different kinds of movement,
and so to ground experiencing the music metaphorically as movement. A
number of the associations between music and movement described in the
association experiment could be of this kind.21 To take a simple example,
changes in inter-onset intervals of tones may be isomorphic with changes in
the rate of footsteps as someone walks or runs faster, and so may be
metaphorically experienced as changes in speed of movement. That
suggests that at least some examples of hearing movement in music may be
explained in terms of our experiencing the music metaphorically as that
movement.
It would seem, then, that Peacocke’s account of hearing “metaphorically-
as” provides the basis of an explanation of how movement can be part of
the content of an experience of music, and so explains how something
extra-musical can be part of the content of an experience of music. But
metaphorical content doesn’t capture anything that is intrinsic to our
experience of music. To say this is not to say that the metaphoric content
isn’t part of the content of our experience of music, because on Peacocke’s
account it is. The problem is that the metaphorical content is something
additional to the musical content of the experience. Consider the experience
of someone who fails to experience metaphorical content in the music in
some way. They will miss something about the music that is there to be
appreciated, but they will still experience the music as such; and there’s no
reason to think that they couldn’t experience the music as having whatever
properties would make the metaphorical content appropriate. They may
simply lack the understanding, or the imaginative or other capacities,
required to bring to bear the metaphorical content. So metaphorical content
is not intrinsic to experiencing the music, even if it is essential to enjoying
the full experience that the music can provide. For someone who fails to
experience the metaphorical content, what the experience lacks is
something extra-musical.
If the connection between our experience of rhythm and movement is
metaphorical, then movement is not intrinsic to our experience of rhythm as
such. In failing to hear a rhythm as involving movement we would miss
something about the rhythm that is available to someone who does hear the
movement, but we would still hear the rhythm. So metaphorical content is
not intrinsic to our experience of rhythm as such, though it may be essential
to a richer experience of the rhythm that involves an appreciation of the
metaphorical content made available by the rhythm. The metaphorical
content does not help explain features of the rhythm as such, nor does it
explain why we experience tones as grouped or what grouping consists in.
One kind of explanation of the expressive powers of music appeals to the
idea of resemblance. We can recognize a passage of music as resembling a
human expression of emotion.22 According to this resemblance account, we
experience music as expressive of an emotion because it sounds the same in
some respect as a human expression of that emotion. For example, we can
perceive music as having a pitch contour that is similar to the pitch contour
of a vocal expression of an emotion. A passage from Handel’s Messiah,
“Rejoice Greatly, O Daughter of Zion!”, resembles the voice rising in joy.23
The vocal lines of Dido’s lament, in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, resemble
human vocal expressions of grief and intense loss.24 Our experience of the
music comes to have content concerning the emotion in the same way our
experience of a vocal expression of the emotion comes to have content
concerning the emotion. A passage of music may resemble other kinds of
expressive behavior. For example, there may be a structural similarity
between music and the expressive motion of the human body.25
This account in terms of resemblance can be extended beyond the
expressive. Eric Clarke has suggested that the connection between music
and movement derives from the way sounds specify their sources. “The
structure of music can and does specify objects and events in the world . . .
and kinds of action,” including movements.26 Clarke draws a parallel
between music and painting. The pigment in a painting is such that the
experience we have when looking at a painting can be like that we have
when looking at what is depicted in the painting. He suggests that music
can work in the same way, by producing experiences of sounds that are like
those produced by events in the world. There is a resemblance between the
experiences of music and the experiences we have of sounds produced by
events in the world. In virtue of that resemblance,
music may create perceptual effects with the disposition of discrete pitches and instrumental
timbres in time that reproduce, or approximate to, those that we experience with the continuous
acoustical transformation that are characteristic of real world events.27
III
Works Cited
Bregman, Albert S., Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound (Cambridge,
MA, 1990).
Budd, Malcolm, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London, 1985).
Carello, Claudia, Jeffrey B. Wagman, and Michael T. Turvey, “Acoustic Specification of Object
Properties,” in Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson, eds, Moving Image Theory:
Ecological Considerations (Carbondale, 2005).
Casati, Roberto and Jerome Dokic, La philosophie du son (Nimes, 1994).
Casati, Roberto and Jerome Dokic, “Sounds,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (2011): https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/sounds/.
Chen, Joyce L., Robert J. Zatorre, and Virginia B. Penhune, “Interactions between Auditory and
Dorsal Premotor Cortex during Synchronization to Musical Rhythms,” Neuroimage, 32.4 (2006),
1771–81.
Clarke, Eric, “Meaning and the Specification of Motion in Music,” Musicae Scientiae, 5.2 (2001),
213–34.
Eitan, Zohar and Roni Y. Granot, “How Music Moves: Musical Parameters and Listeners’ Images of
Motion Music Perception,” Music Perception, 23.3 (2006), 221–47.
Freed, Daniel J., “Auditory Correlates of Perceived Mallet Hardness for a Set of Recorded Percussive
Events,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 87 (1990), 311–22.
Friberg, Anders and Johan Sundberg, “Does Music Performance Allude to Locomotion? A Model of
Final Ritardandi Derived from Measurements of Stopping Runners,” Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 105.3 (1999), 1469–84.
Gaver, William W., “How do We Hear in the World? Explorations in Ecological Acoustics,”
Ecological Psychology, 5 (1993), 285–313.
Gaver, William W., “What in the World do We Hear? An Ecological Approach to Auditory Event
Perception,” Ecological Psychology, 5 (1993), 1–29.
Gjerdingen, Robert O., “Apparent Motion in Music?”, in Niall Griffith and Peter M. Todd, eds,
Musical Networks: Parallel Distributed Perception and Performance (Cambridge, MA, 1999),
141–73.
Houben, Mark M. J., Armin Kohlrausch, and Dik J. Hermes, “Perception of the Size and Speed of
Rolling Balls by Sound,” Speech Communication, 43.4 (2004), 331–45.
Kivy, Peter, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions: Including the Complete Text of the
Corded Shell (Philadelphia, 1989).
Kunkler-Peck, Andrew J. and Michael T. Turvey, “Hearing Shape,” Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1 (2000), 279–94.
Lakatos, Stephen, Stephen McAdams, and René Caussé, “The Representation of Auditory Source
Characteristics: Simple Geometric Form,” Perception & Psychophysics, 59.8 (1997), 1180–90.
Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
Levinson, Jerrold, “Authentic Performance and Performance Means,” in Music, Art, and
Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford, 1990), 393–408.
Li, Xiaofeng, Robert J. Logan, and Richard E. Pastore, “Perception of Acoustic Source
Characteristics: Walking Sounds,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 90.6 (1991),
3036–49.
McAdams, Stephen, “Recognition of Sound Sources and Events,” in Stephen McAdams and
Emmanuel Bigand, eds, Thinking in Sound (Oxford, 1993), 146–98.
O’Callaghan, Casey, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (Oxford, 2007).
Pasnau, Robert, “What is Sound?”, Philosophical Quarterly, 50.196 (1999), 309–24.
Peacocke, Christopher, “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance,” Modern Schoolman,
86.3–4 (2009), 239–60.
Phillips-Silver, Jessica and Laurel J. Trainor, “Vestibular Influence on Auditory Metrical
Interpretation,” Brain and Cognition, 67.1 (2008), 94–102.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. and Edward M. Hubbard, “Synaesthesia: A Window into Perception,
Thought and Language,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8.12 (1990), 3–34.
Repp, Bruno H., “Patterns of Expressive Timing in Performances of a Beethoven Minuet by Nineteen
Famous Pianists,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 88.2 (1990), 622–41.
Repp, Bruno H., “Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of the Tapping Literature,” Psychonomic
Bulletin and Review, 12.6 (2005), 969–92.
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1999).
Spence, Charles, “Crossmodal Correspondences: A Tutorial Review,” Attention, Perception, and
Psychophysics, 73.4 (2011), 971–95.
Trainor, Laurel J., Xiaoqing Gao, Jing-jiang Lei, Karen Lehtovaara, and Laurence R. Harris, “The
Primal Role of the Vestibular System in Determining Rhythm,” Cortex, 45.1 (2008), 35–43.
Wildes, R. P. and Whitman A. Richards, “Recovering Material Properties from Sound,” in Whitman
A. Richards, ed., Natural Computation: Selected Readings (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 356–63.
Woods, Andrew T., Charles Spence, Natalie L. Butcher, and Ophelia Deroy, “Fast Lemons and Sour
Boulders: Testing Crossmodal Correspondences Using an Internet-Based Testing Tethodology,” I-
Perception, 4.6 (2013), 365–79.
1
Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 36, 12.
2
Lerdahl and Jackendoff describe meter as “induced” in the listener.
3
Repp, “Patterns of Expressive Timing.”
4
Repp, “Sensorimotor Synchronization,” discusses the connection between tapping and meter.
Phillips-Silver and Trainor, “Vestibular Influence,” and Trainor et al., “Vestibular System,” discuss
the influence of the vestibular system on metrical perception. Chen et al., “Synchronization to
Musical Rhythms,” provides brain-imaging evidence that implicates the motor system in the
perception of meter.
5
Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.
6
Budd, Music and the Emotions, x.
7
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 3.
8
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 19–20.
9
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 221.
10
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 51.
11
Eitan and Granot, “How Music Moves.”
12
There were no significant differences between those with and without musical training: Eitan
and Granot, “How Music Moves,” 240.
13
Woods et al., “Fast Lemons and Sour Boulders.”
14
Ramachandran and Hubbard, “Window into Perception.” Spence, “Crossmodal
Correspondences,” reviews several such studies.
15
Spence, “Crossmodal Correspondences.”
16
Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 257–8.
17
Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 240, reproduces Zurbarán’s “Still Life with Pottery Jars”
(c.1635).
18
Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263–4.
19
Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 263.
20
Peacock, “The Perception of Music,” 265.
21
It would be an interesting exercise to show that all the association examples can be explained
in this way.
22
Kivy, Sound Sentiment.
23
Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 51.
24
Peacocke, “The Perception of Music,” 269.
25
Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 53–4. Assuming one may perceive someone’s emotion, this
explanation in terms of resemblance is a perceptual account. Someone who rejected that assumption
might claim that the resemblance merely puts us in a position to recognize the emotion.
26
Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 217.
27
Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 221.
28
Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 228.
29
Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 223.
30
Clarke, “Motion in Music,” 225.
31
In what follows my discussion will focus on sounds produced by objects, but could be
extended to sounds produced in other ways.
32
The distinction that I draw here is clearest in the case of reverberant objects, but it also applies
to objects that we would not normally regard as reverberant.
33
Casati and Dokic, “Sounds,” provides a survey of ontology of sound. O’Callaghan, Sounds: A
Philosophical Theory, and Casati and Dokic, La philosophie du son, defend the event view. Pasnau,
“What is Sound?”, rejects the event view.
34
Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis.
35
Wildes and Richards, “Recovering Material Properties,” discusses evidence of hearing material
properties; Freed, “Auditory Correlates,” likewise for hardness; Kunkler-Peck and Turvey, “Hearing
Shape,” and Lakatos et al., “Simple Geometric Form,” for shape; Li et al., “Walking Sounds” for
walking; Houben et al., “Rolling Balls,” for rolling. Carello at al., “Object Properties,” provides
general discussion.
36
Gaver, “How do We Hear in the World?” and “What in the World do We Hear?”; McAdams,
“Recognition of Sound Sources.”
37
Gjerdingen, “Apparent Motion in Music?”, 142.
38
Repp, “Patterns of Expressive Timing.”
39
Friberg and Sundberg, “Model of Final Ritardandi.”
40
Levinson, “Authentic Performance.”
41
On the second component, Levinson says “The expressiveness of music is grounded in the fact
that the actions or gestures one hears in a passage of music recall the actions or gestures that serve as
behavioral expressions of emotions, which allows us to hear the former as the latter”: “Authentic
Performance,” 82.
42
Levinson, “Authentic Performance,” 83.
43
Levinson, “Authentic Performance,” 83.
44
Levinson, “Authentic Performance,” 83.
3
The Ontology of Rhythm
Peter Simons
1. Introduction
From such a broad lexical description, which aims to capture the spread of
usage, we do not expect ontological precision, but the lexicon fixes the
general area in which we must investigate. While the term “rhythm” has
been used in connection with other areas, such as sedimentation in geology,
we shall confine attention to rhythm as perceptibly unfolding in time. We
shall also be looking especially, though not exclusively, at rhythm among
sounds, and again, in particular, as to be expected, at rhythm in music.
However, we should bear in mind that, like the majority of terms in
everyday use, the term does not have a precise definition or delimitation,
and nor should we expect it to have one. We shall see in fact that one of our
more intricate tasks is to indicate the limits of what counts as rhythm.
Because of this intricacy, we shall start with very basic considerations and
move forward slowly.
Not all characters of processes are rhythms: they do not unfold in the right
way. For example, one character of a process is its duration. The flight of a
projectile, such as a well struck cricket ball, is a process, and it has a certain
duration, for example four seconds. But this duration is not a rhythm. Nor is
the process’s location, nor is its cause, nor is its perpetrator if it has one.
Some processes have no rhythm, the flight of a cricket ball from being
struck to coming to rest being a case in point. For a process to have a
rhythm there must be some kind of repetition, possibly but not necessarily
exact, within the process. A pendulum swings to a rhythm, to and fro. Each
swing takes roughly the same amount of time, so talk of a rhythm is
appropriate. Each swing, first one way, then the other, resembles earlier and
later swings, so there are repetitions. The double swing, to and fro, is a
temporal part or subprocess of the longer process of swinging, and these
subprocesses come one after the other in a repetitive way, until the process
stops or runs down. So it is of the essence of processes with rhythm that
there be successive subprocesses of generally like kind. We might at a pinch
say that a pendulum which swings only once and is then stopped has a
rhythm, but only by courtesy of our knowledge that it would continue to
swing with a certain rhythm if left undisturbed.
We shall not then in general count processes without any kind of internal
repetition or variation as having rhythm, which rules out the cricket ball
flight. However, there are cases of unrepeated (though repeatable) processes
where we are reasonably inclined to ascribe a rhythm to the process, even
when its internal structure does not consist of exact or approximate
repetition of very similar subprocesses. They are on the limit of, but not
outside, the extension of the concept of the rhythmical. For this to apply
however, there must be some qualitatively discernible internal variation in
the process which gives it a kind of unrepeated temporally articulated
pattern. A spatial analogy may help. A ploughed field with its repeated
furrows is regularly patterned. It is a spatial analogue of the simple
pendulum or the heartbeat. A mountain range with its peaks, ridges,
shoulders, valleys, cliffs, hollows, etc. is irregular and unrepetitive, but it
still instantiates a highly complex pattern of ups and downs, variations in
altitude across locations. That pattern may not be repeated, but it could in
principle occur more than once. It is the same with an irregular process.
However, where the process is completely or nearly homogeneous, we are
inclined to deny that it has a rhythm, just as we are inclined to deny that a
flat featureless plain has a pattern. The nearly homogeneous flight of the
cricket ball has no rhythm.
4. Repetitive Processes in General
5. Perceptible Repetition
Counting both the pulses and the pulse gaps as beats gives us a regular
sequence of beats again, as there would be if there were only regular pulses,
but now we have two kinds of beats: sounding and silent.
and the “numerator” of such time signatures indicates the number of beats
in a bar.
It is often said of a piece that it is in, say “3/4 rhythm” or “waltz rhythm,”
but this is a waste of a word. It is better to say a waltz is in 3/4 time. The
rhythm of a motif in waltz time, such as the famous motif (ignoring grace
notes)
9. Monorhythms
13. Polyrhythms
but if they sound differently, is clearly two rhythms overlaid. If the onset of
the triple is delayed by a sixth of a measure the different tresillo or
Habañera rhythm results:
The kinds of rhythms we have identified pass from the simple to the
increasingly complex, and we need to ask how this increasing complexity
arises and where its limits are. The latter question is easily answered: there
are no theoretical limits to how complex a rhythm can become, though there
are fairly narrow if ill-defined limits to what is humanly recognizable,
which are toward the lower end of the complexity spectrum. As to the
modes of complexification, as far as I can tell there are essentially two:
sequencing and overlay, giving rise to complex rhythms and polyrhythms
respectively. A rhythm is either a monorhythm or is derived from other
rhythms by sequential addition or by superimposing two or more other
rhythms. By these modes of combination, all rhythms are formal
descendants of pulses, basic rhythms, and monorhythms, and so, I suggest,
form a formal analogue of the biologist’s clade.1
1
I am grateful to the participants of the Durham Conference and to Peter Cheyne for valuable
comments and suggestions. There will be cases I have not considered and which stretch the concept
of rhythm beyond what I have envisaged here, but I would have given them had I thought of them.
That I mention pulse should not be taken to imply that all rhythms have or stress pulse, only that
many straightforward and obvious ones do. I should also emphasize that the similarities and
regularities on which rhythms build can be approximate: exact repetition in music sounds
mechanical. Against another criticism, however, I remain firm. There are processes which lack any
rhythm. A completely homogeneous sound or a smooth rectilinear motion lacks the internal diversity
of parts required for rhythm to gain a hold. If all processes are rhythmical, the concept rhythm is then
doing no work. But it does do work. Therefore, not all processes have rhythm.
4
“Feeling the Beat”
Multimodal Perception and the Experience of Musical Movement
Jenny Judge
5. Conclusion
Works Cited
Boghossian, Paul, “Explaining Musical Experience,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music:
Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007).
Boghossian, Paul, “The Perception of Music: Comments on Peacocke,” The British Journal of
Aesthetics, 50.1 (2010), 71–6.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Hasty, Christopher F., Meter as Rhythm (Oxford, 1997).
Higgins, Kathleen Marie, The Music of Our Lives (Philadelphia, 1991).
Huang, Juan, Darik Gamble, Kristine Sarnlertsophon, Xiaoqin Wang, and Steven Hsiao, “Feeling
Music: Integration of Auditory and Tactile Inputs in Musical Meter Perception,” PLoS ONE, 7.10
(2012).
Levinson, Jerrold, “The Aesthetic Appreciation of Music,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 49.4
(2009), 415–25.
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (Oxford, 2004).
London, Justin, “Three Things Linguists Need to Know about Rhythm and Time in Music,”
Empirical Musicology Review, 7.1–2 (2012), 5–11.
Matthen, Mohan, “On the Diversity of Auditory Objects,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1.1
(2010), 63–9.
O’Callaghan, Casey, “Intermodal Binding Awareness,” in David J. Bennett and Christopher S. Hill,
eds, Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness (Cambridge, 2014), 73–104.
O’Callaghan, Casey, “Not All Perceptual Experience is Modality Specific,” in Dustin Stokes, Mohan
Matthen, and Stephen Biggs, eds, Perception and Its Modalities (Oxford, 2014), 133–65.
Peacocke, Christopher, “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance,” The British Journal of
Aesthetics, 49.3 (2009), 257–75.
Ridley, Aaron, The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations (Edinburgh, 2004).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London,
1983).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
Scruton, Roger, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London, 2009).
Siegel, Susanna, The Contents of Visual Experience (Oxford, 2010).
Thaut, Michael H., Rhythm, Music, and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications
(London, 2005).
Trainor, Laurel J., Xiaoqing Gao, Jing-jiang Lei, Karen Lehtovaara, and Laurence R. Harris, “The
Primal Role of the Vestibular System in Determining Musical Rhythm,” Cortex, 45.1 (2009), 35–
43.
1
Siegel, Contents of Visual Experience, gives an overview of the notion of perceptual content,
and its surrounding debates.
2
O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience,” 139–46; “Intermodal Binding Awareness,” 82–
97.
3
The vestibular system consists of receptors in the inner ear, and their connections to other parts
of the nervous system.
4
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 13–15, 21, 49–71.
5
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 26, et passim, criticizes this “abstract” characterization of
rhythm, proposing instead that rhythm is an essentially dynamic, human phenomenon. On Hamilton’s
view, rhythm is the product of human action: it is “order-in-movement” rather than merely “order-in-
time.” Rhythms must already possess legitimate movement properties in order to count as rhythms in
the first place; they are not, for Hamilton, static and abstract to begin with. This is one valid way to
counter Scruton’s appeal to metaphorical perception in order to explain the experience of musical
movement. It is, however, a different approach to the one pursued here. Rather than challenging
extant “abstract” accounts of rhythm, I focus on musical meter: the experience of patterns of stress
within musical rhythms. I address the perceptual content involved in such “beat” experiences; I do
not directly address the content of experiences of rhythm, taken generally.
6
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 4.
7
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, viii.
8
London, Hearing in Time, 4.
9
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 5.
10
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
11
London, “Rhythm and Time in Music.”
12
London, “Rhythm and Time in Music,” 5.
13
Thaut, Rhythm, Music, and the Brain.
14
Matthen, “Diversity of Auditory Objects.”
15
Again, if “meter” is defined as something existing apart from “pulse” or “beat,” which are
considered as its phenomenological counterparts, this does not derail the argument; for, even in that
case, something other than rhythm, and related to meter, is experienced perceptually, rather than
experienced only in virtue of a perceptual acquaintance with rhythm.
16
Huang et al., “Feeling Music.”
17
Trainor et al., “Vestibular System.”
18
O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience.”
19
O’Callaghan, “Intermodal Binding Awareness.”
20
Siegel, Contents of Visual Experience, passim.
21
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 35.
22
Boghossian, “Explaining Musical Experience,” 122.
23
Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding; Aesthetics of Music; Understanding Music; Peacocke,
“The Perception of Music.”
24
Peacocke, “The Perception of Music.”
25
Boghossian, “Comments on Peacocke.”
26
I am discussing Peacocke’s explication of metaphorical perception (as clarified by Boghossian)
rather than Scruton’s, because I find the former account to be clearer—even though it is Scruton who
applies metaphorical perception explicitly to the experience of musical movement.
27
I am referring, here, to the painting Pots, by Zurbaran, which Peacocke also discusses in this
context.
28
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 87.
29
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 94.
30
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 94.
31
O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience.”
32
O’Callaghan, “Not All Perceptual Experience,” 147.
33
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 357.
34
Levinson, “Aesthetic Appreciation of Music.”
35
Ridley, Philosophy of Music; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music; Higgins, Music of our Lives.
5
Dance Rhythm
Aili Bresnahan
Dewey’s argument is that what makes the new kind of crying art is that it is
performed with the agent’s awareness of its role in human intercourse.
However, this chapter rejects the thoroughgoing “Intentionality” with a
capital “I” that Margolis champions,5 where the actions of persons are
understood primarily as those of cultural agents rather than as individuals.
The transformation I argue for is a metaphysical one of the natural into the
artistic, through awareness and purposes of the artist in a cultural context. It
is thus more deeply rooted in artistic practice than Arthur Danto’s
“transfiguration of the commonplace.”6
My account also differs from that of Susanne Langer, for whom the
ordinary is transformed into art by the creation of symbolic forms of human
feeling. By contrast, this chapter acknowledges that social dance involves
transformative intentionality as well; dance rhythms occur in both high art
dance and in other forms.7 Intentional rhythms are those created by human
persons to develop, diversify, or attend to the range of natural rhythms, for
purposes reflecting the particular genre of art. Though constructed or
person-made, room is allowed for intentional rhythms of proto-persons in
the animal kingdom. Natural, bodily rhythms are also transformed by
dancers into ones serving artistic, social, or other purposes.8
When dance self-consciously transforms ordinary movement, reflexively
listening to, and responding to, natural bodily rhythms, it is showing
something implicit, of which audience and dancers are not normally aware.
The task dance of the Judson Dance Theater, where a performer came
onstage, made and ate a sandwich and walked off, had the rhythm of eating
and of walking—not stylized, but part of the postmodern dance movement,
seeking to eliminate the division between art and life. My claim is that the
intention of focusing on sandwich-making as dance transforms mere
movement, and transforms natural rhythm into dance rhythm if the dance
encourages focus on natural rhythm as dance rhythm. This is what I mean
by intentionality—pragmatism in philosophy, and the postmodern
movement in art, has meant that appreciating ordinary experience can
transform the natural elements of human life and experience into art. Art
may transform an element of life into a unified and heightened experience
(Dewey), in an enculturated world with culturally developed capabilities
and practices (Margolis), or it may focus attention on the aesthetic value of
the ordinary (Danto, and postmodernism). Thus the Judson Dance Theater
dance performs no longer just the making of a sandwich and its movement
should not be interpreted as such. Rhythms not there to be attended to are
rhythm in dance, but not dance rhythm—for instance, if the intended focus
was the sandwich-making rather than the rhythm of walking to the table.
This account of dance rhythm is humanistic in holding that the human act
of converting mere movement to dance transforms natural into intentional
rhythm. Dance rhythm is thus similar but not identical to Andy Hamilton’s
dynamic, humanistic sense of rhythm as “order-in-movement,” in which
perceivable “accents are imposed on a sequence of regular sounds or
movements.”9 The account presented in this chapter separates natural
rhythm from intentional rhythm in order to isolate the underpinnings and
connections between mere sound and mere movement before they have
been transformed into music and dance. There is an organic connection
between music and dance at sound and movement levels, and this would be
overlooked if natural rhythm were not addressed.
We now explore some of the rhythmical connections that exist between
music and dance, highlighting the intentional–natural rhythm distinction.
2. Musical Connections
As dance and music are intimately connected, it is often hard to tell whether
there is a dance–music synthesis, or the dance is following the music, or
vice versa. This essay holds that, in all three cases, the type of rhythm is
intentional insofar as it occurs in dance and music qua dance and music.
Any types of natural rhythm that underlie the dance or music are contingent
upon movement and sound, rather than upon movement transformed
through human intentionality into dance, or sound similarly transformed
into music.
First, there are dance–music syntheses and collaborations where the
components are in tandem or in combined practice. To draw from Western
traditions, dance occurs frequently with music, illustrated by baroque music
and dance, or the waltz. Indeed, Western dance and music were originally
integrated, their separation being a later development. Most dance scholars
place the origin of Western dance in Ancient Greek rituals that integrated
religion, theatre, and music.10 In non-Western countries such as those in
Latin America, dance and music also arose together. Dance–music
syntheses occur in social dance, competition, and in concert dance that
emerged from social dance. Samba, tango, and salsa are all heavily
intentional rhythm-infused forms of dance embedded in a clear and
identifiable musical style, essential to their national cultures.11 In these
dance–music syntheses, rhythm is intentional rather than natural; dancers
and musicians have integrated these artforms in a purposeful way.
Second, dance is often set to music, and following the music can be an
object. As in social dance, a dancer must dance on the beat, and the simplest
kinds of dance to perform are to or with music that has a regular, metric,
rhythmic pattern (as in a country square dance). Indeed, dancers often
choose music that makes them want to dance, and often this is music that
has an intentional, recognizable, and repeated structure of beats and
emphases in sound. When dance follows this type of music it is certainly
dance rhythm as defined above. Following the music is more difficult where
complex rhythms, such as those by Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, or Anton
Webern, are involved—as in the choreography of Jiří Kylián who set
Symphony of Psalms and Svadebka to Stravinsky, and Stepping Stones to
Cage and Webern. Thus, dance that follows music can assist the audience to
perceive the intentional rhythms of the music in an enhanced visual rather
than auditory way, as well as to see the new dance rhythms that result.
Some forms of dance interact with music. In African dance–music
syntheses or collaborations, for example, the master drummer is in charge
of leading improvisations, influenced by feedback from the dancers.12 Thus,
even when dance follows music, there may be a dynamic relationship.
Again, this decision to follow a repeated pattern of beats and emphases is
part of the intentionality that is inherent in dance rhythm.
Finally, there are also dance–music syntheses and collaborations, such as
in jazz, where the band follows the chorus and tap dancers rather than the
other way around.13 Some large, classical ballet companies expect
orchestras to follow the dancers. This seems also to be true in the many
cases where musicians serve as accompanists to the dancers in a supporting
role.
The vast majority of dance–music syntheses and collaborations do
feature intentional rhythm, and the idea of a dance–music piece containing
only natural rhythm, but no dance rhythm or music rhythm, strains
credulity, especially because music rhythm, as mentioned earlier, may not
require that the pattern of beats or emphases repeats. We leave the
possibility of non-musically rhythmic music for another occasion.
This section claims that dance can lack dance rhythm if it fails to have
intentional regular, repeated pattern of beats and emphases in movement,
even though there is some unavoidable natural rhythm in the dance due to
internal bodily rhythms. In Balkan and in Greek dancing, for example,
some dances start with a long piece of instrumental music that has no
identifiable beat and that is both slow and uneven enough metrically that
the dance movement to it might be classed as non-dance rhythmic. There
might also be dance that follows funeral wailing that does not have a
repeated, intentional dance-rhythmic structure; likewise dance movement
that followed free-style poetry. This chapter is reliant on an account of
dance rhythm that might diverge from an account of music rhythm or poetic
rhythm through differences in understanding what “rhythm” refers to in
music, poetry, and dance. It is possible, for example, that there might be
rhythm in dance that is not only not dance rhythm, as this chapter
understands it, but that uses music rhythm or poetry rhythm, in the sense
that these disciplines understand rhythm.
Another example of dance without intentional dance rhythm might be
Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation, a form of creative contemporary
dance with the primary aim of transferring energy and movement dynamics
between dancers and developing new movements in concert. Contact
improvisation requires no explicit adherence to a pattern of beats and is free
enough to allow any participant to move however they please, in contact
with another person. It is not clear that dances created in this way must be
intentionally rhythmic.
A dancer can create a movement with a primary purpose that includes
avoiding intentional repeated pattern of beats or emphases. There would
still be rhythms of dancers’ breath and walking, but these would be
unintentional and incidental. Thus Lauri Stallings, in And All Directions I
Come to You, aimed to interrogate how we associate with one another in
public space in “a constant flow of intuition and place . . . by letting time
happen to offer emancipatory moments and a gathering among strangers.”
Intentional repeated patterns of beats were not a primary concern. Thus one
can find dances that lack the sort of dance rhythm proposed by this chapter,
in which rhythm is either changed in some way from its natural state or the
primary purpose of the dance is to highlight its rhythmic nature. It follows
that dance rhythm is not a necessary condition for dance writ large,
although there may be rhythm in dance that is unavoidable due to dancers’
identity as both persons and biological organisms.
In conclusion, the primary theory of rhythm advocated by this chapter is
the concept of dance rhythm, a sort of rhythm that is not simply the
rudimentary kind found in the processes of the natural world, the truth of
which has been shown through the use of danceworld examples. Dance is a
minded activity of the human person that has social, political,
entertainment, and artistic human purposes, and that can and does involve
the use of rhythm. There is no dance at the level of biology only, and no
dance rhythm at that level. Neither must dance, qua dance, involve dance
rhythm, since dance is a kind of activity that can, but that need not, include
intentional, repeated patterns of beats or emphases in movement. Finally,
dance exists that has contingent and non-essential elements that may have
natural rhythm as defined earlier. When it does this is merely rhythm in
dance.
Works Cited
Bond, Karen E., “Recurrence and Renewal: Enduring Themes in Children’s Dance,” in Thomas K.
Hagood and Luke C. Kahlich, eds, Perspectives on Contemporary Dance History: Revisiting
Impulse, 1950–1970 (Youngstown, 2013), 161–92.
Bresnahan, Aili, “How Artistic Creativity is Possible for Cultural Agents,” in Dirk-Martin Grube and
Robert Sinclair, eds, Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture: Reflections on the Philosophy of
Joseph Margolis (Helsinki, 2015), 197–216.
Chasteen, John C., National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular
Dance (Albuquerque, 2004).
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays (New York, 1918).
Danto, Arthur C., Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
Dewey, John, Art as Experience ([1934]; New York, 2005).
Ellis, Havelock, “The Art of Dancing” [1923], Salmagundi, 33–4 (1976), 5–22.
Gat, Emanuel (chor.), Silent Ballet, dance performance, Emanuel Gat Dance, 2008.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: A Major and Almost Entirely Neglected Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, tr. Frederick Rothwell, ed. Cynthia Cox
([1930]; New York, 1980).
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile, Rhythm, Music and Education, tr. Harold F. Rubinstein ([1920]; New York,
1921).
Jowitt, Deborah, “Modernism: Modern Dance,” in Michael Kelly, ed., The Encyclopedia of
Aesthetics, vol. 4 (Oxford, 2014), 374–8.
Kostelanetz, Richard, ed., Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time (Chicago, 1992).
Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key
(New York, 1953).
Louppe, Laurence, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, tr. Sally Gardner ([1997]; Alton, 2010).
Malone, Jacqui, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visual Rhythms of African American Dance (Chicago,
1996).
Margolis, Joseph, Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the
Millennium (Berkeley, 1995).
Mathur, Nita, Cultural Rhythms in Emotions, Narratives and Dance (New Delhi, 2002).
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, “Man Has Always Danced: Forays into the Origins of an Art Largely
Forgotten by Philosophers,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 3 (2005):
https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=273.
Stallings, Lauri (chor.), And All Directions I Come to You, dance performance/roaming installation,
with glo at Creative Time, Drifting in Daylight event (New York, 2015):
http://www.lauristallings.org/world-premiere-2015/.
1
Sheets-Johnstone, “Man Has Always Danced,” provides an alternative account of rhythm in
dance.
2
Dewey, Art as Experience, 153–5.
3
Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World, 224.
4
Dewey, Art as Experience, 65.
5
Margolis, Historied Thought, Constructed World, 194–8, et passim; Bresnahan “Artistic
Creativity.”
6
Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
7
Langer, Feeling and Form.
8
Bond, “Recurrence and Renewal,” 178.
9
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26–7.
10
Jowitt, “Modernism: Modern Dance”; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music.
11
Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots.
12
Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues, 14–15.
13
Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues, 94ff.
14
Email communication to the author.
15
Ellis, “Art of Dancing,” 9.
16
Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Siva; Mathur, Cultural Rhythms, 9.
17
Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education; and Eurhythmics, Art and Education.
18
Jaques-Dalcroze, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, 7, 183.
19
Jaques-Dalcroze, Eurhythmics, Art and Education, 86.
20
Louppe, Poetics of Contemporary Dance, esp. 50 and 83.
21
Kostelanetz, ed., Merce Cunningham, provides more on Cunningham’s methods.
PART II
EMOTION AND EXPRESSION
6
The Life of Rhythm
Dewey, Relational Perception, and the “Cumulative Effect”
Garry L. Hagberg
In this passage we see the ideas of (a) falling out of step with one’s
surroundings, (b) recovering rhythmical congruity with it, (c) the value of
the experience of incongruent disparity for enriching subsequent
experience, and (d) the growth of life as a result of a “more extensive
balance” with surrounding conditions. These conditions may be
anthropological as much as biological, but in describing the tensions and
resolutions of an organism (or person) within an environment, they
simultaneously describe “the roots of the esthetic”—Dewey’s most
fundamental insight about rhythm. For Dewey, the aesthetic involves not
only a mimesis of nature, but is already in nature; art is one with its
environment:
The first characteristic of the environing world that makes possible the existence of artistic form
is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist. Were
it not so, rhythm as an essential property of form would be merely superimposed upon material,
not an operation through which material effects its own culmination in experience.4
“[N]ot mechanically and inertly,” as with drum machines. One might say:
inert or mechanical rhythm is not rhythm. Mere measured duration provides
only the blank canvas upon which rhythm can be created. Dewey’s
equilibrium—a sense of rhythmic balance and harmony—arises from
tension and is resolved within a dynamic, or “moving” complex of
interaction. Thus, when Garrison’s sudden change in the bass rhythm (3:10–
3:16) establishes tension—displacing the emphasis away from the first beat
of each measure—Jones layers intricate cymbal patterns on top,
acknowledging the ambiguity and subtly contributing to it, particularly at
3:13–3:15. Yet he keeps the underlying rhythm intact, creating the effect of
two rhythm patterns bifurcating but still internally related, guaranteeing
their reunion.
The effect is like that of two trapeze artists separating within a context of
rapid movement, and then—as if in slow motion—reuniting where the one
safely catches the other (at 3:16), or where, as Dewey puts it, equilibrium
comes about. As he says, this is not mere flux and change; there is sense
here. Parallel to Coltrane’s solo, whose melodic motifs generate their own
variations with a sense of logical entailment, Jones and Garrison here
follow out what their improvised patterns entail. What we hear in this
performance would not be possible with a drum machine in place of Jones;
nor by overdubbing in a studio. One could produce a fifteen-minute
recording, and it would have these players playing, but it would never
sound like the original, nor achieve its animate-creature sense—it would
never be, as we say, live music. Creating something like a living thing, the
tensions, resolutions, and further developments arise from within that
interactive entity: “Order is not imposed from without but is made out of
the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another.”8
Again, the illuminating connection is between (a) the live organism
interacting in a dynamic environment in a way that yields survival-
enhancing regularities that constitute forms or patterns of rhythm in nature,
and (b) the parallel emergent forms and patterns in aesthetic experience that
constitute forms of art-work “life”:
For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the
stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and
conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic.9
Jazz improvisers create a sort of parallel world that both reflects and enacts
the tension-resolution relations, the rhythm-finding stabilizations, the
separations, the life-enhancing negotiated reunifications, and the
preservation and continuity of sense and coherence within a world of
motion. Hence we hear life in music of this kind, and respond to it as a kind
of animated presence.10 Accomplished players work hard to create a
mimetic reenactment of the organism’s life of which Dewey speaks:
Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved,
he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them . . .11
Fleetingly and powerfully, at 3:36–3:43 Garrison lifts his line out of its
temporal frame, which movement would be for Dewey a fleeting reminder
of one cause of the “death” of the “organism,” the falling apart of the
performance. Jones’ snare drum follows, and comments, as though he
divides and reunifies.12 Just past three-quarters into this performance, Jones
continues to play with so much overlayering of rhythmic commentary on
the underlying pulse that one is not sure which is primary, yet the
experience remains coherent. The effect is powerfully amplified by
Garrison’s mix of bass pedals, syncopation, downbeat displacement, his
moves into very high registers, and integrated returns with the walking bass.
As Dewey writes,
All interactions that effect stability and order in the whirling flux of change are rhythms. There
is ebb and flow, systole and diastole; ordered change. The latter moves within bounds.13
Dewey rightly asserts the indissoluble union of (a) human action within a
bounded creative structure, where that action incorporates all the elements
of tension, reunion, achieved enrichment, stabilization, destabilization, and
restabilization, (b) the embodied feeling of performing or comprehendingly
experiencing such performances, and (c) the deep, engaging human
meaning of such events:
Contrast of lack and fullness, of struggle and achievement, of adjustment after consummated
irregularity, form the drama in which action, feeling, and meaning are one.14
Dewey sees rhythm in the world, in our interaction with and experience of
the world, and as a foundational element in the arts, where worldly rhythms
are depicted, or enacted.15 But his account requires amplification. It is a
central tenet of American pragmatism, deriving from the work of William
James and C. S. Peirce and developed by Dewey, that an empiricist-based
ontology gives relations between things insufficient weight. Traditional
empiricists hold that we perceive the stable solid object first, and only
subsequently place it in a relational configuration. Pragmatists respond that
this introduces a prismatic distortion in our perception and thought about
the world. Relationally situated perception is central to Dewey’s
understanding of rhythm, and of aesthetic experience:
The Empire State Building may be recognized by itself. But when it is seen pictorially it is seen
as a related part of a perceptually organized whole. Its values, its qualities as seen, are modified
by the other parts of the whole scene, and in turn these modify the value, as perceived, of every
other part of the whole. There is now form in the artistic sense.16
The fact of rhythm requires this mode of relationally situated perception. Its
perception is “relationally constituted”—a rhythmic pattern is not
perceivable as single-slice sonic events added together.17
To understand Dewey’s fundamental insight more fully, it is necessary to
grasp his conception of the live organism’s perception of form, as
manifested in a visual composition, a streetscape, a painting, a set of
sculptures within a curated exhibition, or the environmental setting within
which we as responsive and interacting organisms act. For Dewey, this form
is in essence a kind of rhythm. His “form in the artistic sense” is thus
intrinsically rhythmic. Rhythmic form is (1) in the arrangement of the
world; (2) in our perception or dynamic (each shifting and evolving
combination modifying every other part through our interactive perception)
interaction with that world; (3) in the arrangement and compositional
organization of art; and (4) in our dynamic and interactive perception of that
art.18 It moves toward its own internally generated fulfillment:19
form is not found exclusively in objects labeled works of art. Wherever perception has not been
blunted and perverted, there is an inevitable tendency to arrange events and objects with
reference to the demands of complete and unified perception.20
Berliner, Paul F., Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994).
Clarke, Eric, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning
(Oxford, 2005).
Clarke, Eric, “Music Perception and Music Consciousness,” in David Clarke and Eric Clarke, eds,
Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives (Oxford,
2011), 193–213.
Coltrane, John, Impressions, audio recording (New York, 1963).
Dewey, John, Art as Experience ([1934]; New York, 1980).
Hagberg, Garry L., “Jazz Improvisation and Ethical Interaction: A Sketch of the Connections,” in
Garry Hagberg, ed., Art and Ethical Criticism (Oxford, 2008), 259–85.
Hagberg, Garry L., “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics: The Contours of Experience,” in Alan
Malachowski, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism (Cambridge, 2013), 272–99.
Hagberg, Garry L., “The Ensemble as Plural Subject: Jazz Improvisation, Collective Intention, and
Group Agency,” in Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman, ed., Distributed Creativity: Collaboration
and Improvisation in Contemporary Music (Oxford, 2016), Chapter 13.
Mondrian, Piet, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1943), oil painting, New York, Museum of Modern
Art.
Shorter, Wayne, “Footprints,” Track 6, Footprints Live!, audio recording (Universal City, CA, 2002).
Simons, Peter, “The Ontology of Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds,
The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C3.
1
Dewey, Art as Experience, discussed in Hagberg, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics.”
2
The importance of the organism-in-environment model is recognized by recent music theorists,
though with little reference to Dewey. Clarke, Ways of Listening, Chs 1 and 3, importantly proceeds
from and develops the work of psychologist James Gibson in environmental terms.
3
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14.
4
Dewey, Art as Experience, 153.
5
The sense of life awakens in listeners a corresponding interest in the history of the piece in
question: understanding of a musical performance follows the structure of understanding a person, as
I discuss in Hagberg, “Jazz Improvisation.”
6
Dewey sees rhythm’s significance in anthropological more than biological terms: “Thus, sooner
or later, the anticipation of man in nature’s rhythms, a partnership much more intimate than is any
observation of them for purposes of knowledge, induced him to impose rhythm on changes where
they did not appear. The apportioned reed, the stretched string and taut skin rendered the measures of
action conscious through song and dance” (Art as Experience, 154).
7
Dewey, Art as Experience, 13.
8
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14
9
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14.
10
It is telling that accomplished musicians and listeners with sufficiently trained ears will wince
if a piece such as Coltrane’s “Impressions” is unexpectedly switched off by someone not in the
listening group; if power suddenly goes out at an outstanding live performance; or (worse) a power
plug is deliberately pulled. This reaction does not take place when muzak is unplugged.
11
Dewey, Art as Experience, 14.
12
Hagberg, “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics,” develops this point.
13
Dewey, Art as Experience, 15.
14
Dewey, Art as Experience, 15.
15
To comprehend Dewey’s vision of the pervasiveness of rhythmic patterns, one needs to
recognize its scope from the astronomical to the microscopic: “The existence of a multitude of
illustrations of rhythm in nature is a familiar fact. Oft cited are the ebb and flow of tides, the cycle of
lunar changes, the pulses in the flow of blood, the anabolism and catabolism of all living processes.
[But] every uniformity and regularity of change in nature is a rhythm . . . The very conceptions of
molecule, atom, and electron arise out of the need of formulating lesser and subtler rhythms that are
discovered” (Art as Experience, 155).
16
Dewey, Art as Experience, 141.
17
Simons, “The Ontology of Rhythm,” Ch. 3 in this book, discusses the need for recognizable
repetition with a process (Section 3), and “the dependent nature of rhythm,” where he rightly says,
“There is no such thing as a bare rhythm, on its own and subsisting independently of anything else. A
rhythm is always the rhythm of some complex of sounds in a relationship” (Section 10).
18
Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1943) is a work of visual art that houses, in its
content and in its titular significance, all four of these elements at once.
19
There are many examples of such internally generated fulfillment in jazz. Berliner, Thinking in
Jazz, describes Dizzy Gillespie’s comment on an Art Blakey press roll as “likening its suspension in
time to the effect of stretching a huge rubber band . . . the soloist feels the increasing tension of the
mesmerizing press roll, until its eventual release rearticulates the piece’s rhythmic structure with so
emphatic an accent” that—now in Gillespie’s words—“the world knows that that’s where the beat is”
(329).
20
Dewey, Art as Experience, 137.
21
Dewey, Art as Experience.
22
Shorter, “Footprints.” Hagberg, “The Ensemble as Plural Subject,” discusses more fully the
special kind of ensemble interaction taking place here.
23
Dewey observes that “breaking” in his sense can easily be falsely perceived in work that is
new, highly original, or groundbreaking, and that it can take the proper preparation of the perceiver to
make the coherence audible. This happened when jazz as high art emerged from what was primarily
dance music, and drummers began using what they called “broken time”: “It takes time to discern
whether the shock is caused by inherent breaks in the organization of the object, or by lack of
preparation in the perceiver” (Dewey, Art as Experience, 175).
24
Dewey writes: “The live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty.
Confusion is displeasing but so is ennui” (Art as Experience, 167).
25
Dewey, Art as Experience, 138.
26
Dewey, Art as Experience. Dewey’s opposition to the theoretical separation of the organism
from its environment prefigures recent discussions of externalism in philosophy of mind. The
embodied nature of rhythm as experienced in music, along with our Deweyan direct perception of
rhythm in nature, presents a case in which the boundaries of selfhood as traditionally conceived are
questioned: Clarke, “Music Perception.”
7
Rhythm, Preceding Its Abstraction
Deniz Peters
1. No body, no rhythm
Rhythm is not simply duration, it is duration made. Durations and
proportions can be abstracted into numerical values; but the result cuts out
the sense of immediacy with which rhythm is shared between one person
and another, or between a natural event and an observer, or between a
musical event and a listener. With the sense of immediacy being lost,
common reflections on rhythm face the challenge of deducing rhythmic
immediacy from an intellectual response to rhythmic phenomena.
Acknowledging that musical rhythm arises through our embodied existence
in a space and on an instrument, it is instantly clear that durations are one
with their bodily making—including resonant bodies—and that relations
between durations are temporal and spatial relations between bodily acts
and undergoings.
