What Needs to be Understood About Rhythm

Rhythm is one of the most powerfully affective and yet elusive aspects of music. Through rhythm, music exists as a time art, pitch is organized, periodicity is reinforced and defeated. It is structured - and yet it flows continuously, and its structure reflects not only the brain's capacity to perceive structure and its meaning, but also a constantly moving total sum of accumulated significance at any instant. To really understand rhythm and its meaning, we need to look at it in four different ways, including how it functions, how it is structured, where it came from, and what the rhythmic content of a music is. While it may seem that simply understanding the function of rhythm (with such studies as the relationship between rhythm and melodic mode) or looking at the structure of music that can be discerned by patterns of stress and duration at various archtitechtonic levels would be sufficient to explain rhythm, examining the origins and content (gesture as well as any other hard-to-explain constructions) is really necessary. This is because rhythm has evolved throughout our history and interactions as something that exists both inside the mind/body and is stored and transmitted through sound, space and media (print, recordings and treatises). As humans we create music, and then it is "out there." And when we reabsorb the music, we are both experiencing the musicianship of its creators vicariously and learning it as new information. Therefore, it is simultaneously a shared human experience and an inert object, and to understand what it really is, it must be explained as both - in real music (i.e., literature, rather than fabricated laboratory material used in testing cognition) one does not exist without the other.