simplest classical music has a rhythm for which no criteria of
poetic metre can be made adequate. From the musical point
of view, the rhythm of speech, whether in prose or verse, is very
subtle and almost uniformly fluent. The metrical feet which
constitute the details of poetic rhythm are musically very
minute; and the exaggerated forms in which music represents
them are many and varied. On the other hand, the groups of
metrical feet which constitute any one kind of verse are of a
uniformity which for music on a large scale would be intolerable.
Artistic music is soon compelled to draw upon infinite resources
of its own, which preserve an appropriate accentuation of the
sense and feeling, while obliterating or hugely exaggerating the
poet’s rhythmic effects. Musical rhythm cannot be studied
on a sound basis unless its radical divergences from speech rhythm
are recognized from the outset.
In the earliest extant musical settings of poetry the treatment of accent and quantity was strictly arithmetical; and purely aesthetic requirements were satisfied by ex post facto inference from the arithmetical laws, rather than treated as the basis of the laws. Accent, when translated into music, is a rhythmic sensation resembling the stress we put on the left foot in marching; while quantity rarely suggests any bodily movement at all, since it can correspond only to variations in the length of steps. Now in modern music a sense akin to that of bodily movement is of overwhelming importance. Changes of tempo, and of the grouping of musical beats, are incidents as obvious in their effect as changes in the pace of a running horse. One consequence is that the laws of musical accent are simple and cogent, while the laws of musical quantity, if such exist, are far beyond analysis. Fluent speech and energetic physical exercise cannot be carried on simultaneously by the same person; and hence the laws of quantity belong to speech rather than to dance. Before we could form adequate notions of the musical rhythms of classical Greece, we should need to settle, nrstly, how far the dancing in Greek drama included movements other than idealized dramatic gesticulation; secondly, how much bodily energy was involved in all dancing that may have gone beyond this; and lastly, how much dancing of any kind was executed by the singers while singing. What is certain is that ancient Greek musical rhythms were exact translations of verse rhythms, with the quantities interpreted arithmetically.
The extant fragments of Greek music are, whether we have read them correctly or not, undoubtedly very different in rhythm from the system of discant on which European music of the 12th and 13th centuries first developed; but they resemble discant in so far as the modern sense of rhythm is absent and its place is supplied by a sense of the rhythmic expression of unusually slow and emphatic speech. In ordinary speech there is an important difference between long syllables and short; but it is not naturally regulated by an exact rhythm, and the art by which it is organized in verse admits (or indeed demands) considerable freedom on the part of the reciter in varying his pace within such limits as do not destroy the structure of the lines. But when a chorus is made to sing words, it must, if the words are to reach the hearer, sing them slowly; and moreover, it must sing them exactly together, unless, as in much classical music, it can repeat them until they are either understood or dismissed from the mind as a mere pretext for the employment of voices in a merely musical design. In any case, if a chorus is to sing well together, the contrast between short and long syllables must be placed on an arithmetical basis, the simpler the better. Now the sole function of ancient Greek music was to enhance 'the emotional effect of poetic words by regulating their rise and fall in a musical scale and their length in a metrical scheme; and it was natural and right that its rhythms should, though accurate, have no stronger ictus than those of the words. To make them as rigid and forcible as the rhythms of a non-vocal music would produce an effect as intolerable to a Greek ear as a schoolboy’s worst jog-trotting scansion of poetry. We need not, then, imagine that the human sense of rhythm has suffered any mysterious change, when our best attempts at deciphering the extant fragments of ancient Greek music yield us a rhythm which scholars can explain by the structure of Greek verse, but which gives us no musical sense. Neither here nor in such strange harmonic phenomena as our complete inversion of medieval harmonic ideas as to the treatment of “perfect concords” (see Harmony) do we find any principle involved which is not as true at the present day as it ever was. Ancient musical rhythm shared in the general qualities of that “Flatland” which we know ancient music to have been; modern musical rhythm, like harmony, belongs, as it were, to a three-dimensioned musical space with the vast artistic resources of a consistent perspective.
Indeed, we need much the same kind of mental gymnastic in studying the origins of musical rhythm as we need for the much more abstruse subject of harmonic origins. The two subjects soon begin to show interaction. During the period of discant we find metrical conceptions already strongly modified by two purely musical factors. Firstly, the attempt to make voices produce a harmony from different simultaneous melodies (instead of from combinations conceived as disguised unison) brought with it the necessity for differences of length enormously larger than any possible metrical differences. The metrical influence, however, still so predominated, even in the 14th century, as to produce a rhythm based almost exclusively on what would now be called triple time. Secondly, that sense of bodily movement, for which the less clumsy term “dance rhythm” is far too narrow, gained ground as the only means powerful enough to hold the various rhythms of the new and growing polyphony together. In thi. later stages of discant the old metrical conceptions struggled against the grain of the polyphony for awhile, only to succumb in a tangle of inextricable technicality: and the new art, which became coherent in the r 5th century, disregarded poetic metre, with little or no loss in capacity to interpret words if the composer had leisure or desire to do so; since, after all, poetic rhythm in its highest forms has a subtle freedom which renders mechanical musical translation worse than useless, while the rhythmic swing of the lighter forms of poetry was soon discovered by the composers of the “Golden Age” to be practically identical with the refined dance-rhythm which they in their lighter moments idealized from folk-music.[1]
By the middle of the 15th century polyphony attained such independence that the only rhythms which would hold, the flow of independent melodious voices together were those in which a steadily duple or steadily triple rhythm (either of which might be subdivided by the other or by itself) could be felt as an absolutely regular musical tread. Such a rhythm is capable of expressing every poetic foot, either by the difference of stress between notes or by a difference in their length. Moreover, emphasis may be obtained by the pitch of the note, or, again, by its harmonic significance. All these forms of emphasis combine and counteract each other in an ininite variety, till the sense of musical movement becomes as remote from crude dance-rhythm as it is from poetic metre. But though the part thus' played by accent was already of paramount importance in the “Golden Age” of music, it was not allowed to become evident to the ear except in the lighter and more coarse-grained art-forms. Its highest purpose was served as soon as the listener was able to lose all crude rhythmic impulses in a secure feeling that the mass of 'polyphonic harmony was held together by a general grouping of the rhythmic beats in fours or threes; and individual parts were at least as free to indulge in other rhythms across the main rhythm as they are in the most complex modern music, so long as the harmony was held together by the average grouping, or “time,” as we now call it. Hence the rhythmic variety of 16th-century
- ↑ It would be interesting and fruitful to consider how far the growing preference, in modern European languages, of accent to quantity, may not only have modified the conception of musical rhythm, but may itself have been enhanced by the rhythmic tendencies of popular song, which had so great an influence on the learned music of the middle ages. And it can hardly be said that the subject of musical rhythm has yet been so clearly treated on these lines as to shed the light it seems capable of shedding upon many vexed questions in poetic rhythm.
