The Rhythm of Prose; An Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: far behind. Nevertheless, speaking of the music of the Omahas, Fillmore remarks6 that in "rich variety and complexity of rhythm" it "excels most of our civilized music by a great deal. Our most elaborate compositions for orchestra have no rhythms more difficult or more complex than have these short songs; and our popular music is incomparably simpler in rhythm than is the popular music of the Omahas." In this connection it should be note'd that in the regular experiments7 even the professional musician, Observer No. 7, failed utterly at the task of beating "five's" against "seven's" so long as it was approached from the purely numerical basis; on the other hand, there were very few of the group who failed within twenty minutes to reproduce with a measure of success the seven-five rhythmic tune at a moderate tempo, and to execute the syncopating performance by means of it. The measurements listed are for their achievement at a fairly rapid rate of speed, which reduced the number of successful performances. The way in which primitive man could have developed such facility is easy to imagine. Two men happen to be beating their drums at the same time in different quarters. One is tapping two's; the other one, three's. A third man hears the rhythmic tune of the combination, and proceeds to tap it later on his drum. It interests him; so he plays with it in different ways. Knowing that the original sounds came from a combination of two drums, he taps with his stick to represent one drum, and with his foot to represent the other. Once done, the task is easy, and, of course, it might have been suggested in a dozen ways. The factor of "substitution" is so often mentioned, and is treated so fully in certain phases, that it seems surprising 6 Fillmore, J. C., Primitive rhythms, Co...