Connected to this, and also an aspect of rhythm, is the expressivity of
duration. A long-held note at the top of a climactic vocal gesture in a
performance of Fado,4 for example, is not merely a long note. It is upheld,
sustained by the fervor of an emotional disclosure, of, for instance, despair,
rebelliousness, or hope. Not only is the note’s tone one of despair, for
example, but its extent is too; were it shorter, it would not be as despairing,
rebellious, or hopeful (which is not to imply a direct relationship between
length of tone and intensity of despair). Thus durational expressivity arises
not only from one duration’s numeric difference to another, but from a
note’s realization by the body for this length.
As it is made bodily, duration can be adverbially expressive, to use Peter
Goldie’s felicitous concept.5 It is the despair, the rebelliousness, or the
hopefulness with which it is sung—in Goldie’s sense, colored in by an
emotion from a different context—that give the note its tone and its length.
Again, this is not to be understood in the sense of an isomorphic relation
between duration and expressive content, but, when we do hear
rebelliousness in a note, we hear it, in part, in its duration. Duration bears
emotional expressivity despite the opacity of the intentional object of the
singer’s emotion. By the music alone, without text or dramatic context, we
do not know the despair, rebelliousness, or hope. Due to this opacity, and
since duration encompasses bodily resonances that extend human
instrumental actions, there is an additional aspect to the making of duration
involving the imagination, to which I turn next.
2. Perceptual enactment, attention, and hermeneutical models
Just as duration is achieved through the body when making music, it is also
enacted in imagination as part of perception when listening to music—even
when evoking it in one’s “inner ear.” There are two complementary aspects
of this enactment; neither is necessarily conscious, but each can be focused
on consciously and distinctly. One aspect is that of cognitive attending, the
other that of bodily attending. On listening to a passage of minimalist
music, for example, an accented note may come to my attention, and I may
notice that I am briefly turning my attention to it, catching myself in the act
of attending, sustained perhaps only for the duration of this very accented
note. This would be conscious cognitive attending. Or, as I hear the
accented sound, I may become aware of a short tensing around the stomach
or a brief fluctuation in the solar plexus area, a trace of a movement in the
larynx. This is conscious bodily attending. Such bodily attending can occur
even with imagined music, as when imagining an intense beginning of an
emphatic gesture. In attending I might also make a small or extended
physical movement, involuntarily or intentionally, but this is yet another
matter.
Roland Barthes, in one of his inspired music-related essays, reveals his
bodily attending:
In Schumann’s Kreisleriana (Opus 16; 1838), I actually hear no note, no theme, no contour, no
grammar, no meaning . . . No, what I hear are blows: I hear what beats in the body, what beats
the body, or better: I hear this body that beats.6
The beat—corporal and musical—must never be the sign of a sign: the accent is not expressive.9
This does not contradict the rhythmic expressivity I argued for in Section 1
(No Body, No Rhythm), as Barthes refers to linguistic expressivity. His
word for the somatic expressivity I refer to is enunciation:
What does the body do when it enunciates (musically)? And Schumann answers: my body
strikes, my body collects itself, it explodes, it divides, it pricks, . . . it stretches out, it weaves . .
.10
3. Mobility of attention
4. Experiential variance
Alfred Schütz, in his classic essay “Making Music Together,” proposes that
musicking is a paradigmatic case of social interaction, in which the “inner
times” of composers, performers, and listeners synchronize in a “mutual
tuning-in.”21 Distinguishing the measurable clock time of the “outer world”
from a non-measurable, musically constituted temporal sense, Schütz calls
music “a meaningful arrangement of tones in inner time.”22 This inner,
musically given sense of time is, Schütz affirms, shared by all participants
related to a specific work, who thus enter a state of being in the same
temporal flow of events:
Although separated by hundreds of years, the [listener] participates with quasi simultaneity in
the [composer’s] stream of consciousness by performing with him step by step the ongoing
articulation of his musical thought. The beholder, thus, is united with the composer by a time
dimension common to both.23
This confirms that he takes “the flux of inner time” to be constitutive for the
production of synchronized action, rather than a synchronization with an
external timekeeper, a separate time-keeping entity. This strikes me as a
very attractive feature of his view. Yet, on the downside, Schütz does not
seem to be aware of temporal variance in the case of listening. His idea of
the listener being a co-performer is that of a precise re-creator of the
composer’s temporal experience. But this is contrary to the phenomenology
of listening, and discounts the roles attention and the perceptual making of
duration play in the emergence of rhythmicity, for if one hears the same
work a number of times, its temporal perception sometimes changes. For
example, up-tempo works can start to feel slower upon closer acquaintance.
This is often the case with virtuosic literature, such as Rachmaninoff’s
Etudes-Tableaux.
There is not, therefore, a singular, fixed sense of time that necessarily
emerges, even in a single listener’s multiple listening instances. Contra
Schütz, it is thus unlikely that listeners are in the same stream of
consciousness as the composer. Surely enough, were this the case, there
could not be different interpretations of a single work. What is entirely
possible, however, is an alignment of a listener’s temporal sense with that
of a current performance. Yet again, the emergence of a shared temporal
sense in the fullest, literally reciprocal sense, occurs between performers, if
anywhere. What is arguably most interesting about Schütz’s notion of
mutual tuning-in from an aesthetic point of view, is that its mutual,
bidirectional, symmetrical, dialogical form might indeed take place between
performers. Here, two senses of time are genuinely being negotiated into a
single shared sense of time; or, alternatively, a single, shared sense of time
really emerges interpersonally as the activity of two beings, without two
entirely separate senses of time being in place. Thought on this subject is
elaborated and refined in recent work on entrainment, to which I turn next.
Schütz’s argument raises a familiar question: How do performers entrain?
Does entrainment presuppose an inner, biologically based and skilfully
refined timekeeper of measured time, a sort of mental clock capable of
temporally guiding movement so as to produce well-kept time in
performance? Or could, alternatively, the body be capable of producing
precise regular movement on its own accord, without any distinct inner
timekeeper as a guide? Would, further, an inter-corporeal production of
such movement be conceivable? Differently put: that two performers have
to negotiate a shared sense of time, as Schütz elucidates, does not show that
they have individual senses already in place; the sense of time might
emerge between them, in the very interaction. The negotiation only shows
that if individual senses are established and kept in place, they can also
differ, which difference can be upheld, and is audible to all participants.
Martin Clayton’s work shows that entrainment takes place despite
differences in individual senses of time, and even despite their intentional
upkeeping.26 To Clayton, every participant “knows that the process of
sharing the temporal flow may be a rewarding one,”27 which is, ultimately,
what he appeals to when claiming that “Musical rhythm is irreducibly social
in nature . . . Musical rhythm originates in both endogenous physiological
rhythms and the dynamics of interaction between individual human
beings.”28
I shall complicate Clayton’s advanced understanding of togetherness by
recounting an intriguing phenomenon I encountered during duo and trio
improvisations, namely, a particularly long bodily pulsation. The bodily
rush, visceral widening, briefly increased subcutaneous flow, almost an
inner combustion at times, can, when deliberately exaggerated, be
externalized as a full body contraction and expansion, like a conductor’s
full-body gesture of phrasal emphasis. It is a feeling—like a throb of pain,
aggravation, or lust is a feeling—and though sometimes accompanied by a
conscious realization, it is not necessarily accompanied by a thought. I can
produce this feeling at will outside a musical context. Multiple instances
can be periodical, if I set my mind to it, with pauses (or bodily silences)
between the individual pulses being of two or more seconds in length.
Those pulsations can occur without metric subdivisions, yet they are rich
with the feelings of suspense, anticipation, impact, and retention. They
seem to me to be of the phrasal length observed by Nikki Moran,29 and by
Clayton in his analysis of unintentional periodicity between tanpura players.
Now, I can confirm these bodily pulsations can also occur
unintentionally, when improvising with others. Remarkably, as I
experienced them arising in free improvisation, they are not cognitions that
relate to an external timekeeper. None of the musicians openly established a
common metric structure. Yet I experienced durationally extended
pulsation; and the other players experienced them too, at exactly the same
time as myself, as turned out in numerous post-performance discussions and
listening analyses. This, as far as I can see, would be an impossible thing in
a free, non-metric duo improvisation, i.e., without a reference timekeeper,
unless we generated time together.
While this observation accords with Clayton and even Schütz, it changes
the interpretation of “inner time.” Given neither by external reference only,
nor simply by biological disposition, inner time arises within a mutually
empathic act between players. This shared, inner time allows even a small
deviation from the temporal fusion to become audible, as an ever-so-slight
disjointedness, a disagreement. This is not a case of synchrony; there are
not two clocks, but just one fused sense of time. That sense of time is fused
by way of musicking: anyone who has ever performed unison passages30
will know that this cannot be achieved by counting, or by attention to meter
alone. Such growing and flowing temporal fusions in an ensemble do not
feel as if they can be intended. Instead, they feel like they arrive, or arise,
and can be encouraged by preventing interference, i.e., by release rather
than inhibition. Importantly, however, they are upheld by a sort of attention,
as any distraction will risk their vanishing. Thus they are not inner in any
“private” sense. Schütz speaks of a “We” as the emergent form of social
interaction.31 I claim that this “We” exists, not as the sum of single
individuals, but super-individually, in temporally fused moments of
musicking. Time, in these moments, is interpersonally found and founded.
Despite the significant observation of the genuinely interpersonal genesis
of such shared temporal experiences, it is not foundational for rhythm per
se, but rather a point of epitomized rhythmic experience. Yet from the
interpersonal side of the constitution, the affectivity of rhythmic intricacy
might plausibly be seen to take root. This is recognized by Peter Nelson,
who theorizes an “emotional and aesthetic binding” inherent in rhythm.32
This binding is social in going beyond a simple, perceptual binding into the
realms of bodily interaction and interpersonal negotiation. To Nelson, to
“grasp a rhythm” is “to abandon conscious control . . . to the physical
engagement of the body with sound . . . which is always, inevitably
engagement with another body.”33 Nelson also refers to how durational
space is distributed between sound makers, e.g., between mother and infant,
and in African polyrhythm.34 Nelson conceives out-of-timeness within a
shared durational space as the medium for expressivity in “the actual flow
of the rhythmic narrative,” in his example, mother–infant interaction, where
“minute alterations can have huge significance.”35
While Nelson’s line of thought helps elucidate the social ontology of
rhythmic behavior, it only hints at potential causes of the affectivity of
rhythm. He argues that Colwyn Trevarthen’s findings on mother–infant
interaction, Gaston Bachelard’s thought on the significance of duration, and
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of gift exchange all support the idea that the
“temporal spaces between sounds or actions . . . are pregnant with
meaning”—a meaning derived from the social juxtaposition of those
involved in the exchange. Yet Nelson does explicitly analyze the concrete
link between such rhythmic meaning and affect; perhaps because he adopts
Trevarthen’s notion of pulse, whereby pulse is exteriorized, and expressed
in actions.36 Nelson treats pulse as “socially constructed ‘instants which
stand out,’ ”37 and these instants remain, at least in his account, curiously
disconnected from the body, such that listeners “think [rather than feel] one
at the same time as another person.”38
When, however, one consistently understands rhythm as felt, such as in
Andy Hamilton’s humanistic conception, sources of affectivity abound. One
can then immediately spell out, for example, that the negotiation of
temporal space and its occupation is charged with issues of power,
dominance, submission, struggle, intimacy, and rejection not only in
intellectual, symbolical terms, but in terms of felt experience. Towardness
and union, or aversion and disjunction exist on a somatic plane, and become
psychologically active through it.
This reflection on jointly created pulsation shows how analyses of
entrainment might be even further connected to analyses of social and
psychological meaning; and, complementing Schütz’s and Clayton’s
reasoning, and similar to Hamilton’s idea of projection, how bodily
imagination must be accounted for in attempting to understand
interpersonal rhythmicity.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland, “Rasch,” in The Responsibility of Forms, tr. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1991),
299–312.
Carminho [Maria do Carmo Carvalho Rebelo de Andrade], “Alfama,” at Podium Mozaiek in
Amsterdam, 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YfA7FL05M.
Clayton, Martin, “Observing Entrainment in Music Performance: Video-Based Observational
Analysis of Indian Musicians’ Tanpura Playing and Beat Making,” Musicae Scientiae, 11.1 (2007),
27–59.
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C12.
Clifton, Thomas, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly, 62.2 (1976), 163–81.
Elias, Norbert, An Essay on Time ([1984]; Dublin, 2007).
Goldie, Peter, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2000).
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: A Major and Almost Entirely Neglected Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111.1 (2011), 25–41.
Hanslick, Eduard, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics
of Music, tr. Geoffrey Payzant ([1854]; Indianapolis, 1986).
Hasty, Christopher, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne,
Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
(Oxford, 2019), C15.
Losseff, Nicky and Jenny Doctor, eds, Silence, Music, Silent Music (Aldershot, 2007).
Nelson, Peter, “Towards a Social Theory of Rhythm,” in Jean-Luc Leroy, ed., Topicality of Musical
Universals/Actualité des Universaux musicaux (Paris, 2013), 149–56.
Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).
Peters, Deniz and Simon Rose, Edith’s Problem, CD LR 812, audio recording (Newton Abbot, 2017).
Schütz, Alfred, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” in Alfred Schütz,
Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague, 1976), 159–78.
1
See Chapter 15, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm.”
2
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” develops a projective account of rhythm, in which experiences
of the rhythmicity of human behavior are, on the one hand, present in musical performance, and, on
the other, imaginatively projected upon it. Hamilton qualifies his account as dynamic, with its
essential recourse to human movement, and how the rhythm literally moves (37–41), as an essentially
embodied phenomenon; and as humanistic, in contrast to abstracting accounts that treat rhythm as
“essentially a pattern of possibly unstressed sounds and silences” (36).
3
Peters and Rose, Edith’s Problem.
4
To give but one example: instances abound in a performance of “Alfama” by Carminho at
Podium Mozaiek in Amsterdam, 2011. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8YfA7FL05M.
5
Goldie, The Emotions, 133–4.
6
Barthes, “Rasch,” 299.
7
Barthes, “Rasch,” 299.
8
Barthes, “Rasch,” 303.
9
Barthes, “Rasch,” 303.
10
Barthes, “Rasch,” 305–6.
11
Barthes, “Rasch,” 303.
12
Barthes, “Rasch,” 303.
13
Barthes, “Rasch,” 302.
14
Barthes, “Rasch,” 303.
15
Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 265–71.
16
Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful.
17
Our attention can either be drawn toward something, like a specifically articulated sound; or, in
listening out for something, we can turn our attention toward it, like a particular detail within a
texture.
18
I discuss a special case of remembering and backtracking what one has formerly failed to
notice below, in Section 6.
19
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 172.
20
Elias, Essay on Time, argues against a reified conceptualization of time (as found in naturalistic
positions), understanding time instead as a symbol for a “socially learned synthesis” (24). His
“synthesis” signifies the cognitive combination of various perceived processes, in which one (e.g. the
ebb and swell of the tide or the coming and going of sun and moon) forms a reference to the other.
Timing, as referencing between “socially standardised continua of changes” (39), is a socially
acquired skill and actually orients and historically (and culturally) alters, Elias argues, human
experience of time. In the view I unfold in this chapter, joint rhythm-making is an instance of the
shared creation of timing in Elias’s sense.
21
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 170, 173. Although he refers to Bergson’s concept of durée
in defining his concept of inner time, he does not require this inner time be private, as the shared
“stream of consciousness” that composers, performers, and listeners “live through in simultaneity” to
him is identical, i.e., without the qualitative difference the idea of a truly private time would entail.
22
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 170.
23
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 171.
24
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 171.
25
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 176.
26
Clayton, “Observing Entrainment.”
27
Clayton, “Entrainment and the Social,” this volume, 195.
28
Clayton, “Entrainment and the Social,” this volume, 196.
29
Cited in Clayton, “Observing Entrainment,” 29.
30
E.g. the first movement of Schubert’s Trio Op. 99 D 898; the second movement of his Trio Op.
100 D 929; or the fourth movement of his String Quartet No. 14 D 810, Der Tod und das Mädchen.
31
Schütz, “Making Music Together,” 17.
32
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 151.
33
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 151.
34
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 153.
35
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 153–4. In taking temporal dissonance to be socially
meaningful, Nelson thus develops a point that recalls Adorno’s idea of expressive melodic and
harmonic dissonance.
36
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 152–3.
37
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 153, quoting Bachelard.
38
Nelson, “Social Theory of Rhythm,” 155.
39
To listen out for moments of gestural appearance and disappearance can make for an exquisite
experience. A listener so inclined may choose to savor the borders of musical material, drifting away
from other current sonic events if they are below a certain markedness. Here, the rhythmicity of the
fuller sonic constellation can remain underarticulated.
40
Losseff and Doctor (eds), Silence, Music, Silent Music, offers a few more examples of such
rare work.
41
Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 164.
42
Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” 165, 167, 174, 178.
43
Foreseeably, questions of the nature of meter, accent, beat, and other aspects of rhythm might
reconfigure themselves from the newly gained view, rather than being elements out of which an
understanding of rhythm needs to be uncomfortably construed.
44
Research for this chapter was funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF: P25061-G15.
8
Mozart’s “Dissonance” and the Dialectic
of Language and Thought in Classical
Theories of Rhythm
Michael Spitzer
1. Introduction
Koch notates a bar-line between the second and third notes, demonstrating
that an accent occurs on the first beat of the second bar (Figure 8.3). A little
later, he adds that “the resting-point of perception, and also the weight or
expression through which it is made understood through performance, falls
on the first, third, and fifth note.”9
Figure 8.3 Koch’s Schlagreihe with resting points (Ruhepuncten)
For the present, there are multiple other lessons to be drawn from Koch’s
thought experiment. A rhythmic impulse is not to be understood as an
abstract theoretical construct, but in the context of musical form. As such, it
is entangled within musical form’s dialectic with time. A composition
pushes on towards its final cadence, just as, from an opposite standpoint, in
a quasi-geometrical spatial sense, the work’s hyper-metrical groupings are
gathered together from the perspective of its initial strong beat (hyper-meter
means considering a bar as a “beat” at a higher structural level, so that
meter converges with form). Weak beats complete strong beats (head
orientation) just as cadences complete phrases and pieces (end orientation).
This space–time dialectic is elaborated in Koch’s Anleitung zur
Composition in its alternating emphasis on its two core principles of
“punctuation” (phrase-ending formulas) and “rhythm” proper, by which
Koch means formal time-span grouping orientated toward heads.
A yet more radical lesson is implied by the title of this chapter, a dialectic
between language and thought. “Punctuation” is no idle analogy, but a trace
of music’s language character. Whilst the metaphor of “music as language”
was prevalent in most ages, it was particularly acute in the late eighteenth
century. Laying to one side the problematic issue of musical meaning, i.e.,
semantics, language’s syntactic side was certainly mirrored in the highly
conventionalized character of the classical style—perhaps the most
formulaic musical language ever to arise in the common-practice era
between Bach and twentieth-century modernism. Most eighteenth-century
writers talked of music in terms of an “oration,” as in Mattheson’s famous
annotation of a Marcello concerto using rhetorical figures.13 Koch calls the
first half of a phrase a “subject,” and the second half a “predicate,” by
analogy to the speculations about primitive grammar by contemporary
linguists such as Karl Wilhelm Ramler.14 Thus, just as Ramler imagined
that original word-order placed the noun at the beginning of an utterance
(akin to gesturing or pointing at an object in the world, such as a snake),
Koch saw the opening sub-phrase of a piece as akin to a grammatical
subject. Musical “subject” = linguistic subject, pun intended. Similarly, the
musical sub-phrase which completed the phrase as a whole—typically,
balancing a two-bar start with a two-bar conclusion—was imagined as a
linguistic predicate, such as a verb (e.g., “Snake, flee!,” or “Bread, give
me!”). The crux of this metaphor, however, is not that classical music’s
language character is a steady state, but that it interacts with its conceptual,
formal, character in such a way that its element of linguistic expression is
associated with endings. Punctuation is end-directed, as we have seen; and
this end-orientation is to be understood, I will claim, by the same token that
classical form becomes more lyrical, song-like, or poetic, toward its ending
—typically in sonata-form second groups. There is a received view that
second subjects are more lyrical than first subjects, a truism borne out by
many of Mozart’s sonata-form first movements, such as his “Jupiter”
Symphony. The first group is a fanfare for full orchestra; the second subject
is a much more individuated melody for first violins. They “sing,” and one
infers a metaphorical “voice,” with implicit “language.” The music, then,
becomes progressively more language-like toward the end of the form. By
the opposite token, classical form is more properly “rhythmic,” geometric,
or conceptual in its first half, just as Ruhepunct as metrical accent is head-
oriented.
A third kind of rhythmic impulse will find its way into my account, one
which is actually the most familiar of all, since it is the basis of the
prototypical “just-so” story of Enlightenment linguistics, whereby
philosophers speculated on the origin of language in indexical gestures. A
gesture is a rhythmic impulse, but—unlike musical rhythm—is also
implicitly an act of semantic communication. Rhythmic gestures are
different from the two sides of Ruhepunct also because they are
unstructured singletons, free of metrical grouping. When they occur in
classical music, it is as agents of wild or primitive expression. We will see
that the first movement of Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet projects all three
types of rhythmic impulse at different sections. This concluding analysis
will illustrate my thesis that rhythm is best understood in rich compositional
context rather than as an abstract theoretical category. Although this is true
of how rhythm operates in all musical eras, it is particularly the case for late
eighteenth-century music. Before we get to Mozart, we need to dive into the
detail of Koch’s Anleitung zur Composition, as its pedagogical, generative,
progression from small-scale to expanded form will mediate the leap from
thought experiment to musical practice.
Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style is the most influential study of the
music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven of the modern era. Discursive and
panoramic in its scope, it nonetheless never loses sight of Rosen’s focal idea
that the classical style is fundamentally one of dramatic balance. The
quintessential expression of this sensibility for structural balance is the
sonata. Every type and genre of classical music is revealed by Rosen to be
infused with the principles of sonata form. These principles were
quintessentially tonal rather than thematic. Against the received view that
form was mostly a matter of motives and themes, Rosen contended that it
was really projected by the tonal drama of tension and resolution. In a
sonata form, tension was raised through the exposition’s modulation from
the tonic to the dominant, and resolved by the return of the tonic in the
recapitulation. The same drama was unfolded within a short musical phrase.
Typically, an opening sub-phrase would end on a dominant half-close, and
would be answered by a sub-phrase cadencing on the tonic. The phrase thus
encapsulates the tonal shape of the whole, suggesting that the sonata
evolved generatively from a small-scale model.
I want to suggest that this tonal drama of tension and resolution is a kind
of rhythm. It follows on from the rhythmic models theorized by Sulzer and
Koch as the kernel of late eighteenth-century musical language. Admittedly,
tension and resolution are features of all tonal music, including styles which
don’t sound “rhythmic” at all, such as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.
Nevertheless, classical works do sound rhythmic because they project
rhythm’s qualities of symmetry and articulation through the symmetry and
articulation of their architecture at all levels.15 The periodicity of classical
phrase structure expresses the regularity of the Schlagfolge. The sharp
articulation of the classical style through phrase-endings and cadences
shares the Schlagfolge’s phenomenal quality as a series of points. That is,
classical form concentrates its syntax in finely articulated points of tonal
closure. But how do we get from the literal rhythm of a Schlagfolge (or
Schlagreihe) to the “metaphorical” rhythm of a musical phrase, or indeed
the expanded form of a full sonata? This takes us back to the pedagogical
journey of Koch’s treatise, whose purpose is to lead us step-by-step from
small-scale (literal) to large-scale (metaphorical) rhythm.
Figure 8.5 arrives toward the end of Koch’s pedagogical journey, after he
has taught the novice composer how to handle many varieties of small-scale
forms such as minuets and songs. Though only eight bars long, it is actually
a miniature outline of a hypothetical sonata-form exposition. The first thing
to note about this model is that it comprises four two-bar segments, and that
it thus notionally outlines a recursive expansion of the Schlagfolge: four
beats become four bars become four two-bar segments. The four phrases
project different tonal functions, encapsulated within the varying tonal
orientations of their endings: a tonic-phrase (ending on B); a dominant-
phrase (ending on A); a phrase on the dominant of the dominant (ending on
A); and a dominant cadence (ending on D). Koch’s quadratic structure
could be regarded, then, as a form of tonal rhythm—the four beats of a bar
expanded into four differentiated phrase endings. Such an interpretation
predicates a kind of non-continuous listening, since the four phrase endings
fall at two-bar intervals.
The second point to note is that the sub-phrases are defined as much by
their symmetrical proportion as by their endings. In Koch’s words, phrases
and segments
are distinguished from one another as parts of the whole chiefly by two characteristics: first, the
type of their endings . . . second, the length of these parts along with a certain symmetry or
proportion.16
3. Mozart’s “Dissonance”
Mozart’s String Quartet in C major, K. 465, earned its soubriquet from its
dissonant Adagio, whose chromaticism was avant-garde for its time. It
holds the key for the narrative I shall tell about the sonata-form exposition it
introduces. This exposition moves through the two kinds of metaphorical
rhythm Koch theorizes, and I shall consider it first.
Figure 8.6 Mozart, String Quartet in C major, K. 465, “Dissonance,” bars 23–6
The exposition, the first four bars of which are shown in Figure 8.6,
comprise a 22-bars tonic group (including the “first subject”), followed by a
transition, a dominant second group, and a coda—an order of events
stereotypical of a sonata form. The group demonstrates the recursively
geometric periodicity of what Koch terms “rhythm” proper. The 2 + 2 sub-
phrases in Figure 8.6 answer each other, by analogy to the four beats in a
4/4 metrical group. It does not take much imagination to hear bars 23–6 as
“metrical” (or hypermetrical) in this respect. These four bars are balanced at
a higher level at bars 27–30, which together constitute an eight-bar
antecedent phrase to a putative period. The expected eight-bar consequent
phrase to this antecedent is expanded to fourteen bars (bars 31–44), but this
extension does not disturb the perception of overriding symmetry. The
cadence at bar 44 completes a large-scale rhythmic group established by the
first beat of bar 1; the group is head-orientated.
Figure 8.7 Mozart, bars 67–97
But that is not the whole story, because the quartet begins with a twenty-
two-bar slow introduction (Figure 8.8). It’s typical of Mozart’s ear for
balance to make all three panels nearly the same length: introduction (22
bars), tonic group (22 bars) and dominant group (22 ½ bars). Its harmonic
language could hardly have afforded greater contrast to that of the diatonic
clarity of the exposition. The phrases unfold a sequence of interlocking
interrupted cadences through outlandish modulations: from C major
through B ♭ minor, F minor, E ♭ major. Each harmonic surprise creates a
tonal shock whose gestural impact constitutes “rhythm” in a different, third,
sense, to that presented in the exposition. Not rhythm as hypermetrical
periodicity; nor as rhetorical punctuation; but rhythm as seemingly
disconnected impulses. The “Dissonance” Quartet’s harmonic language
sounds wild. The sudden clarification of tonality and phrase-rhythm at bar
23 effects a kind of “sunrise” of Enlightenment reason against the backdrop
of this wildness. That is how contemporary listeners would have understood
this tonal narrative, one rehearsed in countless other works, most famously
in Haydn’s Creation.18
Mozart’s wildness also reflects current accounts of “primitive” rhythm,
most famously in Johann Forkel’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788).
Like so many of his contemporaries, Forkel was fascinated by evolutionary
theories of language—indeed, musical language. He hypothesized that the
language of music originated with a primitive phase of disconnected
gestures, because, in his view, “primitive nations are only capable of
rhythmic music,” and seem to be drawn to percussive or noisy
instruments.19 Forkel believed that individual musical tones were
unmediated cries of passion, hence “primitive man” communicated through
“interjections and simple words, with which he described external objects in
his immediate surroundings.”20 Forkel was not alone in his time in
comparing such disconnected gestures with “sentences that are formed
merely from nouns.”21 Whereas many of these ideas can be traced to
Condillac and Rousseau, their best-known exponent in the German-
speaking lands was J. G. Herder. Echoing Herder, Forkel views historical
progress as an evolution from a “language of feeling [Empfindungsprach]”
to a “language of ideas [Ideensprache].” Crucially for our discussion,
Forkel sees this progression as pivoting on repetition, i.e., meter:
Man, in his earliest state, quickly realized that all simple things can be maintained through a
certain kind of regular repetition. This regular repetition of simple things, which in itself is
capable of hardly any variety, we call in music ‘meter’, or, to give it its original term,
‘rhythm.’22
The periodic phrasing and clear articulation of the first subject evinces a
“newly found orderliness.” On the basis of this civilized syntax, the second
subject at bar 71 can relax into “a poetic and sensual medium.” Mozart’s
theme is a pastoral musette, imitating the bagpipe’s base drone and
augmented-4th skirl. A musical representation of Nature, the theme is a
musical version of the natural word-order which Herder and others
identified with poetic expression as those “fresh inversions” that
“distinguish poetry from prose.” The boldest inversion is the C# on the
down-beat of measure 72, a signal instance of the gestural head-positions of
primitive syntax. The appoggiatura has been displaced (“inverted”) from its
normative position as a syntactic phrase-ending, i.e., a tonal cue.
Placing the appoggiatura in front liberates the expressive, material
dimension which civilized syntax brackets out. Nevertheless, the musette is
by no means as irregular as the “wild” opening of the quartet, since its
sonorities are disciplined by metrical phrasing. As a hybrid between form
and formlessness, Mozart’s second subject corresponds to the median
position of modern German in Herder’s eyes, a language that can “still
combine the advantages of the poetic stage with those of the philosophical,
a high degree of order as well as freedom.”26 Mozart’s is also a language
both of the head and the heart, of civilization and nature. One is reminded
of Mozart’s description to his father of his concertos K. 413–15 as “a happy
medium between what is too easy and too difficult”: they are “pleasing to
the ear, and natural, without being vapid.”27
In conclusion, I hope that my foray into the thickets of historical music
theory has supported my claim that rhythm has an intrinsically expressive
dimension, in line with the “enhanced formalism” of the musical
experience. “Rhythm” has always been as much an ideational category in
intellectual history as a specifically musical parameter—just as “harmony”
shaded into “Universal Harmony,” and “melody” has its own metaphorical
penumbra. I have elsewhere sketched the genealogy of these three
metaphors: rhythm, melody, and harmony.28 Rhythm, which became the
dominant structural metaphor during the Classical era, is particularly
fascinating because it intersects with notions of gesture and language.
Twentieth- and early twenty-first-century approaches to rhythm (and meter)
have shorn away its ideational, metaphorical dimensions and, in the
process, impoverished its capacity to represent aspects of musical meaning
not captured by traditional analytic techniques. Otherwise put, they have
perpetuated a false dichotomy between musical structure and musical
expression, or “form” and “content.” By contrast, I have sought in this
chapter to show how rhythm is inextricably bound up with music’s rational
and linguistic qualities; and to suggest that a trajectory from reason to
language is wired into the normative course of musical processes. Although
my entry-point into this sphere has been through recherché historical
manuscripts, I maintain that the truths they illuminate are immanent to the
music and available to listeners today.
Works Cited
Baker, Nancy, Heinrich Koch: Introductory Essay on Composition (New Haven, 1983).
Batteux, Charles, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (Paris, 1746).
Bonds, Mark Evan, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge,
MA, 1991).
Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1788).
Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: On Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford, 2002).
Hepokoski, James and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations
in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford, 2006).
Koch, Heinrich, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3 vols (Rudolstadt, 1782–93).
Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
Levinson, Jerrold, Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics (Oxford, 2006).
Mattheson, Johann, Der vollkommene Capellmeister [The Perfect Chapelmaster] (Hamburg, 1739).
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, The Letters of Mozart and his Family, 2 vols, ed. Emily Anderson
(London, 1966).
Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (London, 1971).
Rothstein, William, Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music (New York, 1989).
Scaglione, Aldo, The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Presence
(Minneapolis, 1981).
Schachter, Carl, “Rhythm and Linear Analysis: Durational Reduction,” Music Forum, 5 (1980), 197–
232.
Spitzer, Michael, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago, 2004).
Sulzer, Johann Georg, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, Part 2, vol. 2 (Biel, 1777).
1
Goehr, Quest for Voice, 19.
2
Levinson, Contemplating Art, 101.
3
Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 527.
4
My Metaphor and Musical Thought gives the Leibnizian background of Sulzer’s musical
aesthetics, and a fuller account, with particular reference to Heinrich Koch, of eighteenth-century
theories of rhythm and language.
5
Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 278.
6
Koch borrows the term from Batteux, Les beaux arts.
7
Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 224.
8
Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 282.
9
Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 282.
10
Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 283.
11
Koch, Anleitung zur Composition, 283.
12
I borrow the idea of tensing and relaxing branches from the Chomskian tree-structures in
Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s generative model in Theory of Tonal Music.
13
Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric.
14
Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, 231–2.
15
Talk of form as “rhythmic” was especially fashionable in the 1980s, in association with
Schenkerian reduction of structural levels. See, e.g., Schachter, “Durational Reduction”; Rothstein,
Phrase Rhythm in Tonal Music.
16
Quoted in Baker, Heinrich Koch, 2–3.
17
Hepokoski and Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory.
18
The dramatic shift from “The Representation of Chaos” to the creation of light.
19
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 5.
20
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 6.
21
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 5.
22
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 4.
23
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik, 5.
24
Forkel, Geschichte der Musik.
25
Quoted in Scaglione, German Word Order, 74.
26
Scaglione, German Word Order, 75.
27
Mozart, Letters, 2: 833.
28
Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought.
9
Rhythm and Popular Music
Alison Stone
In this chapter I explore some ways that rhythm affects us in popular music.
This raises straightaway the question of how “popular music” is to be
understood: the concept is notoriously problematic and while many attempts
have been made to define it, all are contentious. Different authors use the
term differently, and overall the term covers “a wide range of fundamentally
different musics,” as Max Paddison points out.1
Some authors take “popular music” to encompass traditional folk music;
for others, “popular” and “folk” oppose both one another and a third term,
“art music.” Within this tripartite popular–folk–art division, “folk” is
supposedly the traditional music of the people rather than the elite, stemming
from rural and pre-modern contexts, while “popular” music is also non-elite
but this time aimed at the urban masses in industrial, modern, commercial
contexts. Since the nineteenth century, the musical styles and practices of
cabaret, music hall, minstrelsy, cabaret, and “light” classical music
popularized for dancing have all at times been counted as “popular.”2 So have
jazz, blues, country, Tin Pan Alley, and big band music; rhythm-and-blues
and rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s; and more recently the array of genres that
descend from rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll—including rock, pop, soul,
funk, electronic dance music (EDM), and rap. Clearly, then, “popular music”
encompasses a range of musical forms and styles. They are diverse not only
in their specifically musical features, but also in their social meanings and
their levels of compliance with or antagonism to the context of capitalist
commodity production.
My focus in this chapter is on the field of popular music genres since rock
’n’ roll, which I call either “post-rock ’n’ roll music” or just “popular music”
for short (thus, unless otherwise indicated, from here on I use the term
“popular music” in this restricted sense). These post-rock ’n’ roll genres still
differ enormously, but they share the following cluster of features:
(1) extensive recording and technological mediation, prioritizing
recording over performance.
(2) four layers of texture: (i) melody (vocal or not), (ii) harmony, (iii)
functional bass, and (iv) “explicit beat,” i.e., indefinitely pitched
percussion (“unpitched” for short). Allan Moore explains:
The vast field that is popular music . . . exhibits a strong tendency to display four functional
layers. Not all will be present in every example, not all will remain unchanging throughout . .
. However, while one layer may be absent, or changes in these layers may occur in the course
of a track, they do so against the background assumption of their presence. It is the principal
norm of popular music.3
Although the musicians who provide the bass and explicit beat layers
are often said to work as a unit to form a band’s “rhythm section,”
these are two theoretically distinct layers of texture with distinct roles.
The role of bass, in particular, is to mediate between the pitched
elements (melody and harmony) and the unpitched percussion,
playing notes that define the chords and underlie the melody, but
stating a definite, usually repeated rhythm that locks in with the
percussion.
(3) Particular instruments realize these layers according to a historical
pattern—respectively: (i) vocals, electric guitar, or synthesizer; (ii)
electric guitar or synthesizer, again, for the chords; (iii) bass guitar or
synthesized bass; and (iv) drums, drum-machines and other
percussion media. But instruments can swap roles: for instance, in rap
the vocals are sometimes entirely unpitched, and so function
rhythmically and not melodically.
(4) A common approach treats chords “vertically” rather than
“horizontally.”4
(5) Songs tend to be constructed repetitively, with small units of musical
material presented at each layer of sound, and these units repeated in
temporal alignment with one another, e.g., with phrases of melody
repeated in time with repeated chord sequences. These combined
blocks of repeated materials are then repeated, with variations, to
yield whole songs organized in verse/chorus or similar formal
patterns.5
In this chapter I focus on another feature commonly found in post-rock ’n’
roll music: a strong rhythmic dimension.6 It is because of this emphasis on
rhythm that music in many popular genres solicits us to dance and move;
songs can energize, elate, enrage, depress our spirits, or wind us down. These
affective reactions have somatic roots, bound up with changes in bodily
energy. Art music has somatic effects too, but popular music genres such as
rock ’n’ roll, disco and EDM are most notable in this regard.
Leading into my exploration of this rhythmic dimension, I want to begin
with a question about value. Theorists such as Robert Grossberg recognize
rock ’n’ roll’s (and related genres’) rhythmic dimension and bodily appeal,
and for Grossberg these features are sources of positive value, as
the power of the music lies not in what it says but in what it does, in how it makes one move and
feel. . . . Rock and roll is corporeal and ‘invasive’ . . . [and] without the mediation of meaning,
[its] volume and repetitive rhythms produce a real material pleasure . . .7
Figure 9.1 Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean,” cabasa, drums, bass guitar, and synthesizer, timing c.00:20–
00:24
If explicit beat spells out meter, meter also regulates the repetitions of
musical elements. Metric constraints govern the length of each element (e.g.,
the bass line in “Billie Jean”) and the points in time when each element
begins and ends, thereby coordinating the elements presented at each layer of
sound. Higher-level groupings determine the length of each song section and
the points at which instrumental patterns change between sections. For
example, the chorus section of a typical popular song might be constructed
out of (a) four repetitions of a four-chord sequence, within which each chord
is presented for one measure; these align with (b) four phrases of melody,
each four measures long; (c) eight repetitions of a two-measure bass line; and
(d) sixteen repetitions of a one-measure percussion pattern. These repetitions
can be coordinated due to the presupposed uniform metrical grid, against
which the durations of all iterated units are measured.
The worry suggested by Adorno, then, is that repetitive organization in
popular music dominates individual musical materials with a quasi-
mathematical grid. Explicit beat spells out the regulating role of this grid.
Further, in its structured repetition, popular music is organized by “measured
time.”10 This is abstract, mathematized time, an artifact of modern science,
abstracted from the irregular, qualitatively varying, lived time of human
experience, and from the uneven temporal processes of nature. To control
natural processes, time is reduced to successive units of identical duration, a
series of infinitely divisible “nows” that we can reckon and calculate with to
intervene into nature. The musical result is meter, where a measure is the
basic temporal unit, each of these units can be divided (e.g., into four quarter-
notes), and those divisions can be subdivided again ad infinitum. In the other
direction, measures can be added endlessly to build up compositions of any
length; this time is divided into identical units. Further, from Adorno’s
perspective, clock-time is an integral factor in industrial society and the
factory system, enabling productive tasks to be broken down into their
components and those components to be timed, apportioned to different
individuals, and coordinated. Thus popular music’s repetitive organization
renders it potentially complicit with capitalism and its domination over the
material world—both the materiality of human bodies and of natural things.
I’ll argue, though, that in its typical approach to meter and rhythm, popular
music challenges rather than reinforces the domination of clock time over the
lived, bodily world. Crucially, popular music typically has a layer of explicit
percussive rhythm (see Section 2). The rhythms of the other sound layers
either reinforce or pull against the percussion rhythm, and so come to form a
dynamic of partly conflicting, partly intertwining energies (Section 3). In
virtue of these complex rhythmic pulls-and-pushes, popular songs solicit us
to move our bodies in time with them (Section 4). But songs do not exert
compulsive force on our bodies as Adorno feared. Rather, we make sense of
songs’ conflicting energies at a bodily level. In moving to music we are
effectively thinking through its rhythms with the tacit, practical intelligence
of our bodies, modeling movements of our body parts on shifts of emphasis
and timing in the music. In turn, we apprehend the music as energetic just
because it invites bodily participation. The measured time that enables this
rhythmic dimension to crystallize within popular music is a formal construct
that elicits the intelligent activity of our bodies. Precisely these formal and
conceptual qualities enable the music to take on an energetic character and
enable our bodies to exercise intelligent agency in response. So, against
Adorno, our bodies are empowered. Contrary to Grossberg, however, they are
empowered as intelligent agencies and not as brute material objects.
2. Explicit Beat and the Backbeat
Explicit beat or explicit rhythm is one of the four typical layers of sonic
texture in popular music.11 It is “explicit” in several respects:
(1) Whether they are real or synthetic, the standardly used drums of
popular music (snare drum, bass drum, toms, hi-hat, and cymbals) are
unpitched, with most of the other percussion commonly used in pop
songs—hand-claps, floor-stomps, tambourines, maracas, etc. Being
unpitched, these instruments or media provide only rhythm without
also contributing to melody and harmony. Because not all these
percussive media are drums, I talk throughout of “percussion” rather
than “drums” regarding this layer of the texture, except in specific
reference to drums.
(2) Typically the percussion layer is present throughout a song. Some
percussion patterns are episodic: cymbal splashes or drum fills
marking transitions between sections, or drum solos. But generally
those episodes are part of the percussion layer present throughout a
song. Popular songs without unpitched percussion do exist—such as
the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”—but are rare.
(3) The percussion layer normally presents a short rhythmic pattern or
cell that is repeated either for the whole song or a whole section. As in
“Billie Jean,” it is common for a percussion pattern to last for one
measure and so be repeated once per measure. Multiple repetitions of
these patterns are then assembled to make up the entire percussion
layer of a track. Usually these patterns are repeated with variations, or
with additional episodes such as drum fills.
(4) Popular music tends to emphasize the backbeat, i.e., beats two and
four in each measure in 4/4 time. This is usually done by sounding the
snare drum on beats two and four, and the bass drum on one and
three. Because the snare drum is smaller than the bass drum its sounds
have higher frequencies (although no precise pitch) and therefore
stand out more, so that the snare’s whip-crack sound cuts through the
texture more audibly than the duller thud of the bass drum. The
prominence of the snare drum can be increased further by other
means, such as its being struck more forcibly, mixed louder, treated
electronically, recorded with echo, or a combination of these. For
example, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” emphasizes the
snare-drum beats so heavily that they sound like explosions.
That strategy continues in rock ’n’ roll, for Bradley, so that what he calls “the
beat”—the constant, explicit rhythm in the background—ceases to be
alienating and is made into a resource against which individuals can realize
themselves freely and creatively.16 The contributions of vocalists, lead
guitarists, etc., musically and symbolically enact the freedom of the
individual from oppressive clock-time.17
For Bradley, that freedom is symbolized by the rhythmic, melodic, and
other variations that vocalists or “lead” instrumentalists effect against the
explicit beat. But we can also apply Bradley’s argument to the explicit beat
layer itself. Yes, we might say, the snare and bass drums (or other percussion
instruments) present a standard beat that encapsulates clock time, but that
beat is subjected to countless variations. These variations on what each
percussion instrument is doing, and how and when it does it, embody the
freedom of individuals to modify and inflect the standard bass-and-snare
beat.
Moreover, there is a stronger sense in which popular music’s standard
bass-and-snare beat establishes an alternative to clock time and its attendant
power relations—not only in the endless variations under which it appears,
but in its standard 4/4 bass-and-snare shape. We turn here to Ted Gracyk’s
account of explicit rhythm, which follows jazz historian Gunther Schuller in
describing the backbeat, descending from early jazz, as a “democratized
beat.”18 To explain this, I need to clarify how I understand rhythm, meter, and
beat.
The definition of musical rhythm is contested, but we may take it that a
rhythm arises when within a series of connected sounds some stand out over
others as “stronger” than others. Several factors, not just relative volume,
make for strength or weakness.19 A rhythm, then, is a pattern of stressed and
unstressed sounds. Meter is “bonded rhythm”:20 a system for organizing and
imposing regularity on rhythmic patterns so that the strong and weak points
regularly fall in certain places relative to one another. Not all music is metric
(many songs that follow the varying emphases of speech are non-metric, save
for the cadence of speech) and different metric systems exist in different
cultures. My concern, however, is with meter in its Western form as it has
crystallized from 1600 onwards, since this kind of meter is what popular
music generally presupposes. In this system, pulses in the flow of time are
evenly placed and used to demarcate the music into measures, each
containing a given number of pulses. The first pulse—or beat—in each
measure is strongest.21 This is because it marks the boundary between
measures, and is thus the point to begin counting out the time. While the first
beat in each measure is thus accented, musicians may or may not physically
stress it (subtly or conspicuously).
Beats, then, are points or pulses in time that mark out the divisions of the
measure to which a song is set, and in this sense need not be sounded. On the
other hand, in popular music, because there is normally an “explicit beat”
layer, it is normal that at least some pulses are sounded. Standardly, when the
metre is 4/4, the bass and snare drums distribute between them the task of
sounding out the four pulses that divide each measure. Thus implicit pulse
becomes explicit beat.
Meter establishes a hierarchy between the beats in each 4/4 measure, with
beat one on top, beat three behind it, then two, then four.22 Because it stresses
the backbeat, popular music’s basic beat rejects that metric hierarchy, re-
emphasizing the beats that are marked metrically as weak. Implicitly, then,
popular music’s typical stress on the backbeat subverts the hierarchy bound
up with meter and, by extension, can be said to reject the broader set of
power relations bound up with measured time.
However, the word “democratization” is potentially confusing, as the
formerly weak beats seem simply to be raised to dominant position.23
Popular music, it may be argued, stresses the backbeat but still presupposes
an accent on beat one. In that case beats one (and three) would be privileged
metrically while beats two (and four) are privileged in actual practice—
resulting in rough overall equality. But does popular music presuppose that
the downbeat is accented? Joel Rudinow argues otherwise, stressing African
influences:
Western musicology has been given to theorizing the back beat as a ‘displacement’ of accent from
presumed normal expectations . . . and thus as an instance of ‘syncopation’, which is in turn
understood to be basically a matter of upsetting rhythmic expectations . . . however, the
presumption as to which expectations are ‘normal’ is objectionable from the point of view of
ethnomusicology . . . unlike European and European-derived musical traditions, African-derived
rhythmic organization does not always accent the reference beat (the one) . . . [which] need not
even be enunciated. . . . it would be a misleading . . . to theorize the back beat as . . . a ‘departure
from normal rhythmic expectations.’24
Perhaps post-rock ’n’ roll music simply operates with a norm on which beats
two (and four) rather than one (and three) are accented.
