Introduction, revised

The following is the current draft of the introduction to my dissertation, revised 4-15-09. The previously posted version has been retracted.

In 1999 I was twenty years old and a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, studying both composition and clarinet performance. I had done quite well in all my aural skills courses up to that point, performing all my pitch and rhythm exercises accurately with high marks. And yet, my third semester Dalcroze-Eurhythmics grade was not what I had hoped it to be. Thinking I ought to have been scored higher given my accuracy at rhythm performance and taking dictation, I asked my teacher if she would explain my grade and where I had fallen short. "You need to learn how to flow," she said. "That's the most important thing." I was not immediately convinced, and persisted through the next year of study wondering why while through all sorts of exercises, tests, discussions and projects, the primary rubric for gauging my accomplishment in this class was something so unscientific and elusive as flow. What was this thing that I wasn't getting, and what business did it have showing up in a graded course? Of course I was barely more than a year into my college study and more likely to find such a nagging issue rather irritating than to accept it, much less understand it. And yet, I can look back to that moment as the beginning of a decade long search for satisfaction in understanding rhythm beyond the obvious durations and patterns which are so often the beginning and the end of theoretical discussions of rhythm. Even exhaustive discussions of micro and macro structural levels of rhythmic activity failed to convince me of what it really is. While I could easily put rhythm and flow into the category of softer science and focus my analytical efforts toward more clearly fruitful ends. Yet it is my lifelong tendency to find this sort of area (the elusive, the contradictory and the irritating) to be the most interesting and enticing. In unlocking rhythm, we unlock the essence of musicality, the tiny germ by which the whole human project of music and dance is born.

While the scope of this paper seems like it would be so broad as to resemble Casaubon's "The Key to All Mythologies" it is in fact a work of an entirely different kind. In this paper, I will pull together perspectives of sources across ten centuries and around the globe who I hold to be my mentors and sources of epiphany. The array of sources, ranging from Medieval Europe to the present Middle East and from late 19th century Switzerland to the laboratories of cutting edge 21st century neuroscientists is to me entirely logical, concise and necessary, and the important connections among these sources follow my own personal adventure in satisfying those questions which pull at the very center of my experience as a musician and human being. It is, therefore, my objective in writing this document to share what I have found about the undocumented and elusive nature of rhythm from a variety of sources, and to explain my reasoning that coordinating such diverse areas of tradition, thought and expertise is critical in understanding at least the domain of rhythm, vitality and musicianship.

There are two principal directions from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality. First, I will approach music as a fundamentally human enterprise: something for which we are, through the design of our brains and bodies gifted with the capacity, propensity and even need. From this direction, I will examine the intuitive remarks of historical pedagogues as well as contemporary studies of the brain and cognition as well as the anecdotal accounts of educators and musicians. One extremely important figure in music education to whom my own education is indebted is Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, the early 20th century Swiss educator who founded the Dalcroze method, which has spread prolifically through Europe, America and East Asia throughout the last century. The primary text written by the master teacher are a series of articles, published in a collection entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education," and his legacy includes several generations of teachers dedicated to teaching musicianship in the forms of solfege, eurhythmics and improvisation with Msr. Dalcroze's guiding principles of learning music experientially through physical movement. Several of his successors have founded institutions around the world and written their own contributions to the textual documentation of this method as it has grown and developed throughout the years. In linking the body's natural sense of space, intensity, time and flow, this method has aided students in externalizing, understanding and internalizing music toward deeper, more effective and more human performances. While this method and others are often taught as a supporting course for children learning music at a young age in a "proper" curriculum, the Dalcroze method is equally useful in educating adults (perhaps even more useful, in my experience), both as advanced music students or as amatuers. The basic principles guiding the coordination of musicular effort, perambulatory exercises and exploration of the body's freedom within the force of gravity with music literature, musical exercises and improvisation (both free and structured) are generally taken intuitively by teachers to naturally "make sense," though a body of imperical data verifying the efficacy of the program is growing. Now more than a century after the founding of the Dalcroze method recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, particularly the discoveries of Daniel J. Levitan and his colleages, suggest that the brain's facilities for music are remarkably linked to its facilities for language and movement. The "brain as limit" has put to rest a number of nagging issues in philosophy as well as provided an understanding of the domain of some of the elusive mysteries of the human experience.

