Note: 6@@@@@@@@@@@@ quando un suono diventa musica? quando lo ascoltiamo prescindendo dalle sue cause materiali ritmo: cosa distingue quello musicale da quello materiale differenze tra ritmo e tempo il ritmo può emergere dalla melodia o calare dall alto estraneo alla musica (es in certo pop) il discorso ha un suo ritmo... la differenza col tempo qui è evidente. il ruolo della danza Edit
Gestalt principles operate in the auditory as in the visual sphere, though applied to temporal rather than spatial configurations.'Read more at location 784
Hence there is a real question as to what must be added to transform an experience of sound into an experience of music.Read more at location 789
I argue elsewhere that sounds become music when organized rhythmically, melodically or harmonically-with the implication that each form of organization is sufficient to provide an experience of music. But I also suggest that these forms of organization pertain to the intentional rather than the material object of perception. Melody is something that we hear in a sequence of sounds, and is not something that would be mentioned in a description,Read more at location 791
In other words the concepts that provide the fundamental framework for musical perception exhibit the comprehensive metaphorical transfer that lies at the heart of musical experience.Read more at location 803
The musical order emerges when we adopt the `acousmatic' attitude to the world of sounds, attending to sounds without focusing on their material causes.Read more at location 807
3. My subject in what follows is rhythm, and the distinction between rhythms imposed by metre, and rhythms generated by musical movement.Read more at location 813
There are musical traditions that derive metrical patterns by adding note-values and not, as we do, by dividing larger units symmetrically.Read more at location 815
The oriental traditions referred to above introduce metres that are generated by addition, not division,Read more at location 826
It is clear from Aristoxenus's account that he has dancing primarily in mind,Read more at location 832
rhythm is a phenomenal, not a mathematical, property of a sequence,Read more at location 833
In the classical tradition metrical divisions coincide with significant junctures in the rhythm.Read more at location 844
The musical phenomena that we group together under the rubric of rhythm have their counterparts in other areas of human activity.Read more at location 847
rhythms of hymn tunes are classified according to their syllabic rather than their metrical structureRead more at location 849
1 suspect that there might be a useful contrast to be made between composers whose rhythmic organization primarily reflects dance patterns, and those for whom speech patterns are more important.Read more at location 851
A. H. Fox Strangways has argued that classical Indian music uses time-value rather than accent to emphasize a note because that is how you emphasize a syllable in Sanskrit.Read more at location 854
The considerations raised in the previous section suggest a use (though not the only possible use) for the distinction between `beat' and `rhythm'.Read more at location 868
A piece of music may have a strong beat but little or no rhythm,Read more at location 870
To see the point of this it is sufficient to imagine how uninteresting Ravel's Bolero would be, were it to consist only of the underlying beat, overlayed by a melody that exactly ran in its groove.Read more at location 873
The beat is what makes the rhythm possible, but in itself it is without rhythmic interest. Read more at location 874
result is rhythmical but static. The beat is like an external force, constraining the music from outside. It is the steady march of fate that can be deflected by nothing in the action. Read more at location 877
The use made of the drum-kit in contemporary pop is to a great extent an innovation. Classical jazz introduced the drum-kit as an embellishment to a pre-existing rhythm, often sounded on the off-beat and hidden, as it were, behind the strumming of the banjo.Read more at location 889
New Orleans jazz has no need of percussion, which it uses-if at all-purely ornamentally. In modern pop, percussion has a constitutive rather than an ornamental use:Read more at location 892
The locus classicus of this is Elvis Presley, whose extraordinary voice, with its barely perceptible micro-rhythms and tremors, produces melody and rhythm together, so that the one is inseparable from the other. In `Heartbreak Hotel', for example, the rhythm is compellingly announced by the solo voice,Read more at location 895
Equally impressive in this respect is Eric Clapton, who uses the guitar rather as Elvis uses his voice, to set the music in motion before the drum-kit enters,Read more at location 897