But this view is incorrect. Contrary to Rudinow, popular music works with
inherited Western meter as well as African-rhythmic practices, and continues
to accent the downbeat, while instituting a new norm of stressing the
backbeat. The two forces—metric and rhythmic, structural and practical—are
pitted against one another to generate conflicting energies.
Returning to the idea that the popular music beat is “democratized,” the
unexpected placements of sounds in (b) and (c) introduce a further type of
democratization. Any 4/4 measure can be subdivided indefinitely, but initially
into eight equal parts. Thus
1234
becomes
1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and
Each eighth-note pair (1-and) adds up to a quarter-note beat (1) at the higher
level, where each quarter-note beat begins on the first of each eighth-note
pair, giving it priority. This norm filters down from the higher-level
prioritization of beat one as marking the start of each measure. Here is
another hierarchy implied in meter, which can be subverted by beginning a
sound on the second half of any quarter-note beat (whether or not the sound
runs on into the next beat). The same kind of subversion or syncopation (a
“timing displacement”) can be accomplished at any subdivision of the beat:
the finer-grained the subdivision, the more possibilities for subversion.
This kind of syncopation presupposes measured time and metric hierarchy
just as the stressed backbeat does: the norm must be presupposed to be
subverted. Thus, popular music presupposes metric hierarchy by using that
hierarchy, playing it off against the stress on the backbeat and against timing
displacements to create a dynamic pull of energies between different beats—
those that are metrically accented and those that are rhythmically stressed or
sound in unexpected places. Metric accent is mobilized into a resource for
producing dynamic pulls and counter-pulls of energy within a song.
Central to this process is the presence of an explicit beat layer to which
every layer of sound becomes related. Songs become fields of energy,
containing forces pulling and pushing with and against one another. We
apprehend the music in this way insofar as we come to enact its tensions with
our bodies and so experience the music’s rhythmic tensions as being
energetic in turn—as sharing in the character of the bodily energies and
impulses that they invite. Or so I now argue.
Critics and proponents of popular music agree that it acts on our bodies
through its explicit rhythmic dimension. But what is the nature of this action?
One might assume that it is causal, affecting our bodies much as one billiard
ball knocks another into motion. However, this cannot be correct; our bodies
are not mere causal mechanisms. We are bodily agents. As de Beauvoir
writes, the body is “our grasp on the world and the outline of our projects.”25
She does not mean that I use my body as an external vehicle for executing my
plans, as I use a car or bicycle for traveling to work, picking up and putting it
down as required. Rather I, as body, decide what projects to pursue just in
deciding how to do something physically by forming an initial bodily sketch
or outline of the action, which I then execute. But if my body is thus the
primary location of my agency and not a mere mechanism, efficient causation
cannot be the route along which musical rhythms affect us somatically. To
consider how these effects occur, we look at the nature of our bodily agency
as explored by de Beauvoir and other phenomenologists such as Merleau-
Ponty.
Their view is that my projects are inherently bodily, involving I-as-body
navigation. I-as-body make sense of surrounding space from the perspective
of my possibilities of movement. This is a tacit process; I act actions,
adjusting my movements, and forming habits, such as the postures by which I
keep a bicycle balanced. For Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, this is primarily
how I experience my body—as identical with me to the extent that I am an
everyday, practical agent going about my daily activities. I exercise
intelligence tacitly, identical with the practical operations of my body.
There is a secondary perspective that we each take on our bodies: I regard
my body from the outside, as an object. For Merleau-Ponty, I adopt this
perspective when breakdowns occur in my habitual, practical, routines: if
something malfunctions, say if I become ill, I turn and look at the body with
which, from the primary first-person perspective, I was simply identical.26 In
this perspective I “have,” rather than “am,” my body. The secondary
perspective makes possible a tertiary, scientific one—in which, having
adopted the standpoint of viewing our bodies and their processes as objects,
we scrutinize and analyze them in abstract, scientific terms. We use explicit
intelligence to make calculations regarding the body, and experience this kind
of intelligence as set over against the body.
My bodily agency can be interpreted in several ways. For early Sartre, I
freely envisage possible actions, and in the light of them, confer meaning on
the world.27 If I choose to take an uphill walk, the hill becomes an
opportunity or challenge, not an obstacle or indifferent natural feature, as
when I want to travel quickly to the hill’s other side. Plausibly, though, the
relation between environment and activities is more reciprocal than Sartre has
it. Environments, situations, and objects are not formless until we frame
possibilities; rather, any environment presents us with determinate
possibilities. A steep hill does not offer a casual, effortless stroll. Objects and
situations afford us definite possibilities of action. What these possibilities
are depends on objects’ physical properties, although the possibilities do not
reduce to this physical base, but arise in the relation between objects and
agents.28
From this perspective, music affords us various possibilities of action. In
the case of popular music these include singing or singing-along; imitating
performers’ gestures and behaviors; playing along, if one has the skills;
moving in time; dancing; exercising; and regulating one’s emotions by
listening to certain songs to cultivate a given mood. Bodily movement is
central to all these activities. Playing, performing, and singing-along involve
repeated bodily movements, and uses of popular music in exercise depend on
its propensity to energize us. Emotional regulation, too, has a bodily
component, with music raising or decreasing our levels of energy.
The movements that popular music encourages do not reduce to dancing.
There is an immense variety of ways of moving to popular music, with dance
practices themselves ranging from the anarchic to highly structured, rule-
governed dance routines (such as the Macarena); from individual to
collective behaviors; and from the restrained and decorous to the ecstatic and
euphoric. Ways of moving can fall short of dancing proper: bobbing one’s
head, tapping one’s fingers or feet, jiggling slightly while performing tasks
around the house, or making gestures such as punching the air or leaping.
Focusing on bodily movement, rather than dance more narrowly, how does
popular music afford possibilities for movement? Bill Haley remarked that
I felt that if I could take, say, a Dixieland tune and drop the first and third beats, and accentuate the
second and fourth, and add a beat the listeners could clap to as well as dance, this would be what
they were after.29
Haley’s remark pertains to the norms for different layers of sound both to
emphasize different beats and also to put sounds and silences in unexpected
places relative to the beat that other layers of sound spell out. These
differences invite listeners to align movements and gestures of their different
body parts with these different points of emphasis or timing in the music, for
example by clapping hands on beats two and four (with the snare drum)
while separating the hands on beats one and three (with the bass drum).
Someone might do this while, say, first centering their pelvis on beats one
and two then thrusting out their hip on beat three and four. Schematically, we
align different body movements with different divisions of the beat and make
each movement when the emphasis falls in a given place. As we move, we
exert energy. We feel the energy in our bodies shift from one place to another,
as different body parts are tensed and relaxed in moving them.
Mostly we do not consciously plan these gestures, although someone can
practice a particular routine in the mirror. Generally, moving to music is
carried out at a directly bodily level without reflective control. Moreover,
there is no set way in which particular rhythmic patterns must become
mapped by bodily movements. Here the intelligent body devises endless
ways to map rhythmic shifts corporeally (usually incorporating social and
cultural mediations, so that dance styles carry social connotations). Thus,
when the music offers us possibilities of movement, we gain a possibility of
bodily self-realization instead of passively accepting the effects of
compulsive force. Our bodies exercise practical agency by generating
meaningful patterns of movement. In addition, they exercise latent
intelligence, making sense of music’s rhythms by generating these patterns.
We do not make explicit calculations regarding the music and how to move to
it—e.g., “this song has a bpm (beats-per-minute) of 130 so I should move my
legs at this speed.” Rather, there is a trial-and-error process by which we
attempt certain movements to a given track and adjust them until they “fit”
the music. DJs and studio practitioners may calculate that songs with a
certain bpm arouse people to dance. But here they assume an already existing
practice in which we respond to music at a tacit, bodily level.
By virtue of its pronounced rhythmic qualities, then, popular music appeals
to our bodies as perceptive agencies. Our response is intelligent and creative
in finding individual and endlessly variable patterns of movement that map
those rhythms. This is a positive value of popular music; it invites us to
participate in its rhythms, exercising our latent bodily intelligence.
To return to our problem of value, the rhythms of popular songs do
presuppose measured time: popular music is constructed repetitively with
homogeneous time serving to measure out and coordinate its repetitions. But
the repeated elements have their own rhythms in relation to the explicit beat
—supporting it, pulling against it, or oscillating. Thus, measured time enables
the rhythms of each layer of sound to stand in a dynamic relation. The pull of
stressed backbeat against metric accent presupposes meter; the tensions
produced by unexpected placements of sounds or silences rely on the metric
subdivision of the beat. Thus, measured time is used in popular music to
intensify its rhythmic quality and its consequent invitation to movement.
Measured time is used to further the realization of the intelligence and
creativity of our bodies. This way of employing measured time subverts the
power relations embedded in the clock time that organizes scientific inquiry
and industrial social life. Whereas ordinarily clock-time is an instrument by
which nature and materiality are analyzed, controlled, and dominated, in
popular music measured time becomes a resource for creating fields of
energy that empower embodied human agents.
Works Cited
1
Paddison, “Critical Reflections,” 197. Birrer, “Definitions and Research”; Jones and Rahn,
“Definitions of Popular Music”; Middleton, Studying Popular Music, esp. Ch. 1; Gracyk, Rhythm and
Noise, esp. Ch. 1, and “The Aesthetics of Popular Music”; Leach, “Popular Music”; and Tagg,
“Analysing Popular Music,” address the problems of defining popular music.
2
Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, discusses the evolution of the category of “popular” music.
3
Moore, Song Means, 20–1.
4
Moore, Song Means, 71.
5
Covach, “Form in Rock Music,” discusses verse/chorus, AABA, and other forms in popular
music. On feature (1), see Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise; on (2) and (3), Moore, Song Means, 20–1; on
(4), Moore, Song Means, 71; and on (5), Middleton, Studying Popular Music. A cluster-based account
places a song in the popular (post-rock-’n’-roll) field if it exemplifies, to a sufficient degree, enough
standard features of this field.
6
Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 7, comments of popular music that its “only common
element” is “a strong rhythmical component, and generally, but not exclusively, . . . electronic
amplification.” That said, the rhythmic component is stronger in some genres, such as disco, than
others.
7
Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out, 113.
8
Gilbert and Pearson, Discographies.
9
E.g. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 29.
10
Abel, Groove.
11
Moore, Song Means, 20–1; Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise.
12
Keil and Feld, Music Grooves.
13
Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 61–2; see also Roholt, Groove.
14
Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll, 48.
15
Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll, 49.
16
Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll, 50.
17
Bradley, Understanding Rock ’n’ Roll, 51.
18
Schuller, Early Jazz; Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise.
19
“Rhythm may be defined as the way in which one or more unaccented beats are grouped in
relation to an accented one” and “such factors as duration, intensity, melodic contour, regularity . . .
play a part in creating an impression of accent” (Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 6–7).
20
Sachs, quoted in Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
21
“Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between more or less regularly recurring
accents. Therefore, in order for meter to exist, some of the pulses in a series must be accented—marked
for consciousness—relative to others. When pulses are thus counted within a metric context, they are
referred to as beats. Beats which are accented are called ‘strong’; those which are unaccented are called
‘weak’ ” (Cooper and Meyer, Rhythmic Structure of Music, 4).
22
“Fundamental to the idea of meter is the notion of periodic alternation of strong and weak beats .
. . For beats to be strong or weak there must exist a metrical hierarchy—two or more levels of beats”
(Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music, 19). For them, if we ascend a level—in 4/4, from
quarter-notes to minims—the “strong” beats at 4/4 level (one and three) are the ones that remain
present at the minim level; hence their strength.
23
Abel, Groove, 49–50.
24
Rudinow, Soul Music, 121–2.
25
De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 66, translation emended.
26
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 157.
27
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 628.
28
My understanding of the concept of affordance comes from Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. See
also DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, 45.
29
Gillett, Sound of the City, 24.
10
Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical
Expressiveness
Ted Gracyk
For no melody has the power to awaken a true sensation or a real feeling in us if the rhythmic does
not order all movement of the tone-feet in a way that produces some pleasing relationship together
and against each other.
Johann Mattheson, The Perfect Chapelmaster (1739)
Objects and events that lack mental states cannot express emotions. Yet
there is a standard use of “express” that recognizes that non-sentient objects
can be used as vehicles to express emotions. Why is music among these
things? The underlying problem is how and why we successfully map the
language of emotional expression onto music.4
I employ the neutral phrase “expressive qualities” as a generic label for
any features of a public display that indicate which emotion is being
expressed. A display of expressive qualities expresses an emotion when it
reveals an occurrent emotion.5 Such qualities may also be displayed when
no such emotion is present, as when there is either insincerity or there is
mere expressiveness. Thus one feigns surprise for the surprise birthday
party that was not actually a surprise. Composers and musicians frequently
build expressive qualities into their music without thereby expressing their
own emotions. It is thus possible that very few musical compositions
express the emotions of their composers. A composer wracked with grief is
unlikely to have composed Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The same point
holds for Janet Baker’s performances of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder.
Baker’s expressiveness is like Natalie Wood’s tears in the film West Side
Story (1961)—it is likely that she performed sadness.6 However, while it is
obvious that the ability to shed tears on cue is a good way to feign sadness,
why does singing a specific melody, orchestrated in a certain way, convey
the depths of grief? The expressive quality of “Wenn dein Mütterlein” is
independent of the libretto, for the music conveys grief even if one does not
understand German. The core problem is that knowledgeable listeners
display considerable agreement about which expressive qualities are present
in instrumental music—for example, that the ending of Vaughan Williams’
Symphony No. 6 is perceived as resignation.
Some contend that these recognitions of grief and resignation are cases of
metaphorical thinking.7 However, there is no reason why we must
consciously apply the concept of sadness to the music in order to perceive
its sadness. Yet that would have to be the case if we were to hold that we
employ a metaphor when we say that music has a particular expressive
quality. At the same time, our intersubjective agreement does not require
literal usage. Thus Todd contends that any talk of musical tempo involves
reference to “a fictitious variable since it cannot be measured directly.”8 He
might be right, but reference to a fictitious variable does not disrupt the
meaningfulness of conversations about tempo, such as the suitability of
Beethoven’s very precise tempo indications for his symphonies.
Finally, music’s expressiveness is not explained by regarding music as a
universal language of the emotions. For example, Raga Yaman is a flowing,
soothing melodic framework, generally performed as a flute piece.
Knowledgeable Hindustani listeners regard it as expressing romantic
yearning (sringâra). In its cultural tradition, its performance can be
understood to express longing, most often the romantic longing of separated
lovers.9 It can also express religious longing. However, listeners unfamiliar
with the Hindustani tradition do not perceive its intended expressivity.
Playing it for American students, I have asked them to select its rasa or
“taste” from the standard rasa list—the majority identify the mood as
sorrowful (nearer to karuna, compassion). These results correspond with
those of a more systematic study, where American students perceive
expressive qualities, but do not strongly agree on their identification.10 At
the same time, the majority of my students identify the Adagietto from
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as sringâra (longing) rather than karuna
(compassion, or sorrow). Despite their ignorance of Mahler’s music
generally and the Adagietto specifically, their familiarity with the basic
structures of Western classical music guides and justifies a fine-grained
response. Such experiments confirm that many musical indicators of
expression are culturally specific and learned, and therefore the test of
expression must be the consensus of culturally immersed or knowledgeable
listeners.11 As Meyer writes, “the languages and dialects of music are
many.”12 This point extends to rhythm, too, and so also to the latter’s
expressive contribution.
II
III
The two Presto variations preserve the original key and meter. Where
variation ten frolics gleefully, the nineteenth charges forward with
determination. The expressive differences among these waltzes are largely
due to differences in tempo and, where there is a shared tempo, to rhythmic
differentiation.
As Justin London writes, “Meter is a perceptually emergent property [of
music]”; we frequently impose rhythmic organization even when no
perceptible accents are present.21 More importantly, the experience of meter
requires entrainment—attentional and bodily anticipation of a periodically
regular accent, of invariance within variance. An extended rhythmic
sequence can typically be heard in any number of metric frameworks, a
point of some importance to my subsequent argument. Because rhythm and
meter are intertwined, any attempt to treat one as logically prior to the other
is ultimately specious. Crucially, there cannot be a perception of metric
regularity within rhythmic diversity unless there is entrainment: “Musical
meter is the anticipatory schema that is the result of our inherent abilities to
entrain to periodic stimuli in our environment.”22 However, this anticipation
involves something more than mere attentive expectation. A listener’s
anticipatory schema is a mental representation of sensory-guided action
involving their own musculoskeletal system.23 Perception of a beat and a
tempo requires motor planning of bodily action.
Foot tapping is the paradigm demonstration of entrainment. A basic
referent tempo is established by the length of time between these strong
accents, with longer lengths providing slower music. Thirty beats per
minute is the slowest that we respond to as an entrainable beat; it is
experienced as crawling, barely moving. Metric perception also involves
awareness of subdivisions heard within the baseline beat. Listeners who
foreground twelve tonal events within the “space” of two downbeats hear
that musical line as moving more rapidly than do listeners who focus on
four tonal events within the hierarchy of events in that same stretch of
music. Metric entrainment is more than just a means of counting notes and
gauging musical tempo. It also involves an awareness of our bodily
deportment and movement that synchronizes us with the occurrent music.
To have a sense of tempo is, in part, to have a sense of our own velocity,
either of the whole body or of a limb.24 Even if we do not move to music,
we do not feel its beat unless we engage in “beat induction” by constructing
a “motor representation of the musculoskeletal system,” that is, we do not
locate the beat unless we perceive how we ourselves would move—and
what at what speed—in synchronizing our movements to the regular strong
accent.25 This correspondence between bodily motion and musical
understanding is routinely exploited so that music can be used to lock a
group into a measured pace, or so that work songs can be used to
synchronize workers. Synchronized dancing is another adaptation of
entrainment.
However, beats per minute do not tell the whole story. Rhythms coincide
and are hierarchically ordered. Music with a steady tempo becomes
phenomenally faster and slower as musical events are crowded within, or
dispersed among, the anticipated downbeats. Again, the point is illustrated
by comparing Diabelli’s original waltz with Beethoven’s thirteenth
variation; or Bruce Springsteen’s standard arrangement of his own song,
“The River.” It opens with a harmonica and an indeterminate meter, settles
into a plodding tempo, and then suddenly bursts into a rapid rush of
giddiness at the line: “But I remember us driving in my brother’s car.” Yet
the downbeats are as evenly spaced as before. The rapidity and the
accompanying emotional change are largely due to the way that the melodic
line suddenly becomes dense with notes. Because we regard the vocal
melody as central to the musical action, the music seems to speed up, even
if, metronomically, it does not. Entraining to the melodic motion, we
recognize that keeping pace with it involves a sudden increase in our own
effort and velocity. Yet we have the same “beats” per minute as before in
the supporting instrumentation, where we find that tactus or primary beat
level. In contrast, when trills and similar musical figures are understood as
ornamentation, their rapidity is not interpreted as speeding up the music.
IV
Kivy notes that a “jagged and halting rhythm” will also have a direct
analogue in human expressive behavior, but otherwise ignores the
expressive potentiality of rhythm. This neglect is not surprising. Outlining a
contour model of expressiveness in which the experience of auditory
contours permits recognition of analogous human expressive behavior,
Kivy emphasizes the music’s melodic line as expressively more pertinent
than its rhythms. The rising and falling of the melody is what really matters.
Tempo is relevant, for it must not be inappropriate to the expressive
contour.
However, tempo is not the whole story. Mari Riess Jones has shown that
we “rely heavily on rhythmic properties to differentiate melodies.” A
melodic contour generally becomes unrecognizable “if its original rhythm
changes, even when temporal segmentations and statistical pitch properties
are unchanged.”27 In short, the perception of rhythmic detail is essential to
the perception of melody, and therefore rhythm is an important variable in
the expressive differences presented by rhythmic and thus melodic
variations of a melodic contour.
Davies is more explicit about the resemblance between rhythm and the
appearances of expressive human gestures; though like Kivy, he focuses on
movement from low to high, with little explicit discussion of rhythm and
tempo.28 His account is consistent with mine, for he says that the
“resemblance that counts most for musical expressiveness . . . is that
between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations
of human behavior associated with the expression of emotion.”29 These
dynamic structures include “subtle nuances of timing.” Thus “music is
expressive in recalling the gait . . . and comportment of the human body.”30
And of course gait and comportment are influences on carriage and posture.
Our first challenge to the expressive centrality of resemblance was the
issue of cross-modal resemblance. How does the listener know which gait
and comportment of the human body is associated with a particular piece of
music? Considerable guidance arises from entrainment with the music’s
primary beat level. Normally, the primary beat establishes a tempo of beats
per minute within a range that crawls (at thirty beats per minute) to one that
shudders in rapid spasms (at 240 beats per minute, the upper range of our
discrimination for downbeats).31 If I can entrain to the music’s primary
beat, which I must do if I am to grasp its tempo, then I know how I will
comport myself in time to it. I know if my gait is fast or slow, sluggish,
comfortable or frenetic.32 If the music establishes one tempo in its primary
beat level and another tempo at another level of the rhythmic hierarchy, I
may entrain to both, by sensing or simulating how different parts of the
same body will move at different speeds. Some tempos are conducive to
whole-body resonance, as in a swaying motion, while others encourage
limb movement.33 (Contrast the bodily motion of waltzing with the rigid
body and arm stance that accompanies elaborate footwork, as in some Irish
dancing.) In order to perceive rhythm, the listener must know how a human
body—his or her own—will move in relation to that music. For most
people, the key resemblance between the movement of music and the gait
and comportment of the human body is not located in an imagined visual
appearance. We grasp the music’s gait in a preconceptual recognition
process. Knowledgeable listeners feel the beat. Even the listener who has
internalized the rule of sitting perfectly still in the concert hall will entrain
to the music.
The centrality of entrainment explains our near-universal propensity to
interpret music as human gait and comportment. A listener might deny
engaging in any conscious comparison of musical movement and human
movement. But entrainment explains why people perceive expressive
movement without having to recognize the resemblance. The second
objection is now defused. We interpret an adagio as a slow human
movement because we judge the tempo in terms of the template it provides
for our own movement. Not knowing how a turtle controls its
musculoskeletal system, I do not hear an adagio as a turtle’s motion, for I
do not feel it that way. Perhaps I could do so, if I consciously thought about
a turtle while listening to the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10,
but this would be a capricious response to Mahler. Perception of rhythm is,
by default, a representation of a pattern of human movement. Once this is
established, we can go on to interpret many movements musically.
My strategy parallels Wollheim’s account of representational seeing,
grounding responses to two major objections—the cross-modality and
multiple resemblance problems—to animation-resemblance accounts of
musical expression. Just as Wollheim posits the capacity for seeing-in as
logically prior to seeing pictures in painted surfaces, an entrainment account
of musical expression holds that the ability to hear expressiveness in
rhythmic sounds is logically prior to hearing some musical patterns as
expressive gestures. Another advantage of the appeal to entrainment is that
it implies that our awareness of temporal patterns in music “is a musically
peculiar instance of a more general perceptual and cognitive ability.”34
Because these abilities are biologically rooted and biologically constrained,
we are limited in the range of basic meters that we can perceive. With visual
representation, Wollheim holds that viewers can distinguish between the
painted surface and whatever they see “in” that surface. Nonetheless, the
perception of the painted surface is inseparable from the picture: there is
one experience with two distinct aspects.35 Similarly, listeners can
distinguish between the sounds and their musical properties.36 Furthermore,
perception of the relevant motion is not an inference from the rhythmic
structure, and neither the perception of rhythm nor its resemblance to
expressive human behavior requires thinking about it under any particular
description. Absent description and inference, expressiveness does not
require the deployment of metaphor or analogy. This account owes no
further explanation of why, from among all the things that music resembles,
listeners “choose” to compare the sad music to sad human gestures and
movements rather than, say, to the droop of the willow tree or the
movement of turtles. We do not choose the comparison.37
This account is bolstered by the emerging consensus that, normally, we
recognize the emotional states of others by feeling them ourselves—by
physically mimicking or imaginatively simulating their bodily actions. This
imaginative simulation prompts simulated emotional response. To a large
extent, an individual’s capacity to recognize a particular emotion in another
person depends on her capacity to mimic that emotion.38 This mimicry is
not necessarily conscious. As Giacomo Rizzolatti puts it, the brain’s natural
mirroring function “allow[s] us to grasp the minds of others not through
conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by
thinking.”39
Rhythmic entrainment is a special application of this general human
capacity. We are naturally disposed to entrain with other people. Without
conscious effort, we feel (and frequently synchronize with) any rhythmic
motion of people we observe. In turn, entraining the body normally
simulates emotion. By extension, if a tempo and rhythmic structure
corresponds to movement patterns associated with a particular emotion,
then competent listeners will tend to agree on the expressive character of
the music, for they will become aware of its particular expressive qualities
by consulting the same mental process that is employed to determine the
expressive behavior of an actual person expressing occurrent emotion. And,
again, there need not be conscious recognition of the way that both musical
movement and human movement move us, spatially and thus emotionally
(even if only as a simulation). The process of identifying music’s rhythms
allows listeners to identify the sadness of a Mahler adagio by feeling, not
thinking. This account of entrainment, movement, and expression has the
additional benefit of explaining why musical expressiveness arouses
emotions. It does so, in part, by engaging the same recognition-contagion
combination that ordinarily accompanies awareness of people in our
immediate environment.
Consequently, the entrainment theory of rhythm deflates the charge that
appearance emotionalism lacks translation rules that correlate human
appearances to specifiable musical structures. Thus London explains how
specific ranges of beats per minute align with distinctive gaits as established
by the number of steps taken in locomotion.40 The difference between
perceived andante and allegro correlates with walking strides and running
strides, respectively. Since these strides impose numerous gait differences
beyond mere steps per minute, the musculoskeletal system aligns to a
musical andante differently than to an allegro. Entraining to these tempos,
we are aware of these musculoskeletal differences. If we move beyond
tempo to consider basic rhythmic variations within andante and allegro
tempos, we are likely to find that there is considerable intersubjective
agreement in human comportment when entraining to these variations.
Thus, rhythms show promise in providing some basic translation rules,
though few listeners will be conscious that they “know” them.
Finally, entrainment as a catalyst for emotional contagion addresses an
issue about musical expressiveness. It answers an objection to resemblance
accounts by Levinson, namely, that appeal to perceptual processes does not
elucidate the concept of musical expressiveness.41 True: it treats musical
expressiveness as a special case of a more general experiential
phenomenon. The elucidation lies in appeal to the mechanism by which we
establish a central resemblance between perception of music’s rhythms and
perception of human movement. Beyond that, the analysis rests on the
concept of expressiveness as it applies to expressive behavior. These
behavioral patterns do not infallibly express emotion, either in persons or in
other situations. Yet the expressive character of grief, joy, and so on can be
perceived in any behavior or process that resembles behaviors that normally
indicate grief. Entrainment explains why we so readily perceive expressive
qualities in familiar kinds of music with entrainable rhythms: it is of a piece
with our relatively effortless ability to perceive the emotions in the people
around us.
A new problem arises from the claim that entrainment and emotional
contagion—our “mirroring” of music’s perceptible expressive qualities—is
non-inferential, natural, and typically unconscious. If true, why doesn’t
everyone perceive the same expressiveness in all music with entrainable
rhythms? Why aren’t we moved emotionally by any such rhythm? Earlier, I
denied that music is a universal language, noting that consensus about the
expressive character of a particular piece of music tends to be restricted to
listeners familiar with its musical tradition. Against this, it might appear
that rhythms are universally accessible, and therefore entrainment should
ensure cross-cultural access to the basic expressive quality of entrainable
music. Thus, everyone should be moved in the same way by most music.
Yet few listeners are equally moved by all music. So the theory seems to
make the wrong predictions.
Three points defuse this problem. First, there are significant differences
in how rhythm is handled in different musical cultures and subcultures;
being adept in one does not make someone equally competent in all others.
Entrainment should not be considered a “passive” response: enculturation
informs recognition of complex rhythms. Second, rhythm is merely one of
several factors responsible for musical expressiveness. At the same time,
different emotions can share similar movement profiles (e.g., serenity and
grief). But if melody and harmonization play anything like the role assigned
to them in standard accounts, it is no surprise that entrainment is frequently
countermanded or clarified by other musical cues. Neophytes and
knowledgeable listeners respond differently. Third, it becomes more
difficult to simulate the emotion of another person when he or she is the
object of one’s own emotion; it is difficult to mirror the regret of someone
with whom one is angry, or to empathize with a friend’s joy while one
envies them. Likewise, music is an occasion and object of full-blown
emotion, as when an unfamiliar style elicits boredom, puzzlement, or
irritation. Acquired associations and prejudices about a particular style can
generate strong negative emotions, overriding the rhythm’s contagion
effect. Someone who disdains religious music might be less likely to entrain
to a Bach cantata. My account emphasizes the importance of kinematic
anticipation of rhythm, not mere awareness of the tempo of the baseline
beat. The former requires far more engagement than the latter and so the
requisite kinematic anticipation is less likely to be grasped by anyone
whose situation or musical tastes interfere with engagement.
My account of the connection between an unconscious kinematic
response and musical expressiveness is necessarily sketchy. However, it
suggests how we can identify music’s expressive qualities in the absence of
overt representation of content. It posits that our capacity for recognition of
music’s resemblance to human behavior is inherent in the perception of
rhythm. Consequently, expressive qualities are grasped in a natural
sympathetic response. This account reconciles details of the resemblance
theory and the contagion theory, which are typically treated as opposing
strategies for explaining music’s expressive power.42
Works Cited
Blakeslee, Sandra, “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times (January 10, 2006):
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10mirr.xhtml.
Chordia, Parag and Alex Rae, “Understanding Emotion in Raag: An Empirical Study of Listener
Responses,” in Richard Kronland-Martinet, Sølvi Ystad, and Kristoffer Jensen, eds, Computer
Music Modeling and Retrieval: Sense of Sounds (Berlin, 2007), 137–44.
Cochrane, Tom, “A Simulation Theory of Musical Expressivity,” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, 88.2 (2009), 191–207.
Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of
Consciousness (New York, 1999).
Davies, Stephen, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, 1994).
Davies, Stephen, “Contra the Hypothetical Persona in Music,” in Themes in the Philosophy of Music
(Oxford, 2003), 152–68.
Davies, Stephen, “Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music,” in Matthew Kieran, ed.,
Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford, 2006), 179–91.
Davies, Stephen, “Infectious Music: Music Listener Emotional Contagion,” in Amy Coplan and Peter
Goldie, eds, Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford, 2011), 134–48.
Drake, Carolyn, Amandine Penel, and Emmanuel Bigand, “Tapping in Time with Mechanically and
Expressively Performed Music,” Music Perception, 18.1 (2000), 1–23.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Jones, Mari Riess, “Music Perception: Current Research and Future Directions,” in Mari Riess Jones,
Richard R. Fay, and Arthur N. Popper, eds, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research (Vol. 36):
Music Perception (New York, 2010), 1–12.
Judge, Jenny, “‘Feeling the Beat’: Multimodal Perception and the Experience of Musical
Movement,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm:
Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C4.
Kerman, Joseph and Gary Tomlinson, Listen (7th edn, Boston, 2012).
Kinderman, William, Beethoven (Berkeley, 1995).
Kivy, Peter, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on Musical Emotions (Philadelphia, 1989).
Kivy, Peter, Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel Between Literature and Music (Oxford, 2009).
Levinson, Jerrold, “Musical Expressiveness,” in The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca, 1996), 90–125.
Levinson, Jerrold, “Musical Expressiveness as Hearability-as-Expression,” in Matthew Kieran, ed.,
Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford, 2006), 192–204.
Lidov, David, “Emotive Gesture in Music and Its Contraries,” in Anthony Gritten and Elaine King,
eds, Music and Gesture: New Perspectives on Theory and Contemporary Practice (Aldershot,
2006), 24–44.
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter (Oxford, 2004).
London, Justin, “Musical Rhythm: Motion, Pace and Gesture,” in Anthony Gritten and Elaine King,
eds, Music and Gesture: New Perspectives on Theory and Contemporary Practice (Aldershot,
2006), 126–41.
London, Justin, “Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Rhythm Perception,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, eds (Oxford,
2019), C11.
Mattheson, Johann, Der vollkommene Capellmeister [The Perfect Chapelmaster] (Hamburg, 1739).
Meyer, Leonard B., Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956).
Nussbaum, Charles O., The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology and Emotion (Cambridge,
MA, 2007).
Robinson, Jenefer, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford,
2005).
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1999).
Scruton, Roger, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
Sharma, Manorama, Music Aesthetics (New Delhi, 2007).
Todd, Neil P. McAngus, “The Kinematics of Musical Expression,” The Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 97.3 (1995), 1940–9.
Todd, Neil P. McAngus, “Sensory-Motor Theory of Rhythm, Time Perception and Beat Induction,”
Journal of New Music Research, 28.1 (1999), 5–28.
Tormey, Alan, The Concept of Expression (Princeton, 1971).
Trivedi, Saam, “Music and Imagination,” in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds, The
Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music (London, 2011), 113–22.
Trivedi, Saam, “Resemblance Theories,” in Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds, The Routledge
Companion to Philosophy and Music (London, 2011), 223–32.
Vermazen, Bruce, “Expression as Expression,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 67.3 (1986), 196–
224.
Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987).
1
Notable exceptions include Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 119–52, and Scruton “Thoughts on
Rhythm.”
2
Drake et al., “Tapping in Time,” 1–23.
3
Davies, “Infectious Music,” defends a complementary explanation of contagion. Features of my
argument are suggested by Davies, “Artistic Expression”, and Cochrane, “Theory of Musical
Expressivity”; neither assigns a central role to entrainment.
4
I set aside any position that says that the correlations between musical properties and emotive
predicates are arbitrary and conventional.
5
This distinction derives from Tormey, The Concept of Expression.
6
Appeal to an expressive persona is promoted by Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness” (1996),
and Robinson, Deeper than Reason; criticisms are found in Davies, “Contra the Hypothetical
Persona”, and Kivy, Antithetical Arts.
7
Trivedi, “Music and Imagination,” 116–17. Vermazen, “Expression as Expression,” 206,
criticizes the metaphor account.
8
Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression,” 1941.
9
Sharma, Music Aesthetics, 120.
10
Chordia and Rae, “Understanding Emotion in Raag.”
11
Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” 107.
12
Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music, 62.
13
Davies, “Artistic Expression,” 181.
14
Davies, “Artistic Expression,” 182.
15
Lidov, “Emotive Gesture in Music,” proposes a resemblance theory in which posture is equally
important.
16
See Chapter 4, “ ‘Feeling the Beat’: Multimodal Perception and the Experience of Musical
Movement.”
17
Trivedi, “Resemblance Theories,” 227.
18
Levinson, “Hearability-as-Expression,” 192–204, 196–8.
19
Kerman and Tomlinson, Listen, 9.
20
Kinderman, Beethoven, 215.
21
London, Hearing in Time, 4.
22
London, Hearing in Time, 12.
23
Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression.”
24
Todd, “Kinematics of Musical Expression.”
25
Todd, “Sensory-Motor Theory of Rhythm,” 26; see also Todd, “The Kinematics of Musical
Expression,” and London, “Musical Rhythm.”
26
Kivy, Sound Sentiment, 55.
27
Jones, “Music Perception,” 10.
28
Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression, 229–39.
29
Davies, “Artistic Expression,” 181.
30
Davies, “Artistic Expression,” 182.
31
London, Hearing in Time, 127.
32
London, Hearing in Time.
33
Todd, “The Kinematics of Musical Expression,” 1948.
34
London, Hearing in Time, 5.
35
Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 46.
36
E.g. Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 16–20, distinguishes sounds and tones.
37
My account is consistent with Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, 33, which explains
musical representation in terms of Gibsonian “affordances”—environmental invariants that
perceiving organisms interpret as affording possibilities of action.
38
Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 65–77, provides examples.
39
Rizzolatti, quoted in Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds.”
40
London, “Musical Rhythm,” and “Problem(s) of Rhythm Perception.”
41
Levinson, “Musical Expressiveness,” 106.
42
This essay profited enormously from comments by Justin London and Joseph G. Moore.
PART III
ENTRAINMENT AND THE SOCIAL
DIMENSION
11
Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of
Perception
Justin London
1. Introduction
When the various shapes (visual “cues”) are arranged as in the left-hand
panel of Figure 11.1, we see an equilateral triangle with edges defined by an
illusory brightness and grayscale contrast. In the right-hand panel, with
some of the cues repositioned, the triangle vanishes. Kanizsa’s illusion
illustrates how our perceptual systems fill in missing information, as in the
case of occluded visual objects, or intermittently masked sound sources,
and can thus generate complete percepts from partial cues. The larger lesson
is that our perceptual systems are not passive filters or transmitters of
information, but are actively engaged with the stimuli that is presented to
them. Similarly, treating our senses as perceptual systems (to paraphrase
Gibson) breaks down the distinctions between sensation, perception, and
cognition, as these systems are characterized by a dynamic flow between
the perceptual periphery, higher levels of the central nervous system, and
everything in between. The function of perception is not to register
sensation, but to pick up information, and so rather than picking out
individual features of a stimulus (its apparent size, shape, color, etc.)—that
is, all of John Locke’s individuated primary and secondary qualities—the
task of our perceptual systems is to make the most coherent sense of the
changing stimulus array.
The perception of rhythm adds another set of problems to this task of
reconciliation. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall discuss some of the
limits and mechanisms of our perceptual faculties for auditory rhythm,
along with their epistemic ramifications. Specifically, we only have a direct
perception of rhythms within a limited temporal range. Our perception of
rhythm seems to be inherently cross-modal, and that rhythmic perception is
often non-veridical, as we may add subjective accents and grouping
structure to otherwise undifferentiated stimuli. I shall then conclude with
some broader considerations of musical ontology as they relate to this
perceptual problem.
More details (and examples) of these phenomena are given in Section 2.3.
The more immediate point to be made, however, is that if entrainment arises
in our sensory-motor system, and there is a large and growing body of
evidence from neuroscience that it does, then that system plays a pivotal
role in our perception of periodic auditory rhythms, which temporal
sequences we would reflexively describe as “rhythmic.” This in turn means
that the perception of these rhythms is inherently cross-modal. It is not
simply that we extract information about the temporal structure of an
auditory signal, and thus can distinguish rhythm A from rhythm B. Rather,
our perception of temporal regularity in music—grounded in our perception
of a beat of pulse—is part of a broader, embodied response to that auditory
array, what is referred to as a perception-action loop. This embodied
response is active, not passive, as it causes the listener to interact with his or
her auditory environment in a certain way. In the course of that interaction,
however, our perception of the auditory signal often changes.
Figure 11.2 Beat interpolation in the opening theme of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E-minor, Op. 98
If there are regular cues, but at a much slower rate, we are likely to
interpolate the missing beats, and thus hear these “loud rests.”17 Consider
the opening melody from Brahms’ Fourth symphony, shown in Figure 11.2.
The crotchet/quarter-notes are too quick in most performances to be heard
as beats, while the semibreve/whole-notes are too slow. Yet even when we
hear this without orchestra accompaniment, we readily interpolate beats at
the minim/half-note level (as per the cut time signature). This is again due
to entrainment—for our entrainment to musical rhythms can and usually
does involve a nested set of periodicities. In Brahms’ melody these
periodicities are in 4:1, 2:1, and 1:1 relations, with the “1” (the
crotchet/quarter note) being only intermittently present in the melody.
As our rhythmic entrainment habitually involves more than just 1:1
periodic relationships, this leads our sensorimotor systems to add layers of
rhythmic structure even when there are no cues for those layers in the
musical/rhythmic stimulus. Thus when we listen to a metronome, we hear
groups of 2, 3, or 4 ticks—the so-called “tick-tock” phenomenon. Such
“subjective rhythmization” has been known to psychology since the
nineteenth century,18 and its neurological correlates have recently been
shown.19
Figure 11.3 A “metrically malleable” melody notated in (a) 4/4, and (b) 9/8, showing alternate
listening construals
Works Cited
Agawu, Kofi, “Structural Analysis or Cultural Analysis? Competing Perspectives on the ‘Standard
Pattern’ of West African Rhythm,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 59.1 (2006),
1–46.
Brochard, Renaid, Donna Abecasis, Doug Potter, Richard Ragot, and Carolyn Drake, “The
‘Ticktock’ of our Internal Clock: Direct Brain Evidence of Subjective Accents in Isochronous
Sequences,” Psychological Science, 14.4 (2003), 362–6.
Chen, Joyce L., Virginia B. Penhune, and Robert J. Zatorre, “Listening to Musical Rhythms Recruits
Motor Regions of the Brain,” Cerebral Cortex, 18.12 (2008), 2844–54.
Clarke, Eric F., “Categorical Rhythmic Perception: An Ecological Perspective,” in Alf Gabrielsson,
ed., Action and Perception in Rhythm and Music (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music
55, 1987), 19–33.
Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (Chicago, 1960).
Crane, Tim, “The Problem of Perception,” in E. N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (2014): https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/perception-problem/.
Eitan, Zohar and Roni Y. Granot, “How Music Moves: Musical Parameters and Listener’s Images of
Motion,” Music Perception, 23.3 (2006), 221–47.
Gibson, James J., The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, 1966).
Glass, Leon and Michael C. Mackey, From Clocks to Chaos: The Rhythms of Life (Princeton, 1988).
Grahn, Jessica A., “Neuroscientific Investigations of Musical Rhythm: Recent Advances and Future
Challenges,” Contemporary Music Review, 28.3 (2009), 251–77.
Grube, Manon and Timothy D. Griffiths, “Metricality-Enhanced Temporal Encoding and the
Subjective Perception of Rhythmic Sequences,” Cortex, 45.1 (2009), 72–9.
Himberg, Tommi, “Interaction in Musical Time,” PhD thesis (University of Cambridge, 2014).
Houle, George, Meter in Music, 1600–1800 (Bloomington, 1987).
James, William, The Principles of Psychology ([1890]; Cambridge, MA, 1983).
Kanizsa, Gaetano, “Subjective Contours,” Scientific American, 234.4 (April 1976), 48–52.
Large, Edward W., “Resonating to Musical Rhythm: Theory and Experiment,” in Simon Grondin,
ed., The Psychology of Time (Bingley, 2008), 189–232.
Locke, David, Drum Gahu: An Introduction to African Rhythm (Tempe, 1998).
London, Justin, “Loud Rests and Other Strange Metric Phenomena (or, Meter as Heard),” Music
Theory Online, 0.2 (1993): www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.93.0.2/mto.93.0.2.london.xhtml.
London, Justin, “Rhythm,” in J. Tyrrell and S. Sadie, eds, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, vol. 21 (Oxford, 2001), 277–309.
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter ([2004]; 2nd edn, Oxford,
2012).
McAuley, J. Devin, Mari Riess Jones, Shayla Holub, Heather M. Johnston, and Nathaniel S. Miller,
“The Time of Our Lives: Life Span Development of Timing and Event Tracking,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 135.3 (2006), 348–67.
Rankin, Summer K., Philip W. Fink, and Edward W. Large, “Fractal Structure Enables Temporal
Prediction in Music,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136.4 (2014): doi:
10.1121/1.4890198.
Repp, Bruno H., “Rate Limits in Sensorimotor Synchronization with Auditory and Visual Sequences:
The Synchronization Threshold and the Benefits and Costs of Interval Subdivision,” Journal of
Motor Behavior, 35.4 (2003), 355–70.
Repp, Bruno H., “Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of the Tapping Literature,” Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 12.6 (2005), 969–92.
Repp, Bruno H. and Yi-Huang Su, “Sensorimotor Synchronization: A Review of Recent Research
(2006–2012),” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20.3 (2013), 403–52.
Salzer, Felix, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1962).
Snyder, Joel S. and Edward W. Large, “Gamma-Band Activity Reflects the Metric Structure of
Rhythmic Tone Sequences,” Cognitive Brain Research, 24.1 (2005), 117–26.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, “The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music,” tr. Elaine Barkin, Perspectives
of New Music, 1.1 (1962), 39–48.
Toiviainen, Petri, Geoff Luck, and Marc Thompson, “Embodied Metre: Hierarchical Eigenmodes in
Spontaneous Movement to Music,” Cognitive Processing, 10.2 (2009), 325–7.
Wing, Alan M., Satoshi Endo, Adrian Bradbury, and Dirk Vorberg, “Optimal Feedback Correction in
String Quartet Synchronization,” Interface, 11 (2014): doi: 10.1098/rsif.2013.1125.
1
Crane, “Problem of Perception,” section 1.1.
2
Here, “sensory data” is used in its psychological sense, that is, the output of our sensory organs,
and not to invoke “sense-datum” theories of perception.
3
Gibson, The Senses.
4
Kanizsa, “Subjective Contours.”
5
Clarke, “Categorical Rhythmic Perception.”
6
Stockhausen, “Unity in Electronic Music.”
7
I survey relevant psychological research in “Rhythm,” and Hearing in Time.
8
e.g. Cooper and Meyer’s analyses, in Rhythmic Structure, of formal structures as rhythms writ
large, or a twenty-measure passage as an extended “upbeat” or anacrusis.
9
Salzer, Structural Hearing.
10
On embodied rhythmic cognition, see Eitan and Granot, “How Music Moves,” and Toiviainen
et al., “Embodied Metre.” For the neurobiology of rhythm perception, see Chen et al., “Musical
Rhythms”; Grahn, “Neuroscientific Investigations”; and Grube and Griffiths, “Temporal Encoding.”
11
Glass and Mackey, Clocks to Chaos.
12
Chen et al., “Musical Rhythms.”
13
Repp, “Tapping Literature”; Repp and Su, “Recent Research”; Himberg, “Interaction”; and
Wing et al., “String Quartet Synchronization.”
14
Rankin et al., “Fractal Structure.”
15
McAuley et al., “Time of Our Lives,” gives a survey.
16
Repp, “Rate Limits.”
17
London, “Loud Rests”; Snyder and Large, “Gamma-Band Activity.”
18
James, Principles of Psychology.
