Rhythm and Timbre

with PETER DALE

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To listen (say) to Tchaikovsky's writing for strings, and even for winds, you'd think he'd found the secret of eternal life, so seamless is the texture; to listen to Bach on the organ you sense that the biggest difficulty for player and listener alike is to make the music breathe, to locate it after all in the natural pulmonary rhythms of life; to listen to Stravinsky, however, is to breathe again - but natural though the motion is, this is often to breathe strangely: to pant, to stammer, to susurrate, to shout - at its best, to exhilarate, literally: to let the breath out.

And also to re-invent rhythm.

T.S.Eliot once remarked that it was listening to a wood pigeon - the familiar Coo-coo-cucoorico - that suggested a line of verse to him. It's not so much that sound was primary and sense secondary, but that in sound itself (and above all in rhythmically organised sound) lay sense. Eliot also famously remarked: 'I have to use words when I'm talking to you'. And that, of course, is precisely what music does not have to do and why music - the rhythmic patterning of sound to imply sense - has been the most fertile of all the modernist arts.

Gershwin got the idea for Rhapsody in Blue from the Brooklyn Railway - the chug of the first subject from the rhythm of the train over the tracks. Against the regularity of pulse (the heart of music?) the expressive character of the rhythm pulls. That's the life-blood of Jazz, of course, and it's only a small step from there to freeing pulse itself from the straight-jacket of metronomic regularity. What Bartok discovered (and recovered) from Hungarian folk-song, some modernists deceived themselves into thinking they had invented. They didn't, but that too is characteristic of modernism: the rhetoric of the new and, as we can see now with the wisdom of hindsight, the recovery of the old, the primitive, and the essential, which seemed to take music forward through the process of identifying its primal elements in the past - and, of course, the shock that what was true of the nature of music when it all began is no less true now. It's the primitive, essential savagery of so much modern music - and above all its rhythmic savagery - which at one and the same time makes it shockingly new and timelessly original.

Copyright © Peter Dale, August 16th 1999