The second direction from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality is through the literature itself, and through current and historical performance practice. While rhythm itself is a huge topic, including such aspects as melodic rhythm, harmonic rhythm, polyphonic counterpoint, time in form and many others, I will focus on monophonic music. The reason for this emphasis is that I want to explore the principles of how rhythm functions as it is applied to melodic modes. I should be clear about my somewhat liberal usage of the term monophony, which in its most pure and literal sense describes a singularly bare linear texture reserved for unharmonized melodies and chant - something existing only at the earliest fringe of the canonical Western tradition. For my usage, monophony is more of a general principle than a definite textural category. This idea of monophonic essence becomes clearer when modality is contrasted directly against tonality. My aim is to examine principles of rhythm in melody, and truly any music with linear integrity can be analyzed to some extent to this end, the significant influence of harmony as a potentially dominating "shaping force" makes some music more or less useful for examining melodic principles. Monophonic music is also a point of intersection between European and Middle Eastern music both historically and in material content. Out of this use of monophonic music arise two important and controversial political issues. First, it involves the ethical issues related to a comparative study of musics of different cultures which share a rich though troubled history. Second, it involves a reorganized look at European musics and cultures, calling into question the canonization of the immense project of tonal music throughout the Common Practice, a process by which I will assert that German-Austrian hegemony in late 19th century European musicology reductively consolidated the tradition of European music that has been handed down to the present generation. To these political issues I will devote a small chapter explaining the importance of such concerns as well as how they affect my discussion of rhythm, which is the principle subject of this paper. In focusing on monophony and melodic aspects of music, I propose to explain the underlying musical sensibilities in performance practice, and the power of rhythm to harness the musical potential of pitch and mode. I will not, therefore, give preference to individual works of particularly genius musical architecture. The greatness of music in this discussion is measured in the freedom of expressivity as experienced by performer and listener-participant. The distinction, then, between performer, composer, improviser and passive (or active) participant are admittedly blurred. This slippery nature of musical material is not actually problematic, and after relaxing the boundaries of Common Practice self-identity such blurry distinctions may well be more the norm in human music experience rather than the exception.


Finally I should explain the implications of this present work, and the potential interest and value it would have to those who share in this lifelong journey of curiosity and discovery. As I mentioned earlier, my own motivation for asking these questions about the essence, origin and function of rhythm is personal, spawned in my dissatisfaction with duration-structural analysis as theory to explain such an important, fundamental aspect of music. Now in 2009, we stand a full 88 years since the materialization of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system and at least a century since various modal systems from the fringes of Europe, octatonic scales and a plethora of novel non-tonal pitch arrangements began to supplant the dominance of common practice tonality. Concurrent with the rise and fall of tonality (not as a force but as a universal paradigm) is the normalization and rethinking of rhythm. The past century saw no less than four generations of composers struggling through decades frought with myriad "isms," evidence of a world struggling to reidentify itself in the wake of the undoing of one of the most ambitious intellectual projects in human history. In examining principles of rhythmic (and melodic) principles at the dawn and twilight of such a massive and yet relatively brief period of pan-European collective musical activity I believe a new and fruitful perspective can be reached regarding the often convoluted yet endlessly fascinating hetero-stylistic period of 20th century European-American-World art music as well as an optimistic, healthy and relavent musical future. There is, in my opinion, no heavier burden to dampen the richness of our cultural and human future than fear of irrelavence and lack of conviction in the value of our own enterprises, nor is there any greater source of inspiration and hope than sharing the musical delight of expressing ourselves as musical creatures by design and sharing of ourselves in commonalities and differences through the internal-external-internal trajectory of shared musical material.

CHAPTERS

I. Msr. Jacques, Brain Scans and Me (and You)

II. Thinking Modaly

III. Not Your Grandma's Europe: Linguistic and Musical Geography in the 13th Century

IV. The Arab Connection: Booty from Barbastro, Things the Crusader's Picked Up, and Edward Said

V. Unraveling the self-image of the West and how it's already been done

VI. Implications for the "classical" musician of the 21st century

Conclusion