19
Brochard et al., “ ‘Ticktock’ of our Internal Clock”; Large, “Resonating to Musical Rhythm.”
20
Agawu, “West African Rhythm.”
21
Quoted in Houle, Meter in Music, 80.
22
Locke, Drum Gahu, 24.
12
Entrainment and the Social Origin of
Musical Rhythm
Martin Clayton
But the sounds of nature alone do not follow any rhythmic pattern. Rhythm is the product of social
life. The individual by himself could not invent it. Work songs, for example, arise from regular
repetition of like motions among cooperating workers. Were these motions rhythmic in themselves,
the songs would not provide the service expected of them. The song offers a model to the cooperating
workers; the rhythm flows from the song into their movements. Hence it assumes a prior collective
agreement . . . At a very young age, we are familiarized with musical ‘beat’. But society, not nature,
has done this for us.
Maurice Halbwachs, “The Collective Memory of Musicians” (1939), 171–2
As Ghosh makes clear, the transition from alap to tala-bound sections marks
a move from an individual engagement with the musical materials to a
social, dialogic engagement.38 The livelier, more rhythmic music is played
together with an accompanist, and makes most sense when listeners actively
engage with the tala structure (which they may show by means of specific
hand gestures). In performance, rhythm emerges from melody, and social
engagement from contemplation—which, intriguingly, likely reverses the
direction in which these forms emerged historically.
Metered music affords what Jones calls “future-oriented attending,”39 in
which the listener is attuned to a regular temporal structure and unpacks the
music in real time with reference to a protention of the temporal structure.
The listener knows roughly what the soloist is trying to achieve in aamad
(the return to sam, the “one”), and roughly when it must occur, hearing the
music in relation to possibilities she herself can imagine. This knowledge is
possible due to a combination of two things: the regular beat which affords
entrainment, and familiarity with the particular tala pattern, which provides
a conscious knowledge of the number of beats in a tala cycle. In other
words, an enculturated, expert listener is not only entrained to the musical
beat, which is open even to a complete novice listener, but also actively
deploys culturally specific, shared knowledge.
In the metered sections, these learned metrical structures organize
interactions which in turn indicate social formations and relationships. As
demonstrated by Clayton,40 tala structures the interactions between soloist
and accompanists, and also between musicians and listeners, with the latter
often being drawn into visibly demonstrating the fact that they share the
flow of the tala and therefore appreciate the musicians’ achievement in
creating transitions that are both consonant with this framework and
aesthetically pleasing (which may include “unexpected”). This process can
be understood as something like Schütz’s “mutual tuning-in relationship,”
in which participants share the temporal flux of inner time.41 Clearly, in this
case, it is shared, culturally specific knowledge that affords this mutual
tuning-in.
Shared temporal flow is usually experienced as felicitous. Psychological
studies of much simpler experiences in which individuals share temporal
structure in analogous ways empirically demonstrate the link between
interpersonal entrainment and social effects, such as increased prosocial
behavior, affinity, and feelings of belonging to a group (entitativity).42 How
much stronger might such effects be in real-life situations, which may also
be highly affective and meaningful in terms of real social identities and
relationships? No wonder that ethnomusicologists such as John Blacking
have argued for many years that musical performance leads to heightened
“fellow-feeling” and hence social bonding.43
The story is not so simple, however, since this sharing of inner time—to
use Schütz’s language—takes place within a hierarchical setting. It is
socially shared, but the individuals doing the sharing are placed in
hierarchical relationships: main artist to accompanist, expert to lay listener.
Such hierarchies are both expressed and understood, but may also be
contested. What happens when an accompanist doesn’t wish to be led? In
practice such situations are familiar to musicians in this tradition, and many
moments of conflict can occur, though they are usually concealed from
audiences. Singer Ranjani Ramachandran spoke about her experience as a
young soloist having to manage more senior accompanists:
in one [concert a] senior tabla player was very mad at me. I was not getting the laya [tempo] I
wanted. I gave one laya, and he actually didn’t give the right laya; then I changed it. So he got
very mad! He just stopped and looked at me: I didn’t know how to react! I didn’t do anything;
he then started. He was just trying to say: ‘You cannot do this to me, you cannot tell me what
laya I should play.’44
Works Cited
Agawu, Kofi, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (London, 2003).
Arom, Simha, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm (Cambridge, 1991).
Backwell, Patricia, Michael Jennions, Neville Passmore, and John Christy, “Synchronized Courtship
in Fiddler Crabs,” Nature, 391 (January 1, 1998), 31–2.
Blacking, John, “Towards an Anthropology of the Body,” in John Blacking, ed., The Anthropology of
the Body (London, 1977), 1–28.
Buck, John and Elisabeth Buck, “Mechanism of Rhythmic Synchronous Flashing of Fireflies,”
Science, 159 (March 22, 1968), 1319–27.
Clayton, Martin, Time in Indian Music: Rhythm, Metre and Form in North Indian Rāg Performance
(Oxford, 2000).
Clayton, Martin, “Observing Entrainment in Music Performance: Video-Based Observational
Analysis of Indian Musicians’ Tanpura Playing and Beat Marking,” Musicae Scientiae, 11.1
(2007), 27–60.
Clayton, Martin, “Time, Gesture and Attention in a Khyāl Performance,” Asian Music, 38.2 (2007),
71–96.
Clayton, Martin, “The Time of Music and the Time of History,” in Philip V. Bohlman, ed., The
Cambridge History of World Music (Cambridge, 2013), 767–85.
Clayton, Martin, “Theory and practice of long-form non-isochronous metres. The case of the North
Indian rupak tal,” submitted article.
Clayton, Martin and Laura Leante, “Role, Status and Hierarchy in the Performance of North Indian
Classical Music,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 24.3 (2015), 414–22.
Clayton, Martin, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will, “In Time with the Music: The Concept of
Entrainment and Its Significance for Ethnomusicology,” European Meetings in Ethnomusicology,
11 (2005), 1–82.
Condon, William S., “An Analysis of Behavioral Organization,” Sign Language Studies, 13 (1976),
285–318.
Condon, William S. and W. D. Ogston, “A Segmentation of Behavior,” Journal of Psychiatric
Research, 5.3 (1967), 221–35.
Drake, Carolyn, Mari Riess Jones, and Clarisse Baruch, “The Development of Rhythmic Attending
in Auditory Sequences: Attunement, Referent Period, Focal Attending,” Cognition, 77.3 (2000),
251–88.
Gilbert, Margaret, Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation (Lanham, 1996).
Halbwachs, Maurice, “The Collective Memory of Musicians,” in Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective
Memory, tr. and ed. Lewis A. Coser ([1939]; New York, 1980), 54–83.
Jones, Mari Riess, “Attentional Rhythmicity in Human Perception,” in James R. Evans and Manfred
Clynes, eds, Rhythm in Psychological, Linguistic, and Musical Processes (Springfield, 1986), 13–
40.
Kelso, J. A. Scott, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior (Cambridge,
MA), 1995.
Kendon, Adam, Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters (Cambridge,
1992).
Knoblich, Günther and Natalie Sebanz, “The Social Nature of Perception and Action,” Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 15.3 (2006), 99–104.
Knoblich, Günther and Natalie Sebanz, “Evolving Intentions for Social Interaction: From
Entrainment to Joint Action,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences, 363 (2008), 2021–31.
Large, Edward W., “Neurodynamics of Music,” in Mari Riess Jones, Richard R. Fay, and Arthur N.
Popper, eds, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research, 36: Music Perception (New York, 2010),
201–31.
Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983).
Lomax, Alan, Folk Song Style and Culture (New Brunswick, 1968).
Lomax, Alan, “The Cross-Cultural Variation of Rhythmic Style,” in Martha Davis, ed., Interaction
Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behavior (New York, 1982), 149–74.
London, Justin, Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter ([2004]; 2nd edn, Oxford,
2012).
Lucas, Glaura, Martin Clayton, and Laura Leante, “Inter-Group Entrainment in Afro-Brazilian
Congado Ritual,” Empirical Musicology Review, 6.2 (2011), 75–102.
McAuley, Devin, Mari Riess Jones, Shayla Holub, Heather M. Johnston, and Nathaniel S. Miller,
“The Time of Our Lives: Life Span Development of Timing and Event Tracking,” Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 135.3 (2006), 348–67.
MacDougall, Hamish G. and Steven T. Moore, “Marching to the Beat of the Same Drummer: The
Spontaneous Tempo of Human Locomotion,” Journal of Applied Physiology, 99.3 (2005), 1164–
73.
Marsh, Kerry L., Michael J. Richardson, and Richard C. Schmidt, “Social Connection through Joint
Action and Interpersonal Coordination,” Topics in Cognitive Science, 1.2 (2009), 320–39.
Moelants, Dirk, “Preferred Tempo Reconsidered,” in C. Stevens, D. Burnham, G. McPherson, E.
Schubert, and J. Renwick, eds, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music
Perception and Cognition (Sydney, 2002), 580–3.
Patel, Aniruddh D., “Musical Rhythm, Linguistic Rhythm, and Human Evolution,” Music
Perception, 24.1 (2006), 99–104.
Patel, Aniruddh D., John R. Iversen, Micah R. Bregman, and Irena Schulz, “Experimental Evidence
for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,” Current Biology, 19.10 (2009),
827–30.
Sachs, Curt, Rhythm and Tempo: A Study in Music History (London, 1953).
Schachner, Adena, Timothy F. Brady, Irene M. Pepperberg, and Marc D. Hauser, “Spontaneous
Motor Entrainment to Music in Multiple Vocal Mimicking Species,” Current Biology, 19.10
(2009), 831–36.
Schütz, Alfred, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Social Research, 18
(1951), 76–97.
Strogatz, Steven, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (New York, 2003).
Styns, Frederik, Leon van Noorden, Dirk Moelants, and Marc Leman, “Walking on Music,” Human
Movement Science, 26 (2007), 769–85.
Tenzer, Michael, “A Cross-Cultural Topology of Musical Time,” in Michael Tenzer and John Roeder,
eds, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (Oxford, 2011), 415–39.
Widdess, Richard, “The Emergence of Dhrupad,” in Joep Bor, Françoise ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, Jane
Harvey, and Emmie te Nijenhuis, eds, Hindustani Music: Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries (New
Delhi, 2012).
Will, Udo, Martin Clayton, Ira Wertheim, Laura Leante, and Eric Berg, “Pulse and Entrainment to
Non-Isochronous Auditory Stimuli: The Case of North Indian Alap,” PLoS ONE, 10.4 (2015):
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0123247.
1
Schütz, “Making Music Together.”
2
Jones, “Attentional Rhythmicity”; London, Hearing in Time.
3
Large, “Neurodynamics of Music.”
4
Knoblich and Sebanz, “Social Nature of Perception,” “Evolving Intentions.”
5
Clayton, “Time of Music.”
6
Clayton et al., “In Time.”
7
Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 32–3; discussed in Clayton, Time in Indian Music, 82.
8
Styns et al., “Walking on Music.”
9
MacDougall and Moore, “Marching to the Beat.”
10
Moelants, “Preferred Tempo Reconsidered.”
11
McAuley et al., “Time of our Lives.”
12
Styns et al., “Walking on Music.”
13
Will et al., “Pulse and Entrainment.”
14
London, Hearing in Time.
15
Buck and Buck, “Flashing of Fireflies”; Backwell et al., “Courtship in Fiddler Crabs”;
Strogatz, Sync.
16
Patel, “Musical Rhythm.”
17
Patel et al., “Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal.”
18
Schachner et al., “Spontaneous Motor Entrainment,” 835.
19
Condon and Ogston, “Segmentation of Behavior.”
20
Condon, “Behavioral Organization.”
21
Schütz, “Making Music Together.”
22
Kendon, Conducting Interaction, 115.
23
Gilbert, Living Together, provides a relevant philosophical theory of “joint commitment.”
24
Clayton, “Observing Entrainment”; Lucas et al., “Inter-Group Entrainment.”
25
Kelso, Self-Organization of Brain.
26
Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo.
27
Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 39.
28
Agawu, Representing African Music.
29
Clayton, “Time of Music.”
30
Lomax, Folk Song Style.
31
Lomax, “Variation of Rhythmic Style.”
32
Arom, African Polyphony; Clayton, Time in Indian Music.
33
Tenzer, “Cross-cultural Topology.”
34
Clayton, “Theory and practice.”
35
Drake et al., “Rhythmic Attending.”
36
Widdess, “Emergence of Dhrupad.”
37
Nayan Ghosh, Interview, Mumbai, May 23, 2005.
38
Alap can involve dialogue, for instance when two singers or instrumentalists alternate in its
performance, or when a singer is accompanied by a melodic instrument. The paradigm case is,
however, strictly that of solo performance.
39
Drake et al., “Rhythmic Attending.”
40
Clayton, “Khyāl Performance.”
41
Schütz, “Making Music Together.”
42
Marsh et al., “Social Connection.”
43
Blacking, “Anthropology of the Body.” Emile Durkheim’s influence was strong on both
Halbwachs and Blacking.
44
Ranjani Ramachandran, singer, Interview, Pune, February 19, 2010.
45
Clayton and Leante, “North Indian Classical Music.”
13
How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?
Michael Tenzer
The question “how many kinds of rhythm are there?” seems preposterous
but the response is still obvious: there are infinite kinds. Rhythm is
movement or flow; it is time’s doppelganger. It is a percept of the mind, and
equally a product of it. If a definition is intractable, we can at least attempt
to inventory and sort. Langston Hughes addressed the topic in an
enchanting children’s book, by ruminating on naïve categories: the rhythms
of nature, music, words, athletics, machines, daily life, furniture, unseen
rhythms, and more.1 Musicologist Curt Sachs launched his classic inquiry
by asking, “What is rhythm? The answer, I am afraid, is, so far, just—a
word: a word without a generally accepted meaning.”2 But he went on to
assert his own, self-consciously provisional, categories.
Christopher Hasty says that “Everything the word ‘rhythm’ implies can
be found in music.”3 I would emend this as follows: everything the word
“rhythm” implies can be made musical, for the reach of the sign “music” in
our time—owing equally to the work of composers and the discoveries of
ethnomusicology—has far exceeded its earlier semantic capacities. The
relationship between music and rhythm is paradoxical: rhythm’s
provenance in nature makes it bigger than music, yet music’s provenance is
imagination, so it can replicate and enlarge nature’s reach.
Grasping the scope of musical rhythm now requires accounting for its
encoding into bacterial DNA, as in the composer-protagonist of Richard
Powers’s 2014 novel Orfeo; or the idea of a rhythmic event spanning
dozens of human generations, such as John Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP (As
Slow as Possible),” launched on the chapel organ of the Burchardikirche in
Halberstadt in 2001 with the final cadence scheduled for 2639;4 or sound
events so tiny and “granular” that they are to entrainable periodicities as
nanocomputers are to PCs.5 Discrete meter is undermined by Arapaho Wolf
Dance singers, seemingly uncoordinated with their drum,6 or the
incrementally accelerating and unstable micropulses of Tunisian sṭambēlī.7
Human sound production that those outside the culture would regard as
music, might be culturally defined as a shaman’s incantation, the muezzin’s
call to prayer, or cattle auctioneering.8 Conversely, humpback whales
produce what we suspect must be like music, if we could only decode it.
Though each may be seen as an outlier to the preponderance of human
music, we marginalize such cases at our peril. For while we do so, others
are inventing or discovering more extreme cases at the accelerating rate
typical of our era. Whether we speak of the rhythm of music or the music of
rhythm, their extent is far richer than the putative opposition between the
regularities of metrical ground and the liberty of rhythmic figure that until
recently framed discussion.
Music is a layered social construction shaped by biological and historical
factors, but it is still possible to characterize it. This chapter considers
several kinds of frameworks for rhythm that offer complementary vantages.
My perspective is shaped through investigation of world music genres9 and
developments in music in the modern and digital eras. It takes features such
as regular meter and periodicity, predominant in Western scholarship, as
one among many possibilities. Five perspectives are presented: music and
language, the anthropology of music, rhythm as percept, rhythm as object,
and the advancing technologies of music and time.
3. Perception of Rhythm
We now turn to the distinction between rhythm in real time, and frozen as if
out of time, corresponding to J. M. E. McTaggart’s temporal A-series and
B-series.26 The A-series comprises past, present, and future. The perceiver
experiences temporality as durations unfolding with respect to the present,
moving through time with the advancing “now.” In the B-series time is
rendered spatially as if on a canvas. With respect to any given point there is
only before and after, no transient experience of passage. As an A-series
percept rhythm events are susceptible to a phenomenological description of
active rhythmic experience. As B-series objects, a set of rhythms is
categorized by structural type, as we shall see in Section 4.
Can we compare different kinds of rhythm experience? We take into
account biological predispositions, such as limits on what the memory can
retain in real time, how fast or slow a pulsation can be latched onto, and
how complex or scant a rhythm structure can get before it becomes too
difficult to parse. Insider cultural perspectives often conflict with outsider
ones around these issues too. For example, outsiders often misperceive the
orientation of pulsation in unfamiliar music, or are unable to aurally
disentangle the separate constituents of unfamiliar polyrhythmic textures.
An A-series portrayal of rhythm in time should be an account of
changing perception of events, and how their accumulation alters rhythmic
experience—how the rhythm “feels” rather than what its properties and
proportions are. In such an account there are not kinds of rhythm, but kinds
of rhythm sensation—though to be communicated it must be recollected
and objectified afterwards, softening the distinction from the B-series. In
recent music theory, influenced by process-oriented philosophers William
James, Henri Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze,
phenomenological approaches are prominent, especially in Hasty.27 Rhythm
is conceived as a dynamic interaction between events and awareness.
Hasty’s motivation includes rejection of the tyranny of the score in Western
art music, which can be seen as overly regimenting what ought to be the
fluid experience of listening and performing.
Hasty’s elegant apparatus has only a choice few components, notably the
notion of a “projection” stemming from a beginning, in which we become
aware of an event with duration and imagine its outcome. A second event
onset creates expectation of a third one with an equal duration thereafter,
due to our propensity to entrain isochrony. When the third onset occurs it
could anticipate, delay, deny, or confirm this expectation. Events are
“continuations” if felt to follow from a previous projection, or “anacruses”
if retroactively felt to have anticipated a subsequent, more important onset.
Rhythmic experiences comprise far more complexity than a mere three
onsets, and become extremely rich affairs.
In ethnomusicology, A-series ideas have often appeared, but usually to
render a cultural, not an individual, sensibility. It is difficult to depict how
people in other societies experience their rhythms. To focus too much on
difference is to essentialize; to focus overly on sameness is to undermine a
culture’s genuine identity. This permanent tension is complicated further by
rapid twenty-first-century cultural change and mixture. To date,
ethnomusicology’s fealty has been to the notion of culture, hence to
difference, downplaying biology.
As fieldworkers learn to perform others’ music and aspire to ever-more
faithful inside viewpoints, they have sometimes tried to explain how it feels
to experience the music in performance, or have given a platform to
indigenous voices. Africa, and black music generally, has been a major
focus. John Chernoff describes the exhilarating sensations of being
unexpectedly thrust into a leadership role, drumming with his teachers at a
village festival in Ghana.28 Chernoff, having experienced ecstatic
communion with Ghanaian drummers, argues for distinctively African
aesthetic modes of attending and “being” in music, corroborated by his
teachers’ own reports.
Anne Danielsen, a Norwegian who performed in funk bands, learned the
grooves of ‘blackness’ in Oslo:
Being in a groove, feeling the right feeling, letting presence happen, from the inside, from a
position within time, within the experiential now, this is probably what funk is all about, and we
should perhaps leave it at that, in all its meaningful non-sense.29
6. Conclusion: Metarhythm
We began by paying homage to the vast realm of rhythm. From the start we
ruled out the likelihood of defining it. But persisting with the title question,
we visited the five sub-domains of language, anthropology, perception (the
A-series), structural analysis (the B-series), and technology, in each case
seeking a way to characterize rhythm. We found that rhythms of language
and music are not so distinct as one may think at first; that there are limits
to how much one can associate particular rhythms with cultural formations;
that the perception and the objectification of rhythms are highly imperfect
enterprises; and that rhythmic variety is constantly expanding as a function
of technology. The results were not terribly promising for anyone hoping to
get a handle on how to slot rhythm into types and categories, and to
enumerate the extent of its manifestations. Others, with less need to find
rigorous order in nature or in human affairs, may celebrate rhythmic
diversity for its own sake.
We might consider that, cumulatively, the five topics discussed yield an
emergent phenomenon—call it metarhythm. What is metarhythm? It is the
rhythm of rhythm: the encompassing movement by which human
conceptions of rhythm evolve and interact. It is the eons-long process
paralleling the expansion of human consciousness, during which the
rhythms of the natural world gradually entered into explicit human
awareness. There, in imagination, both individual and cultural, they
replicated, developed, are tinkered with and added to.
The canvas on which metarhythm unfolds is the same natural and
temporal one as that of rhythm itself. But metarhythm organizes rhythm
into shifting planes of concept and signification as the mind confers many
dimensions of meaning upon it. And at a certain moment the rhythms
created by human imagination acquired a potential even bigger than those
of the natural world. Each metarhythmic configuration is a description of
human rhythmic understanding and capacity for some cross-section of the
evolving composite process, and these understandings and capacities are
always on the move. This is not, in the end, anything like a definition or a
categorization of rhythm, but an assertion that its definitions and categories
are contingent and changing. The signifiers of rhythm and music remain
what they are, but what they signify does not.
Works Cited
1
Hughes, The Book of Rhythms.
2
Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo, 12.
3
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 3.
4
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7880793.stm and related internet videos.
5
Roads, Microsound.
6
Nettl and Levine, “Four American Indian Songs.”
7
Jankowsky, “Tunisian Sṭambēlī.”
8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea7gn8hhEFA portrays cattle auctioneering.
9
Tenzer, ed., Analytical Studies in World Music; Tenzer and Roeder, eds, Cross-Cultural Studies
in World Music.
10
Rousseau, “Origin of Languages.”
11
Herder, Origin of Language.
12
Brown, “ ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Evolution”; Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals.
13
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPuE0UMEMEs.
14
Deutsch, Musical Illusions.
15
Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain, 51, 150.
16
Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music, however, posits a more intricate and closer
relationship between music and language rhythm.
17
Wiora, The Four Ages of Music.
18
Merriam, Anthropology of Music, 210, 209–28.
19
Merriam, Anthropology of Music, 219, 210.
20
Fürniss, “Aka Polyphony,” 166.
21
England, Music Among the Jul’hoansi.
22
Levin and Suzukei, Rivers and Mountains Sing.
23
Nattiez, “Throat Singing.”
24
Lewis, “As Well as Words,” 238.
25
Terauchi, “Japanese Court Music (Gagaku).”
26
McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”; Gell, The Anthropology of Time, 151.
27
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm.
28
Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, 139.
29
Danielsen, Presence and Pleasure, 204.
30
Lutoslawski, in Stucky, Lutoslawski and His Music, 127.
31
For changes in pitch or tone color, even when durations repeat without change, there is still a
strong sense of movement. “Pitch and tone color” is meant to encompass harmony as well. The
envelope of a sound comprises its physical intensity, attack and decay contour, articulation, etc.
32
Tenzer, “Generalized Representations.”
33
Rahn, “Repetition,” 50.
34
Blacking, “Musical Change,” 17.
35
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 69.
36
E.g. Lerdahl and Jackendoff, Theory of Tonal Music.
37
Krause, Great Animal Orchestra, 115.
38
Molino and Nattiez, “Typologies et Universaux,” 357.
39
Zemp et al., eds, Voices of the World. The CDs are out of print but the entire collection can be
streamed at https://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/archives/collections/CNRSMH_E_1996_013_001/, with an
excellent, downloadable booklet.
40
Zemp et al., eds, Voices of the World: CD 1, track 1; CD 3, track 2; CD 2, track 33; and CD 2,
track 34, respectively.
41
Fitch, “Biology and Evolution of Music,” 183.
42
Kvifte, “Categories and Timing,” 77.
43
Polak and London, “Mande Drumming.”
44
Benadon, “Slicing the Beat.”
45
London, Hearing in Time, 27–8.
46
Brøvig-Hanssen, “Opaque Mediation.”
47
Palmer, The Living Clock, 4.
48
Palmer, The Living Clock, 38–44.
14
Temporal Processing and the Experience
of Rhythm
A Neuro-Psychological Approach
Udo Will
1. Introduction
2.2 Duration
State-changes are temporally extended phenomena, and the term “duration”
designates the length of a state change, demarcated by onset and offset. It
also designates the time between two successive (point) events. These two
interval types are also known as filled and empty intervals. Filled auditory
intervals are perceived more accurately, and as longer than, empty
intervals.4 However, this effect does not seem to generalize to interval
sequences; accuracy for empty rhythms is consistently better than for filled
rhythms.5 Identification of temporal order (Section 2.3) seems to improve if
events are separated by silent intervals.6
Studies indicate that perception of intervals shorter than 2–3 seconds are
perceived as qualitatively different from longer intervals, with shorter
intervals eliciting synchronization of body movements, while longer
intervals are perceived as having no effect on them.7 Temporal processing
in the two time ranges also involves different physiological processes.8
Our perception of duration is also influenced by our movements. Events
are perceived as longer when observed, and self-generated actions are
congruent, indicating an intimate link between temporal perception and our
actions.9 Duration perception is an active, guiding component in an
organism’s interaction with its environment.
7. Conclusions
For over thirty years, time research was dominated by the idea that temporal
processing is accomplished by a unitary, amodal process across various task
domains. Recently, alternative models have arisen that reject dedicated
neural structures because temporal processing is inherent in neural
dynamics. In these models, timing functions are executed by multiple,
overlapping neural systems, which may be flexibly engaged depending on
context; temporal processing is modality, task, and context specific.
The reported processing differences for vocal and instrumental rhythms
is compatible with such models, and poses a challenge for the idea of
rhythm as an abstract feature of event sequences. In the auditory domain
rhythm processing has discernable sensory components. The differences in
temporal processing can be explained by the ways sensory input changes as
agents interact with the environment. From an enactive perspective, the
distinction between vocal and instrumental rhythm appears to reflect their
different origins in relation to the human body—one produced actively
inside the body, the other created through limb action on external objects—
as well as their different significance in human interaction and
communication.
This interpretation resonates with the analysis offered by W. Tecumseh
Fitch’s comparative research into the origins of music, which combines
cross-cultural, intra-specific and inter-specific perspectives.58 He
emphasizes that “the music faculty” consists of various components with
different evolutionary histories, which talking about “music” as a unitary
phenomenon obscures. In support of a multi-component view of music that
treats vocal and instrumental music as distinct, he discusses lines of
evidence from design features of music and language to the evolution of
analogous and homologous behavioral traits. In addition, to reiterate, vocal
and instrumental rhythms differ also in temporal processing.
These different lines of research offer new perspectives on the
relationship between speech and music. Thus it would be difficult to
maintain that the rhythm of speech is at the origin of vocal music, which in
turn gives rise to instrumental music.59 Although they all exhibit different
temporal properties, speech and vocal music are both based on the voice,
produced inside our body through engagement of vocal folds, lungs, mouth
cavity, etc. Instrumental sounds are produced through interactions of our
limbs with external objects, or with resonating parts of our own body.
Hence, vocal rhythms—in speech and vocal music—and instrumental
rhythms derive from different ways of interacting with our environment and
are controlled by different temporal mechanisms. Thus instrumental music
should be considered in parallel to vocal music, not as derived from it.
Works Cited
Agawu, Kofi, African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective, tr. Martin Thom, Barbara Tuckett, and
Raymond Boyd (Cambridge, 1995).
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1
Will, “Cultural Factors.”
2
Noë, “World in Time.”
3
Cheong and Will, “Empty and Filled Rhythms”; Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term
Memorization.”
4
Wearden et al., “Internal Clock Processes”; Nakajima, “Empty Duration Perception”;
Rammsayer and Skrandies, “Temporal Information Processing.”
5
Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
6
Warren and Obussek, “Temporal Order”; Thomas and Brown, “Time Perception.”
7
Nakajima et al., “Successive Sound Bursts.”
8
Lewis and Miall, “Brain Activation Patterns.”
9
Press et al., “Moving Time.”
10
Schimmel and Kohlrausch, “Interaural Differences.”
11
Schütte, “Subjektiv gleichmäßiger Rhythmus.”
12
Pöppel, “Temporal Perception,” “Lost in Time.”
13
Wittmann, “Moments in Time.”
14
“Try the McGurk Effect,” Horizon (online video).
15
See this volume, Chapter 11, London, “Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception.”
16
Le Poidevin, The Images of Time.
17
Michon, Making of the Present.
18
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo.”
19
Lewis and Miall, “Brain Activation Patterns.”
20
Huys et al., “Distinct Timing Mechanisms.”
21
Schaal et al., “Rhythmic Arm Movement.”
22
MacDougall and Moore, “Marching to the Beat.”
23
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo”; Van Noorden and Moelants, “Perception of Musical Pulse”;
Will and Berg, “Brain Wave Synchronization.”
24
Will et al., “Pulse and Entrainment.”
25
Jones, “Time, Our Lost Dimension”; Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending”; Jones and
McAuley, “Time Judgments.”
26
Will, “Cultural Factors.”
27
Merchant et al., “Common Mechanism”; Shuler and Bear, “Reward Timing”; Bueti et al.,
“Sensory and Association Cortex.”
28
Deutsch “Recognition of Durations”; Povel and Essens, “Perception of Temporal Patterns.”
29
Hung, “One Music? Two Musics?”
30
Klyn et al, “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
31
The articulatory loop is a working-memory mechanism that prevents pronounceable memory
content from decaying through repeated articulation.
32
Cheong and Will, “Empty and Filled Rhythms.”
33
Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization.”
34
Fant, Acoustic Theory of Speech.
35
Belin et al., “Voice-Selective Areas”; Bent et al., “Cognitive Processing of Pitch”; Zatorre et
al., “Auditory Cortex”; Hung, “One Music? Two Musics?”
36
Wang, “Communication Sounds in Primates.”
37
Pa and Hickok, “Parietal-Temporal Sensory-Motor Integration”; Wang, “Communication
Sounds in Primates.”
38
Klyn et al., “Differential Short-Term Memorization” (experiments 2 and 3); Wang,
“Communication Sounds in Primates.”
39
Will et al., “Pulse and Entrainment.”
40
Cummins, “Rhythm in Speech.”
41
Moore, “Rhythm in Speech: A Response,” argues from system dynamics for the relative
independence of spoken language from other bodily functions.
42
Cummins and Port, “Stress Timing.”
43
Dooling, “Sentence Perception.”
44
Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions.
45
Level tones have a longer duration than deflected tones.
46
Tunstill, “Pitjantjatjara Song.”
47
Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
48
Ellis, Aboriginal Music; Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
49
Dixon, The Dyirbal Language.
50
Dixon and Koch, Dyirbal Song Poetry.
51
Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
52
Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song”; Will, “Kognitiven Musikethnologie.”
53
Ellis, Aboriginal Music.
54
Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
55
Will, “Oral Memory in Australian Song.”
56
Havelock, Preface to Plato.
57
Clayton et al., “In Time with the Music”; see also this volume, Chapter 12, Clayton,
“Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm.”
58
Fitch, Biology and Evolution of Music.
59
Arom, African Polyphony; Agawu, African Rhythm.
PART IV
TIME AND EXPERIENCE
Subjective and Objective Rhythm
15
Complexity and Passage
Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm
Christopher Hasty
II
Although “rhythm” and “poetry” are not focal concepts of process thought,
“experience” is. The process-thought perspective I take affirms process as
activity, ongoingness, emergence, movement, growth, learning.1 Such
thinking feels itself in opposition to the thought of substance, stasis,
mechanism, timeless transcendence, and knowledge as a secure possession.
There can be virtue in sharpening the opposition, and in finding a balance,
especially if both terms change in order to balance. With this latter virtue in
mind, rather than dwell on the opposition of process thought to, say,
substance thought, I will attempt to exemplify and instantiate process by
experimenting with poetic rhythm, reading/hearing/saying a single stanza
from Keats’ Endymion, namely, the beginning of the “Hymn to Pan.” This
excerpt will serve as a laboratory for experimenting with problems of poetic
rhythm.
Written poetry is an excellent vehicle for rhythmic experimentation,
largely because it can be returned to repeatedly, and because all readers
have access. Experimenting with written music is more difficult and
restrictive. To experiment in detail with hearing or playing from score can
take much time and energy, and few have the skills to work with a score. To
take full advantage of the example in Figure 15.1, I ask that the reader join
in the experiment by repeatedly trying out saying. With repetition a reader
will, I hope, make discoveries—some in line with my suggestions, and
some not.
These experiments aim at feeling events of different sorts or levels and
focus especially on duration or timing. They involve action (saying) and
reflection (thinking-about) in alternation. Indeed, there is a rhythm of
experimenting: if thinking about creates events, thinking about takes time.
My position is that there is no ultimate escape from time and passage. But,
at the same time, I truly value the practice and also the instruments of
thinking-about—abstractions, diagrams, categories, schemata that appear to
resist passage. In fact, I will preface the following analysis with some such
abstraction—a distinction between rhythm performed (said, heard, felt) and
described or talked about. I call the rhythmic-performative “R1,” and the
description of rhythm (about rhythm) “R2.” R1 is the actually felt or sensed
course of events, or their emergence; a process of event-formation in which
repetition is transformed into novelty and felt as such, felt as fully “now.”
R2 is an intellectual construction of rhythm involving naming, description,
analysis—any thinking about. A dominant variety of R2 overvalues itself to
the point of denigrating or denying R1, the temporal or performative. R1 is
denigrated when it is dismissed as mere performance, merely subjective. To
the extent the temporal, dynamic, ongoing is a threat to stability—to fixed
objects, eternal laws; to the extent there is the threat of evanescence and
disappearing, ineffability and loss of control, R2 moves to eliminate R1 as
an illusion—the illusion of time’s arrow, or of time as anything more than a
mere formality. But since R2 here means any construction, it can also refer
to event- or process-based constructions such as I will explore with poetry.
I specify the difference when I speak of the old R2 or ask for a new R2.
Again, any R2 will, in fact, be its own R1 as it is actually done. Thus, there
is no real escape from time or passage. It is crucial to understand that R2
must be performed—in speaking, reading, writing, thinking about (all
present progressive tense). Moreover, music-poetic rhythmic performances
and practices are never isolated from discourses. Positing R1 as primary
does not denigrate or demote such discursive (R2) activities, but
acknowledges the primacy of temporality and process. It also suggests a
perhaps inescapable (more or less Diltheyian) hermeneutic circle
connecting R1 and R2; suggesting also that such regenerative, rhythmic
work can be more or less creative, more or less sterile. Positing R2 as
secondary is to recognize that no R2 description can capture an intricacy
that is always on the move. But we can make room for intricacy if we make
room for movement, and perhaps fashion an R2 practice that might
remember and honor its R1 involvements.
III
stopping and listening for how long the second beat lasts. Several tries will
be useful in developing a feeling for duration here. The first beat can be
lengthened or shortened. The syllable -ty might come more urgently
(quickly) or more leisurely (slowly). We can listen for a more or less clear
ending of the second beat. Or we can take this duration for the precise
timing of a following beat, saying palace. If we do choose to say palace, we
can experiment with earlier or later sayings, and with sayings too early or
too late, where “too early” could be felt as an interruption of the second
beat and “too late” a hiatus or break in which the second beat no longer
works to give us a third.
Although this experiment asks for an unusual attentiveness to durational
quantity in finely observed distinctions, it points to the context-sensitivity
of timing and the special relevance of immediate succession in our
decisions of when to say, and how we value this when. More importantly,
such experimentation can also serve quickly to get us more deeply involved
in the poetry. Introducing more context and time will help hold onto such
distinctions. Try the following two (re-composed) lines:
Here four longer beats are marked. Those heard in mighty, -roof, and jagged
are now heard as continuations: still beats in themselves, they function also
to continue larger beats already begun. In this case, try stopping with trunks
and listening for how long this beat lasts. A longer duration can be felt, and
it should be easier to hear the silence after trunks filled with a continuation
of the beat’s duration, a duration inherited from its predecessor. (A similar
opening of duration might be heard in stopping with hang.) We might even
feel traces of a \, a silent smaller beat inherited from the preceding beat’s \
(in jagged). To sharpen the difference projective context makes, say trunks
(or hang) by itself. In this case, duration will be relatively indeterminate—if
trunks by itself begins a beat, how long does it last? Here the silence is not
filled with a palpable duration (no more or less definite silent continuation).
In Figure 15.3 I have reluctantly distinguished arsic (\) and anacrustic (/)
continuations—the dominance of triplets can overshadow the phonological
dependencies to make the distinction otiose. The contrasting (compounded)
third line can invite a variation in the triplets, lengthening the first syllable
and making the second shorter in a “dotted rhythm” (to use the musical
term). Thus inflected, the second continuation of the second beat in line 4,
to-, can be similarly shortened (such “dotted rhythms” are still within the
triplet). To further illustrate the pressure of these beats, try substituting for
the last line the following: Couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again. I
believe that there will be only one way to do this (finer points of timing
aside) and that it will come easily. The power of these beats derives from a
projective depth indicated by labeling alternating beats as continuations of
larger beats. As evidence of these greater projections, notice the duration
opened by the last syllable of the substitution—(a)gain. To test the
projection, try beginning the poem again from here. When is the right time
to say Humpty-? What would seem too soon? What is the effect of waiting
“too long” or the difference “too late” makes?7
Rather than limit isochrony to such situations, I speak of degrees of
isochrony, but loosely, given the variety of applications. I distinguish
relatively strict isochrony from loose, flexible isochrony, and treat -chrony
not as clock-measured time but as event-measured duration. Duration in the
intended sense is not a purely quantitative timespan, but a spanning of time
in the old sense of stretching or reaching across. Thus we might think of
duration substantively as an action, a process of enduring (from durus,
hardening, solidifying) or becoming an event. Duration in this sense blurs
the quantity–quality distinction. The continuations labeled \ and / shape
duration, as do the syntactic/semantic values of the words we say, the
physical movements of our bodies (vocal apparatus), and the larger socio-
cultural environments of our saying—all working together. If isochrony can
never be an exact repetition, and if what constitutes similarity in duration is
quantitative–qualitative, we can allow for degrees of isochrony and perhaps
allow that there may be situations in which the isochronous–non-
isochronous distinction is not clear-cut.
To experiment with projection in the first line, let’s try three
performances in order of increasing attunement to the complications of
context, taking more into account in our timing of beats/syllables. First
(Figure 15.4), a strict-isochronous sing-song reading of five iambic feet,
where iambic means / |. To make the continuations anacrustic—against the
grain of syntactic-semantic dependencies—we must make the continuations
short, moving them close to the following beats. This reading demonstrates
(purported) iambic feet. Although the decision to reproduce iambs is made
prior to the performance as part of the context of performance (in this case a
context that works to limit the context of other factors), the performance is
still made beat-by-beat—not predetermined by an atemporal grid.
Figure 15.4 The first line said as strict iambic pentameter (five isochronous beats each of the form
“weak-strong”) in obvious violation of the line’s complexity
Figure 15.5 The first line said as five more or less isochronous beats, but now allowing for
complexities of “weak” and “strong”
Figure 15.6 shows further differences in timing, taking more into account
than the distinctions of / and \, and allowing a freer, more variable
isochrony. Should we call such a performance non-isochronous? The
performance represented here (where line-segment length loosely
corresponds to durational quantity) shows an acceleration to –roof.
Figure 15.6 The first line said as five “flexibly isochronous” beats whose flexibility or variability is
determined (or “controlled”) by higher levels of complexity
This performance begins with longish O thou! taking into account the
focus on this address, which is to be held throughout the stanza, the
punctuation, and the emerging syntactic/semantic in which the anacrustic
whose promises a new clause. Experimenting with a relatively slow tempo
may be helpful, at least initially, in giving more time for feeling variation
and for sensing potentials for rhythmic complexity. After experimenting
with this slow tempo, the line can be said faster (much like practicing a
piece of music). If migh-ty is said quickly we will be left with a long stretch
if we attempt to reproduce the first beat’s duration—we must either endure
a long silence or begin to intone the second syllable. One solution is to
move more quickly to a third beat. The projective potential of the first beat
is still relevant in the second if we feel an acceleration—indeed, this
potential is precisely what allows a feeling of acceleration. If we were to
shorten further the second beat, making it too short—too short to realize the
projected potential—the result would be felt as an interruption, palace-
coming too soon. But note that this feeling too is the product of projection,
a projection interrupted. The power (potential, virtue) of projection is
weakened only by withdrawing attention, feeling less, taking less into
account. Now that we have begun an acceleration, we will be inclined to
continue it, for acceleration is now part of the second beat’s projective
potential. The third beat inherits from the second not an “absolute” length
but acceleration (projection is thoroughly relative and contextual). Nothing
here contravenes this inheritance; much supports it. Palace- is emerging as
a second adjective, like mighty, still under the sway of whose and not yet
(fully) discharged in the promised noun. Palace-, like mighty, has a short
first syllable. Indeed, in the mouth pa- can move to -lace more easily and
hence more quickly than migh- to -ty. There is also a syntactic-semantic
intensification at work that can serve acceleration: [mighty [palace-[roof]]].
Acceleration is broken in the fourth beat with -roof. Here is our long-
awaited noun and the opening for a verb. (Notice that acceleration might be
continued by further compounding: for example, whose mighty palace-by-
the-sea.) It is from -roof that the relative clause closes in doth hang (whose .
. . roof doth hang). The deceleration makes -roof momentarily focal and sets
up the verb (doth) hang, which will be crucial for comprehending the larger
clause (lines 1–4)—doth hang will be revived or sustained in
overshadoweth, which in turn must be held for its adverbial phrase in heavy
peacefulness at the end of the clause. Notice too that a feeling/hearing of
the sudden darkening in -roof (from mighty and especially palace-)
enhances/is enhanced by the deceleration. As a measure of the force of a
possible multidimensional focus on -roof, notice that it is here possible to
break the “Compound Rule,” requiring a stress for the first element of a
compound word, and here to stress -roof relative to palace-.
These rhythmic possibilities are motivated (in part) by syntactic
possibilities, and serve the syntax in an ongoing process of making sense.
The qualifier whose implies (creates syntactic projective potential for) some
as yet unspecified noun. We await the appearance of “the” noun, even if we
“know” it in advance; and it is in this particular waiting that we are in time
and rhythm. The qualifier whose also implies a verb that would follow the
noun (a “what” for the noun to be or to do—here, finally, to hang) and thus
opens the prospect for a longer clause, helping us hold onto the movement
from whose to the end of the clause. Whose is our link to thou! (sustaining
thou!) and remains throughout the first four lines. Its renewal in who, line 5,
initiates a second phrase-event and thus an end to the first. And again, O
thou! lasts well beyond its qualifiers, whose and who (thee and thou).
Implying, awaiting, opening the prospect for, remaining, renewing,
reviving, sustaining, holding, these point to a sort of projection, a working-
in—present into future, or past into present. But in contrast to the
quantitative-durational projection of beats, lexical-semantic and syntactic
projection does not require immediate succession—whose can be effective
long after the word has ceased to sound. As we move to larger contexts we
will return to the question of other sorts of projection and to contexts that
expand beyond beats.
IV
Having come to the end of our first line we are already on the threshold of a
larger context, that of the line-event. Lines ask to be performed/heard as
events, things that begin and end. The following line is a new beginning.
What then of the projective potential of the fifth beat? Does the first beat of
a line take its measure from the last beat of the preceding line? It is difficult
to generalize. Indeed, even within a line, projective relevance may be
attenuated through hiatus (as in line 12 following Syrinx), and there can be
great variety in the distinctness with which beats are felt (for example, in
lines 8 and 11).8 Such situations are neither defective nor departures from
the norm; beat suppression is a part of projective complexity (in how many
iambic pentameter lines can we feel clearly only four beats?). The
emergence of line-events carries its own complexity—the sixth beat
(jagged) is now also a first beat with its own anacrusis from (like O, thou!).
There is now a continuity of lines as well as beats. However it is
accomplished in terms of timing, stress, and pitch contour, the articulation
of lines involves a feeling of beginning again and, in the case of this stanza,
beginning a new line of iambic pentameter. Does the articulation of lines
create the poetic meter or does the poetic meter make the lines? Without the
need to continue making pentameter lines there would be no reason to hear
hang as an ending (it is not an ending in my recomposed version on page
241).
Iambic pentameter is a form, a complex potential made of countless lines
internalized (learned, memorized, embodied) by poets and readers. I
suggest that such a form does not work as an out-of-time abstraction
(except in pedagogical contexts) but instead as a repertory of many past
experiences constrained by a rule that might be most simply put: (1) ten
syllables (or nine if “headless,” or eleven if a final continuation) most often
beginning with anacrusis, (2) predominately one continuation per beat, (3)
five beats (or four where there are more continuations).9 Thus, a play
between the constraint of syllable “count” and the constraint of beat
“count”—where “count” is internalized, becomes a bodily feel. Having
these two dimensions in play in this way is part of the charm of this form or
habit. Think of form as our habits of playing, and not just the rules of the
game. Such a form (like “the” sonnet, sonata, chaconne) has power or
potential because it has so often been repeated that it has become a rich
reservoir of past experiences for readers and writers of poetry.10 But the
form would not have been so often repeated (to become a form) if it did not
offer something of value. In its long history, iambic pentameter has been
developed on the basis of changing cultural values. Many writers have
pointed to the values of complexity and spontaneity as opportunities
afforded by the iambic pentameter line.11 Derrick Attridge has specifically
pointed to the resistance of the line to the strong inclination toward
“doubling” found in tetrameter (creating “2-beat” potentials such as we saw
on pages 241 and Figure 15.3).12 One value that emerges from the choice of
five beats is a flexibility with regard to continuations and timing, allowing
departures from strict isochrony. Flexible timing is made possible by an
openness to contextual complexity generally suppressed in tetrameter.
Comparatively strict or flexible here does not imply more or less metrical
verse (meter is not a rigid grid). From a temporal or projective perspective,
pentameter is no less metrical than tetrameter (nor “free rhythm”
necessarily less metrical than strict). Flexibility in timing is a mark of
intense potentials working together, and thus an intensely metrical
phenomenon.
As we saw on page 241, four beats can give rise to a larger beat where
beats 2 and 4 become continuations. Since the diagram in Figure 15.2
showed only two beats, we should explore this possibility with more
complex diagrams, that provide an opportunity to consider projection
further. Figure 15.7 represents four consecutive projections.