The normal dancing of the disco floor involves little or no contact with or recognition of a partner, and may occur with no partner at all. You dance to Heavy Metal by head-banging, slam-dancing or `mashing'Read more at location 914
The social impoverishment of disco has a rhythmical cause.Read more at location 918
The dance, like the rhythm, remains external to the music, a kind of generalized `setting in motion'Read more at location 919
Modern rock is crowd-forming, rather than society-forming. Read more at location 924
It is hard to attract modern audiences to music in which rhythm is either melodically generated or measured out in Messiaen's way, by addition rather than division of time-values; it is comparatively easy to attract them to music with an ostinato propulsion, regardless of its melodic or harmonic invention. Hence the popularity of John Adams, whose `The Chairman Dances' (from Nixon in China) and `Short Ride in a Fast Machine' typify a new kind of ostinato writing, with the melodic instruments assigned essentially percussive tasks, and with continual repetition of elemental rhythmical cells.Read more at location 930
Composers used to be wary of `the tyranny of the bar-line'; in Adams, however, the tyranny is accepted, as a benign dictatorship which gives us all what we want. Read more at location 934
difficulties of atonal music are experienced as much at the rhythmical as at the melodic and harmonic level.Read more at location 942
tonality is founded in repetition, with the music constantly returning to identifiable places, and constantly departing on some new but related journey of its own. Take away the old tonal order, however, and rhythm has a tendency either to collapseRead more at location 945
10. Like his teacher Olivier Messiaen, Stockhausen uses metres formed by the addition rather than division of time-values. The result may be a-rhythmical, but it is meticulously measured.Read more at location 959
Messiaen took the idea of additive metre from the deci-tdlas of Sharngadeva (see above, section 3 p. 59), in which the notion of a beat is replaced by that of the shortest note-value (mdtra), and metres are classified as repeatable sequences, of which Sharngadeva lists 120.Read more at location 963
we should recognize that the practice of adding value to notes has been widespread in folk-music, and is by no means confined to oriental traditions.Read more at location 995
The need for rhythmical organization to change with the change in harmonic language was widely recognized in the wake of Messiaen's teaching.Read more at location 1003
If Wagner is not often thought of as a rhythmic innovator, this is because the ostinato conception of rhythm has to a great extent obscured the origins of rhythmRead more at location 1004
Wagner hardly ever uses percussion as a rhythm-generating device.Read more at location 1007
Rhythm is a property of dancing and also of speech. As Aristotle pointed out, we hear speech differently from other since speech is an expression of soul, and is organized semantically.Read more at location 1020
Speech is therefore a paradigm for us of a rhythmical organization generated not by measure and beat but by internal energy and the intrinsic meaningfulness of sound.Read more at location 1022
(One of the most remarkable developments within the sphere of pop is the `rap' artist, who speaks toneless rhyming prose along the groove of a relentless percussive rhythm, so replacing speech-rhythms with chant-rhythms.Read more at location 1025
Schoenberg did not wish to repudiate the connection between rhythm in music and rhythm in life. Instead he wished to replace dance-rhythm by speech-rhythm as the organizing principle of the musical line. The instrumentation and harmony of a work like Pierrot Lunaire are dictated in part by the desire to generate speech-like rhythms in all the instrumental voices.Read more at location 1033
Hence in tonal music, even when speech-rhythm inspires the melodic line, a reminiscence of dance-rhythm will inhabit the harmony.Read more at location 1036
Rhythmic organization is fundamental to musical meaning and intimately connected with the moral character of music. The externalized rhythm of much contemporary pop invites people to move in crowd-like rather than conversation-like ways.Read more at location 1041
The Darmstadt orthodoxy (as propagated by Stockhausen, Boulez and their immediate followers) effectively killed off rhythmical organization as an intrinsic feature of the musical line. Somehow the dancing musical line that Messiaen discovered through the tdlas disappeared from the music of his followers.Read more at location 1045
People can listen to Stockhausen's Gruppen and move `along with' it, even be moved by it. But the experience of rhythm is absent from Stockhausen's block-like sounds, as it is absent from the meticulously metrical music of Brian Fernyhough. In reaction, composers like John Adams have tried to address our need for rhythmRead more at location 1047
