Rhythm in the aesthetics of Western music

This dissertation is an account of the development and function of rhythm and meter in Western music and an examination of the relationship between the rhythms of music and language. A discussion of music and language in Gregorian chant and in twelfth-century Notre Dame polyphony reveals that Western music evolves from monophony measured by linguistic phrases to polyphony measured by rhythmic modes, modes which measure music in the way that quantitative meters measure poetry. Augustine's De Musica serves as the initial theoretical model for evaluating musical rhythm in terms of measured movement. Although Augustine's emphasis on words as the best measure of musical movement supports the thesis that musical measure is rooted in linguistic forms, Augustine's understanding of well-measured movement as a proper ratio between rhythmic phrases unnecessarily limits the rhythmic possibilities in music. In place of proper ratio, aesthetic judgments about the interplay between meter and rhythm in poetry serve as models for making similar judgments about measured forms and rhythmic surfaces in music. The innovative balancing, or harmony, of these elements contributes to the aesthetic value of both poetry and music.; The centrality of rhythmic structure in musical analysis is illustrated through an evaluation of the interplay between rhythmic and metric phrases in musical examples from the Classical period. The musical movement in these examples, from an aesthetic point of view, is a result of the harmonious interplay of an intrinsic rhythmic phrase within and against the extrinsic metrical measure. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the eventual disintegration of the harmonic and metrical forms of Classical and Romantic music. As a result of this disintegration of form, twentieth-century composers sought ways to replace metrical tonality as the measure of musical movement. In addition to the solutions by composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky, jazz musicians answer the problem of form in music by returning to language. In jazz, the strophe is the measure of musical movement, while meter is transformed into a rhythmic surface. As a result, jazz once again makes possible the harmonious interplay between measured form and rhythmic surface essential in aesthetic music.