Edmund Gosse and Donald Francis Tovey

“ In great music the expanding principle is therefore always contrasted with or modified by the tapering principle, which can indeed exist simultaneously with it and with any other. For, to take only three categories, the harmonic changes of a passage may be designed in tapering rhythm while the melodic phrases expand, and the entries of instruments or parts occur on some third principle, regular or irregular. Such interplay need produce no feeling of complexity; indeed, it is an art most neglected by those composers who most rely on the effect of complex rhythm. ”

“ One important term has acquired a special significance in music: viz. Syncopation. It means a cross-accent of such strength as to equal or even suppress the main accent; but the use of the term is generally restricted to cases in which the cross-accent is produced by shifting the notes of a melody or a formula so that they fall between the beats instead of upon them. From what we have said as to the almost physical energy of musical rhythm it is obvious that such a phenomenon is of far greater effect and importance in music than it could possibly he in verse ”

“ In the blank verse of Milton the free use of pauses constitutes the principal element in the amazing metrical art of the poet, and is the source of the sublime originality of his music. In speaking of rhythm, it is customary to think of the formal rules which govern the fixed cadence of feet in poetry, but there is also a rhythm in prose, which imitates the measured movements of the body in Stately speech. ”

“ Rhythm in Music.—The rhythm of modern music began to develop through -the attempts of learned medieval musicians to adapt the rhythms of spoken language to the necessities of choral singing; but before the process had gone far, certain much more ancient and powerful principles, always manifest intfolk-song and dance, gained ascendancy, so that even the 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. ”

“ This is probably the basis of our natural tendency to group rhythmic units in pairs, with a stress on the first of each pair; and hence, if our attention is drawn to larger groups, we put more stress on the first of the first pair than on the first of the second; and so with still greater groups, until our immediate and unanalysed sense of rhythm merges into a sense of proportion distributed through time with a clear consciousness of past, present and future. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Square rhythms become desirable at climaxes where physical energy dominates thought. Strong final cadences accordingly require that the last chord should fall on an accent; and if the pace is rapid the final chord will probably be not only on an accented beat but on an accented bar. Thus it is quite obvious that there is by a mere oversight one bar too many in the four bars of tremolo quavers at the end of the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony ”

“ For the passions, as expressed in verse, various movements are appropriate. joy demands that the voice should leap and sing; sorrow that it should move solemnly and slowly; and poetry, which is founded on rhythm, requires that the movement of words should respond to this instinctive gradation of sounds. The finer the genius of the metrist the more exquisitely does his rhythm convey, as upon an instrument, the nature of;the passion which burdens his verses. ”

“ The fact is that rhythm is an expression of the instinct for order in sound which naturally governs the human ear, and little practical knowledge is gained by following Suidas when he says that rhythm is the father of metre, or Quintilian in his epigram that rhythm is male and metre is female., These definitions arise from a rhetorical desire to measure a delicate instinct by rule, of three, and, as a matter of fact, Greek criticism on this subject often lost itself in arithmetical absurdities. ”

“ Aristoxenus proceeds to deflne the rhythm so produced as an arrangement of time-periods, τάξιν χρόνων, but other early theorists make not the time but the syllable the measurement of poetic speech. Both music and poetry depend, and have depended from the earliest times, on rhythm. But in music melody and harmony have to be taken into consideration, whereas in poetry the rhythmical value of the tone is modified by the imaginative value and importance of the words themselves. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The special sign for triplets is readily adapted to other subdivisions where necessary; but such adaptation generally indicates rather a freedom of declamatory rhythm than any abstruse arithmetical accuracy. Among the worst barbarisms in musical editing is the persistent reduction of Chopin's septoles, groups of 13 and other indeterminable, into mutton-cutlet frills. A natural freedom in performance is as necessary for the minutiae of musical rhythm as it is in speech ”

“ It is the main discoverable source of that almost dramatic sense of movement that distinguishes the great musical styles from the academic methods which play for safety, and from the anti-academic novelties which end in monotony. ”

“ In earliest times the fundamental unity of the two arts was constantly manifest, but as the world has progressed, and they have ramified into countless forms, the difference between them has been emphasized more and more. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Simple time is that in which the normal subdivision of its beats is by two, whether the number of the beats themselves is duple or triple. Compound time is that in which the beats are regularly divided by three, which three subdivisions are reckoned as subordinate beats. ”