Figure 15.7 Beat-to-beat projections in which each new event is focally aware simply of its
immediate predecessor
I have omitted event labels and added brackets to represent the actual
achieved durations (a–e) of the five events. Again, the dotted lines are
potentials, not actuals. For each event is shown an actualized duration (a–e);
a potential for its actualization (dotted line); and a potential for actualization
in another event (line with arrowhead). In Figure 15.8 things are more
complicated.
Figure 15.8 A representation of projective complexity showing the resistance of a five-beat line to
the determinacies of four, or rather two, beats (Attridge’s “doubling”). NB: this diagram is not meant
to represent the complexity of most “pentameter” lines where a reduction to two is not an issue.
(Indeed, in some “pentameter” nine- or ten-syllable lines there are four beats, but these situations are
hardly “square.”)
Discussing Figure 15.2, I said that one limitation of the diagram was in
not showing anything before A (or after B). Figure 15.8 shows more
context. The third beat enters a world of relevance larger than that of beat 2,
and thus can assume a larger potential. Here, I show the emergence of a
projective potential R given to the new beginning with beat 3 as a potential
for reproduction (R’), and I show this potential actualized in the duration of
a second, larger beat labeled II.13 What then of the relevance of beat 2?
Here I suggest a denial of Q’ (crossed out) in a second beat-event that takes
its measure from a now first beat (I). In this way beat 2 becomes a
continuation. Beat 2 is still relevant for beat II, as is beat 1. The first event
(I) would not be this event with this potential (R) apart from all that
constitutes it. To show beat 2’s potential in this new context we might,
instead of crossing Q out, move Q’ over a space to fall under beat 4,
showing a delay of Q’ rather than a denial of Q. This might account for our
timing of a corresponding continuation in beat II (and of the vivid feeling of
silent beats). Perhaps both denial and delay can be involved and more one
or another depending on context. For example, since beat II is from the start
actualizing an R’ potential, beat 4 will emerge already as continuation and
not as “denied beginning,” as if it knew nothing of its fate. Or we might
imagine a situation when we feel a sudden expansion into larger measure
and thus denial of the smaller. Such possibilities point to the openness of
potentials in their emergence (and, more specifically, to the projective
relevance of continuations which did not appear in Figure 15.2). Things can
change quickly in complex situations.
Figure 15.8 shows a projection S–S’ interrupted by the beginning of a
new beat IV (if large) or 6 (if small, and thus a sudden reduction of beat
length). The interruption (\→ |) actively denies projected potential S’ (rather
than a denial of projective potential as in Q) and might be felt as a too-early
new beat. There must be reasons for feeling beats. For present purposes,
let’s say that beat 6 (or IV) begins a new line. So if we have large projective
potentials—“2-beat” projective potentials (i.e., two small beats)—we now
have two choices: to wait before beginning the new line, allowing S’ to play
itself out (as in trimeter, the earlier odd number), by default making six
beats, or to begin the new line as an interruption.14 Neither choice is what
iambic pentameter aims for. The solution is to avoid 2-beat measures or
reduce their strength, as in Figure 15.6 where acceleration and deceleration
cut across possible 2-beat measures following the 1 + 3 + 1 syntactic
division: O thou! | whose mighty palace-roof | doth hang. This sort of
reduction reflects an opening of the line to an intricacy of context not
afforded by larger measures. Complexity of many potentials (factors)
working together can complicate beat projection. Projection is enhanced,
not weakened, by becoming more variable—free to respond to context
(more possibilities for performance, more challenging to perform,
rewarding more attentiveness and experimentation).
For iambic pentameter, a fifth beat offers a sixth relatively little. The
sixth beat here begins a new line and is thus a new first beat. Felt as a new
beginning, the second line-event can (perhaps must) escape local projective
obligations arising at the end of the first line (rather as beat II can escape
Q’). This is a crucial moment for timing, a movement to a new event. Some
such crossings are difficult and take some practice to enact successfully. In
performance, they can be a provocation to test or experiment with the poetic
sequence or flow. Meeting this challenge repeatedly will develop poetic
skill. Rather than of exceptions (with their threat of de-formation) we might
think of poetic refinements, enrichments of the art (technical refinements)
that open new dimensions. Within the constraints of iambic pentameter,
how many ways can line elision (ending into beginning) be plausibly done,
i.e., how many forms/styles of elision are there, which are particularly
stylish, when?
Each line presents its own problems/opportunities for articulation
involving many factors—the rhythm of the preceding line; the rhyming of
the line ending; the semantic connection of lines; local inflection (volume
or stress, pitch contour, as well as timing). An ending may be enhanced by
suppressing a fifth beat in a “triple ending” (dactylic | \ \) as in lines 2, 4,
and 10 where the final (tenth) syllable is continuative. Here the following
anacrusis, beginning the next line, can have even less to go on, with a
feeling of slowing down in the fourth beat’s lengthening. Notice that line 4
ending in peacefulness (| \ \) closes the first large clause with the new
beginning, Who . . . (corresponding to the initial whose but moving the next
step closer to the god: from attributes/possessions to actions, verbs). At the
end of line 2, the triple overshadoweth is by contrast, an opening, crucial in
that it must be held all the way to peacefulness (doth hang . . . and
overshadoweth . . . in heavy peacefulness). In this long stretch, a sort of
pausing, holding up, or holding onto overshadoweth helps make the
syntactic/semantic connection. In line 10, overgrowth (| \ \) ends the next
large clause which initiates the intimate address, Bethinking thee, leading to
Pan’s naming. Notice that the next line is broken by hiatus (||, a dissolution
of projection) with the delay of do thou now (with stress on the do to carry
into the imperative Hear in the final line), which initiates a departure from
iambic pentameter into trimeter, preparing, two lines later, the turn to
dimeter. This metrical change could be prepared by the enjambment of line
11 and 12 motivated by syntax (loth Thou wast) in the emergence of
continuous beats across the lines (loth Thou wast to lose | / | / |), thus
providing an acceleration to fair Syrinx as an end. (The end rhyme growth-
loth is weakened by the clause division and perhaps more immediately by
the alliterative connection of loth and lose.) In any case, the hiatus (||) opens
the possibility for a shift (perhaps ecstatic) to a “displaced” or especially
urgent and risky new pentameter line, Do thou now, By thy love’s milky
brow. The rhyme now-brow would argue by “rule” (de jure), but rhythm
always asks for much more than rule. In fact, such a transitional
displacement may again be turned in hearing the (possibly accelerated)
expansion from By thy love’s milky brow to By all the trembling mazes that
she ran. How long to wait to say line 15, when will the time be just right?
In attending to these line-articulations, much more context was taken into
account than that of adjacent beats, but still less than the situation requires.
The emergence of a new line from the old is predicated on there being, or
rather becoming, a new pentameter line, which cannot happen immediately.
The promised line takes time to emerge, even if we decide to make it
happen. (Try, for example, beginning the second line and stopping with
trunks, noticing the tendency of the new line fragment to attach to the first
line as a continuation). Potential is continuous, not incremental but spread
through the whole duration.
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H., The Fourth Dimension of a Poem, and Other Essays (New York, 2012).
Attridge, Derrick, Poetic Rhythm (Cambridge, 1995).
Easthope, Antony, Poetry as Discourse (London, 2002).
Gendlin, Eugene, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological
Approach to the Subjective (Evanston, 1997).
Gendlin, Eugene, A Process Model (Evanston, 2017).
Hasty, Christopher, Meter as Rhythm (Oxford, 1997).
Hasty, Christopher, “Rhythmusexperimente: Halt und Bewegung,” in Christian Grüny and Matteo
Nanni, eds, Rhythmus—Balance—Metrum (Bielefeld, 2014), 155–207.
Keats, John, “Hymn to Pan,” ll. 232–46 of Endymion, in Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger
([1818]; Cambridge, MA, 1986), 70.
Polanyi, Michael, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene (Chicago, 1969).
Pred, Ralph, Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
Rescher, Nicholas, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany, 1996).
1
Rescher, Process Metaphysics, gives a general and ecumenical definition. My narrower
perspective is informed especially by James, and Whitehead, Bergson, and Deleuze. Pred, Onflow,
connects James and Whitehead with John Searle and Gerald Edelman.
2
Two weeks after the publication of Endymion, these five stanzas were excerpted and published
as “Hymn to Pan,” in Yellow Dwarf (May 9, 1818).
3
Hasty, “Rhythmusexperimente—Halt und Bewegung.”
4
M. H. Abrams, Fourth Dimension of a Poem, 1–29, 30–52, eloquently describes poetry as
involving “the lungs, throat, mouth, tongue, and lips,” especially in “the material, articulative aspect
of Keats’ language” (32).
5
E.g. Attridge, Poetic Rhythm on “beats” and emphasizing performance.
6
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, discusses “beats,” emphasizing performance.
7
Concerning question of scale, one might feel some trace of even larger projective potentials in
which the second half of the line functions as continuation (by focusing in two rather than four beats
per line). Such a possibility would clearly show that projection is dependent on many factors (for
example, beginning again Humpty-, emerging parallelisms, rhyme). In this connection, a large pattern
emerges in this poem, one found in other poems (all limericks, for example), and in many musical
phrases comprised of four “measures” (not necessarily bars). As here, the third line or measure is
“compounded” or “divided” relative to the others, leading us hear a sort of acceleration or
compression in the third part as, say: long | long | short-short | long or | | | \ |. See my Meter as
Rhythm, 113–15, 225–36 for discussion of this pattern in music.
8
In line 8 the -dy of melody could enter early as a syncopation. In syncopation the syllable enters
just before the beat it bears (which must be felt as such for there to be an early or “just before”), as if
an anacrusis were to become a following beat, perhaps to detach from the crucial (for Pan) mention
of bedded reeds. Line 11 is the turning point—Bethinking thee. (Note the ending of line 10 with the
triple, | \ \.) Here it is easy to say the two beats of melancholy quickly, twice as fast as the two
preceding beats, thus making -choly a continuation of the larger beat, and perhaps give momentum
for moving straight into the next line Thou hou wast to lose. (As we shall see, from here it may be
tempting to depart from the pentameter norm.)
9
These three constraints clearly work together—any two taken together will produce the third.
10
Of course, the question arises: which version of “the” sonnet, sonata, chaconne? Indeed, each
of these terms has its own taxonomical structure or history. That is to say, form need not be
understood as a fixed and separate entity, nor need structure be thought fixed if it is possible to think
of structure in terms of history.
11
E.g., Easthope, Poetry as Discourse.
12
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 153–8, finds the power of doubling so strong that he classifies
pentameter as one of many non-quadratic, non-2 × 2 meters.
13
For illustration try trimeter, saying, “O thou! whose mighty roof / Doth hang from jagged
trunks” hearing a long measured duration with roof before beginning the second line; or Blake’s “I
love the jocund dance, / The softly breathing song.”
14
To see this potential, try saying the two lines of recomposed verse on page 241, hearing the
two-beat projections, and then returning to Keats’ pentameter line. It may take some effort to get
back into the pentameter—the tetrameter has a very strong pull.
15
Numerous resources explore linguistic and semiotic process. See, for example, the systemic
functional linguistics of Michael Halliday and his followers. Relevant also might be the
interdisciplinary work of Jay Lemke, Stanley Salthe, and Paul Thibault that integrates dynamic
systems theory and more or less Peircean semiotics.
16
Gendlin, Creation of Meaning, and A Process Model, give a processive semiotic. Polanyi,
Knowing and Being, points to a “rhythmic” movement of focal and subsidiary awareness in learning
and discovery.
16
Encoded and Embodied Rhythm
An Unprioritized Ontology
Peter Cheyne
2. An Unprioritized view
It should be noted that there is, and can be, no such thing as a “straight
print” from a negative, just as there is, and can be, no such thing as a
“straight performance” of a score. The duration of exposure to the overhead
light is always a matter of judgment. The master printer in the darkroom
might use a wand to prevent certain parts of the photographic paper from
receiving too much light. He or she might use techniques such as feathering
in certain areas and borders. The paper itself has to be chosen, and this
choice affects qualities such as micro-contrast and macro-contrast.
One might object, nonetheless, that in music a read-through does in fact
involve a “straight” playing, which consists in playing the notes without
any pre-considered interpretation. A read-through, however, unlike a
performance for an audience, need not be done in real time, and often
involves moving quickly through slower passages, and more slowly through
rapid, or otherwise difficult sections. Perhaps sight-reading––performing a
prima vista––is more pertinent, but even then it is practically impossible to
deliver a “straight performance.” Indeed, as Louis Armstrong described
highly skilled musicians, “they might read a Fly Speck, if it get in the
way.”13 Playing a prima vista must be done in real time, so even skipping
notes, or playing wrong ones––which itself involves interpretation––would
be more acceptable than losing the rhythm. There can, then, be no such
thing as a straight print from a negative, a straight reading of a poem
(however, characterless an actual reading might seem), or a straight
performance from a score. Straight performance is impossible because any
performance from a description requires an interpretation that necessarily
contains a degree of openness. An exhibition that hung photographic
negatives on the walls or a performance that consisted only in distributing
the sheet music to the audience to imagine the work in relative silence
might count as conceptual art, but the practice would not become
conventional.
Against those who argue that performance is primary, Adams’ analogy
illuminates the mutual importance of the codified description (the negative
or the musical score) that is necessarily the antecedent original and any
rhythmic performances that are then produced. This is not to argue that
performances are simply inferior copies of an archetypal and more perfect
original. Even a photographic connoisseur who admires a negative for its
exposure and composition does so with the understanding of how this
serves the quality of the print, and much the same can be said of the admirer
of a musical score. Like the negative, the score primarily has instrumental
value, whereas the performance (like the print) has intrinsic value. But if
the performance has intrinsic value, and the score has primarily
instrumental value, does that not therefore mean that the performance has
priority? The answer must be no, because of an inescapable asymmetry.
While the performance depends on the score for its very existence, the score
does not likewise depend on the performance for its existence. However, in
the unprioritized view that I am presenting, while the score may be
chronologically prior to performance (this is not true for improvisation, but
even here there is often an initial idea and outline), it nevertheless depends
upon performance for its actualization, which is in an aesthetic sense its
completion.
Although the score in itself, as a concrete artifact, has only instrumental
value, it is the fundamental prerequisite that subsequent performances
depend on before any intrinsic value can be realized. It is the work that has
intrinsic value, and the musical composition as work of art is a composite of
co-dependent encoded form and actual or imagined performance. Perhaps
the performance never entirely realizes the work, which is always, as Sartre
suggested, held in “the imaginary”; thus it never quite exists concretely as
accomplished, once and for all. If this view is correct, while the
performance effects the completion of the work, it never quite achieves its
perfection. The score, then, encodes, though necessarily incompletely, with
gaps concerning expression, nuance, grouping. What one might call the
arch-performance is created by the composer in imagination and is ever and
anew appreciated, rediscovered, in the imagination of the performers and
the audience.
The musical score and the photographic negative are both creations of
their respective composing artists. As encoded, prototypical artifacts, they
have a uniqueness that performances do not, in that the original encoded
version is the one from which any number of performances develop. Note,
however, that it is not because the score or the negative are each one, and
only one, whereas the performances are many, that the prioritizing of
performance is prevented. Copyright allowing, the score is often published
and facsimiles can be reproduced from film negatives. Still, these copies
remain multiplied tokens of the one prototype. A question also arises from
multiple editions of the composer’s score leading to the quest for scholarly
editions to construct an Ur-text out of various manuscripts, proofs, and
prints. The point concerning the uniqueness of the encoded prototype is that
although performance-prioritizing theorists wish the descriptive artifact to
be understood as secondary, and although it is only as performance that the
art achieves intrinsic (actual not potential) value, it is the encoded artifact
that originates and inspires worthwhile performance. Accepting this co-
dependence of form and performance is key to the unprioritized view of
encoded and embodied aesthetic qualities such as musical rhythm.
My assertion of an unprioritized account amounts to defending encoded–
embodied (description–performance) co-dependence. It is based on the
argument that a conventional descriptive text holds open the possibility of
many different performances that might embody it, rather than minutely
describing expressive nuances such as the finer points of timing, note
grouping, offbeat stresses, etc. Indeed, the method of increasingly minute
and burgeoning description would, paradoxically and unfortunately, become
the ideal if some original, authoritative performance were always prioritized
over the encoded prototype. The job of such a minutely finessed,
burgeoning description would be to convey every nuance and particular of
that performance. While one can commend the scholarly quest to construct
the most accurate description of the composer’s intentions, it should also be
noted that those intentions often change as a composer returns to a score
over many years, so further questions inevitably arise as to whether any one
of these can have priority over another. Further, the existence of multiple
editions might produce interesting historical and scholarly questions, but
these are of lesser importance to the performing artist, who is, and ought to
be, free to explore perceived nuances across different texts that variously
suggest alternative expressive responses and resonances in the performer.
Thus the unprioritized view has value here, being an account where the
rights of the work are balanced in co-dependence with the sensitive
intuitions and expressive instincts of the interpretive performer.
It could, however, be argued that the existence of multiple texts supports
the opposite view, that particular performances have a uniqueness that is
almost completely missed by the atemporality and universality of
conventional description. Each performance is a one-off event that that can
be recorded but not repeated, while a musical score can easily be
photocopied and is essentially repeated, with added nuance, by becoming
embodied with each performance. Performances involve different maestros
or even the same ones but on good and bad days; the synergy of all
involved is such that small differences in some factors can affect the power
of the whole. So while performances can rightly be said to be interpretive
iterations of the score, they are necessarily unrepeatable in terms of the
many particulars involved and how they add up to an aesthetic whole.
Certainly analogue or digital reproduction is possible, but that is quite
different from the (impossible) repetition of the event. The unity of the text,
however, even if there are multiple versions from which to choose, is
performance generative, without itself being in any normal sense of the
word a performance.
Performance, aside from improvisation, develops from code—the text—
but the issue of priority is not such a vital quarrel. Each is necessary for the
more-or-less faithful reproduction of embodied rhythm from an encoded
composition. A good score never performed is wasted, almost a nullity. And
a performance of a composition is equally dependent on the score, however
radically the performer departs in expressive interpretation. Those who
radically prioritize performance aim, quixotically, I believe, toward a
reversal of values that not only promotes the particular and embodied (there
is nothing wrong in that), but which also denigrates the powers of form as
timeless agents of perpetual identity (which I consider to be tilting at
windmills). But all this sounds like fighting an imaginary Platonic
bogeyman,14 as if one should, like a good Nietzschean, fear shadows that
threaten to engulf the living world of matter and bodies. What is really
being opposed here? If the enduring identity of the text were instead to
become, per impossibile, as unrepeatably nuanced as the temporal
performance, then the text could not be the performance-generative artifact
that it undoubtedly is.
Nobody seriously argues that the score––or any text intended to generate
performance––dictates or ought to dictate each detail and expressive nuance
of every possible performance. As T. V. F. Brogan diplomatically but
decisively judges the matter, with respect to poetry:
It is natural to want to enrich scansion with other kinds of analyses which capture more of the
phonological and syntactic structure of the line . . . But all such efforts exceed the boundary of
strict metrical analysis, moving into descriptions of linguistic rhythm, and thus serve to blur or
dissolve the distinction between meter and rhythm. . . . Scansions which take account of more
levels of metrical degree than two, or intonation, or the timing of syllables are all guilty of
overspecification.15
Those who wish to enrich scansion all too easily end up “guilty of
overspecification” through blurring the distinction between meter and
rhythm and jealously prescribing not only precise timing, but also tongue
movements, etc. Yet, though one might annotate a rhythmic, rather than just
a metric, scansion, a greater freedom of experiment and expression in
rhythm exists, perhaps counterintuitively, in remaining with the more basic,
binary metrical scansion. Greater freedom is afforded by simple metrical
scansion, marking only ictus (/), i.e., the metric beat or pulse, and non-ictus
(˘, or ×), because by not prescribing any rhythm, the reciter is left free to
experiment and discover rhythmic possibilities without needing to fixate on
any particular one as the rhythm. This is not to deny that the lines strongly
lend themselves to a particular rhythmic reading, indeed, I contend that
reasons for favoring one reading over another already lie objectively in the
text or in the cultural context. Yet it is equally true, however, that some
lines are deliberately inflected with the ambiguity of multiple,
contradictorily rhythmic readings. It therefore bears reflecting, against
overspecified scansion and rhythm analysis, that, as William Empson said:
“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.”16
These insights return me to Adams’ analogy of the photographic negative,
whereby the print is the performance, which serves well to show that the
text (the score, or negative) is not a code that dictates exactly how the
performance ought to turn out in each detail and in every instance.
Could there be more at stake, then, in the argument for the living reality
of actual, temporal, flowing presence than the apparently not very vital
question of which of two necessary components is to be given priority? The
foregoing discussion suggests that what is at stake is an assertion of
personality, vitality, of spirit above the dead letter. My response is that such
vitality requires an alternative to prioritizing terms on either side of the
debate. An unprioritized theory of objective–subjective, descriptive–
performative co-dependence is free to pursue atemporal and temporal
aspects of the artwork. The atemporal form is the imagined ideal, that
which allowed Sartre to insist of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony: “I do not
hear it actually,” because it is “outside existence,” such that “I listen to it in
the imaginary,” where beauty is possible.17 The unprioritized, co-
dependence view of rhythm and other aesthetic qualities is at once common
sense, in defending the openness and utility of traditional conventions, and
dynamic (opposing merely static forms), in celebrating the fact that every
new performance brings the ideal creation that is the artwork (Sartre’s
“imaginary”) into an aesthetic, embodied reality that actualizes the power of
the work to touch and move audiences intellectually and viscerally.
The cause, then, of the expression would still exist objectively, even if only
entailed by, rather than explicitly stated within, the musical score as read by
a sensitive and talented performer.
Comparable to the enduring of the beat through the offbeats, Lussy
portrays rhythm as the music “breathing.” In his analogy, as the music
“breathes,” the downbeats are the inevitable exhalation, his point being that
rhythm is the pulsation of building up and relaxation, a process as vital to
music as breath is to life. Each downbeat carries on the impulse from
previous beats, passing them on through the offbeats in a continuous flow.
So long as he or she has more than merely mechanical ability, the performer
intuitively appreciates all this, even though the signs of expression—the
accents and so on—may be absent from the score.
Throughout his essay, Hasty asks a series of questions about the enduring
of past events of a musical series in the present, i.e., the moment being
performed right now. When is one to let go? Is that even possible? When to
move to the next level or at least to a more fully new one? It is true that
conventional descriptive models might seem to encourage “letting go,” but I
contend that this only helps the performer to exercise sensitivity and tact.
Conventional description in fact neither forces nor prevents the loosening
and binding, the holding onto beats, phrases, motives, and other forms, that
constitute the enduring, lifelike, breathing qualities of music that do not
merely unfold time, but seem almost to enfold time, so that the past and the
future are also in the present as resonance, memory, and expectation.
But is one to believe, as Hasty argues, that conventional descriptive
structures are in fact destructive, designed to prune natural growth, and cut
off the past from living in the present? I have argued the contrary, that
conventional descriptive structures leave enough openness in the system for
performative expression and judgment by in fact not prescribing exactly
where, when, and how to bind, loosen, cut, remember, and so on. Whether
notation by the composer, or annotation by a critic or instructor, to create a
new system of description that added so much extra information would be
to prescribe too much. Such rigorous prescription made on behalf of “living
rhythm” would be counterproductive, constraining the expressivity of the
artist, reducing latitude for interpretation, and intruding on the performing
artist’s sensitivity for what, as Lussy explained, already resides “in the
structure of the musical phrase.” The existing conventions of description
have evolved not to prune the outgrowths of memory, nor to excise the
living rhythm, but rather to allow the artist at sensible or unexpected
junctures to cut or not to cut and to bind or not to bind, according to a
sensitive intuition of possibilities already there in the musical score. Thus
Lussy celebrates, rather than bemoans the fact, that: “In music there are no
special signs to mark the rhythm.”26 The reality is that such questions as
when one should let go of a beat, let it peter out through its successors, or
move onto the next level, are addressed afresh in each instance to the
spontaneous artistic conscience. One should therefore resist giving
prescriptive answers, let alone inscribe them as a new notational norm. If
conventional descriptions and encodings such as traditional scores did
indeed note where to let go of a beat and its memory, when to stop its pulse
and begin a new level, and notate every accent and emphasis, etc., then that
would stem experimental and creative performance and result in an artifact
with much more information than is needed for an elegant encoding of
music to be performed and thus embodied.
Works Cited
1
Wollheim, Art and Its Objects; Davies, Works and Performances.
2
Sartre, The Imaginary.
3
See Chapter 15, Hasty, “Complexity and Passage”; and Chapter 7, Peters, “Rhythm, Preceding
its Abstraction.”
4
Cook, Beyond the Score.
5
Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” 235.
6
Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” 235.
7
Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” 241.
8
Lussy, Musical Expression, 3.
9
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 129, 279, 283; Jarvis, “What Does Art Know?”
10
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis.”
11
Davies, Works and Performances, 20.
12
Adams, The Print, 2.
13
Armstrong, His Own Words, 26.
14
Cook, Beyond the Score, 8–32, blames what he sees as the traditional prioritizing of score over
performance on “Plato’s Curse.”
15
Brogan, “Scansion,” 1118.
16
Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 21.
17
Sartre, The Imaginary, 193.
18
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk 2, Ch. 8, §23, 140.
19
Anosov, “Topological Dynamics.” McGinnis and Newe, “Topological Dynamics: A
Framework,” and Sutil, “Topological Movement,” discuss topological dynamics as a framework for
dance notation, drawing on the pioneering choreography and movement notation of Rudolf Laban.
20
Nicomachus, Manual of Harmonics, 83, the earliest extant record of the account (83–97).
21
The “mathematicians,” with their more scientific Pythagoreanism, opposed the “acousmatics,”
who followed the sayings—however cryptic—of the master on authority without need of
mathematical proof or reasoning: see Riedweg, Pythagoras, 107–8. The acousmatic thesis in current
aesthetic theory holds that music does not move, or if so, moves only metaphorically. The acousmatic
theory is named in allusion to the Pythagorean acousmatics who heard the teachings of the master
only through a veil or screen. Thus an acousmatic account of music makes no reference to anything
beyond the sounds qua sonic phenomena.
22
Cage, “Dream,” instructions at top of score.
23
Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” 239.
24
Lussy, Musical Expression, 2.
25
Lussy, Musical Expression, 3.
26
Lussy, Musical Expression, 44.
17
Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity
The Aesthetics of Duration
Max Paddison
Art manipulates our experience, and all art forms experiment with the ways
we perceive time, space, and motion. This is particularly so with the
experience of duration and rhythm in the temporal arts—music, dance and
also performed poetry and drama. And yet, this experience of temporality as
a continuity is not in itself a given, but is something that we ourselves
create. As Célestin Deliège has put it, “whatever our perception of time
might be based upon, it is we who create this time, it remains always our
work, our oeuvre.”1 This chapter starts from the position that the concept of
rhythm needs to be understood in the context of its relation to time and
subjectivity. The approach taken is phenomenological, with a focus on
Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of time (via his critiques of Bergson
and Husserl), together with the Bachelard-influenced theory of musical
time-perception to be found in the work of Célestin Deliège.
My argument falls into three parts. First, the case is made for an
experiential concept of temporality through a brief survey of philosophies
of time that takes Kantian subjectivity as its point of reference and argues
that temporal experience is fundamentally subjective and exploratory.
Second, attempts to define rhythm are placed in this context, with music as
the focus. The argument is made for a concept of rhythm that also involves
a large-scale notion of “rhythmicized duration” as form, a concept that
affords extended scope for an aesthetic experience of temporality that is
also experimental in character. And third, I argue that the concepts of
temporality, duration, and rhythm, which have a particular identity in the
experience of music, are subject to historical change, and in the case of
Western art music have functioned both normatively and metaphorically in
different historical periods. It is suggested that there are different “aesthetic
times”—something reflected in the fact that paradigms of temporal
experience in the arts shift2—and that our experience of rhythm as
structured duration is shaped by this.
It is true to say that it is the relationist view that prevails today, particularly
in the natural sciences since the theory of relativity,5 but also in the arts. It
is therefore both significant and unexpected that the musicologist
Christopher Hasty opts for the absolutist position on time,6 in the process
appearing to raise a contradiction to which I shall return shortly. There is,
however, a strong case that has been made in the cognitive sciences that our
experience of time is dependent on our encounter with things and events
either outside us (changes in the environment, the cycle of the seasons) or
internal to us but largely independent of our volition (breathing, pulse).7
This lends support to the relationist rather than the absolutist position. Udo
Will, for example, points out that we don’t actually possess a special
internal organ that enables us to “sense” time directly as such, and can only
experience time through our relationship to other things.8 It is true that this
does not in itself disprove the “absolutist” case that time flows of its own
accord, independently of space and whatever happens to be filling it or
going on in it, but it does demonstrate that our perception of time as “flow”
and “continuity” is contingent upon the motion of things and events, and
that we have no other way of sensing it than through these relations. The
claim that we only really perceive time through our perception of change as
motion or movement of some kind I find persuasive. For example, while the
experience of a piece of music (as an object or event “outside” us) might
convince us that “time flows” of its own accord and that the “music flows”
of itself and in some way “contains time,” the Bachelardian view taken here
is that music and the temporal arts are constituted of discontinuous elements
to which our consciousness lends continuity. Without an attentive mode of
consciousness that makes connections as part of the experience of the
music, the sense of temporal continuity collapses, as happens in distracted
listening to extended pieces. The music then appears to us as a series of
disconnected fragments.
What the Newtonian and Leibnizian positions, and also empirical
experiments in the cognitive sciences and neuro-sciences, do not directly
address is the nature of our subjective experience of time, and it is, of
course, how time appears to us that is most significant in the experience of
the temporal arts. Interestingly, given his “absolutist” stance on time,
Christopher Hasty writes that
[r]hythm, in our aesthetic sense, seems to refer to a time of subjectivity and human experience—
a world apart from the objective ‘absolute’ time of Newtonian physics (but perhaps not so far
from quantum physics).9
Kant does not, of course, deny the empirical reality of time, how it appears
to us as experiencing subjects, but only its absolute reality—that is to say,
time is “empirical” because it is fundamental to the way we, as human
beings, experience the world, the way it appears to us through our senses.
Particularly significant, therefore, is Kant’s insistence that time is not an
attribute of the object but is something brought to it by the experiencing
subject. It is, however, important to note that “subjectivity” in this sense,
does not refer to the everyday meaning of the term as entirely personal and
a matter of individual choice, but refers instead to the subject side of the
subject–object relationship, and indeed to the subject’s relationship to the
world.11 The Kantian position on the subjectivity of the experience of time
is taken up by two of the most influential philosophers of temporality in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Henri Bergson and Edmund
Husserl. I want to consider their positions here in brief overview, both as a
preparation for my main methodological focus on Gaston Bachelard and
phenomenology, and for the support they provide for the concepts of
“rhythmicized duration” as form, and the subjectivity of temporal
experience.
In his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Time and Free
Will) of 1889, Bergson makes a well-known distinction between what he
called temps durée and temps espace. He defines these terms again in his
Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) as follows (and I paraphrase): temps
durée (duration) is the flux of experience, fleeting, elusive, not measurable,
and identified with intuition; temps espace—as its designation clearly
indicates—identifies measured time, clock time, with space, and with
intellect, reason and rationality. The former is characterized by continuity,
the latter by discontinuity.12 Duration, as temps durée, is what underlies the
continuity and persistence of consciousness of the self for Bergson, the
connectedness of “lived moments.” Bergson claims that the experience of
duration is characterized by a simultaneity and multiplicity of different
durations, and he writes in Durée et simultanéité (1922) that “different—or
rather I should say diversely rhythmicized—durations may coexist.”13 By
this he means that duration may be structured in different ways by the
rhythmic events that occur within it, and that several different
“rhythmicized” durations may exist simultaneously and be experienced
together. In the same passage Bergson also writes of consciousness itself as
duration in the following terms:
Such a consciousness would grasp in a single instantaneous perception multiple events situated
at diverse points in space; simultaneity would be precisely the possibility for two or more events
to enter into a single instantaneous perception.14
Even though this sense of the continuity of the self is also characterized by
constant change from one minute to the next, it is memory, according to
Bergson, that gives this duration its feeling of continuity, in spite of
apparent discontinuities along the way. Underlying Bergson’s philosophy of
time is the notion of the persistence of the self through change. He writes of
a “self which endures,” or “a present which persists.”15 As he puts it:
There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple
analysis. It is our own person in its flowing through time—our self which endures.16
In his demolition of the notion that pitches can really “move,” and in his
refusal to account for the importance of metaphor in the way we listen to
music, Dahlhaus also underlines the frailty of the fictions that sustain the
illusion of movement and continuity in music. He concludes, like
Bachelard, that the appearance of motion in music is really only carried by
rhythm:
One can think a rhythm without any succession of tones, but not a succession of tones without
some rhythm. This indicates that rhythm forms the basic component of the impression of
musical motion. Time—temps durée made into a firm temps espace—is the primary dimension
of tonal space; verticality is secondary.34
It is obvious that Samuel thinks that rhythm informs every aspect of form—
something that is clear to him in Debussy’s music. Messiaen, on the
contrary, sees no connection at all between these two levels. For him,
rhythms are one thing (he deals with them as if they are objects, and seeks
to utilize them as such in his system of retrogradable and non-retrogradable
rhythms), while form is another thing (although he also treats “form,” and
the sections that make up his forms, as objects in space). This seems to me
to reveal a gap between (i) what artists consider they are doing in making a
work, and (ii) how a work of art is actually experienced and what causal
connections are made by an attentive consciousness. Messiaen manipulates
his distinctive rhythms and his block forms as if they were quite separate
compositional matters, but I suggest that in the experience of listening to
Messiaen’s music the listener hears the larger formal connections derived
from the juxtaposed and superimposed “rhythmicized” timbral blocks that
typically characterize his work as also constituting a larger formal
rhythmicized structure—an example of this would be the Antistrophe I & II
in his appropriately named orchestral work Chronochromie (“Time
Colouration”) of 1960. In “musical time,” which is uni-directional and
where musical events must succeed each other, memory and anticipation in
the listening experience seek causal relations that sustain a sense of
continuity, even where the composer has sought to emphasize structural
discontinuity. However, it is also the case that Messiaen’s music can disrupt
the impression that time “flows,” to the extent that it often seeks to create
the experience of time standing still. He sometimes does this through using
extremely slow repeated rhythmic units against a continuous melodic line,
as in the final movement of his Quatuour pour la fin du temps (1941),
where there is a continuous, unbroken violin line lasting eight minutes or
so, with what seems like an endlessly repeated and unvarying rhythmic
motif in the accompanying piano chords. On the other hand, there is the
sheer profusion and density of rapidly moving material derived from
birdsong where the excess of rhythmic and melodic diversity acts to blot
out all sense of difference, and as a consequence seems to arrest completely
any perception of time passing, as in the sixth movement, Épode, of
Chronochromie. I consider that these examples clearly demonstrate the
close connection between small-scale rhythm and large-scale “rhythmicized
duration” as form in Messiaen’s music, and in our experience of it, in spite
of the composer’s insistence that there is no connection between rhythm
and form. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine that the composer would
deny that such pieces certainly constitute clear examples of the
manipulation of our perception of time, and to that extent they are
experimental.
Experimentation and innovation are particularly associated with
twentieth-century modernism across the arts, and it was at the beginning of
this period (which actually starts in the late nineteenth century) that
Bergson’s vitalist ideas had their greatest influence. This is strikingly the
case in music, as the musicologist Jann Pasler has argued in her work on
temporality and the Bergsonian influence on Debussy, and later on the
spectralist composers towards the end of the twentieth century in France (in
particular Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey, and Hugues Dufourt).39 I want to
consider the example of Debussy’s ballet Jeux in this context, and in the
light of Pasler’s comments on it, to clarify what I understand by the concept
of “rhythmicized duration” in music.
Debussy’s Jeux (1913) is a late work, written for Diaghilev and Nijinsky,
and it represents the composer’s rhythmic and formal innovations at their
most radical. As a ballet it takes as its point of departure the rather nebulous
plot of a game of tennis and the constantly changing interrelations between
the players—a love triangle of two women and a man. It is usually
performed as a concert work, however, and is a highly structured piece in its
own right. It lasts about seventeen minutes. Pasler writes: “What gives Jeux
its formal coherence is its overall rhythmic organization; recurrence of
motives and timbres support this form rather than create it.”40 In each of the
sections that make up the mosaic-like structure of the work Debussy creates
a distinct and self-contained set of timbres, textures, and rhythmic motives.
Pasler demonstrates this in her analysis, and emphasizes that “form is the
rhythmicization of sections, each with their own colour and sense of
time.”41 She points out that time for Debussy is seen as free-flowing and in
a state of flux, depending for its perception on what is filling it. This
Bergsonian conception brings us to the point where we must now attempt to
clarify what is meant by “rhythmicized duration” in relation to music,
because the concept of “duration” is difficult to pin down in Bergson’s
philosophy.
For Bergson, as we have seen, duration is the indivisible flow of
“becoming” that cannot be rationalized mechanistically, and can only be
experienced intuitively. Bachelard had criticized this at a philosophical
level. For Debussy, you could say that, while influenced by Bergson, he has
no choice but offer a critique of Bergson’s ideas at a practical and technical
level. For the artist as composer, involved at the poietic level in making
musical works, the problem is how to make something that appears to
embody the experience of this endless flux of time with its ebb and flow, its
speeding up and slowing down, and its increasing and decreasing of
intensity. This unavoidably involves calculation and artifice. Viewed in this
context, I suggest that “duration” in music can be understood as the period
of time taken up and animated by an event, in this case a musical event.
Seen in this way, distinct durations can be made to shade into each other, be
superimposed upon each other (for example, in simultaneously occurring
different rhythms, as happens at many points in Jeux), and to overlap,
creating a larger “rhythmicized duration” of which these individual events
become the rhythmic elements. Debussy achieves this with such subtlety
that we are not aware of his contrivance. Pasler cites from a letter Debussy
wrote to his publisher Durand in 1907:
Music is not, in its essence, a thing which can flow within a rigorous and traditional form. It is
de couleurs et de temps rythmés [made of colours and rhythmicized time].42
He asks the question: If, from the moment an artform like the musical work
slips between our consciousness and our usual experience of time [and] as a result a new quality
of time experience offers itself to our consciousness, then does this not imply that it is indeed
the art form itself that engenders its own time, a time conditioned by its organization, its
rhythms and the hierarchy of its structures?46
This appears to claim that the work itself is the sole source of the
complexity and richness of such an experience of time, that experience is
merely shaped and directed by the complexity and richness of the structure
of the musical work. But Deliège recognizes that this conclusion needs to
be treated with caution. He writes: “If a particular ‘time’ of the work of art
does exist, then it belongs to our consciousness to make it real.”47
This is the most Bachelardian feature of Deliège’s theory. As Bachelard
puts it: “Indeed, causality in its many forms brings many reasons for
relations, links, and successions, and by doing so makes time and space
organic.”48 Furthermore, the sense of continuity and duration we come to
ascribe to “the music” is not necessarily the experience of the “innocent”
first hearing. It is, rather, an experience constructed in reverse, the result of
a combination of memory and expectation. In effect, the sense of the “form”
of a work is as much the result of a psychological process of “re-forming”
and “reflux” as it is of the facticity of the work as structure “in itself.”
Indeed, the continuity of the sounds themselves is illusory, according to
Bachelard, and likely to break down at any moment. It is sustained only by
our consciousness and our active attention through the process of making
connections, through perceiving recurrences of groups of material, of
rhythms, of motivic ideas. In a sense, therefore, the Bergsonian notions of
duration and continuity are fictions. As Bachelard puts it: “In this way then,
it gives us not really duration but the illusion of duration.”49 He concludes:
“Music’s action is discontinuous; it is our emotional resonance that gives it
continuity.”50
And yet, it also has to be argued that the facticity of the musical work and
the potential it affords for a structured experience of time cannot be denied.
Deliège, unlike Bachelard, cannot help but recognize the materiality of
musical works. That is to say, works exist not only as successions of sounds
given a sense of continuity by our consciousness, but also as “spatial”
objects that can be read silently as scores, and where connections can be
made both forwards and backwards as superimpositions of simultaneous
levels, as similarities compared, as differences and contrasts recognized,
and as the relationship of parts to whole seen as part of a process of
increasing familiarity. Deliège restores the strong counterweight of the
existence of the “work,” albeit as a work still to be re-composed and re-
formed by an attentive consciousness, and in the process develops it further.
The extent of his indebtedness to Bachelard nevertheless remains evident,
which is to say, what it means to talk of the experience of time through
music as specifically the perception of musical time. This is to be seen in a
passage like the following, where Deliège writes:
In effect, time is not a thing, but an experience where one lives time and constructs it at the
same time; experience sufficiently fluid to accept its own disruption and provisional
annihilation, all under the pressure of a simple fiction.51
But our experience of time is dependent on the objects and events that
occupy our consciousness. In this respect, musical works constitute a
particular category of objects that can occupy our experience. That is to say,
they are intentional objects, and as such tend to be highly structured with
relationships between parts and whole that demand an attentive
consciousness which also imbues such works with causality and continuity.
Is the temporal experience afforded by any particular piece of music
unique to that piece and different from the experience of any other piece?
This raises the problem of nominalism (not addressed by Bachelard or
Deliège), where any attempt to generalize from particular instances, and to
establish universals is resisted by the uniqueness of each piece and the
uniqueness of the experience of temporality. An example in support of this
extreme position could be Edgard Varèse, each of whose works (there are
fewer than a dozen) defies any attempt at generic categorization. To ask,
therefore, whether there might be, on the contrary, a strong similarity
between the experiences of temporaity enabled by most pieces of music
regardless, would be to see composers like Varèse merely as exceptions to
the rule, and to argue, untenably, that generic norms in music do indeed
provide a sufficient similarity of experience across different historical
periods. Deliège has to consider the problems raised by the implication in
his argument that each work might indeed appear to imply its own unique
experience of temporality. From a modernist perspective it could well be
argued that this is to some extent the case. However, can extreme
nominalism also be said to apply to musical works of earlier centuries?
How might this apply, for example, to the Baroque, or to the early Classical
period in Western art music? Deliège proposes that on one level, the
experience of musical time is also always historical and cultural, because it
involves culturally learned responses, expectations, and indeed, you might
say, skills, that are to do with period, style, language and, one might add,
idiom.
Deliège draws two conclusions from this. The first is that, if a musical
style or language underpins in some way the temporal structure of a musical
work, then it is absolutely pointless to attempt to provide a single general
definition of musical time that will apply in all cases and for all times. As
he points out, the time of Machaut, of Handel, of Mozart, and of Wagner are
not the same. He therefore proposes, quite reasonably, that there is a sort of
“standard time” that characterizes the musical time of any particular period.
It does not follow from this, however, that the experience of individual
works will be similar, but only that general features of style, melodic
phrasing, harmonic progressions, and characteristic rhythms will be
familiar. Deliège’s second conclusion is that the concept of musical time is
not one possessed by either the individual artist or by the art community,
because these come down to the mediated relationship between listener and
musical work, and this is largely a question of the acceptance or rejection of
a dominant musical-historical style or language, conditioned by, as he puts
it, “four centuries of tonal polyphony.”52 He concludes, therefore, that much
of the temporal structure of music and of the musical consciousness of a
particular period is a given, especially in relation to phraseology, which is
itself the most obviously rhythmic aspect of melodic lines and also of
harmonic progressions. It is this cultural, historical—and indeed,
ideological—dimension of musical time and rhythm that seems to me to be
the important further development of Bachelard’s dialectic of duration, and
his critique of Bergson in Deliège’s scheme. At the same time, the
dialectical aspect of his approach also reveals itself yet further when, in
talking about one important style period in the nineteenth century—that of
“developing variation”—he moves back and forth between musical
structure and listener demands to demonstrate how close and even fragile
the relationship between them is.
This suggests that ideas of continuity and coherence that we attribute to
the musical work, and which we understand as belonging to the experience
of musical time, are constructs, metaphors sustained by the norms of their
historical period, and which are liable to disruption and change. Musical
time is seen by Deliège as an “ingenious metaphor” that psychologically
and ideologically we attribute to the work itself, and do so until the
historical paradigm shifts and a different musical time takes its place.
Deliège points out that this operates only as long as there is a degree of
harmony between artists and listeners in a particular period. However, a
crisis develops when such harmony breaks down through artistic
innovation, and the gap between the musical time of innovators and the
musical time of everyone else then widens, so that incomprehensibility
results.53
What are the implications of such crises of comprehensibility between
innovation and normativity in the experience of musical time? Viewed in
the historical context of the crisis of musical modernism, Deliège
distinguishes two antagonistic groups reflecting the kind of conflict of
cultures of which “the state of crisis is the expression,” as he puts it.54
Group 1 is characterized by what he calls bi-dimensional sonic processes,
non-reversible, continuous and linear movement. The temporal structures
hinge on the valuing of development and homogeneity. Group 2 opposes
the linear and continuous values of the established culture, putting in its
place “a non-Euclidean geometrical space” that characterizes the
contemporary imagination, so Deliège proposes, and the projection of
“multiple dimensions in a succession of discontinuous instants favouring . .
. a dynamic present.”55 These two antagonistic groups represent two
distinctly different metaphors of time. The first group he suggests is
characterized by the phraseological type of process organized according to
the mode of development by variation. The second group is characterized
by other modes of temporal organization like, for instance, moment forms,
where the experience of continuity is constantly interrupted, as each
“moment” is discontinuous with every other moment.56 Other forms of
organization might also be included here, like labyrinth forms, with
different routes through the structure, and mobile forms where different
orderings of elements might be used in each new performance. You could
therefore say that Deliège presents the second, the metaphor of
discontinuity, as a critique of the first, the metaphor of continuity. Deliège
takes Bachelard’s notion of a dialectical mode of experience of duration and
attempts to sketch a critical theory of music and musical experience that has
ramifications beyond Bachelard’s theory of rhythm, and is clearly
influenced by Adorno.57
4. In conclusion
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H. R. Parkinson (London, 1973).
Le Poidevin, Robin, “The Experience and Perception of Time,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/time-
experience/.
Messiaen, Olivier, Music and Colour: Conversations with Claude Samuel, tr. E. Thomas Glasow
(Portland, 1994).
Newton, Isaac, “Scholium to the Definitions,” in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
[1689], tr. Andrew Motte (1729), revd Florian Cajori (Berkeley, 1934).
