DISSERTATION OF RHYTHM

## PROLOGUE

There is nothing duller than the clock-tick,
nothing more infuriating than the sound of the
metronome, that bane and instructor of performers.

We have a need for something to beat
" against the measure ".

There is a phantom contrapunto in all good
verse, by which I mean that one line beats
*against* the memory of the movement of the
line or the lines preceding -- and, naturally,
establishes its own movement for succeding verses
to beat against.

//////

JUVENILE RECOLLECTIONS

DISSERTATION ON RHYTHM

If my name is known to the limited public, to which
it is known if it is known at all to the present
reader that knowledge is due more to my sensitivity
to rhythm than to any other one cause, or to any
other six causes. I have been studying the subject
was
consciously for 27 years, and probably observing it
for eight or ten years before that. For
which reasons a guess on my part, even if it be
proved, ultimately, a wrong guess, is worth
some attention, and is of more value than
a half dozen dilletante guesses, or guesses by men
living in dead euclidian space, or living mainly
by space perception.

For purely personal reasons it might also
be to my advantage to annul the idea that when I
"broke into" melody (about the year 1920) I
committed a definite rupture with my particular past.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS DISSERTATION IS TO
"GET AT" OR "CLEAR UP" THE SOMEWHAT DISCUSSED AND
NEVER VERY CLEARLY DEFINED DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RHYTHM
AND THE EVEN MEASURING OF TIME.

"Everyone", that is to say a
great number of people known that some musicians
play with " a sense of rhythm ", which sustains them
and keeps life in the music even when they do
manifest damages to the measure of the music as written ;

Let it therefore go into the record, that when I
was working on troubadour music ( 1910-12 ) with
Walter Morse Rummel, in Paris, that patient and long
( in very generous moments )
suffering man used alternately to declare that
I was a better musician than he was ; and that I was
incurably unmusical, and incapable of lining/ reading cloud
to measure. I had obviously some sort of sense of
the movement of words in Provençal, and this served
for interpreting the duration of notes ; and I read,
or did now and again, with some sort of rise and
fall voice, not filling the octave, but moving about
in the tetrachord, etc. In fact I had some sort
of sensibility, and several annoying habits.

And the music, a single line of melody was
not sufficiently complicated to interest a modern musician
for more than two years ; and there were certain
definite results, published by Augner. And I left
with the conviction that musicians' music was a mystery
from which I was by nature debarred ; and that it
possibly began and ended with a capacity for measuring
bars with very neat uniformity.

My sense of pitch has something funny about
it ( if one was to grant that it wasn't merely no
sense of pitch whatsoever. )

I wasn't deeply interested in pitch. I
didn't need it in my own particular job, and for
some years I left pitch to professed musicians. I
was deeply interested in rhythm.

5

there appeared to me a glimmer of daylight. I began
to interpret the troubadour mss. for myself.

Now whatever may be the approach to composition
taught in any conservatory of music, it is not the
approach that I made. which was

1. I was interested in the verbal text of
the ~~tout~~ troubadours.

2. This was combined with a melody.

3. They Even the work with Rummel had
started to indicate
more or less ~~indicated~~ that ~~THIS~~ the record of
this melody was not an exact exposition of the
duration of its various notes, but simply an aid
to the memory of the singer, who had learned the
~~tout~~ tune from its author.

The criterion of interpretation became simply :
Either these tune are beautiful, above the average
melodic beauty, or they are not worth digging up.

IF one can find for the duration of
their series of notes ~~(a set, 2 sets)~~, ~~2 sets~~ several )
sets of values that constitute and definition of
beauty, ones work is justified.

In the case of Faidit's Lament for
Coeur de Leon, I think one can claim to have done
this ( for the tune as a whole ) ; and in
other cases, say for Ventadorn's " Cant par la flor "
one has done it least for a fragment.

The conclusion after examining some
two hundred tunes, and after examining very carefully
all the tunes in the Milan mss. ( R. 71 superiore,
Ambrosiana ), I have set down in a general theory .