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Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The
Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The
Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience.
List of contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I: Movement and Stasis
- 1. Dialogue on Rhythm: Entrainment and the Dynamic Thesis
- 2. Rhythm and Movement
- 3. The Ontology of Rhythm
- 4. 'Feeling the Beat': Multimodal Perception and the Experience of Musical Movement
- 5. Dance Rhythm
- Part II. Emotion and Expression
- 6. The Life of Rhythm: Dewey, Relational Perception, and the 'Cumulative Effect'
- 7. Rhythm, Preceding its Abstraction
- 8. Mozart's 'Dissonance' and the Dialectic of Language and Thought in Classical Theories of Rhythm
- 9. Rhythm and Popular Music
- 10. Rhythms, Resemblance, and Musical Expressiveness
- Part III: Entrainment and the Social Dimension
- 11. Metric Entrainment and the Problem(s) of Perception
- 12. Entrainment and the Social Origins of Musical Rhythm
- 13. How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?
- 14. Temporal Processing and the Experience of Rhythm: A Neuro-psychological Approach
- Part IV. Time and Experience: Subjective and Objective Rhythm
- 15. Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm
- 16. Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized Ontology
- 17. Time, Duration, Rhythm: The Aesthetics of Temporality in Bachelard and Deliège
- 18. Husserl's Model of Time-Consciousness, and the Phenomenology of Rhythm
- 19. Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm
- 20. Soundless Rhythm
- Part V. Reading Rhythm
- 21. Hearing it Right: Rhythm and Reading
- 22. The Not-so-silent Reading: What Does it Mean to Say that we Appreciate Rhythm in Literature?
- 23. Leaving it Out: Rhythm and Short Form in the Modernist Poetic Tradition
- 24. Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction
About the author
Peter Cheyne is Associate Professor at Shimane University, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Durham University. He leads two international projects, one on the Aesthetics of Perfection and Imperfection, and the other on the 17th- to 19th-century Philosophy of the Life Sciences.
Andy Hamilton teaches philosophy at Durham University, UK. He specialises in aesthetics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and history of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, especially Wittgenstein.
Max Paddison is Emeritus Professor of Music Aesthetics at the University of Durham. He works in critical theory, philosophy, contemporary music, and popular music.
Summary
With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary critics, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm offers a broad perspective on rhythm-the fundamental pulse that animates music, dance, and poetry across all cultures.
Additional text
This wonderful collection considers questions about rhythm from a wide variety of angles, perspectives, and disciplines-among them analytic and continental philosophy, musicology, art history, poetics, and neuroscience. Like the dialogue that opens the book, The Philosophy of Rhythm supports no particular line of thought or argument but enormously deepens our understanding of a topic so palpable and yet so mysterious.