Paddison, Max, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993).
Paddison, Max, “Adorno, Time, and Musical Time,” The Opera Quarterly, 29.3–4 (2013), 244–52.
Pasler, Jann, “Debussy, Jeux: Playing with Time and Form,” 19th-Century Music, 6.1 (1982), 60–75.
Pasler, Jann, “Resituating the Spectral Revolution: French Antecedents and the Dialectic of
Discontinuity and Continuity in Debussy’s Jeux,” Musicae Scientiae, special issue: Discussion
Forum 3: Aspects du temps dans la création musicale (2004), 125–40.
Pöppel, Ernst, “A Hierarchical Model of Temporal Perception,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1.2
(1997), 56–61.
Spitzer, Michael, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago, 2004).
Taylor, Benedict, “On Time and Eternity in Messiaen,” in Judith Crispin, ed., Messiaen: The
Centenary Papers (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2010), 256–80.
Will, Udo, “Rhythm, Time Experience and the Body: Rethinking Musical Time,” conference paper
(Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, November 2012).
Winkler, Rafael, “Husserl and Bergson on Time and Consciousness,” Analecta Husserliana, 90
(2006), 93–115.
1
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 88 (my translation).
2
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 208, writes: “To the extent that the
book portrays scientific developments as a succession of tradition-bound periods punctuated by non-
cumulative breaks, its theses are undoubtedly of wide applicability . . . for they are borrowed from
other fields. Historians of literature, of music, of the arts, of political development, and of many other
human activities have long described their subjects in the same way.”
3
Newton, Principia Mathematica, 6.
4
Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, 211.
5
In physics, the dominant view since Einstein’s theory of relativity has been that time is an
illusion, the corresponding reality being “space-time.”
6
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 7 n.1; also 9–10.
7
E.g. Pöppel, “Temporal Perception”; Le Poidevin, “Perception of Time”; and Paddison
“Musical Time,” 244–52.
8
Will, “Rethinking Musical Time.”
9
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 7.
10
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 164 (A36, B52).
11
Cox, “Tripartite Subjectivity,” 1 n.1.
12
Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 9.
13
Bergson, Durée et simultanéité, 42–3 (my translation).
14
Bergson, Durée et simultanéité (my translation).
15
Bergson, “La perception du changement,” 170 (my translation).
16
Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics, 6–7.
17
Winkler, “Husserl and Bergson,” 93.
18
Husserl, Ideas, 1: 155 (§81).
19
Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 168.
20
Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 213–16.
21
Pierre Janet (1859–1947), French psychologist and psychotherapist who developed a theory of
memory and of the concept of dissociation.
22
Corbier, “Bachelard, Bergson, Emmanuel,” 19.
23
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 19.
24
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 19.
25
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xv.
26
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 134.
27
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 87 (my translation).
28
Messiaen, Music and Colour, 67.
29
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” also argues a case for rhythm as movement in space.
30
Taylor, “Time and Eternity,” 256–80.
31
Ingarden, Work of Music, 89.
32
Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, extends the discussion of metaphor theories applied
to music.
33
Dahlhaus, Aesthetics of Music, 80.
34
Dahlhaus, Aesthetics of Music, 80.
35
Hasty, Meter as Rhythm, 6.
36
Aristotle, Poetics, 7.
37
Adorno, Zu einer Theorie, 69–72/Towards a Theory, 52–3, discusses this in a note dated June
20, 1946.
38
Messiaen, Music and Colour, 70.
39
Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 60–75, discusses the influence of Bergson on Debussy, and the
coexistence of different “rhythmicized durations.” See also Pasler, “Spectral Revolution,” 125–40.
40
Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 61.
41
Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 63.
42
Debussy to Durand, cited in Pasler, “Debussy, Jeux,” 71.
43
Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, on Heinrich Koch’s theory of form, is helpful in this
respect, as is Clayton, Time in Indian Music, on the case of metric cycles and extended forms in
Indian music.
44
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 110.
45
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 87 (my translation).
46
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 87–8 (my translation).
47
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 88 (my translation).
48
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 73.
49
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 123.
50
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 124.
51
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 90 (my translation).
52
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 92–3.
53
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 94–5.
54
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 95.
55
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 95–6.
56
Deliège, “Perception du temps musical,” 97.
57
The connection is particularly striking, because Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 207, proposes
that “musical time” acts as a critique of “empirical time.”
58
Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, 133.
18
Husserl’s Model of Time-Consciousness,
and the Phenomenology of Rhythm
Salomé Jacob
1. Introduction
2. Rhythm
The listener’s faculty to anticipate the sounds that will be heard depends on
a relatively coherent rhythmic structure (and often includes a relatively
stable beat). Admittedly, music plays with these forms of expectation, e.g.,
with syncopation. Anticipation occurs at various levels and can have a
shorter or longer time-lapse.
Edward Large and Mari Riess Jones’s study claims that anticipation plays
a central role in the perception of rhythm.10 They argue that a periodic pulse
affords anticipation of when the next notes are likely to occur. Central to
their theory—the dynamic attending theory—is the role of entrainment.
Entrainment happens when two or more autonomous rhythms interact, e.g.,
the human circadian rhythm entraining to the twenty-four-hour cycle of
light and dark. In music, entrainment occurs for example when musicians
play together in time.11 Large and Jones focus on the entrainment between
brain processes and music, more specifically between neural oscillators
(called “attending rhythms”), and the periodicity in the music, i.e., beats
and meter. Beats, however, are rarely isochronous; the interval between
each beat may vary slightly. Attending rhythm must thus be capable of
adapting itself to such variations. Large and Jones’ study points out that
attending rhythm can be “tuned,” i.e., it is able to take into account the
temporal alterations in the external stimuli.12 Their research suggests that
tone grouping is facilitated by an accurate perception of strong and weak
beats. In particular, the listener’s attention is more acute at strong metric
positions. Entrainment to the beats thus facilitates the expectations one has
with regards to rhythm: the beginning of a new rhythmic pattern, for
instance, is expected to fall on the strong metric position.
Entrainment to the beat can also be manifest in the synchronization of
one’s body parts with the music, such as foot tapping.13 In such cases, the
body movement occurs at the same time as the sound: stimulus and
response are simultaneous. Fraisse emphasizes that this phenomenon is
possible “only if the motor command is anticipated in regard to the moment
when the stimulus is produced.”14 More precisely, the signal for the
response is not the stimulus but the temporal interval between successive
signals. Without anticipation of the sound stimuli to be heard,
synchronization would not be possible. Fraisse stresses that synchronization
is established very quickly, after the second or third sound. This means that
it relies at most on short-term memory (of the interval time between the
sounds) and that the expectation process concerns quasi-immediate
events.15 Fraisse adds that synchronization can occur when the interval
between two sound stimuli ranges from 200 to 1800ms, and it is most
accurate for intervals from 400 to 800ms.16
Rhythmic anticipation is also crucial when one engages with the music,
as in the case of dance and groove. Someone familiar with Chuck Berry’s
“Johnny B. Goode” is likely to anticipate the development of the first
succession of quavers running over five bars on a quick tempo. The bodily
movement may follow this unfolding of the notes. Admittedly, one’s degree
of familiarity with a musical piece or a musical genre can bring more or less
determinate anticipations. It appears from the above that anticipation plays
a fundamental role in the experience of rhythm, and does so at various
levels. Listeners may not be actively aware of their anticipation of sounds
but their bodily movements suggest that there is an implicit anticipation of
coming notes. The following section brings in Husserl’s framework of time-
consciousness, which I think clarifies the anticipatory character of rhythmic
experience.
Husserl spent more time developing the concept of retention than that of
protention—although in two of his Lectures on Transcendental Logic he
insists on the crucial importance of protention.22 There is an important
asymmetry between the two notions. Retentions are fulfilled intentions
whose content has already been given. In contrast, protentions are
unfulfilled intentions toward what is just about to come: their content
increases in vividness as we get closer to the event. Husserl talks about
“protentional continuity” or “directedness-ahead.”23 This means that a
constant intention towards what is about to be heard allows for the
perception of continuity and change. Protention corresponds to the
consciousness that there is a future continuity of tone phases, i.e., the
consciousness that the music will carry on, at least in what is just about to
come.
Protentions are not necessarily devoid of content, but their degree of
clarity varies. The following quote sheds light on the role of retention in
shaping protentions:
The further an event progresses, the more it offers in itself for more differentiated protentions,
‘the style of the past is projected into the future.’24
The more retentions there are, the more precise the protentions can get. If a
rhythmic pattern has been unfolding for a couple of bars and has a
predictable structure (such as the succession of three quavers played
together with six semi-quavers in the opening of Chopin’s “Ballade No. 4”),
the short-term anticipations can have a better defined content.
Husserl adds that any experience has a double intentionality. The term
“intentionality” relates to the awareness of something, which is most often
implicit: one does not reflect upon it. Any experience is the experience of
an object, an event, etc., and the subject’s thought is directed towards this
object or event. In the case of listening to a melody, one is aware of the
melody itself. At the same time, however, one is also aware of one’s
ongoing experience of that melody (see Section 4.2). The retention is not
just the retention of the past-note, but one also retains the just-past
experience of this note. My experience thus has this temporal structure,
which enables me to be aware both of the melody—i.e., of temporally
extended units—and of my experience of this melody. Put differently, there
is an implicit awareness that I am the subject undergoing the experience.
This double-intentionality also applies to protentions. While I can protend
toward the notes which are about to be heard there is an implicit
anticipatory sense that I will be the subject listening to these notes.25
Husserl’s purpose is thus two-fold: to account for the experience of
temporally extended objects and also to account for the experience of one’s
ongoing stream of experiences.
To reiterate, Husserl’s analysis does not say much about the experience of
rhythm, given the ubiquity of the experiences that are grounded on the
temporal structure of consciousness. But there are crucial aspects of his
analysis that a phenomenology of rhythm should take into account. In
particular, Husserl’s theory sheds light on the interaction between short-
term memory and short-term anticipations. What is pervasive in the
perception of rhythm is not just the anticipatory aspect but the full intrinsic
temporality of the process. To clarify, the anticipation of when the next note
or the next rhythmic pattern will be heard does not depend solely on the
anticipation of the listener, but the anticipation itself is shaped by the short-
term memory of the past notes or past rhythmic pattern.
Let us first develop what short-memory is and why I am relating this
concept to Husserl’s notion of retention. Memory consists of three phases:
echoic memory and early processing; short-term memory; and long-term
memory. Each of these phases has a different time-scale, although they may
sometimes slightly overlap. Echoic memory usually fades away in less than
a second: during this phase, the acoustical features of sounds, e.g.,
frequencies and timbre, are processed in the brain and grouped together to
form coherent events.28 Short-term memory lasts on average 3–5 seconds.
The information then gradually fall into long-term memory. Bob Snyder
writes that short-term memory is the “memory of the immediate past.”29 He
adds that it plays an essential role in perceiving duration. Long-term
memory falls beyond the 3–5 seconds of short-term memory. At this point,
the events are not immediately present to consciousness but can be
experienced only in retrospect: they must be “recollected.”30
Snyder’s terminology seems to echo Husserl’s, and the similarity requires
further examination. Snyder stresses that short-term memory is tied up with
present experience, being “immediately available to conscious awareness at
any given time.”31 He adds:
Each frame persists for a time, fades, and is continuously related to others coming immediately
after it while retaining its proper time order. At the same time, new memory and experiences are
almost always fading in. In this way, separate ‘chunks’ of experience are integrated into an
ongoing, unified world.32
Unexpected events then fall into retention and when they are retentions (and
retentions of retentions etc., as Figure 18.1 in Section 3 indicates), they
shape new protentions. To reiterate, the experience of every musical aspect
—melody, tone, rhythm—is experienced within this temporal framework.
Why develop Husserl’s argument specifically with regard to rhythm then?
Husserl’s framework applies at all levels of rhythmic anticipation,
mentioned in Section 2. It is particularly pertinent when we consider the
listener’s bodily engagement with rhythm. Part of the process is enabled, I
think, by the fact that the listener’s bodily movements have the same
intrinsic temporality.
5. Conclusion
This chapter has examined the extent to which Husserl’s analysis of time-
consciousness could prove useful in a study of rhythmic experience. Crucial
to rhythmic experience is the listener’s anticipation, which is most often
pre-reflective and can occur at various levels, including at the bodily level
in the case, for instance, of synchronization to the beat. According to
Husserl, the consciousness of temporal objects and processes is integrally
related to the temporal structure of consciousness itself. In order to account
for the experience of duration, change, and movement, one must provide
the basis that enables this experience. The processes of retention, primal-
impression, and protention in the subject render possible the experience of
temporal objects. I have argued that this framework applies to the
experience of rhythm. It is useful in insisting on the interaction between the
just-past sounds and protention toward the new ones. Rhythmic experience
is like a continuous cycle, in which unexpected events can be integrated and
shape new coherent protentions. This claim appears consistent with
empirical research on short-term memory.
Furthermore, in rhythmic experience the subject’s body often engages
with the music, whether or not the subject is consciously aware of it. A
phenomenology of rhythm must be able to take into account the bodily
dimension of the experience. Admittedly, Husserl’s analysis of time cannot
do all of the work. A much more detailed analysis of bodily engagement
would be required. The temporal structure inherent in bodily movements is
of particular interest however. There is in rhythmic experience an
interrelation between several temporal continua, including movement in the
music and of the body. Bodily movements follow the expected sonic event
and variations in the musical rhythm entail an implicit re-evaluation of the
bodily movements. This highlights the particularly rich and complex
phenomenology of rhythm, in which temporality interacts with the body.
Thinking about rhythm cannot be thinking about time on the one hand and
about the body on the other, as both are intertwined.
Works Cited
Arom, Simha, African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (Cambridge,
1991).
Brown, Rosemary and Paulo Fabbri, “La Sperimentazione Ritmica in Dallapiccola: Tra Libertà e
Determinazione,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, 13.1 (1978), 142–73.
Cheyne, Peter, “Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized Ontology,” in Andy Hamilton,
Peter Cheyne, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
(Oxford, 2019), C16.
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment, Ethnography and Musical Interaction,” in Martin Clayton, Byron
Dueck, and Laura Leante, eds, Experience and Meaning in Music Performance (Oxford, 2013),
17–39.
Fraisse, Paul, “Rhythm and Tempo,” in Diana Deutsch, ed., The Psychology of Music (Cambridge,
MA, 1982), 149–80.
Gallagher, Shaun, “Husserl and the Phenomenology of Temporality,” in Heather Dyke and Adrian
Bardon, eds, A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (Oxford, 2013), 135–50.
Gallagher, Shaun and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind ([2008]; 2nd edn, London, 2012).
Hasty, Christopher, “Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm,” in Andy
Hamilton, Peter Cheyne, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music,
Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C15.
Husserl, Edmund, The Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, tr. John Barnet Brough
([1893–1917]; Dordrecht, 1991).
Husserl, Edmund, Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic, tr. Anthony J. Steinbock ([1918–26]; Dordrecht, 2001).
Kortooms, Toine, Phenomenology of Time: Edmund Husserl’s Analysis of Time-Consciousness
(Dordrecht, 2002).
Large, Edward and Mari Riess Jones, “The Dynamics of Attending: How People Track Time-Varying
Events,” Psychological Review, 106.1 (1999), 119–59.
Mensch, James R., “A Brief Account of Husserl’s Conception of Our Consciousness of Time,” in
Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd, eds, Subjective Time: Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of
Temporality (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 43–60.
Rodemeyer, Lanei M., “Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness: An Analysis of
Protention,” in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl: A Critical Reader (Bloomington, 2003).
Roholt, Tiger C., Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (London, 2014).
Snyder, Bob, Music and Memory: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
Taipale, Joona, Phenomenology and Embodiment: Husserl and the Constitution of Subjectivity
(Evanston, 2014).
Thaut, Michael H., Rhythm, Music and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications
(London, 2005).
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge,
MA, 2007).
1
In this volume, Chapter 15, Hasty, “Complexity and Passage,” and Chapter 16, Cheyne,
“Encoded and Embodied Rhythm,” present contrasting views on this question.
2
Husserl, Internal Time, 24–5.
3
By arrhythmic pieces, I do not mean pieces that are ametrical (see Section 2). Neither do I mean
that there is no rhythmic structure specified on a score, even if, like John Cage’s “As Slow as
Possible,” its performance (in this case, some notes lasting two years) prevents any experience of
rhythm, and therefore of music. Similarly, a creation that has no temporal organization at all, i.e.,
notes with no sense of coherence between each duration, lacks a rhythm. I leave open the question
whether or not such a piece may be experienced as musical.
4
Arom, African Polyphony, 233.
5
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind; Thompson, Mind in Life.
6
I do not hold a conservative position on what features are constitutive of musical works. I am
not claiming in particular that a musical work necessarily involves pitched notes.
7
Brown and Fabbri, “La Sperimentazione Ritmica,” 143.
8
The Arabic taqsim may have an ostinato pedal in a passage but would most often be ametrical.
9
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo,” 153.
10
Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending.”
11
Clayton, “Entrainment, Ethnography.”
12
Large and Jones, “Dynamics of Attending,” 149.
13
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo”; Thaut, Rhythm, Music and the Brain.
14
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo,” 154.
15
Section 4 develops the notion of short-term memory.
16
Fraisse, “Rhythm and Tempo,” 155.
17
Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, xiii–iv.
18
The term “living present” (lebendige Gegenwart) is introduced in the C-manuscripts. It is
understood as a flowing present and replaces Husserl’s earlier term “primal stream.” It encompasses
the phases of retention, primal-impression and protention.
19
Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 107. Gallagher, “Phenomenology of Temporality,” 137,
notes that Husserl was here influenced by William James’ concept of the specious present in his
Principles of Psychology.
20
Husserl, Internal Time, 24–5.
21
Mensch, “Husserl’s Conception.”
22
Husserl, Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 106–21.
23
Lectures on Transcendental Logic, 116.
24
Husserl, Bernau manuscripts (1917–18), 20, cited in Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 178.
25
Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 88.
26
Cited by Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 68, drawing from Husserl’s Nachlass (a
manuscript on “Phantasy, Mental Images, and Memory”).
27
Kortooms, Phenomenology of Time, 199.
28
Snyder, Music and Memory, 48.
29
Snyder, Music and Memory.
30
Snyder, Music and Memory, 69.
31
Snyder, Music and Memory, 161.
32
Snyder, Music and Memory.
33
Snyder draws a distinction between voluntary recollection and spontaneous awareness of
events/objects from long-term memory. Recollected memories require the voluntary bringing-back-
into-awareness of the subject. He distinguishes voluntary recollection from automatic reminding
occurring from environmental cues, and also from recognition where an environmental event acts as
its own cue: Snyder, Music and Memory, 70.
34
Snyder, Music and Memory, 70.
35
Snyder, Music and Memory, 70.
36
Rodemeyer, “Theory of Time-Consciousness,” 139.
37
Bodily engagement, of course, also occurs on the part of the performer, an element that would
be extremely interesting to develop, but this would extend the scope of this chapter.
38
Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment, 23.
39
Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment, 55–9.
40
Taipale, Phenomenology and Embodiment, 57.
41
Gallagher, “Phenomenology of Temporality,” 142.
42
Roholt, Groove, 111–12.
19
Pictorial Experience and the Perception of
Rhythm
Jason Gaiger
Given the intensive interest in the relation between music and painting, it is
not surprising that many artists gave their works musical titles. Here we
might think of Paul Signac’s decision to allocate his paintings Opus
numbers and in some cases even tempo markings, or Whistler’s use of titles
such as “Symphony,” “Harmony,” and “Nocturne.”10 After the
breakthrough to full abstraction, we find artists explicitly characterizing
their work as a “rhythm” in line or color. For example, Sonia Delaunay
produced a series of paintings from the late 1930s with titles such as
Rhythm (1939), Rhythm Colour no 1076 (1939) [Figure 19.1], Coloured
Rhythm (1946), and Syncopated Rhythm (1967); and Robert Delaunay’s
Rhythms (1934) graces the cover of this book. A retrospective exhibition of
her work at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at Tate
Modern in London, 2014–15, provided an opportunity to view several of
these paintings together in a room dedicated to “Rhythm and
Abstraction.”11 Delaunay’s use of repeated motifs such as circles and
curved bands of color allows for subtle variations of line, color, and shape
organized around one or more axes that subdivide the paintings into parts.
Figure 19.1 Sonia Delaunay, Rythme coleur n° 1076 (1939). Centre national des arts plastiques. ©
Pracusa S.A./Cnap/Photograph: Yves Chenot
3. Sequentiality
Figure 19.4 Nicholas Dorigny, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1719), etching and engraving on
paper, 51 x 65cm, Victoria and Albert Museum. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Given the diversity of ways a work of graphic art can be viewed, the
question arises as to whether there are nonetheless regularities,
conventional or otherwise, that inform a “normal” or “standard” viewing of
pictures, such as from left-to-right or in a Z pattern. Thanks to the
experimental research that has been carried out by cognitive psychologists
and other scientists who investigate the human visual processing system,
there is now a large body of empirical data that can be drawn on to answer
this question.19 Advances in eye-tracking technology and the development
of dedicated software programs has allowed gaze movements that take
place during picture viewing to be analyzed in detail, including saccades,
fixations and fixation clusters, scanpaths, and areas of interest. There are
studies, for example, that compare the gaze-movements of expert and non-
expert viewers under specified control conditions, and that investigate
whether there are specific viewing patterns associated with different kinds
of depicted content, such as the human figure and the natural
environment.20 Vision research is a vast and rapidly developing area of
enquiry. However, there is broad agreement about certain basic anatomic
and neural features of the human visual processing system. The key
findings give support to the claim that human vision is inherently selective
and discontinuous. Nonetheless, recent studies by Raphael Rosenberg and
Christoph Klein have yielded some surprising results that, while in accord
with other work in the field, offer an alternative way of approaching the
claim that some works of graphic art have an identifiable rhythmic
structure.
Visual acuity is determined, at the most basic level, by the anatomy of the
human eye. Light entering the pupil passes through the lens and is absorbed
by photoreceptive rods and cones in the retina, where electromagnetic
waves in the visible spectrum are converted or “transduced” into
electrochemical charges that are transmitted to the visual cortex in the brain.
The receptor cells, identified as rods and cones due to their distinctive shape
when viewed through a microscope, are sensitive to different wavelengths:
rods detect the intensity of black, grey, and white stimuli, while cones are
sensitive to color and bright light. The rods are distributed across the
surface of the retina with the exception of a small indented area, less than
2mm in diameter, termed the “fovea,” in which the cones are densely
concentrated. The number of cones falls away steeply outside of this region.
As a consequence, it is only within foveal vision that we see with any
sharpness. Although foveal vision only encompasses a visual angle of about
1 or 2 degrees, anything that falls within parafoveal (10 degrees), near
peripheral (60 degrees) or peripheral vision (180 degrees) is poorly
resolved.21 To compensate for the fact that visual acuity is restricted to the
small foveal area, human visual perception is highly dynamic, characterized
by discontinuous step-wise movements termed “saccades” (from the French
“jerk”) and brief “fixations,” which typically last around 200–300
milliseconds before the eye moves again to a new fixation. The valuable
resource of foveal vision is allocated to discrete locations, at an average of
three to four locations each second.22
Rosenberg and Klein note that the definition of a “fixation” has proved
hard to determine, because even during periods of relative stationary gaze
the eye carries out “micro-saccades” or what are termed “fixation-saccades”
plus “drifts.”23 The human eye is thus in almost constant motion, controlled
by six extraocular muscles, as well as by head and body movements. We do
not take in a scene or an object in detail all at once: rather, the eye jumps
from one area to another, gathering high-level information that enables the
mind to build up a composite picture.24 Saccadic movements “exact a
significant cost” since the perceptual system must cope with this rapidly
changing flow of information. Nonetheless, as Eileen Kowler emphasizes,
Perceptual experience is seamless despite saccades, and the world appears clear and stable. The
chaos on the retina does not reach awareness, nor does it impair our ability to perceive the
objects around us.25
Recast in terms of our earlier discussion, we can say that the temporal
ordering of saccades and fixations does not correspond to the spatial
ordering of the parts of the painting. At least as far as gaze-movements are
concerned, there does not seem to be any evidence to support the claim that
spatial patterns can be designed in such a way that they are apprehended by
the viewer in a temporally ordered sequence.
There is, however, an alternative way of approaching Diderot’s claims
concerning the ligne de liaison that links the different parts of a painting
together. The analysis of extended viewing times enabled Rosenberg and
his colleagues to confirm another of Buswell’s findings, which was that
although gaze movements do not follow a temporally ordered sequence,
both fixations and saccades tend to repeat identifiable patterns: most
paintings have specific “areas of interest” that attract a significantly higher
density of fixations, and saccades frequently traverse the same pathways.
As Rosenberg and Klein observe,
For a significant number of paintings and despite major differences between subjects, not only
fixations but also saccades build patterns that are specific to each painting: beholders tend to
reiterate particular paths with their eyes.40
Crucially, these patterns “do not only occur for single subjects but are very
similar for different subjects viewing the same painting as long as they do
so for longer stretches of time.”41
Evidence for this finding in relation to Vien’s altarpiece is provided by
the graph reproduced as Figure 19.7. This visualizes the most frequent
saccadic transitions between fixations clusters, using the relative thickness
of the line to represent the frequency with which a particular pathway is
followed. Once the least frequent saccades are filtered out, a clear pattern
emerges, revealing that over time the eye tends to repeat certain saccadic
transitions far more often than others. It is striking that the resulting graphic
representation closely corresponds to Diderot’s description of the ligne de
liaison that links the different parts of the painting, a finding that Rosenberg
rightly describes as “astonishing [verblüffend]” in one of the first published
reports of his research.42 The contrast to the painting by Doyen is equally
informative, for the corresponding graph, reproduced as Figure 19.8,
reveals a broken or discontinuous line of connection between the principal
parts.
Figure 19.7 Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters for Vien’s St.
Denis Preaching in Gaul (average of forty viewers, twenty art experts and twenty non-experts, whilst
viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version © Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art History,
University of Vienna
Figure 19.8 Visualization of frequent saccadic transitions between fixation clusters for Doyen’s The
Miracle of St. Anthony’s Fire (average of forty viewers, twenty art experts and twenty non-experts,
whilst viewing for two minutes each). Adapted version © Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art
History, University of Vienna
Rosenberg and Klein conclude that Diderot’s “description of the line of
composition in Vien’s altarpiece is correct as long as we consider the
frequently repeated saccades and not the actual course of the movement of
the eye. The line he describes matches the graph of the most frequent
saccadic transitions between clusters of fixations.”43 The paintings by Vien
and Doyen have particular significance because of their discussion by
Diderot. However, similar results have been confirmed for “a wide range of
paintings” for which “the fixations and saccades of almost all beholders
repeat patterns that are specific to the composition of each painting.”44
There are some important exceptions, such as portraits, for example, since
gaze movements are almost always concentrated on the eyes and the mouth
of the face.45 Of particular relevance for our discussion here is the
discovery that some abstract paintings, such as Jackson Pollock’s
Convergence (1952), do not have areas of interest that are sufficiently
strong to show up as red in heat maps: instead fixations are almost equally
distributed across the canvas.46 It would be highly rewarding to carry out
eye-tracking studies on other examples of abstract art which, unlike
Pollock’s “all-over” compositions, have a more clearly structured form of
spatial organization. A future direction for empirical research might be to
examine whether repeated patterns emerge in gaze movements when
viewing works such as Delaunay’s Rhythm Colour no 1076 and perhaps
also more simple graphic designs with repeated motifs.47
5. Conclusion
Works Cited
Battaglia, Fortunato, Sarah H. Lisanby, and David Freedberg, “Corticomotor Excitability During
Observation and Imagination of a Work of Art,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 5.79 (2011):
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00079.
Brieber, David, Marcos Nadal, Helmut Leder, and Raphael Rosenberg, “Art in Time and Space:
Context Modulates the Relation between Art Experience and Viewing Time,” PloS ONE, 9.6
(2014): doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0099019.
Buswell, Guy T., How People Look at Pictures: A Study of the Psychology of Perception in Art
(Chicago, 1935).
Clark, Kenneth, Looking at Pictures (London, 1960).
Clayton, Martin, “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C12.
Carrasco, Marisa, “Visual Attention: The Past 25 Years,” Vision Research, 51.13 (2011), 1484–525.
DeAngelus, Marianne and Jeff B. Pelz, “Top-Down Control of Eye Movements: Yarbus Revisited,”
Visual Cognition, 17.6–7 (2009), 790–811.
Diderot, Denis, The Salon of 1767, tr. John Goodman (New Haven, 1995).
Durà-Villà, Víctor, “Soundless Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds,
The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C20.
Fry, Roger, “Post Impressionism” (1911), in Roger Fry: A Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago,
1996), 99–110.
Grant, James, The Critical Imagination (Oxford, 2013).
Hamilton Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: A Major and Almost Entirely Neglected Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
Kandinsky, Wassily, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds, Kandinsky:
Complete Writings on Art (New York, 1994), 119–219.
Kennedy, Michael and Joyce Bourne Kennedy, “Rhythm,” in Tim Rutherford-Johnson, ed., The
Oxford Dictionary of Music (6th edn, Oxford, 2012), 703–4.
Klein, Christoph, Juliane Betz, Martin Hirschbuehl, Caroline Fuchs, Barbara Schmiedtová, Martina
Engelbrecht, Julia Mueller-Paul, and Raphael Rosenberg, “Describing Art: An Interdisciplinary
Approach to the Effects of Speaking on Gaze Movements during the Beholding of Paintings,”
PLoS ONE, 9.12 (2014): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102439.
Kowler, Eileen, “Eye Movements: The Past 25 Years,” Vision Research, 51.13 (2011), 1457–83.
London, Justin, “Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Rhythm Perception,” in Peter Cheyne,
Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics
(Oxford, 2019), C11.
Massaro, Davide, Federica Savazzi, Cinzia Di Dio, David Freedberg, Vittorio Gallese, Gabriella
Gilli, and Antonella Marchetti, “When Art Moves the Eyes: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking
Study,” PloS ONE, 7.5 (2012): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0037285.
Montfort, Anne and Cécile Godefroy, Sonia Delaunay (London, 2014).
Nodine, C. F., P. J. Locher, and E. A. Krupinski, “The Role of Formal Art Training on Perception and
Aesthetic Judgment of Art Compositions,” Leonardo, 26.3 (1993), 219–27.
Podro, Michael, Depiction (New Haven, 1998).
Rosenberg, Raphael, “Dem Auge auf der Spur: Eine historische und empirische Studie zur
Blickbewegung beim Betrachten von Gemälden,” Jahrbuch der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissenschaften für 2010 (Heidelberg, Winter, 2011), 76–89.
Rosenberg, Raphael and Christoph Klein, “The Moving Eye of the Beholder: Eye Tracking and the
Perception of Paintings,” in Joseph P. Huston, Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi F. Agnati, and
Camilo José Cela-Conde, eds, Art, Aesthetics and the Brain (Oxford, 2015), 79–108.
Scruton, Roger, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
Shaw-Miller, Simon, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven,
2002).
Solso, Robert L., Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
Tatler, Benjamin W., “Current Understanding of Eye Guidance,” Visual Cognition, 17.6–7 (2009),
777–89.
Umilta, M. Alessandra, Cristina Berchio, Mariateresa Sestito, David Freedberg, and Vittorio Gallese,
“Abstract Art and Cortical Motor Activation: An EEG Study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,
6.311 (November 2012): doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00311.
Vergo, Peter, That Divine Order: Music and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
(London, 2005).
Vergo, Peter, The Music of Painting: Music, Modernism and the Visual Arts from the Romantics to
John Cage (London, 2010).
Wade, Nicholas J. and Tatler, Benjamin W., The Moving Tablet of the Eye: The Origins of Modern
Eye Movement Research (Oxford, 2005).
Whittall, Arnold, “Rhythm,” in Alision Latham, ed., The Oxford Companion to Music (Oxford,
2011); online version:
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199579037.001.0001/acref-
9780199579037-e-5635.
Wölfflin, Heinrich, “Über das Links und Rechts im Bilde,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst,
5 (1928), 213–24.
Wölfflin, Heinrich, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art
([1915]; 7th edn 1929), tr. M. D. Hottinger (New York, 1932).
Wölfflin, Heinrich, Classic Art: An Introduction to the High Renaissance ([1899]; 8th edn, 1948), tr.
Peter Murray and Linda Murray (2nd edn, Oxford, 1953).
Yarbus, Alfred L., Eye Movement and Vision, tr. Basil Haigh (New York, 1967).
1
To give just two examples, The Oxford Dictionary of Music characterizes rhythm as “In the full
sense of the word everything pertaining to the time aspect of music as distinct from the aspect of
pitch” (Kennedy and Kennedy, “Rhythm,” 703), while the entry in the online Oxford Companion to
Music states that “Rhythm in music is normally felt to embrace everything to do with both time and
motion—with the organization of musical events in time, however flexible in metre and tempo,
irregular in accent, or free in durational values” (Whittall, “Rhythm”). It might be countered that both
of these examples refer to music, and thus to the concept of rhythm as it is understood in relation to a
specific art form. However, even if we take as our starting point natural phenomena, such as the beat
of the human heart, the swing of the arms when walking, or the crash of waves on the shore, rhythm
is still identified as something that is essentially durational.
2
Clayton, “Entrainment,” 184, observes, “Rhythm, for late twentieth and early twenty-first-
century theorists, is not an immanent quality of a musical work or performance. Rather, it emerges in
the individual’s engagement with an auditory stimulus.”
3
Clayton, “Entrainment,” 185–187. For recent studies of cortical motor activation when viewing
works of visual art, see Battaglia et al., “Corticomotor Excitability”; and Umilta et al., “Cortical
Motor Activation.”
4
Podro, Depiction, 91.
5
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 25, notes that “We also talk—though perhaps metaphorically—
of the rhythm of a line in a drawing, reflecting the movement of the artist’s hand.”
6
Vergo, That Divine Order, 13. See also Vergo, Music of Painting, and Shaw-Miller, Visible
Deeds of Music.
7
Vergo, Music of Painting, 192, and That Divine Order, 17.
8
Vergo, That Divine Order, 14.
9
Fry, “Post Impressionism,” 105. For Kandinsky’s use of the term “rhythm,” see Kandinsky,
Spiritual in Art, 217.
10
Vergo, Music of Painting, 57, 74.
11
Montfort and Godefroy, Sonia Delaunay.
12
London, Chapter 11 (this volume), “Entrainment and the Social Origin of Musical Rhythm,”
174, considers the tempo limits within which listeners “are able to (a) individuate the elements that
make up a pattern or sequence; (b) determine their number; and (c) determine their duration.” For
London, it is “self-evident that if one cannot make these sorts of discriminations and determinations,
one cannot tell one rhythm from another, and hence one cannot be aware of the particular rhythm one
is perceiving/has perceived.” A similar point can be made in relation to the work of Sonia Delaunay:
in the absence of the appropriate discriminations and determinations, in what sense can the viewer be
said to perceive or be aware of a specific “rhythm”?
13
London, “Entrainment,” 176.
14
An exception here may be some works of Op Art that “trigger” responses in the viewer, such
as pulsation effects and other sensations of visual movement. I take these works to be atypical insofar
as they rely on discordant figure–ground relationships that are purposely avoided in most graphic art.
15
Clark, Looking at Pictures, 64–5. Grant, The Critical Imagination, 165, insightfully discusses
this passage, analyzing Clark’s use of metaphor as a means “to cause a reader to have, or to imagine
or to recall having, certain experiences.” Clark’s description closely follows the analysis in Wölfflin,
Classic Art, 109–10: “With astonishing skill, Raphael brought all the occupants of the boats into one
major line, beginning with the oarsman, rising over the two men bending forward, coming to a
climax in the standing figure and then turning abruptly downwards, rising again to its conclusion in
the figure of Christ: everything leads up to Him, He is the goal of all the action, and, although quite
small as a mass and placed at the very edge of the picture, He dominates everything. No one had
composed like this before.”
16
Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 74, 80.
17
Wölfflin, “Links und Rechts,” notes that we are disturbed by the reversal of images—for
example when a slide is shown the wrong way round—and that this seems to be the case even for
highly “symmetrical” paintings such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.
18
Durà-Villà, “Soundless Rhythm,” Chapter 20 in this volume, defends this proposal.
19
Useful overviews include Kowler, “Eye Movements”; Carrasco, “Visual Attention”; Solso,
Visual Arts; and Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
20
Nodine et al., “Formal Art Training,” an influential early study, examined visual-exploration
patterns in eye-movement data from trained and untrained viewers. Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking
Study,” shows that if a painting depicts a human figure, attention is focused mostly on the face area,
whereas if a painting depicts a natural environment, attention tends to be more evenly distributed.
21
Solso, Visual Arts, 23–4, diagrams the “visual field” and the “cone of vision.”
22
Tatler, “Eye Guidance,” 777.
23
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 84.
24
Solso, Visual Arts, 26.
25
Kowler, “Eye Movements,” 1472.
26
Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” 1.
27
Yarbus, Eye Movement, showed that gaze movements varied when a viewer was asked to
complete a “high-level task” such as estimating how long the “unexpected visitor” had been away
from the family while viewing Ilya Repin’s painting They Did Not Expect Him (1884). See also
DeAngelus and Pelz, “Yarbus Revisited.”
28
Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” 1.
29
Tatler, “Eye Guidance”; Kowler, “Eye Movements.”
30
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 86.
31
See Buswell, Perception in Art; Wade and Tatler, The Moving Tablet.
32
E.g. Brieber et al., “Art in Time.”
33
Rosenberg, “Dem Auge”; Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
34
Diderot, Salon of 1767, 152, cited at Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 80, and
Rosenberg, “Dem Auge,” 78–9.
35
Diderot, Salon of 1767, 29.
36
Diderot, Salon of 1767, 152.
37
E.g. Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking Study,” investigated viewing where stimulus is presented
for just three seconds. By contrast, Klein et al., “Describing Art,” studied “the effects of speaking on
gaze movements during the beholding of paintings” over a viewing period of fifteen minutes.
38
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 91.
39
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 94.
40
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
41
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye.”
42
Rosenberg, “Dem Auge,” 83.
43
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 94–5.
44
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 95–7.
45
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 95–7. See, too, Massaro et al., “Eye-Tracking
Study.”
46
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 91–2, 95.
47
Further advances in technology might also allow a comparative study of gaze movements
when viewing architecture. Intriguingly, it seems less problematic to describe architectural features
such as fenestration and intercolumniation as possessing a “rhythm.” It may be that this is connected
to bodily movement, whether physical or imaginary, and thus to the different ways in which viewers
respond to three-dimensional objects in circumambient space.
48
If it is correct, as Scruton (“Thoughts on Rhythm,” 231) and others have argued, that “rhythm
is a phenomenal, not a mathematical property of a sequence,” and that a rhythm is therefore
something that has to be felt by the listener or the viewer, then the pattern that emerges in eye-
tracking studies possesses a regularity that is not experienced as a rhythm.
49
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 228.
50
An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Can a Painting have a Rhythm?,” British
Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 58 (3), 2018. I would like to record my thanks to Raphael Rosenberg for
permission to reproduce the visualizations made by the Laboratory for Cognitive Research in Art
History at the University of Vienna.
20
Soundless Rhythm
Víctor Durà-Vilà
1. Introduction
This chapter has three goals; first and foremost, to establish the idea that
rhythm does not require sound. I maintain that a universe without creatures
with aural capacities, or a universe without the physics that make sound
possible, would still potentially be a universe with rhythm. Although the
case seems straightforward, the overwhelming influence of discussions of
rhythm in relation to music and poetry may, perhaps unreflectively, create a
state of opinion where, for some people, this is not so obvious and its
consequences not so evident. Dance is crucial for my argument here.
Second, I develop a defence of rhythm in painting, but the lessons are
transferable to photography, sculpture, and architecture. Finally, I advance
the view that we can readily conceive of rhythm in relation to senses other
than sight and hearing.1 The upshot is that the very notion of soundless
rhythm can encourage the creative aesthetic explorations of these sense
modalities, and that awareness of what rhythm may achieve in the
traditional art forms can motivate these explorations, without limiting them
or downplaying their original nature.
This section argues that neither music nor sound are necessary for the
existence of rhythm.2 I begin by confronting what, in my opinion, is the
strongest challenge to my position, namely, Andy Hamilton’s account of
rhythm. I then put forward the positive case for soundless rhythm and
chiefly use dance to motivate and exemplify my proposal. Finally, I build
on Peter Simons’ work in this volume to elaborate a definition of rhythm
that is neutral regarding the sensorial input required for the production and
experience of rhythm.
Hamilton’s work on rhythm does not focus narrowly on the concept, but
is rather part of a broader project which attempts to challenge, among other
targets, the influential metaphorical interpretation of the notion of
movement as applied to music.3 Therefore, it must be admitted from the
outset that there are theoretical pressures and ambitions in Hamilton’s work
with which I will not engage even though they contribute to the aspect of
his theory of rhythm that is of interest to me in this chapter. However, I am
persuaded that I can discuss the relevant ideas of his work, if not to their
full potential, at least in such a way that is useful for my own purposes here,
without distorting their meaning and implications in relation to rhythm.
Some of Hamilton’s formulations might seem to point to a rather
ecumenical strategy regarding rhythm, one that could be consistent with the
notion of soundless rhythm (as will be explained below) by dint of not
prioritizing music or sound over dance or movement. So, for example,
Hamilton writes that “Producing music is not more primitive or basic than
moving rhythmically, or dancing.”4 Indeed, his definition of rhythm could
be read as allowing its existence through senses other than hearing and,
consequently, as being sympathetic to the idea of soundless rhythm, i.e.,
rhythm existing independently of music or sound:
rhythm is order within human-bodily-movement or movement-in-sound that is perceivable
through one or more of the senses, and achieved when accents are imposed on a sequence of
sounds or movement.5
Nevertheless, Hamilton does not really espouse a view that puts music and
dance on the same footing with respect to his conceptualization of rhythm.
The following quotation effectively captures the position antithetical to
mine:
Rhythm is essential to music, and—a stronger claim—rhythm and music cannot be defined
independently of each other. They are internally related and form a conceptual circle or holism.6
3. Rhythm in Painting
I would now like to extend the idea of soundless rhythm into art forms such
as painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture. I begin with two
preliminary remarks. First, the success of the notion of soundless rhythm
explained in the previous section in relation to dance (in addition to lighting
and fireworks) does not depend on its being applicable to other art forms,
such as painting or architecture. The reverse is true as well: it could be that
my proposal in this section is received sympathetically by someone who
disagrees with the argument advanced earlier. Of course, in both cases I
endeavor to support a broad conception of rhythm as not manifested
exclusively in sound, but recognizable through the different art forms. I
discuss the importance of a relevant continuity in the concept of rhythm
across different art forms in this section and the next.
Second, I find it most useful to engage with Jason Gaiger’s contribution
to this volume in order to establish the existence of rhythm in painting,
since he precisely rejects my contention. In fact, Gaiger’s chapter allows for
a very effective development of my position because of the deft structure of
his text and the careful consideration he gives to the potential criticisms of
his own view. While my focus here is, following Gaiger’s lead, on painting,
I hope that it will be relatively uncontentious that the lessons learnt from
reflecting on painting can be readily applied to photography, most
obviously, but also to sculpture and architecture.15
There is much that I find congenial in the way Gaiger sets up the enquiry
concerning the possibility of there being genuine rhythm in painting. I take
it that, in line with current musicological trends, we are not concerned with
the properties of the painting itself, but with what is perceived by the
viewer.16 Moreover, all parties agree about the temporal nature of rhythm.
Hence, any meaningful ascription of rhythm to a painting will require
showing that an array of lines and brushstrokes can sustain a durational
experience that can be recognized as containing rhythm. Merely
considering the non-durational nature of a painting might make the previous
proposition seem implausible, but we soon realize that “the process of
looking at a painting is something that takes place over time.”17 It follows
that, at least in principle, viewers can attend to temporal phenomena and,
consequently, to rhythmic structures in paintings. With this much agreed on,
the crucial point of contention presents itself: for there to be rhythm in
painting, we need to elucidate whether or not the elements of paintings (i.e.,
the marks on the canvas, in whichever way one wants to conceptualize
them: lines, colors, shapes, figures, etc.) are to be perceived over time in a
rhythmic fashion.18 In the remainder of this section, I examine Gaiger’s
rejection of this possibility and submit my defence of it.
Let me take up first what I consider to be the most serious challenge to
my proposal here and look at lesser threats later. Gaiger writes:
The position I shall defend is that pictorial experience takes place in time, and thus is
successive, but that it cannot be temporally structured in a sufficiently determinate manner to
sustain the kind of attentional focus required for the communication of even simple rhythmic
patterns.19
It seems clear that Gaiger would accept the existence of rhythm in painting
if there were requirements on viewers that resulted in their pictorial
experience being structured in such a way that the experience of rhythm
was included. This is, therefore, the crux of my contention: making use of
what I take to be the most popular theories of interpretation on offer in
current anglophone aesthetics, the requirements necessary for viewers to
experience rhythm in paintings can be established.
The sustained research effort of the last few decades has taken us away
from, as we may judge them now, rather crude and radical views that either
maintained a naive authorial intentionalism or proclaimed the absolute
disregard of authorial intentions along the lines of the well-known thesis of
the death of the author. For the most part, participants in the contemporary
debate tend to gravitate toward three different positions: moderate actual
intentionalism, hypothetical intentionalism, and weak or moderate anti-
intentionalism.20 My task here is to explain how we can posit a requirement
to experience rhythm in painting that is consistent with any of these three
mainstream theories of interpretation.
Sensible varieties of anti-intentionalism do not suggest that interpretative
efforts discard what we can learn about the intentions of the author of a
given work of art, but neither do they limit or restrict interpretation to the
meaning intended by the author. An attractive version of anti-
intentionalism, the value maximizing theory, advocates that the goal of
interpretation is to maximize the artistic value of each work of art within
certain constraints having to do with each work’s identity.21
Let us take Gaiger’s own example, Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of
Fishes.22 I would submit that our aesthetic experience23 of Raphael’s
painting is more satisfying if we subscribe to an interpretation that follows
Kenneth Clark’s elucidation of the rhythm exhibited by the group of heroic
fishermen, which is quoted by Gaiger.24 Indeed, one can perceive other
instances of rhythm in the painting beyond what is alluded to in Clark’s
quotation, for instance, by noticing the groupings of different birds, from
those in the foreground of the painting to those in the distant background.
