The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics

Description

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. Cover The Philosophy of Rhythm Copyright Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors Introduction: Philosophy of Rhythm 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 Origin 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 15. Complexity and Passage: Experimenting with Poetic Rhythm 16. Encoded and Embodied Rhythm: An Unprioritized Ontology 17. Time, Rhythm, and Subjectivity: The Aesthetics of Duration 18. Husserl’s Model of Time-​Consciousness, and the Phenomenology of Rhythm 19. Pictorial Experience and the Perception of Rhythm 20. Soundless Rhythm PART VREADING RHYTHM 21. Rhythm, Meter, and the Poetics of Abstraction 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. Hearing It Right: Rhythm and Reading Index