Perhaps the most conspicuous example is that of the four birds flying above
the river, the first two getting relatively close to the fishermen. The notion
of rhythm can be used not only to focus the viewers’ attention on the
internal dynamic of these bird groupings (analogously to Clark’s description
focusing on the internal dynamic of the fishermen), but also to underscore
the potential connection between the groupings themselves, where the
pictorial motif repeats itself as it reduces in size and impact while changing,
much as a musical rhythmic motif that dies out as it repeats itself while
effecting certain variations. The inter-group rhythmic connection could be
posited as well for the groups of people other than the fishermen, from
those who are close to the river to those that recede into the background.
Therefore, those subscribing to the value maximizing theory need only
point to any of the many examples throughout art history in which rhythm
is salient, such as the Raphael painting just discussed. An interpretation of
the painting including rhythm is to be preferred to an alternative which does
not since the experience derived from and the value ascribed to the painting
will be superior with than without rhythm. Evidently, the value-maximizing
theorist will support an interpretation containing rhythm regardless of any
considerations involving the intentions of the painter.
We may wonder, on Gaiger’s behalf, whether the interpretation of
paintings might guide the direction of the viewer’s experience of rhythm.
Should the group of heroic fishermen be viewed from right to left or vice
versa? I do not think that this presents much of a problem. First of all, we
should allow that, due to the dramatic differences between art forms at
many levels, it is perfectly reasonable for rhythm in painting not to have the
normative directionality encountered in music, dance, or poetry. But,
secondly, in some (perhaps many) cases, it will be obvious what the most
aesthetically satisfying way of viewing a given composition is. For
instance, if we draw our attention to the birds flying over the river and
getting closer to the fishermen, it would seem very counterintuitive and
even unpleasant to view them against the direction of their flight, i.e., from
the one closest to the fishermen to the one most removed.
According to hypothetical intentionalism, the interpretation of a work of
art should not correspond with the actual intentions of its author, but with
the hypothetical intentions that people, when interpreting and focusing on
the work itself, ascribe to the author as being most likely, their having made
or been given certain contextual and background assumptions about said
author.25 Hence, documentary evidence that might illuminate what the
author actually intended is of no use for those endorsing hypothetical
intentionalism.
I maintain that any judicious hypothetical intentionalist would want to
postulate, merely on the basis of the analysis of the composition of the
painting, that Raphael intended that rhythm be perceived by those looking
at his painting along the lines, broadly speaking, of Clark’s description. Of
course, we are thinking here of “Raphael” as the hypothetical or postulated
author or, in this case, painter. Whether or not Raphael actually thought in
terms of the concept of rhythm (and if so, how similar his conception might
have been to our own notion) is of no consequence. The crucial contention
is that we can justifiably hypothesize Raphael’s intention that the viewer
undergo the type of experience captured by Clark’s remarks on the painting.
To resist positing said intention would appear to run contrary to a salient
aspect of our experience of the painting and its critical appraisal. Therefore,
one would need good reasons to resist such an interpretation.
For those favouring moderate actual intentionalism, the actual intentions
of an author should at least dictate the contours or limits of the correct
interpretation of a work of art, as long as those intentions are successfully
realized.26 At this point we face one of the standard problems of any
version of actual intentionalism, namely, that often the actual intentions of
an author are not accessible, nor is there any hope that they will be. One
way to get around this problem is to emphasize the negative aspect of actual
intentionalism: the commitment of this theory of interpretation is to avoid
interpretations that are incompatible with the known intentions of the
author, but not to require explicit, positive proof of every aspect of the
interpretation of a work of art. Despite actual intentionalism being perhaps
less forthcoming than either its hypothetical counterpart or the value
maximizing theory in sanctioning the ascription of rhythm to Raphael’s The
Miraculous Draught of Fishes, if it were decided that it did not have the
capacity to do so, I would argue that it would run into serious trouble
beyond any consideration of rhythm, given the ubiquitous potential
occurrence of interpretative dilemmas of this kind, which hypothetical
intentionalism and anti-intentionalism can standardly avoid.
I conclude then that in contemporary aesthetics we have the theoretical
tools to meet Gaiger’s challenge along the lines that viewers should be
required to experience rhythm in paintings. I believe that this is particularly
evident in any version of anti-intentionalism that is chiefly motivated by the
maximization of artistic value. But I also contend that this should be
accepted rather straightforwardly by the proponents of hypothetical
intentionalism. Finally, I argue that moderate versions of actual
intentionalism have the conceptual resources to endorse rhythm in paintings
such as the one by Raphael discussed here.
Although I submit that the plausibility of my proposal concerning rhythm
in painting lies on what I have developed so far in this section, I turn now,
rather briefly, to two other worries that Gaiger considers. He devotes some
effort to discussing the literature on eye-tracking.27 There is empirical
evidence that the human eye is not fixed on any given spot for more than
0.2–0.3 seconds, jumping from one point of the painting (or any other
object for that matter) to another in a way that does not follow in a
continuous fashion what we would think of as the most important features
of the painting. Hence, there is no relationship between the way gaze
movements are temporally ordered and the spatial disposition of the
relevant elements of paintings. To be fair, Gaiger does not claim to establish
this as a positive reason to discard rhythm in paintings;28 nonetheless, he
arguably finds some merit in the skepticism emanating from the empirical
work on gaze movement. However, I remain unpersuaded for a very simple
reason: as is well known, our perceptual experience does not correspond in
any way with the reality of our gaze-movements, but rather with the
experience of a continuous, seamless gaze.29 Since, as mentioned earlier,
Gaiger and I agree that the focus is on what is experienced by the viewer, I
do not think that the empirical data derived from gaze-tracking experiments
(interesting though it may be in its own right) provides any significant input
regarding the topic under scrutiny here. Intriguingly, as commented on by
Gaiger, the empirical findings to the effect that there are “areas of interest”
in paintings, in the sense that “beholders tend to reiterate particular paths
with their eyes,”30 could plausibly help my cause in this chapter, as long as
we may purport a pertinent connection between the repeated patterns and
our experience of the painting. As Gaiger admits:
The pattern is spatial not temporal but it does give structure to pictorial experience as something
inherently durational. This recognition perhaps goes some way to meeting our intuition that
there can be spatial as well as temporal rhythms and that certain works of graphic art have a
pronounced rhythmic structure or rhythmic line that connects the different parts.31
While this is an exciting possibility, I need not explore it any further for
present purposes, since I rest my case on what I have explained above in
relation to what is required or demanded from viewers attending to
paintings with rhythmic elements.
A different worry, according to Gaiger, is that we cannot find entrainment
(or an analogue of it) in painting. I would be happy to bite the bullet here
and accept that generally we do not have entrainment in the case of rhythm
in painting. Given the vast differences between art forms, it would be
surprising if every prominent aspect of rhythm in music and dance could be
maintained in painting. I merely note that entrainment is not usually a
definitional aspect of rhythm and for good reason: it would be problematic
since, despite the fact that we often find entrainment in music and dance,
there are cases where it is not an option, and yet no one contends that
rhythm is not perceived. To give a clear example, many of Conlon
Nancarrow’s compositions (both the humanly and non-humanly playable)
cannot produce anything by way of entrainment; nonetheless, they are
perceived as highly rhythmic. The same is true of other examples of
virtuoso music and dance. In the case of virtuoso dance, skilled
professionals are able to entrain, but most members of the audience are not,
though they often perceive the virtuoso dance as rich with rhythm.
Even though engaging with art forms other than painting is beyond the
scope of my contribution to this volume, it should be apparent that the very
same strategy deployed in painting can be successful in photography,
sculpture, and architecture, allowing for the particular characteristics of
each art form. It is not hard to imagine a photograph similar to Raphael’s
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes or a complex sculptural group with
features that can require the viewer to appreciate rhythm. As for
architecture, precisely because of the fact that repeated motifs are used very
frequently in many styles, I believe that the notion of rhythm should be, if
anything, easier to accept in this art form than in painting or sculpture.
After having articulated my proposal, I would like to highlight some of
its benefits. To begin with, it is advantageous to preserve the notion of
rhythm in painting: a great deal of critical commentary and scholarly work
will not need to be reinterpreted, but can instead be taken at face value.
Furthermore, there is another important gain to be had if the existence of
rhythm in painting is admitted. Let us ponder the fundamental role that
rhythm plays in the creation, experience, and critical reception and analysis
of works of music, dance, and poetry. I maintain that meaningful
connections can be established among different and seemingly distant art
forms if a notion of rhythm continuous with that of music, dance, and
poetry can be successfully preserved in painting, photography, sculpture,
and architecture. I would then propose that such connections among distant
art forms may (and sometimes do) play a positive role in art creation and
experience by way of fostering conceptualizations and modes of
appreciation which benefit from being inspired, motivated or, perhaps
simply, colored by one’s acquaintance with a different art form.
Finally, I would like to turn to a methodological matter which, beyond
capturing a potential contrast between Gaiger’s and my own approach,
underscores a point that affects the very motivation and scope of our
respective inquiries. In this chapter, I have argued for a normative thesis in
relation to the notion of rhythm in painting to the effect that the experience
of rhythm is required for the correct appreciation of certain kinds of
paintings, namely, those which exhibit the right features for being so
experienced. Gaiger’s article may be interpreted as defending a descriptive
thesis rather than a normative one. On this reading, Gaiger is concerned
with the psychological possibility of experiencing rhythm when looking at a
painting.32 It is true that my normative approach presupposes an affirmative
answer to the descriptive or psychological question. Nevertheless, barring
empirical evidence to the contrary, which I do not think likely to be
forthcoming, I believe that it is entirely possible to engage with paintings in
a temporarily structured fashion that satisfies the definitional requirements
of rhythm. One need only reflect on the therapeutic exercises recommended
for several eye disorders where, in a very regimented manner, a person has
to look at different spots on a wall or card board, in a precise order, at fixed
time intervals, and so on. Given that the descriptive question seems
unproblematic to me, I have naturally taken Gaiger’s views to directly
challenge my normative position. An alternative descriptive focus could be
on the ways that people actually engage with paintings in relation to
rhythm. Here, as in so many other matters concerning aesthetic
appreciation, people will exhibit all kinds of behavior. This, if anything,
will only incentivize paying attention to a normative approach, which will
require exploring whether it is the right one and whether it can be plausibly
developed. I hope to have made some progress on both related matters in
this section.33
In this final section, I examine artistic practices that may exhibit rhythm in
sense modalities other than vision and hearing. Although a defence of
soundless rhythm can be independently motivated for the reasons discussed
in Sections 2 and 3, an exciting aspect of an enquiry such as this one is that
it allows us to think about (and potentially motivate) new art practices.
Considering these uncharted creative avenues fulfills a dual function in the
context of the present chapter. First, reflecting on these options will help us
to further refine and clarify the notion of soundless rhythm. In this respect,
much of what I propose in what follows can be regarded as thought
experiments. Second, it will also allow us to contemplate in what ways new
art practices and, perhaps, art forms can be explored. Therefore, I am fully
aware that the nature of this section is both speculative and ambitious, but I
am satisfied that this is only to be expected given what I endeavor to
investigate here.
At this point, it is necessary to revisit my modification of Simons’
definition of rhythm: rhythm is a repeatable (and typically repeated) pattern
of sensorial inputs in time. Next, I put forward a few examples to show that
this expanded definition of rhythm is both sound and eminently accessible.
My hope is that readers will relate to these examples simply by recourse to
their own experiences of rhythm and of the different sensory systems
invoked.
Let us take olfaction first, which has recently been the object of study in
relation to the potential emergence of an art form centered around it.34 I
argue that it is perfectly conceivable that we could perceive rhythm through
smell, that is to say, that rhythm can be created by using perfumes or scents.
There are different ways of implementing the idea; for example, a device to
be put on one’s nose (it would not need to be a full mask covering the
whole face) that discharges different scents in a very precise, sharp
fashion.35 The device would be controlled by software either in real time or
through a preprogrammed routine. Given the current state of software
development, for use both in the arts and elsewhere, the actual technical
aspects of the program do not seem to pose any significant difficulty. That
such a set-up could produce sensorial inputs in repeated patterns seems
uncontroversial to me. Owing to the sophistication and breadth of already
existing scent databases, the possibilities would be endless, not only in
relation to the mere formal contrasts and connections that can be established
among scents, but also to their associations with different aspects of human
experience.36 This final point is relevant to putting the rhythm generated
through smell in the context of a more ambitious artistic enterprise, one that
goes beyond simply creating rhythmic patterns.
As far as touch is concerned, no hypothetical scenario involving
technology is necessary, although, naturally, such a possibility would
always be an option. Without downplaying the ingenuity involved in giving
massages in different cultures, one need only envision an approach that puts
a greater focus on producing repeated patterns of touches. The amount of
variation regarding the length and type of pressures that can be applied to
one’s skin, not to mention their different locations over one’s body, speaks
to the complexities of potential rhythmic patterns and the scope for the use
of this sense modality. Of course, limitations on the repeatability of this
kind of “artistic” massage and the fact that a massage calls for one
“performer” per “spectator” could be readily overcome by using devices
that resemble massage chairs, the only difference being that they would be
more sophisticated and versatile, as required by the artistic ambitions of the
project in question.
By analogy with the proposal for smell rhythm above, one can imagine
how gustatory rhythm might be created. The idea of a device rhythmically
discharging different types of flavors to different parts of the tongue is
meant to make as intuitively accessible as possible the notion of gustatory
rhythm. Two brief points of clarification are in order. One, given what we
know about the mechanisms for sensing flavor, I am dramatically
simplifying matters for the sake of ease of engagement with the thought
experiment in a way that still renders it perfectly useful for my purposes
here. In all likelihood, for this idea to work efficiently, the tongue would not
be the only part of our sensorial make-up under consideration: as people
who cannot taste their food on account of having a cold know all too well,
there is more to taste than one’s taste buds. Two, even though it is beyond
the scope of this chapter to consider this matter, one may posit the existence
of rhythm in the degustation menus of high-end restaurants. I refer to high-
end restaurants because it is typically in those settings that a great deal of
attention is paid to matters of order and timing of the different foods that are
being consumed.
We could think of smoking cigars as, at least potentially, displaying
rhythm in relation to olfaction and gustation. A viable notion of rhythm
readily presents itself involving the frequency and sharpness (or,
conversely, smoothness) of the smoke intake, the length of retention of the
smoke in the vocal cavity and the manner of the exhalation. Indeed, there is
a sense in which different people smoke cigars at different rhythms, where
such sense of variation has to do with the aspects of smoking a cigar just
mentioned. Other fictional scenarios are conceivable, including ones that
involve a simultaneous plurality of sensorial inputs, a sort of multi-modal
rhythmic structure, but I believe that the examples provided so far
sufficiently establish what I propose in this section.
I finish with a reflection on the importance of postulating a viable notion
of rhythm for those senses that, up until now, have been largely ignored in
art creation and art practices. First of all, my hope is that the thought
experiments described above further support the contention that soundless
rhythm is a perfectly plausible notion. In this respect, it is immaterial
whether readers think that any of the fictional scenarios explained in this
section will ever come to pass.
Second, I contend that there is no contradiction in maintaining that it is
theoretically irrelevant whether or not a fictional scenario will become
actual (in the tradition of the philosophical methodology on thought
experiments), while at the same time positing that it is worth considering
the role of soundless rhythm in the emergence of new art practices and,
perhaps, art forms. Here, I simply wish to deploy the very same idea
elaborated upon at the end of Section 3: a notion of rhythm that is
continuous through different art forms or practices can lead to meaningful
connections. However, this point is of vastly more consequence for new art
practices than it is for traditional art forms, since novel art practices stand to
benefit more from connections to conventional art forms in order to
facilitate engagement, acquire status, and so on. Of course, points of contact
between a novel art practice and a traditional one, while helping to
consolidate the status of the former in the arts world, would not take away
any of the originality of the newly explored art practice. In this respect, the
influences between the traditional art forms and novel ones would not be
any different from the influences among the traditional art forms
themselves. Therefore, the acceptance or awareness that a robust experience
of rhythm can be sustained by smell, taste, and touch could be significant
for the very viability of artistic enterprises focused on these senses.
I was initially motivated to write this chapter by the opportunity to argue
for soundless rhythm, an aspect of the broader concept of rhythm such as
can be found in dance, that is often ignored or downplayed. I subsequently
sought to establish the same notion in the more controversial realm of
painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture. But here again I was
defending what I believe exists and what we by and large recognize in our
aesthetic experiences and critical practices. However, in the final part of this
chapter, I have endeavored to propose some hypothetical scenarios, both as
a way to additionally sustain the idea of soundless rhythm and as a means to
perhaps motivate further developments in our art practices.37
Works Cited
Carroll, Noël, “Interpretation and Intention: The Debate between Hypothetical and Actual
Intentionalism,” Metaphilosophy, 31 (2000), 75–95.
Carroll, Noël, “Art Interpretation,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (2011), 117–35.
Clark, Kenneth, Looking at Pictures (London, 1960).
Currie, Gregory, “Interpretation and Objectivity,” Mind, 102 (1993), 413–28.
Currie, Gregory, “Interpretation and Pragmatics,” in Arts and Minds (Oxford, 2004), 107–33.
Davies, Stephen, “Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value,” British Journal
of Aesthetics, 46 (2006), 223–47.
Dickie, George and W. Kent Wilson, “The Intentional Fallacy: Defending Beardsley,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 53 (1995), 233–50.
Gaiger, Jason, “Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy
Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford,
2019), C19.
Gaut, Berys, “Interpreting the Arts: The Patchwork Theory,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
51 (1993), 597–609.
Gaut, Berys, “Understanding Cinema,” in A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, 2010), 152–
96.
Hamilton, Andy, Aesthetics and Music (London, 2007).
Hamilton, Andy, “Rhythm and Stasis: A Major and Almost Entirely Neglected Philosophical
Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature [À rebours], tr. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Nicholas White
([1884]; Oxford, 1998).
Kowler, Eileen, “Eye Movements: The Past 25 Years,” Vision Research, 51 (2011), 1457–83.
Lamarque, Peter, “The Death of the Author: An Analytical Autopsy,” British Journal of Aesthetics,
30 (1990), 319–31.
Levinson, Jerrold, “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Statement, Objections, and Replies,” in Michael
Krausz, ed., Is There a Single Right Interpretation? (University Park, PA, 2002), 309–18.
Levinson, Jerrold, “Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (2010),
139–50.
Livingston, Paisley, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford, 2005).
Nehamas, Alexander, “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal,” Critical
Inquiry, 8 (1981), 133–49.
Rosenberg, Raphael and Cristoph Klein, “The Moving Eye of the Beholder: Eye Tracking and the
Perception of Paintings,” in Joseph P. Huston, Marcos Nadal, Francisco Mora, Luigi F. Agnati, and
Camilo J. Cela-Conde, eds, Art, Aesthetics and the Brain (Oxford, 2015), 79–108.
Scruton, Roger, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
Shiner, Larry, “Art Scents: Perfume, Design and Olfactory Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 55
(2015), 375–92.
Simons, Peter, “The Ontology of Rhythm,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds,
The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C3.
Stecker, Robert, Interpretation and Construction: Art, Speech, and the Law (Oxford, 2003).
Stecker, Robert, “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 64 (2006), 429–38.
1
Throughout this chapter, for the sake of simplicity, I confine my discussion to the traditional
five senses. Obviously, such a view of the senses is no longer tenable in light of the current
understanding of the senses. However, for the purposes of this chapter, it is acceptable to restrict
ourselves to the traditional division. Furthermore, I use the terms “sense,” “sense modality,” and
“sensory system” as synonymous. Likewise, I will write the following pairs interchangeably: “sight”
and “vision,” “smell” and “olfaction,” and “taste” and “gustation.”
2
In what follows, it becomes apparent why I need to refer to both music and sound, as opposed
to sound only.
3
I will focus on Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, and “Rhythm and Stasis,” rather than on his
own contribution to this volume (see Chapter 1), since those texts are fixed and it is easier to engage
with and quote from them. However, I do so while being aware that his text in the present collection
is continuous with his earlier writings.
4
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 127. In fact, he argues that “Dance, poetry and music are
conceptually inseparable in that rhythm is essential to each, and none can be understood
independently of it” (Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 39). The same formulation appears in
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 119; see also 144.
5
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 37.
6
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 127.
7
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 145.
8
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 127.
9
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 26–8.
10
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.
11
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 250; see also 234.
12
He does not seem to agree with the view I put forward in this section in relation to rhythm in
painting, given his remark about rhythm in graphic patterns: see Simons, Chapter 3, “Ontology of
Rhythm,” this volume, 63; but it seems misguided to make much of this potential disagreement
owing to the brevity of the comment.
13
Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm,” 63 (my emphasis).
14
Simons, “Ontology of Rhythm,” 69–70.
15
See “Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm,” Chapter 19 in this volume. Hence,
when I use the word “painting” referring to the art form rather than an object, it should also be
understood as applicable to photography, sculpture, and architecture, unless I am discussing
something specific to painting itself.
16
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 307–8. Here, as in the rest of the paragraph, I follow Gaiger’s
text very closely.
17
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 307–8.
18
I use advisedly the phrase “are to be perceived” instead of “are designed,” “are organized,” or
“are required to be perceived” in order to maintain neutrality with regard to matters that soon will
become critical to developing my argument.
19
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 308.
20
Although some contributors to this debate admittedly focus on literature or other narrative art
forms, I believe, as do other authors, that these positions can (and should) be extended to all art forms
regardless of whether their works have literary or narrative content.
21
Davies, “Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations.” For other useful texts on anti-
intentionalism, see Dickie and Wilson, “The Intentional Fallacy”; Gaut, “Interpreting the Arts,” and
“Understanding Cinema”; and Lamarque, “Death of the Author.”
22
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 316f.
23
Insofar as it is usually understood that aesthetic value contributes to artistic value, and as long
as we think of aesthetic value as the value afforded by our aesthetic experience, we honor the
commitment of the value-maximizing theory as explained earlier in relation to artistic value. For
those who think that non-aesthetic artistic value does not exist, the problem is solved by
reformulating the value-maximizing theory accordingly.
24
Clark, Looking at Pictures, 64–5, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 314.
25
Currie, “Interpretation and Objectivity,” and “Interpretation and Pragmatics”; Levinson
“Hypothetical Intentionalism,” and “Defending Hypothetical Intentionalism”; and Nehamas “The
Postulated Author.” Versions of hypothetical intentionalism may differ with respect to the degree to
which assumptions about the author (e.g., cultural background or context of creation) restrict the
freedom of interpretation.
26
Carroll, “Interpretation and Intention,” and “Art Interpretation”; Livingston, Art and Intention;
and Stecker, Interpretation and Construction, and “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended.”
27
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 317.
28
Gaiger is quite subtle in the wording of his view with regards to the meaning of the empirical
work on gaze-movements. He writes: “At least as far as gaze-movements are concerned, there does
not seem to be any evidence to support the claim that spatial patterns can be designed in such a way
that they are apprehended by the viewer in a temporally ordered sequence” (“Pictorial Experience,”
321).
29
Kowler, “Eye Movements,” 1472, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 319.
30
Rosenberg and Klein, “The Moving Eye,” 92, quoted in Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 321.
31
Gaiger, “Pictorial Experience,” 326–7.
32
Here, I am using the phrase “psychological possibility” very broadly and ecumenically.
Depending on one’s terminological preferences, the same thought could be conveyed with “cognitive
possibility” or “experiential possibility.”
33
Of course, if one accepts that the perception of rhythm in paintings is psychologically possible,
as argued above, then a normative thesis could be supported even if most people did not experience
paintings in the prescribed way. It would make the defense of the normative thesis perhaps harder,
but certainly not impossible. Throughout history, a majority of people have engaged wrongly with art
for a wide variety of reasons: it was novel, subtle, unfamiliar, obscure, and so on. For instance, the
fact that most people today might approach a Latin poem expecting rhyme and in ignorance of its
rhythm should have no influence on how one ought to appreciate it.
34
Shiner, “Art Scents.” For a novel that explores the idea of an olfactory art, see Huysmans, À
rebours ([1884] 1998).
35
My point here is independent of (and, indeed, would adapt itself to) any empirical findings
about the speed at which our sense of smell can experience different odors. In order to make sense of
what I am trying to convey, one simply needs to reflect on how we register different scents during an
activity in which we particularly focus on olfaction, such as, for instance, when cooking or enjoying
an elaborate dish, or walking through a garden or forest heavily populated with aromatic plants.
36
Shiner, “Art Scents,” 380–1.
37
I am grateful to Jason Gaiger, Ted Gracyk, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Simons for their
comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
PART V
READING RHYTHM
21
Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of
Abstraction
Jason David Hall
Good poetry, the speaker goes on to say, “needs much laboring.” While the
poem might sound conversational and off-the-cuff, it is in fact designed on
a strict formal template: its lines are not only set to the regular dip and drive
of iambic pentameters (we SAT toGETHer AT one SUMmer’s END) but
also linked in heroic couplets (end/friend, thought/nought, stones/bones).
But given that the poem is about making what is really intricate and studied
appear effortless, this strict patterning is rightly counterbalanced by
deformalizing touches. As David Holdeman observes,
Speechlike rhythms roughen its iambic pentameter meter, and its sentences often strengthen the
impression of spontaneous, colloquial speech by extending themselves over several lines,
sometimes by means of enjambment.2
Let’s come back to the question I posed above: How has this meter–rhythm
dynamic impinged upon the reading of poems aloud? Throughout the
nineteenth century (and for some time before then), one prosodic discussion
that captivated the imagination not only of poets and verse theorists but also
of professional elocutionists, and readers and reciters more generally, was
the place and function of pause in metered lines: not only mid-line or
caesural pause but also a pause at the end of a line; it’s the latter I want to
focus on right now. On the one hand, there were a number of proponents of
final pause. Lindley Murray, author of a number of books on grammar,
asserted in his 1825 English Reader that we “ought to read” not only
rhymed but also blank verse
so as to make every line sensible to the ear: for, what is the use of melody or for what end has
the poet composed in verse, if in reading his lines, we suppress his numbers, by omitting the
final pause; and degrade them, by our pronunciation, into mere prose?4
Yet in making every line sensible to the ear, the reader ran the risk of falling
into a wooden “sing-song” rhythm that sounded like an attempt at spoken
scansion. Wilkie Collins parodies such a reading by having one of his
characters recite the opening verses of John Milton’s Paradise Lost so that
he “ended every line inexorably with a full stop”—each of which Collins
deliberately prints.6 What this humorous example implies is a correlation
between how we see poetry and how we are likely to sound it. Collins’s
reader sees lines as discrete units, and in his reading he gives voice to the
line as end-stopped, self-contained segment, even if the sense of what he’s
reading does not conform to Milton’s pentameter lineation. Some of
Collins’s contemporaries were making similar points about the visual
display of verse. According to the “visible speech” popularizer Alexander
Melville Bell, for example, a reader too mindful of the structure of meter is
unduly inclined toward “sing-song,” hypermetrical recitation. To guard
against a pupil’s “too rhythmical [for which read too metrical] delivery,”
Bell experimented with a way of printing verse so that it didn’t look like
verse at all. If we could get beyond seeing meter asserted by “metrically
printed lines,” he argued, then there would be less chance of our pronouncing
poems in an artificially metrical manner. The authors of Bell’s Standard
Elocutionist (1878) preferred to display many poems—including extracts
from Milton’s epic—“prosaically” (Figure 21.1).7
Figure 21.1 Opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose in David Charles Bell
and Alexander Melville Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London, 1878), 426
Only the unchanging, abstract pattern of meter can underwrite the many
possible performances, and form a basis for rhythmical interpretations.
Meter, in other words, is the structure that enables the poem to function. In
a nod toward Richards’s metrics of “orientation,” Wimsatt and Beardsley
uphold the metrical poem as “a public linguistic object, something that can
be examined by various persons, studied, disputed—univocally.”35
5. Conclusion
Works Cited
Armstrong, Isobel, “Meter and Meaning,” in Jason David Hall, ed., Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of
the Long Nineteenth Century (Athens, OH, 2011), 26–52.
Bell, David Charles and Alexander Melville Bell, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist (London, 1878).
Bolton, Thaddeus L., “Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology, 6.2 (1894), 145–238.
Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry ([1938]; 4th edn, New York, 1976).
Brown, Calvin S., “Can Musical Notation Help English Scansion?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 23.3 (1965), 329–34.
Bynum, W. F., Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994).
Collins, Wilkie, Man and Wife, ed. Norman Page ([1870]; Oxford, 1995).
Cook, Albert S., “Prosody,” Review of Studies from the Yale Psychological Laboratory, ed. Edward
Wheeler Scripture, Modern Language Notes, 16.1 (1901), 27–9.
Cureton, Richard, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London, 1992).
Dallas, E. S., Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (London, 1852).
Finch, Annie, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor, MI,
1993).
Golston, Michael, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York, 2008).
Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound ([1880]; New York, 1966).
Helmholtz, Hermann von, “On the Physiological Causes of Harmony in Music,” in Science and
Culture: Popular and Scientific Essays, tr. and ed. David Cahan ([1857]; Chicago, 1995), 46–75.
Helmholtz, Hermann von, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music (1863; 3rd edn, 1870), tr. Alexander J. Ellis ([1875]; Cambridge, 2011).
Holdeman, David, The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats (Cambridge, 2006).
Holder, Alan, Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line (Cranbury, NJ, 1995).
Murray, Lindley, English Reader (New York, 1825).
Omond, T. S., The English Metrists: Being a Sketch of English Prosodical Criticism from
Elizabethan Times to the Present Day ([1906]; New York, 1968).
Patmore, Coventry, “Essay on English Metrical Law [1857]”: A Critical Edition with a
Commentary, ed. Mary Augustine Roth (Washington, DC, 1961).
Pinch, Adela, “Love Thinking,” Victorian Studies, 50.3 (2008), 379–97.
Richards, I. A., Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment ([1929]; New Brunswick, 2004).
Scripture, Edward Wheeler, Elements of Experimental Phonetics (New York, 1902).
Shapiro, Karl and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York, 1965).
Taylor, Dennis, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody with a Metrical Appendix of Hardy’s Stanza
Forms (Oxford, 1988).
Webster, Noah, An Improved Grammar of the English Language (New York, 1843).
Wimsatt, W. K. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,”
PMLA, 74.5 (1959), 585–98.
Yeats, W. B., William Butler Yeats: Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York,
1996).
1
Yeats, Selected Poems, 28–9.
2
Holdeman, Introduction to W. B. Yeats, 50.
3
Armstrong, “Meter and Meaning.”
4
Murray, English Reader, 12.
5
Webster, An Improved Grammar, 164.
6
Collins, Man and Wife, 195.
7
Bell and Bell, Bell’s Standard Elocutionist, 139.
8
Patmore, English Metrical Law, 11, 15.
9
Dallas, Poetics, 12.
10
Pinch, “Love Thinking,” 391.
11
Taylor, Hardy’s Metres, 22.
12
Omond, English Metrists, 171.
13
Patmore, English Metrical Law, 15.
14
Dallas, Poetics, 171, 159.
15
Gurney, Power of Sound, xviii.
16
Helmholtz’s two major contributions to the physiology of music are “Physiological Causes of
Harmony,” published the same year as Patmore’s Essay, and Sensations of Tone.
17
Bynum, Science, 98–9.
18
Bolton, “Rhythm,” 146, discussed at Golston, Rhythm and Race, 12–17.
19
Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 509, 552.
20
Cook, “Prosody,” 28.
21
Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 513.
22
Patmore, English Metrical Law, 9.
23
Scripture, Experimental Phonetics, 552.
24
Brown, “Musical Notation,” 331.
25
Richards, Practical Criticism, 219.
26
Richards, Practical Criticism, 214.
27
Richards’s views on metrical “orientation” can be read in relation to other theories of metrical
variation (e.g., the “iconic theory”), as well as to theories regarding “the importance of the
knowledge and previous associations a reader brings to the meter of a poem” (Finch, Ghost of Meter,
6–12).
28
Richards, Practical Criticism, 216.
29
Richards, Practical Criticism, 218–19.
30
See also Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing, 8–9.
31
Holder, Rethinking Meter, 23.
32
Finch, Ghost of Meter, 6–10.
33
Shapiro and Beum, A Prosody Handbook, 30.
34
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 587.
35
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 588.
36
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 589.
37
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 596.
38
Wimsatt and Beardsley, “Concept of Meter,” 597.
22
The Not-So-Silent Reading
What Does It Mean to Say that We Appreciate Rhythm in
Literature?
Rebecca Wallbank
This subtle shift to I* is made to varying degrees, but can be seen in the
work of Jerome Stolnitz who describes aesthetic experience as so
“rigorously object centered” that one can “miss nothing of the structural and
physiognomic detail.”16 Similarly Eliseo Viva describes aesthetic
experience as “an experience of rapt attention which involves . . .
apprehension of an object’s immanent meanings and values in their full
presentational immediacy.”17 The danger of I* is that two further
commitments may be assumed:
II If objects of experience are attended to in a non-foregrounded manner, they cannot be
aesthetically appreciated.
III If relevant qualities of objects are experienced in a non-foregrounded manner, they
cannot form part of our aesthetic appreciation.
Assumption III will be the prime focus here given that it would hereby
eliminate the possibility for a non-foregrounded feature of our experience
(such as a non-foregrounded experience of rhythm) to have a role in
aesthetic experience. This assumption relates to the idea that, as Robert
Hopkins puts it, “aesthetically relevant properties of a work are manifest to
the sense, or senses appropriate to it.”18 Similarly, Malcolm Budd holds that
“for you to experience a work with full understanding, your experience
must be imbued with an awareness of (all) the . . . properties that ground the
attribution of artistic value” to it.19 Of course, whether anyone strictly holds
(III) will depend on what might be meant by terms such as “awareness” and
“attention.” An appeal to perceptual psychology can help here.
According to William James:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid
form, of the use of what seem several simultaneous possible objects for trains of thought . . .
Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence.20
It strikes me that at certain points of this passage one would feel the need
for pause, to correct oneself and read again with different articulation,
particularly the dialogue. Most interestingly, it is possible that the
articulatory act was not foregrounded in one’s attention until the conscious
need for pause and correction; it is at such moments that non-foregrounded,
auditory-imagery becomes foregrounded. This experience of stopping to
correct oneself is not overly frequent given that it is an experience that
many authors tend to avoid; the fluent reader is often well prepared for the
manner in which one has to—often non-consciously—articulate a
character’s voice, and shift the rhythm and tone of a passage.
For these reasons, I argue that rhythmic auditory-imagery is prevalent
within one’s experience of literature, even if one is not attentive to it, and it
can alter the tone, tenor, and mood of an author’s writings in a non-
voluntary, non-foregrounded manner. Moreover, through altering these
things, it can play a fundamental role in how we experience the value of the
literary work.
In drawing from all of this, let us turn now to (d). It seems that as a
reader we naturally find ourselves reading in a multitude of ways and here
our modes of engagement will be automatically guided by the text. But so
far we have identified no clear signals or clues that we can actively pinpoint
which determine how we should be attending to the text at any particular
moment in time. Sometimes we will be primed to focus primarily on form,
othertimes we will be immersed in the narrative or contemplating the social
ramifications, othertimes our attention may be scattered between these. But
there seem to be no set or preordained moments where we should switch
between these. And to say that we should be reading in a certain manner
because an inanimate work deserves it adds unrealistic and unusual pressure
for the reader.
At most we can say that we find certain modes of reading particularly
enjoyable, and we might owe it to ourselves to maximize on this enjoyment.
Or we might say that as a matter of respect for the artist we should try to
approach literature in a frame of mind that is open to all the kinds of
experiences that it can afford. And so Holliday’s point can be seen as a
valuable call for all readers to engage with the text whilst acknowledging
the often overlooked potential of literary rhythm. But to require that we are
successful for the sake of the work seems like a very strong claim. Perhaps
Holliday will be happy to bite this bullet, and simply argue that artworks are
an unusal kind of entity which although inanimate can still require
attention, loyalty, preservation, even love etc. But in which case Holliday
needs to say much more.
Let’s finally turn now to a different focus. In the above examples the
literary works themselves have been the objects of experience. I have
argued that rhythm can play a role whether it is foregrounded or non-
foregrounded in our experience; but one may ask: What about an
appreciation of rhythm as an object of appreciation in itself?
First, I want to emphasize that when a foregrounded appreciation of the
rhythm alone occurs, this is rare; it is not often that we turn to literature for
pure rhythmic appreciation. As seen in discussion of the passage from The
Bell Jar, we often appreciate the role of rhythm in terms of it’s instrumental
value, among other literary devices, for the role it serves in enhancing the
literary work. Moreover, even if we appreciate a rhythm’s buoyancy or
joviality itself, this would often be made in connection to other sonic
qualities, such as the pitch, timbre, and melody of the words. For example,
we may appreciate how the harsh jarring and dissonant-sounding words
have been used to create a disconcerting atmosphere, or how the repeated
sibilance might soften and slow the mood down. In such cases, rhythm is
not doing all the work; it is rarely as valuable in isolation within a literary
context.
Further, in relation to whether the object of appreciation—rhythm—can
itself be appreciated in a non-foregrounded way, I want to emphasize that,
just as it would sound strange to say “I have aesthetically appreciated this
painting, sculpture, or architectural building itself, but I have never noticed
it,” it would sound equally strange to say “I have aesthetically appreciated
the rhythm itself, but I have never noticed it.” However, for the purposes of
this chapter I would like to leave that particular question open, whilst I
defend the claim that it can plausibly feature as part of our aesthetic
appreciation when it itself is not the sole or primary object.30 Through
pursuing this, I have shed light on the ways we experience and appreciate
rhythm in literature, and have also called into question various assumptions
concerning literary aesthetic experiences, their compatibility, and the
various ways we might attend to them.
Works Cited
Allot, Miriam, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London, 1974).
Bell, Clive, Art (London, 1914).
Budd, Malcolm, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London, 1995).
De Brigard, Felipe, “Consciousness, Attention and Commonsense,” Journal of Consciousness
Studies, 17.9–10 (2010), 189–201.
Goldman, Alan H., Aesthetic Value (Boulder, 1995).
Goldman, Alan H., “The Experiential Account of Aesthetic Value,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 64.3 (2006), 333–42.
Hamilton, William, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. 1 (of 4), ed. H. L. Mansel and John
Veitch (Edinburgh, 1859).
Holliday, John, “Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading,” in Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max
Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C24.
Hopkins, Robert, “Aesthetics, Experience, and Discrimination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 63.2 (2005), 119–33.
Iser, Wolfgang, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, 3.2
(1972), 279–99.
James, William, The Principles of Psychology ([1890]; Cambridge, MA, 1981).
Kentridge, R. W., L. H. de-Wit, and C. A. Heywood, “What is Attended in Spatial Attention?,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15.4 (2008), 105–11.
Kivy, Peter, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford, 2006).
Koch, Christof and Naotsugu Tsuchiya, “Response to Mole: Subjects Can Attend to Completely
Invisible Objects,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12.2 (2008), 44–5.
Levinson, Jerrold, The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, 1996).
Mack, Arien, “Perceptual Consciousness and Attention,” in Harold Pashler, ed., Encyclopedia of the
Mind, vol. 2 (London, 2009), 577–9.
Manson, Neil C., “Consciousness and the Unconscious,” in Harold Pashler, ed., Encyclopedia of the
Mind, vol. 1 (London, 2009), 199–202.
Marchetti, Giorgiom “Against the View that Consciousness and Attention are Fully Dissociable,”
Frontiers in Psychology, 3.36 (2012): doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00036.
Nanay, Bence, “Imagination and Perception,” in Amy Kind, ed., The Routledge Handbook of
Philosophy of Imagination (London, 2016).
Plath, Slyvia, The Bell Jar ([1963]; London, 2005).
Prinz, Jesse and Eric Mandelbaum, “Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words,” in John
Gibson, ed., The Philosophy of Poetry (Oxford, 2015).
Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Active Powers in Man, ed. Knud Haakonsen and James A. Harris
([1788]; Edinburgh, 2010).
Simons, Daniel J. and Christopher F. Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional
Blindness for Dynamic Events,” Perception, 28 (1999), 1059–74.
Smith, Barbara Hernstein, “Literature, as Performance, Fiction and Art,” Journal of Philosophy,
67.16 (1970), 553–63.
Stecker, Robert, “Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Value,” Philosophy Compass, 1.1 (2006), 1–10.
Stolnitz, Jerome, “The Artistic Values in Aesthetic Experience,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 32.1 (1973), 5–15.
Tye, Michael, “Attention, Seeing, and Change Blindness,” Philosophical Issues, 20.1 (2010), 410–
37.
Van Boxtel, Jeroen J. A., Naotsugu Tsuchiya, and Christof Koch, “Consciousness and Attention: On
Sufficiency and Necessity,” Frontiers in Psychology, 1 (2010), 217:
doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00217.
Vivas, Eliseo, “Contextualism Reconsidered,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18.2
(1959), 222–40.
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway ([1925]; Oxford, 2008).
Wu, Wayne, “What is Conscious Attention?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82.1
(2011), 93–120.
1
By “non-dramatic” I do not rule out the argument that such works are ontologically
performative by nature; I simply restrict my focus away from scripted and improvised plays and
toward rhythms of literature that are primarily experienced through reading.
2
Holliday, “Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading,” Chapter 24 in this volume; Kivy,
Performance of Reading.
3
Note, as will become apparent, the term “sounding” here does not necessarily refer to a publicly
audible sound, measurable in decibels.
4
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 3.
5
Where, following current philosophical debate, “mental imagery” is not restricted to visual
imagery, but is also applicable to olfactory, tactile, and auditory experience (Nanay, “Imagination and
Perception,” 125).
6
Smith, “Literature, as Performance,” 536; Kivy, Performance of Reading, 49.
7
Holliday, “Hearing it Right.” See also Smith, “Literature, as Performance”; Kivy, Performance
of Reading.
8
Allot, The Brontës, 152. Miriam Allot relates F. J. A. Hort’s suggestion that the reviewer is
probably Hort’s former tutor, the Shakespearean scholar W. G. Clark.
9
Poulet, “Criticism and the Experience of Interiority” (1966), quoted in Iser, “The Reading
Process,” 297.
10
One might draw from the Observation in several ways. One approach, beyond the scope of this
chapter to discuss, combines the Observation with a further assumption, to conclude that novels as an
artform are particularly non-aesthetic. The assumption in question would be that a consideration of
form and structure serving the content is essential to aesthetic experience; since novels are not
prevalently experienced in this manner, but are rather experienced “for the story,” novels are
therefore prevalently non-aesthetic.
11
Prinz and Mandelbaum, “Poetic Opacity,” 71–2.
12
Bell, Art, 27; Goldman, Aesthetic Value, 151.
13
Levinson, Pleasures of Aesthetics, 6.
14
Nanay, “Imagination and Perception.”
15
The term is used to capture the possibility that rhythmic qualities may be either aesthetic or
non-aesthetic whilst either way they play a fundamental role in our aesthetic experience.
16
Stolnitz, “Artistic Values,” 15.
17
Vivas, “Contextualism Reconsidered,” 227.
18
Hopkins, “Aesthetics, Experience, and Discrimination,” 119.
19
Budd, Values of Art, 4.
20
James, Principles of Psychology, 403–4.
21
Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, 1: 238.
22
Wu, “What is Conscious Attention?”
23
e.g. Reid, The Active Powers, 61 (Essay 2, “Of the Will,” Ch. 3): “Every man knows that he
can turn his attention to this subject or to that, for a longer or shorter time . . . It is a voluntary act and
depends on his will.” See also Wu “What is Conscious Attention?”
24
De Brigard, “Attention and Commonsense”; Kentridge et al., “Spatial Attention”; Koch and
Tsuchiya, “Response to Mole.”
25
Simons and Chabris, “Gorillas in our Midst.”
26
Mack, “Perceptual Consciousness,” 577.
27
We can have focal and distributed attention; we can further have degrees of attention, higher or
lower attentional-load; our attention might be voluntary or involuntary; and it might be controlled by
external stimulus (exogenous) or internally controlled (endogenous). In relation to this it has been
argued that whilst the objects of high-load, focal, voluntary attention are consciously perceived, other
objects or properties of distributed, low-load attention may not be (Van Boxtel et al., “Consciousness
and Attention”; Marchetti, “Consciousness and Attention”).
28
Mack, “Perceptual Consciousness”; Manson, “Consciousness and the Unconscious”; Tye,
“Change Blindness.”
29
Plath, The Bell Jar, 122.
30
Many thanks to Elisabeth Schellekens and Andy Hamilton for their helpful comments.
23
Leaving It Out
Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic Tradition
Will Montgomery
Looking back years later, he would write, “To break the pentameter, that
was the first heave.”9
Although there were notable pre-modernist exponents of free verse in
English—the translators of the Psalms for the King James Version of the
Bible, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman—it was Pound’s
dynamism and vision that put the vers libre techniques of imagism on the
poetic map.10 Pound was committed to a fundamentally musical model of
poetic language. However, he often wrote his critical prose in haste, and his
remarks on musicality and the primacy of sound in poetry resist
systemization. What does it really mean, for example, to “compose in the
sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”? Or to
suggest, as he did in his “Treatise on Metre,” that melody is rhythm:
A melody is a rhythm in which the pitch of each element is fixed by the composer. (Pitch: the
number of vibrations per second.)?11
Such questions are difficult to articulate clearly, partly because Pound’s
references to “music” often meant a commitment to the non-discursive
dimensions of language. Nonetheless, Pound was instrumental in
developing expanded conceptions of rhythm and musicality. In poetic
language, for him, “words are charged, over and above their plain meaning,
with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that
meaning.”12 The finely tuned acoustic sensibility of the poet adds an
additional aesthetic layer to language, which complicates or enriches the
communication of meaning. Writing of this element of musical excess,
David Ayers comments,
Pound does not merely celebrate the mellifluousness of wonderful-sounding poetry—far from it.
His notion is that the sound of verse corresponds to a certain type of meaning quite as definitely
as does its semantic content.13
Pound believed that the “listening ear” would allow an appropriate pattern
of stresses to emerge in relation to vowel and consonant sounds and
meanings.
Rhythm emerges in configurations determined by the particular personal,
historical, and literary consciousness of the poet. Meter is not to be viewed
as a hidden machine whirring in the background, part of a commonly held
stock of off-the-peg alternatives. In “A Retrospect” Pound argues as
follows:
I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the
emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be,
therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable.18
In this view, the rhythmic axis of poetry is an index of both originality and
authenticity. This is a position that, variously inflected, would become
enormously influential on twentieth-century poetry, informing the thinking
of such diverse writers as William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and
Allen Ginsberg. This highly subjective mode led in the work of Charles
Olson to a privileging of the poet’s breath—a bodily experience that could
only be felt by Olson himself. In Ginsberg’s version, spontaneity and
immediacy were markers of “uncounterfeitable” authenticity.
It is important to note at this point, however, that for none of the key
figures of early modernist poetry did free verse mean the wholesale
abandonment of rhythm. Eliot, for example, argued in 1917 that meter and
the deviation from it were both implicated in the best poetry: “It is [the]
contrast between fixity and flux, [the] unperceived evasion of monotony,
which is the very life of verse.”19 Williams, from a more social and demotic
perspective, viewed “measure” as a means of reflecting rhythmic qualities
intrinsic to everyday American speech. He argued, with a far less
individualistic emphasis than Pound’s, for a poetry that “will be
commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are living as
contrasted with the past.”20 In Pound’s own view, free verse was a broad
and endlessly flexible category, opening up a spectrum of rhythmic
possibility that ranged from “heavily accented” rhythms to highly “tenuous
and imperceptible” ones. What was to be avoided in the composition of
poetry was “carelessness.”21 As early as 1918, he was warning that vers
libre could be as “verbose” or “flaccid” as more formal verse.22
Yet, for Pound, there were circumstances for which only free verse would
do:
one should write vers libre only when one ‘must’, that is to say, only when the ‘thing’ builds up
a rhythm more beautiful than that of set meters, or more real, more a part of the emotion of the
‘thing’, more germane, intimate, interpretative than the measure of regular accentual verse; a
rhythm which discontents one with set iambic or set anapaestic.23
His repeated claim “No ideas but in things” continued Pound’s commitment
to a poetry that was neither discursive nor abstract—in other words, poetry
that had a distinct and privileged cognitive status, that could not be reduced
to paraphrase in prose. Williams’ compact dictum “the poet thinks with his
poem” made the point that the valuable intellectual labor of a poem lay
within the literary text itself, and was not external to it.29 Poetic language
could enframe a self-sufficient intellectual project on its own terms, and
need not be seen as a merely ornamental aesthetic object.30 All this has
clear implications for rhythm, as Williams’ espousal of measure comes to
mean a poetry that is capacious enough to get the measure of the culture
from which it emerges.31
Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” poem XII of his epochal, anti-Eliotic
Spring and All (1923; the title added in subsequent editions), is a manifesto-
like anti-poem because it apparently confines itself to bald statement,
eschewing the lyrical, expressive, ornamental qualities commonly held to
constitute the “poetic”:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
With “what uses me is what I use,” Creeley envisages the poet as both
linguistic receptor and shaper. Measure is understood an aestheticized form
of language use that spans both public and private. It is not amenable to the
metrical grid because what is “measured,” whether individually or
collectively, is too various to reduce to an on-off pattern of stress. The
individual’s social being is necessarily imprinted in measure, which
captures the local variations of a language that is understood to be always
somehow rhythmic. A fundamentally Romantic experience of poetic
selfhood persists in Pound’s sensitized “listening ear,” which implies a
reliance on the discriminations of the expressive individual. In Creeley’s
view the poet’s role is far less elevated: there is “simple agency.” This bare
existence in the world, formed by and forming language, needs to be
tracked on the page. This is a distinct advance on Pound’s cultivated but
ultimately hieratic ear: Creeley, through Williams, arrives at a much more
social understanding of the poet’s embeddedness in the linguistic collective.
Yet elsewhere Creeley seeks to mark the distance between himself and
Williams. In his review of Williams’ Selected Essays, Creeley praises
Williams’ poem “The World Narrowed to a Point,” singling out the play of
variation in the second stanza. However, he also attacks Williams’ idea of
measure on the grounds that any use of the term will lead the poet to a
generalized metrics of pattern:
So, then, what does it all come to . . . ‘measure,’ bitterly enough, has most usually been that
means by which lesser men made patterns from the work of better—so to perpetuate their own
failure. . . .
It all goes around and around. That I suppose would hold as true of the world as anything else
would. Let’s measure that?41
II
In the remainder of this chapter I use some examples from Creeley’s work
to illustrate my thesis, first that poetic rhythm is integral to the thinking that
a poem performs, and second that short-form poetry offers particularly
powerful examples of the rhythmic potential of modernist disjunction. His
first major collection For Love, written during the 1950s, amply illustrates a
specific understanding of rhythm’s role in the overall architecture of the
poem. In much of this writing, the foreshortened quality of the lines and the
frequent uncertainties about the relationships between the component parts
of the poem bring a distinctive kind of movement to it. Evenness of flow
was a sine qua non of traditional prosody, notwithstanding significant
departures from the underlying grid. In Creeley’s poetry, it is hard to detect
any kind of metrical pattern. Although there are, particularly in the early
work, gestures at older forms and some pointed archaisms, the poetry
achieves its rhythmic effects through a particularly disjunctive application
of Pound’s “form cut into TIME.” The forward movement of spoken
language in time is set in a relationship with the typographical and
syntactical marks of uncertainty in the writing.43 Sentences are broken
across several lines. The relationship between the groups of words on
separate lines is unclear. Sometimes such clusters of words seem to run
across lines, sometimes the line groups coincide with actual phrases,
sometimes both are possible.
Creeley’s broken utterances attempt to follow discontinuous cognitive
processes. Sound is central to the unfolding of these processes, throwing up
trains of similarity and dissonance that work across the patterns of syntax
and sense-making. In “After Mallarmé,” from For Love, a stone is the
object of contemplation—a particularly bald presentation of the post-
Romantic poet encountering the natural world.
Stone,
like stillness
around you my
mind sits, it is
a proper form
for it, like
stone, like
compression itself,
fixed fast,
grey,
without a sound.44
teeth and
eyes, bite
it but
much so
little. Words
say everything.
I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.45
This is a poem that, in quite unsparing ways, wants to “give witness not to
the thought of myself—that specious concept of identity—but, rather, to
what I am as simple agency.” The opening challenge, “Locate I,”
immediately spills into cliché over the line break—and a reflection on lyric
address. This “I love you” both preserves and stands at a distance from the
emotion it enacts. The poem considers how embodied speech navigates the
paradox of a lyric address that is both full and empty (“so || much so |
little”) of meaning. The contention “Words | say everything,” midway
through the poem, leads to the Beckettian reduction of “speech is a mouth.”
Emptiness is merely a space to fill. A schematized version of coitus hovers
between the empty and the full. And speech is equated to the primal
desiring apparatus of the mouth, the point at which, following Freud,
hunger and desire are co-located in the infant. In this context the earlier
“bite it” combines the voracious desire for incorporation with eroticism.
The poem’s lines extend, on the whole, to only one or two words and the
line breaks are violent: “some- | where.” Yet the poem is marked by patterns
of close half-rhyme. These patterns intensify the poem’s compression by
restricting the sound palette: “bite | it but”; “but || . . . not | . . . hurt”; “so || . .
. so”; “fill, fill | . . . full || . . . holes”; “heard words | . . . words.” Here, the
repeated and half-repeated sounds threaten the blanking out of sense by
sound, raising the possibility that speech, like love, might be nothing more
than a compulsion, like the words that flood the brain of Beckett’s speaker
in Not I. This would be a fiercely reductive proposition, yet the poem’s
specifically linguistic being complicates the suggestion. Transposed to
prose, the poem’s first three clauses might follow one another smoothly, but
the final one (“you | want so | much so | little”) is made syntactically
awkward through ellipsis. The mirroring of the poem’s beginning midway
through the poem, “I | love you | again, || then what | is emptiness | for,”
similarly sets two phrases into a call-and-response relationship. Echo,
another side effect of condensation, is integral to the poem’s workings. The
poem’s interlocutor is shadowy at best, leaving open the possibility that the
poem might be self-addressed.
The poem almost consumes itself as it anxiously progresses. Sense-
making is tenuously supported by the near-functioning syntax, but this
sense-making potential is pulled this way and that by the cross-weave of
sound-play, repetition, and jagged line breaks. The resulting slim procession
of words enacts the self-consuming, self-doubting speculation that the poem
preserves. Yet the poem does not posit a negative theology of regress
towards an unsayable nothingness. Instead it performs a wary, processual
encounter with language that succumbs to neither of the alluring fantasies
of fullness or emptiness that it sketches. A stuttering rhythm, experienced as
the total effect of the multiple discontinuities of the poem, pervades the act
of communication, in both its fullness and its emptiness.
As he moved towards the increasingly self-reflexive work of Pieces
(1968), the question of “content” became bracketed off in Creeley’s writing.
Indeed, in 1965 he writes baldly that “poems are not referential—at least
not importantly so.”46 Although some of the poems in Pieces are looser and
more prosaic than the impacted lyrics of For Love, the most challenging
poems in the collection divert the reader’s attention toward their formal
arrangements. The poems sometimes seem to scrutinize nothing so much as
their own unfolding.
The first poem of Pieces, “As Real as Thinking,” lays the foundation for
a book that would prove highly influential on the language writers of the
1970s and 1980s.47 The first of the poem’s three sections runs as follows:
As real as thinking
wonders created
by the possibility—
forms. A period
at the end of a sentence
which
began it was
into a present,
a presence
saying
something
as it goes.48
The poem begins with a hypothetical “as.” However, it is not clear what is
being compared to what—what, in the end, is “as real as thinking”? The
“forms,” perhaps, of the following stanza. But what, in that case, is meant
by forms—does it carry a Platonic weight, or is Creeley, perhaps, thinking
about poetic forms? The immediate friction in the poem is in that phrase, as
it appears to claim a greater reality for thinking than for the material world.
The poem then discusses the way a sentence set in the past (“it was”)
emerges into the present, but must end in a full stop.
The bland phrase “saying | something | as it goes” is worth considering.
After all, the poem may be “saying” something about the volubility of
language’s incessant self-staging. But the point is not in the philosophical
import of such lines. It lies in the peculiar rhythm through which a thought
is encountered as part of the poetic artifact.
Creeley thinks about the strangely elusive temporality of the present, and
how that is encountered in the language of a poem. The poem goes on to
indicate an interest in portrait and spectator—the face that is looked at that
appears to reflect that of the viewer. Are we internal or external to the
perceptual or linguistic events in which we participate?
The third and final section of the poem appears to discount both inner
and outer as “impossible | locations,” postulating a transaction between the
two that is imaged in the figure of the hand:
Inside
and out
impossible
locations—
reaching in
from out-
side, out
from in-
side—as
middle:
one
hand.49
III
Practiced?
Loops
on ruled paper.
What is supervised
has meaning.
A brow-beating
pulse . . .51
Works Cited
Armantrout, Rae, Veil: New and Selected Poems (Middletown, CT, 2001).
Armantrout, Rae, Versed (Middletown, CT, 2009).
Attridge, Derek, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London, 1992).
Attridge, Derek, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995).
Attridge, Derek and Thomas Carper, Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry
(London, 2003).
Ayers, David, Modernism: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2004).
Carr, Helen, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H. D. and the Imagists (London, 2009).
Creeley, Robert, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (Berkeley, 1982).
Creeley, Robert, “A Sense of Measure” [1964], in Collected Essays (Berkeley, 1989), 486–8.
Creeley, Robert, “Poems are a Complex” [1966], Collected Essays (Berkeley, 1989), 489–90.
Creeley, Robert, “William Carlos Williams: Selected Essays” [1954], in Collected Essays (Berkeley,
1989), 34–9.
Creeley, Robert, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan
Harris (Berkeley, 2014).
Creeley, Robert and Daniel Kane, What Is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde
(New York, 2003), 50–64.
Cureton, Richard, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London, 1992).
Cureton, Richard, “Analysis of William Carlos Williams, ‘To a Solitary Disciple,’” Thinking Verse, 3
(2013), 51–107: http://www.thinkingverse.org/issue03/RichardCureton_SolitaryDisciple.pdf.
Eliot, T. S., “Reflections on Vers Libre” [1917], in Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode (London,
1975), 31–6.
Flint, F. S., “The History of Imagism,” The Egoist, 2.5 (1915), 70–1.
Jarvis, Simon, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge, 2007).
Jones, Tom, Poetic Language (Edinburgh, 2012).
Moody, Anthony D., Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man & His Work (Oxford, 2014).
Pope, Alexander, “An Essay on Criticism” [1711], in Alexander Pope: The Major Works, ed. Pat
Rogers (Oxford, 2006), 17–39.
Pound, Ezra, “A Retrospect” [1913], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 3–14.
Pound, Ezra, “How to Read” [1931], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 15–40.
Pound, Ezra, “T. S. Eliot” [1917], in Literary Essays (London, 1954), 418–22.
Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading ([1934]; London, 1961).
Pound, Ezra, “Affirmations: As for Imagisme” [1915], Selected Prose 1909–1965 (New York, 1973).
Pound, Ezra, The Cantos (London, 1975).
Saintsbury, George, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, vol. 1
([1906]; 2nd edn, London, 1923).
Weaver, Mike, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge, 1971).
Williams, William Carlos, Autobiography (New York, 1951).
Williams, William Carlos, “The Poem as a Field of Action” [1954], in Selected Essays (New York,
1969), 280–91.
Williams, William Carlos, Paterson ([1963]; Harmondsworth, 1983).
Williams, William Carlos, Collected Poems, 2 vols, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan
(Manchester, 2000).
1
Pope himself is skeptical about rigid systems: “Those rules of old discovered, not devised, | Are
nature still but nature methodized; | Nature, like liberty, is but restrained | By the same laws that first
herself ordained” (“Essay on Criticism,” 21).
2
The foot is a basic unit of prosody. Each line in metrical verse can be divided into smaller
rhythmic units that function independently of word boundaries and punctuation. A regular iambic
pentameter line, for example, contains five two-syllable feet, each containing an unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed syllable.
3
Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, 4.
4
There have, nonetheless, been attempts to rethink poetic rhythm and meter: e.g. Cureton,
Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. Cureton, “Analysis” is an exhaustive account of William Carlos
Williams’ “To a Solitary Disciple.” (Thinking Verse is the most vibrant forum for the discussion of
contemporary anglophone prosody: see http://www.thinkingverse.org/.) See also Attridge, Rhythms
of English Poetry and Poetic Rhythm; and Attridge and Carper, Meter and Meaning.
5
For a contemporaneous account of events, see Flint, “History of Imagism,” 70–1.
6
Pound, ABC of Reading, 36, 92, 97. Pound, 97, credits two prose-writers, Stendhal and
Flaubert, with pioneering a mode of writing that privileged “clarity” above “poetic ornament.”
7
Pound, ABC of Reading, 203.
8
Pound, “A Retrospect,” 3.
9
Pound, The Cantos, 518.
10
Vers libre was a late nineteenth-century French critical coinage. For the importance of T. E.
Hulme and F. S. Flint in preparing the way for imagism before Pound’s arrival in London, see Carr,
Verse Revolutionaries.
11
Pound, ABC of Reading, 199. Moody, Ezra Pound, 23, notes that the Pound–Antheil version of
Pound’s opera Le Testament de Villon uses such complex micro-rhythms that it is almost unplayable.
Pound developed a radical musical theory grounded in subsonic bass tones that he entitled the “Great
Bass” (Moody, Ezra Pound, 217–28).
12
Pound, “How to Read,” 25, defining “Melopœia.”
13
David Ayers, Modernism, 6. Pound, “Affirmations,” 377, argues that energy can find artistic
expression in three ways: in pure form (painting or sculpture); pure sound (music); and through the
image, which “may find adequate expression in words.” Rhythm may bolster the communication of
energy in words, but it should not be too regular.
14
Pound, ABC of Reading, 205.
15
Pound, “T. S. Eliot,” 421. The remark is a footnote added in 1940 to a review of Prufrock and
Other Observations published in The Egoist in 1917.
16
Pound, ABC of Reading, 201.
17
Pound, ABC of Reading, 206.
18
Pound, “A Retrospect,” 9.
19
Eliot, “Vers Libre,” 33.
20
Williams, “The Poem,” 283.
21
Pound, ABC of Reading, 12–13.
22
Pound, ABC of Reading, 3.
23
Pound, ABC of Reading, 12.
24
H. D.’s poems were published in the January 1913 issue of Poetry. Two brief prose texts by
Pound on imagism appeared in the March issue, and Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro” in the
April issue.
25
A Williams poem appeared in the first anthology of imagist poetry, Des Imagistes, which was
edited by Pound and published in 1914.
26
Williams, Collected Poems, 2: 54.
27
Williams, Paterson, 311. Williams’ mother was Puerto Rican.
28
Williams, Paterson, 225.
29
Williams, Paterson, iii. Creeley, Collected Essays, passim, cites this precept.
30
Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song, credits Wordsworth with inaugurating a new way of
thinking in poetic language.
31
In his later writing, Williams developed a flexible three-line stanza form that he called the
“variable foot.” However, his writings on it are not systematic and it is generally seen as a form of
structured free verse.
32
Williams, Collected Poems, 1: 224.
33
In an early unpublished essay, “Speech Rhythm” (1913), cited in Weaver, William Carlos
Williams, Williams argues that all the constituent parts of the poem function together as “an assembly
of tides, waves and ripples” that partake “of the essential nature of the whole” (82).
34
Pound, ABC of Reading, 198, 202.
35
Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 64, quoting Pound, “Treatise on Metre,” 201.
36
Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 61. To summarize brutally, the three Poundian categories
refer to the sonic, visual, and verbal capacities of the poem. By “company,” we can take Creeley to
mean such contemporaries as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, both of whom are associated with
the Black Mountain school of poetry. Creeley maintained a prodigious correspondence with Olson.
37
Jones, Poetic Language, 212.
38
Creeley, “Poems are a Complex,” 489.
39
Creeley and Kane, What Is Poetry, 62.
40
Creeley, “Sense of Measure,” 487–8.
41
Creeley, “William Carlos Williams,” 39.
42
Creeley, Letters, 134.
43
When reading his work aloud, Creeley adopted a hesitant style that emphasized the crisis of the
line break.
44
Creeley, Collected Poems, 250.
45
Creeley, Collected Poems, 283
46
Creeley, “Poems are a Complex,” 490.
47
Language writing was an avant-garde literary movement that was particularly active between
the early 1970s and the early 1990s, though many language writers are still publishing. The key
anthology is In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986);
various critical and creative-critical texts are gathered in The ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ Book, edited
by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
48
Creeley, Collected Poems, 379.
49
Creeley, Collected Poems, 380.
50
Long neglected, Armantrout won the Pulitzer prize in 2010 for her book Versed.
51
Armantrout, “Rehearsal,” in Veil, 130.
24
Hearing It Right
Rhythm and Reading
John Holliday
While literary theorists have long been concerned with rhythm, within the
philosophy of literature, the matter of sound, let alone rhythm, has been
neglected. This chapter addresses that gap. First, it establishes a working
account of rhythm as it pertains to literature. It does not address the
metaphysical or conceptual question of what rhythm really is. Rather, it
provides a foundation for questions of value, arguing that poetry is not more
rhythmic than prose. Second, it argues that rhythm in prose is not a rarefied
thing, but worth attending to more generally.
Poetry is generally considered musical, and prose is not. But as Gass
notes,
prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a
low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious
measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed.1
This chapter bolsters Gass’s claim. I argue that like works of music and
poetry, works of prose have rhythm, to which the pauses, inflections,
stresses, and pronunciation of its language all contribute. As such, like
poetry, prose literature should be considered musical. It may be that poetry
is somehow more musical. For instance, Hamilton argues that “Dance,
poetry and music are conceptually interdependent in that rhythm is essential
to each, and none can be understood independently of it.”2 One might be
reluctant to extend the same status to prose literature. But while poetry is
distinct from prose, in that the former is lineated and the latter is not, I
argue that this distinction does not result in poetry being more rhythmic.3
The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 sketches a working account of
rhythm. Whatever constitutes rhythm in a work of literature, the rhythm
itself is a feature to be experienced, and one in need of explanation and
analysis. If literature has rhythm, literally so, then we should be able to gain
understanding of that feature by appealing to discussions of rhythm in
philosophy of music. Section 3 establishes a working account of rhythm as
it pertains to literature, according to which poetry is in no sense more
rhythmic than prose. Section 4 reflects on the interpretative demands of
attending to rhythm in literature. Finally, Section 5 argues that rhythm in
prose literature is generally worth attending to, for rhythm plays various
important roles in prose.
1. Rhythm
In any case, we can consider all the basic properties that give rise to
rhythmic organization without worrying whether metaphorical or non-
metaphorical movement supervenes on this rhythmic organization. Even if
one must hear movement to appreciate rhythm properly, as Scruton notes,
this movement is a Gestalt property.14 So even if it turns out that Budd is
right that movement is an eliminable feature of experiencing rhythm, my
account of literature’s rhythmic organization remains unaffected.
While literary texts are mute, literary works are not. The latter have
properties of sound, as our practice of discussing literature suggests. Critics,
writers, and everyday readers alike remark on alliteration, assonance,
rhyme, and the overall sound of sentences in both poetry and prose
literature. At minimum, it seems odd to deny that literary works have
properties that require vocalization or sub-vocalization in order to
experience them fully.15 Say then that the sonic properties of a sentence are
all the properties audible to the human ear—save any individualizing vocal
characteristics—when the sentence is appropriately vocalized by a natural
language speaker, where an appropriate vocalization contains correct
pronunciation and enunciation sensitive to all features of rhythmic
organization.
The features that organize a sentence’s sonic properties rhythmically fall
into three classes: pronunciation, intonation, and phrasing.16 These are
features shared by both prose and poetry, and belong to the linguistic
medium itself. “Speech is,” as Scruton argues, “a paradigm for us of a
rhythmical organization generated not by measure and beat but by internal
energy and the intrinsic meaningfulness of sound.”17 The question is
whether the apparent literary analogues to measure and beat—lineation and
meter—somehow distinguish poetry from prose rhythmically. I argue that
while meter may give the rhythm of poetry a distinctive character, neither
lineation nor meter, contrary to conventional belief, make poetry more
rhythmic than prose. Linguistic features of rhythmic organization do the
real work of supplying literature with rhythm.
Correctly pronouncing a word requires enunciating its syllables and
stressing them correctly. The number of syllables that a word contains, and
which syllables receive more emphasis, determine the patterning of sound.
Some languages (such as French) are said to be syllable-timed, and others
(such as English) stress-timed.18 The distinction is intended to trace what
feature of pronunciation—syllable number or stress—does the primary
work in determining the time it takes to pronounce a word. This distinction
is contested,19 but the important point is that both syllables and stress bear
on the organization of sound in language. With English, it is most salient
with stress. For instance, a two-syllabled word with stress on the first
syllable organizes sound differently than a two-syllabled word with stress
on the second syllable. Consider the words rocket and Rockette20 or content
defined as substance or meaning and content defined as satisfied. These
examples illustrate not only how stress organizes sound, but also that stress
is determined—at least usually—by the correct pronunciation of the word.21
We should, however, distinguish stress from accent, where the latter is
determined not by pronunciation, but by typographical conventions and
contextual cues. When italicization is used for emphasis—as in “He had
barricaded himself in his house”22—accent in vocalization is required and
realized by the sense of raising vocal pitch (i.e., modifying intonation).23
However, emphasis is not always so clearly indicated, and thus what
deserves accent might be open to more than one interpretation, as in this
passage:
The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt you don’t mind
so much because you yourself are all right. But it won’t work if you are just a little selfish. You
must be very selfish.24
One might take issue with Attridge’s four basic types, but it seems
undeniable that sentences deserve analysis along these lines, that meaning
influences phrasing and thus rhythm.
All features of rhythmic organization examined thus far belong both to
poetry and prose. I will now consider features specific to literary language.
But if my analysis is right, then it is the shared linguistic features of poetry
and prose that do the real work of supplying both with rhythm. Neither an
appeal to lineation nor to meter can support the conventional view that
poetry is more rhythmic than prose.
Poems are lineated; prose is not. In poetry, a row of text does not end
simply due to the constraints of the page’s margins, as it does in prose; the
arrangement of lines is not a contingent affair. Rather, a poem’s rows of text
end for reasons other than the margins; a poem’s lines are intentionally
broken. But lineation’s influence on rhythm is less straightforward than it
appears. It might seem that line breaks constrain phrasing, calling, like
commas and periods, for pause in enunciation. But it would be wrong to say
they clearly function this way. Readers unfamiliar with the conventions of
poetry often treat them in this fashion, pausing longer than they would for a
period; and there is a history of scholarship to support such treatment.29 But
there are also many poets and scholars who advise against this, urging that
we read through line breaks, pausing only when the usual features of syntax
demand we do.30 On this view, line breaks serve only to amplify pause, and
even that function is questionable. Finally, between these extremes lies the
prescription of a brief pause at line breaks.31 In short, there is no consensus
on the proper treatment of line breaks in the vocalization of poetry. But
given any view, there is no sense in saying that poetry is more rhythmic or
has more ability to be rhythmic than prose. Pausing to any degree at line
breaks would result in rhythmic organization, but no more than syntax does
in prose.
Meter also does not make poetry more rhythmic than prose. On the one
hand, some prose may have meter. Faulkner’s prose, for instance, is said
sometimes to be written in iambic pentameter32 and Baum argues that meter
can be found in much prose.33 On the other hand, as noted above, rhythm
does not reduce to meter. In fact, meter may sometimes overwhelm rhythm,
subsuming any non-periodicity to periodic beat. Some argue that this is a
common occurrence in rap music.34 With enough emphasis on the beat of a
metric poem, a reading can begin to lose the poem’s rhythm. Some poems
may even invite such readings, most likely to their detriment. In her guide
to understanding and writing poetry, Oliver warns against just this.35 So
while poetry may, on the whole, be more metric, this entails only that its
rhythms tend to be more regular and thus more easily noticed. Many prose
writers clearly labor over sentence rhythms despite their sentences being
non-metric, to which George Saintsbury’s lengthy A History of English
Prose Rhythm attests.36 Virginia Woolf even believed that rhythm was the
primary business of all good writing—for her, without the right rhythm,
nothing else could work.37
Nevertheless, while meter may not make poetry more rhythmic than
prose, it does shape its rhythms in a particular way. Without some extra-
rhythmic cue, one must scan a line or sentence to determine if it has meter
and what that meter is. Here, scanning amounts to determining whether any
linguistic features of rhythmic organization establish a periodic beat. If they
do, the line—or sentence—has meter. But since linguistic features of
rhythmic organization underdetermine rhythm, they therefore also
underdetermine meter. Unlike prose, however, poetry has metric forms,
established by history and codified by practice. The lines of sonnets,
ballads, and blank verse are iambic; those of epics and elegies, dactylic;
those of limericks, anapestic.38 Except for blank verse, these forms are also
comprised of a particular rhyme scheme, stanza structure, or subject matter.
Thus there are extra-rhythmic cues that a poem follows a particular metric
form, that its lines have a particular meter and ought to be vocalized
accordingly.39 So while a poem’s meter may not be indicated explicitly, as
in musical scores, it may be suggested by form.
This all amounts to meter functioning in a much more determinate way in
poetry than in prose. Sentences in works of prose may be metrical, but there
are no prose forms that determine a particular kind of meter. Because of
this, one might argue that at least in poetry that embodies metric forms,
rhythm has a distinct character. Such a view might be pushed further by
arguing that even blank verse offers an extra-rhythmic cue to its pervading
meter in virtue of it being historically entrenched. After enough unrhymed
lines exhibit iambic pentameter, the suggestion of blank verse will ring for a
reader with the relevant background knowledge. A metric expectation will
arise. In fact, one might attempt to extend this line of argument to all metric
poetry and, potentially, poetry in general. Tempest seems to have something
like this in mind.40 Yet it is not clear that such an argument can ground any
fundamental distinction between prose and poetry. Baum argues that “the
difference is only in degree of [rhythmic] regularity”41 and I am inclined to
agree. Poetry is in no sense more rhythmic than prose, even if its rhythms
tend to be more regular, marked by a consistent, anticipated beat. While it
may be tempting to think that this regularity does in fact make poetry more
rhythmic, such a view runs the risk of reducing rhythm to meter. Whatever
position one takes on rhythm, relegating it to the mere space of beat seems
unsatisfactory, as it makes no room for rhythmic complexity and threatens
to leave free verse beyond poetry’s bounds.42
Even if one admits that, in principle, poetry is not more rhythmic than
prose, one still might hold that attending to rhythm is rarely required to
recognize the merits of a prose work. Some prose works have rhythm that
requires attending to, works where rhythm stands to the fore, works whose
authors evidently care a great deal about rhythm and craft their sentences
accordingly, authors like Woolf, Proust, and Joyce. But this does not
encompass most prose literature. Strongly rhythmic prose works are the
exception. It seems absurd to suggest that one should need to attend to
rhythm in pulp fiction in order to appreciate it fully. We read such works for
their entertaining plots, not their engaging rhythms. While there may be a
place for such rhythmically impoverished literature in our lives, I will
outline some reasons why rhythm in prose literature is generally worth
attending to and why prose works whose rhythms deserve attention are
worth seeking.
First, considerations of rhythm are common in literary criticism of
prose.52 So if assessing the value of literary works is part of the primary
business of literary criticism—as Noël Carroll argues53—then it would
seem that rhythm deserves our attention when reading prose literature. It is
reasonable to think that criticism explicitly serves a social function, one that
aids readers in recognizing the merits of literary works.
Second, a common recommendation given to novice writers of poetry
and prose is to read their work aloud so they may be more sensitive to its
rhythms.54 It may not be that everything novice writers are instructed to do
or be sensitive to deserves our attention when reading. For instance, novice
writers are commonly recommended to write daily, yet a writing schedule
seems irrelevant to our appreciation a writer’s work. But we at least have
good reason to attend to advice for novice writers when it bears directly on
the writer’s work.
Third, rhythm stands to the fore in various ways. It may be most natural
to think of notably rhythmic language as being what Robert Ochsner calls
“fluid.”55 The following sentence from Updike’s Rabbit Redux embodies
such fluidity:
The clicking and the liquor and the music mix and make the space inside him very big, big
enough to hold blue light and black faces and ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and stale smoke sweeter than
alfalfa and this apparition across the way, whose wrists and forearms are as it were translucent
and belonging to another order of creature; she is not yet grown.56
As Raban aptly states, Gaddis brilliantly captures the way we speak now,
with a wicked fidelity to its flimsy grammar, its elisions and hiatuses, its rush-and-stumble
rhythms. When Gaddis’s characters open their mouths, they’re apt to give voice to sentences
like car pileups in fog, with each new thought smashing into the rear of the one ahead and
colliding with the oncoming traffic of another speaker’s words.62
Though simple, there is something dead on in the way the rhythm shifts to a
staccato patterning in the last two lines. Rhythm worth attending to does not
just reside in the ornate, complicated, and prominent.
Fifth, successful narration captures rhythms we can imagine someone’s
thought embodying. This is especially important when narration is in first-
person point of view. If a first-person narrator’s “voice” does not feel as if it
could be the way a real person would think or speak, the whole narrative
will feel flat and perhaps inauthentic. Rhythm not only aids in constructing
a narrator who feels real, but helps suggest reality as a particular person,
with a distinctive personality. For instance, part of why J. D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye is so celebrated is the authenticity of Holden Caulfield’s
narrative voice. Take the opening sentence:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was
born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before
they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if
you want to know the truth.64
Thus, in most prose literature, when the narrative voice does not feel true to
character, when “author and character get too separated, . . . we feel the cold
breath of an alienation over the text.”67
Finally, the opportunity for sheer aesthetic pleasure that well-wrought
rhythms in prose offer should not be overlooked. As Saintsbury notes,
the power of appreciating concerted harmonies in articulate and sense-bearing language seems
to be much rarer than that of enjoying music proper. Yet it is certain that the tens who appreciate
the close of the Urn Burial . . . receive as keen and as systematic a pleasure as the tens of
thousands who listen to Beethoven or Bach.68
As an avid vocalizer of literature and listener of Bach, I can at least attest to
this being my experience. The pleasure I receive from a sentence like “The
chilly reptilian film of concentration in the cold blue eyes, Jim”69 is great
and largely due to rhythm, the way the measured, iambic opening—
enhanced by assonance, alliteration, and sense—gives way to the triple
stress on “cold blue eyes” then brought to a wavering halt by the comma, a
precipice that descends into a last, unexpected beat. However, contra
Saintsbury, I suspect that the relative lack of those who experience such
pleasure is less a matter of the power to enjoy rhythm in prose and more a
matter of finding reason to attend to rhythm in prose. For a reader fluent in
the language of a given literary work, making considered choices about
accent and phrasing is far from foreign; linguistic judgment based on
context and semantic importance is an everyday affair. Thus, by intending
to be sensitive to a literary work’s rhythm a fluent reader’s construction of a
plausible performative interpretation is not far off. Though accents and
phrasings must be chosen deliberately, the felt reasons for these choices
may be intuitive and non-verbal, sentences seemingly just moving in
particular ways. If this is right, consider what I have argued here a call for
readers’ attention.
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York, 2008), 145–73.
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Problem,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111.1 (2011), 25–42.
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Perception and Performance, 14.3 (1988), 389–403.
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LaPlante, Alice, The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing (New York, 2007).
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415–25.
Lombardi, Chris, “Description: To Picture in Words,” in Alexander Steele, ed., Writing Fiction: The
Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School, Gotham Writers’ Workshop
(New York, 2003), 104–25.
Mills, Paul, The Routledge Creative Writing Coursebook (London, 2006).
Montgomery, Will, “Leaving it Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic Tradition,” in
Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, eds, The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics,
Music, Poetics (Oxford, 2019), C23.
Ochsner, Robert, “Rhythm in Literature and Low Style,” Style, 19.2 (1985), 258–81.
Oliver, Mary, A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (New York,
1994).
Patel, Aniruddh D., “Musical Rhythm, Linguistic Rhythm, and Human Evolution,” Music
Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24.1 (2006), 99–104.
Patel, Aniruddh D. and Joseph R. Daniele, “An Empirical Comparison of Rhythm in Language and
Music,” Cognition, 87.1 (2003) B35–45.
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Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who
Want to Write Them (New York, 2006).
Raban, Jonathan, “At Home in Babel,” in Harold Bloom, ed., William Gaddis (Philadelphia, 2004),
163–72.
Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping (New York, 1980).
Saintsbury, George, A History of English Prose Rhythm (London, 1912).
Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye (New York, 2001).
Saunders, George, “Victory Lap,” in Tenth of December (New York, 2013), 3–27.
Scruton, Roger, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford, 1997).
Scruton, Roger, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” in Kathleen Stock, ed., Philosophers on Music: Experience,
Meaning, and Work (Oxford, 2007), 226–55.
Sutton, Emma, “‘Putting Words on the Backs of Rhythm’: Woolf, ‘Street Music’, and The Voyage
Out,” Paragraph, 33.2 (2010), 176–96.
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Updike, John, Rabbit Redux (New York, 1971).
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Wennerstrom, Ann K., The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis (Oxford,
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Wood, James, How Fiction Works (New York, 2008).
1
Gass, “Music of Prose,” 314.
2
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 39. See also Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 144.
3
The hybrid form prose poetry is so designated because it lacks lineation. Though the distinction
between prose and prose poetry is highly contested and often elusive.
4
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136; Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 236.
5
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 23.
6
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 236.
7
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136, sketches these positions.
8
Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 141.
9
Budd, “Musical Movement,” 167–8.
10
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 35, and, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.
11
Hamilton, “Rhythm and Stasis,” 37–41, and Aesthetics and Music, 144–5.
12
Budd, “Musical Movement,” 168.
13
Levinson, “Aesthetic Appreciation,” 423.
14
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 229.
15
I am assuming that the sound of a sentence can be internally realized via sub-vocalization. But
nothing of substance turns on this assumption, at least for my concerns here.
16
Patel, “Musical Rhythm,” canvasses empirical studies that examine the similarities between
rhythm in music and rhythm in language.
17
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 250.
18
Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 47.
19
Patel and Daniele, “Language and Music,” B36.
20
Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 47.
21
Context sometimes alters stress. Compare “sixteen believers” and “sixteen anecdotes”
(Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 30). In the first phrase, it is natural to stress the second syllable of
“sixteen”; in the second, it is natural to stress the first syllable. Perhaps a more conspicuous example
is the pronunciation of “unknown” in the phrases “unknown assailant” and “Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier” (Kelly and Bock, “Stress in Time,” 389). While one might stress the second syllable in the
first phrase, it would be odd to do so in the second.
22
Bernhard, The Loser, 17.
23
Wennerstrom, Music of Everyday Speech, 18, calls this pitch accent.
24
Davis, “Selfish,” 138.
25
Rhythms prescribed by syntax and pronunciation may also work against the internal energy of
a phrase, presumably even for deliberate effect.
26
Saunders, “Victory Lap,” 25.
27
Robinson, Housekeeping, 204.
28
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 183.
29
Hall, “Poetics of Abstraction,” this volume, Chapter 21.
30
E.g. Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, 18; Hall, “Poetics of Abstraction.”
31
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm, 2.
32
Pinsky, Sounds of Poetry, 67, 73.
33
Baum, English Prose Rhythm, 82–91.
34
Scruton, “Thoughts on Rhythm,” 250; Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music, 136.
35
Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, 43–4.
36
As do Baum, English Prose Rhythm, and Tempest, Rhythm of English Prose—both shorter, yet
still substantive, monographs.
37
See Sutton, “Putting Words.” I cite Woolf’s position merely as evidence of a prose writer who
toiled over rhythm; the tenability of her position is another matter.
38
Though there are exceptions, such is the general rule, and thus the default assumption.
39
In some cases, a poem’s form is explicitly indicated in the title (e.g., Shakespeare’s sonnets).
40
Tempest, Rhythm of English Prose, 110–11.
41
Baum, English Prose Rhythm, 80.
42
This is of particular importance to High Modernism and the new rhythmic practices of
twentieth-century poetry. See this volume, Chapter 23, Montgomery, “Leaving It Out.”
43
Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 61.
44
Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 63. Levinson distinguishes between two modes of
performative interpretation: realizational and reconstructive (61–2). But this distinction is not
important here.
45
Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 61.
46
Levinson, “Interpretation in Music,” 66.
47
For instance, slow and heavy phrasing of a literary passage is compatible with critical
interpretations that consider the passage somber or lethargic or especially tense and fraught with
narrative tension, among other moods.
48
Goldman, Philosophy and the Novel, 34.
49
At least some are aware of this. William Gaddis, for instance, abstained from giving readings
of his novels, noting that “You have to be a sort of actor to get away with reading it aloud” (“On
Receiving,” 129).
50
Lamarque, “Literary Interpretation,” 302.
51
On the underdetermination of rhythm in literature, see this volume, Chapter 15, Hasty,
“Complexity and Passage,” 233; Baum, English Prose Rhythm, 91; and Saintsbury, History of
English Prose Rhythm, 465.
52
For a sampling of the evidence, browse past issues of the New York Times Book Review. At the
time of this writing, a search for “rhythm and novel” returns over 700 results.
53
Carroll, On Criticism, esp. Chapter 1.
54
E.g. Burroway, Writing Fiction, 205; Gardner, Art of Fiction, 153; Lombardi, “Description,”
115; LaPlante, Making of a Story, 554; Mills, Creative Writing Coursebook, 35, 91; Prose, Reading
Like a Writer, 56.
55
Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 273.
56
Updike, Rabbit Redux, 121, quoted in Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 273–4.
57
Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 274.
58
Hemingway, “Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” 136, quoted in Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,”
275.
59
Ochsner, “Rhythm in Literature,” 274.
60
E.g. Lamott, Bird by Bird, 64–6; Burroway, Imaginative Writing, 135.
61
Gaddis, JR, 46.
62
Raban, “At Home in Babel,” 164.
63
Carver, “Cathedral,” 519.
64
Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 3.
65
Alsen, “Catcher in the Rye,” 153.
66
Wood, How Fiction Works, 7–8.
67
Wood, How Fiction Works, 34.
68
Saintsbury, History of English Prose Rhythm, 224. Saintsbury is referring to the fifth chapter of
Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse on Sepulchral Urns lately found in
Norfolk (1658), analyzed by Saintsbury at 183–91.
69
Wallace, Infinite Jest, 678.
Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number.
Bachelard, Gaston, 4, 120–21, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277–79, 280, 286, 288–89
The Dialectics of Duration, 278
The Poetics of Space, 278
backbeat, 145–50
democratized beat, 148, 149, 151
Barthes, Roland, 113–15
Baum, Paull Franklin, 398–400
Beardsley, Monroe C., 358–60
beat, see meter
missing, 176
Beauvoir, Simone de, 152
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Diabelli Variations (Op. 120), 159–60, 161
Third Symphony, 304
Bell, Alexander Melville, 352
John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose, 352f, 352
Bell, Clive, 366
Bell, David Charles, 352
John Milton’s Paradise Lost displayed as prose, 352f, 352
Bergson, Henri, 4, 204, 272, 273, 275–78, 279, 283–84
influence on Debussy, 283–84
Berry, Chuck
“Johnny B Goode,” 295
Blacking, John, 194
bodily movement, and rhythm, 1–2, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 32–33, 38, 44, 91–96, 112–13, 117, 161,
183, 259, 292, 296–304, 331
bodily agency, and rhythm, 152
bodily rhythms, 96
kinesthesis, role in rhythm, 302
Boghossian, Paul, 23, 83–84
Bolton, Thaddeus L., 355
Bordieu, Pierre, 120–21
Bradley, Dick, 147–48
Brahms, Johannes, 177
Symphony No. 4, 171, 177f, 177
breathing, and pulse, 111–12
Brogan, T. V. F., 263–64
Brown, Calvin S., 356–57
Budd, Malcolm, 23, 28, 44–45, 47, 368, 394, 395
Bunting, Basil, 375
Buswell, Guy T., 319–20
Bynum, William F., 354–55
Cage, John
Dream, 268
Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), 199–200
Carroll, Noël, 402
Carver, Raymond
“Cathedral,” 404
Cerha, Friedrich
Spiegel VI, 121–22
Chabris, Christopher F., 369
Chernoff, John, 205
Chomsky, Noam, 191
clades, 66, 74
Clark, Kenneth
Raphael’s The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 314–15, 314f, 320, 337
Clarke, Eric, 51–52
Clayton, Martin, 119–20, 121, 194., See also interaction, social
Clifton, Thomas, 122
Collins, Wilkie
John Milton’s Paradise Lost, 352
Coltrane, John, 102–4, 105
Garrison, Jimmy, 102–3, 104, 105
Jones, Elvin, 102–3, 104, 105
conceptual holism (of music, poetry, and dance), 31, 35, 332
conceptual interdependence (of music, poetry, and dance; or entrainment and meter), 30, 34, 35, 392.
See also conceptual holism
Condon, William, 188
content, perceptual, 76–77
continuity/discontinuity, 272, 274
Cook, Nicholas, 255
Cooper, Grosvenor, 4
Crane, Tim, 171
Creeley, Robert, 375, 380–89
“After Mallarmé,” 384–85, 389
“As Real as Thinking,” 387–89
Erik Satie’s “loops” and Anton Webern’s “reductions,” 382
“The Language,” 385–87
Cunningham, Merce, 96, 333
Eitan, Zohar, 46
Elias, Norbert, 116
Eliot, T. S., 376, 378
Ellis, H., 95
emergent timing, 219–21
emotionalism, appearance, 158, 161
emotions, music as language of, 137–38, 156, 165
Empson, William, 264
endogenous/internal rhythms, 184–85, 196
entrainment, 19–20, 31, 32, 117, 156, 159, 161, 165, 171–79, 183–92, 221, 226–27, 294–95, 308,
311, 316–17, 340
as elucidation rather than scientific explanation, 19–20, 32, 36–37
definition of, 184–85
inter-individual/interpersonal, 164, 187
eurhythmics, 96
experimentation, rhythmic, 234, 238–39, 241
expression, in music, 50–51, 58, 125, 139, 156–65
arousalism, 156
expression, performative, 268–69
expressive quality, of music, 157, 158, 165
resemblance theory, of musical expressiveness (see resemblance)
Expressionism, German, 327–28
saccades, 317
Sachs, Curt, 185–86, 190–91, 196, 199
Saintsbury, George, 374–75, 398–99, 405
Salinger, J. D.
Catcher in the Rye, 404
Sartre, Jean–Paul, 152–53, 255, 261–62, 264–65
Saunders, George, 224, 397
Schachner, Adena, 187
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 3
Schenker, Heinrich, 129–30
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3
Schuller, Gunther, 148
Schumann, Robert, 113, 114
Kreisleriana, 113
Schütz, Alfred, 32, 117–20, 121, 183–84, 188, 194
inner time, 19, 117
mutual tuning-in, 19, 117–18, 183–84, 194, 195
Scriabin, Alexander, 116
Prelude, Op. 74, No. 2, 116
Scripture, Edward Wheeler, 355–56, 358–59
The Elements of Experimental Phonetics, 355–56, 356f
Scruton, Roger, 5, 22, 23, 30, 41, 45–46, 57, 77, 83, 84, 88, 328, 334, 393, 395
sculpture, rhythm in, 279, 335
Shaw-Miller, Simon, 309
Shorter, Wayne, 107–8
“Footprints,” 107, 108
silence, 96, 122, 159
Simons, Daniel J., 369
Simons, Peter, 331–32, 334–35, 342
Slade (Wolverhampton rock band), 29
“Merry Xmas Everybody,” 29
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 363–64
Snyder, Bob, 300–1
Socrates, 1–2, 15
sonata form, 131–35
as rhythm, 131–35
sonicism (view that music is exclusively sonic), 31, 40
sounds (and music), 62, 180
sound-producing events, 52
space, 5, 21–26, 45–46, 286
quality space, 23–26
Stallings, Lauri, 97
static thesis/account (that music does not move), 7, 23, 26, 63, 78n5
Stolnitz, Jerome, 368
stress, cf. accent, 298–97
Stynes, Frederik, 186
subjectivity, 272, 273
Sulzer, Johann Georg, 126–28, 129–30, 132, 134
Schlagfolge, 126–27, 127f, 132
syllable timing, speaking vs singing, 224–25
length contrasts (in Vedic, early Chinese, and Aboriginal Australian poetry), 223–24
syncopation, 151, 178–79, 180, 304, 350
syntax, cf. semantics, 252
understanding (music), 26, 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, 59, 125–26, 160–61
Updike, John, 402–3
Zuckerkandl, Viktor, 5, 23
Zurbarán, Francisco de
“Still Life with Pottery Jars,” 48–49