Levels of Rhythmic Perception

Imagine a listener, listening to some rather conventional jazz. Imagine that it is me, so I will call him "he."

He perceives the quarter-note pulse. 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4... These notes are grouped into measures, and those groups are easily perceived too. He has no problem grouping these measures into four- and eight-bar phrases, and these phrases into larger song structures like AABA or the twelve-bar blues.

So he counts four levels of perception: he can easily keep track of the pulse, the measure, the phrase, and the organization of phrases into song-structures. Of course, the actual notes he hears are not just quarter-notes, but whatever notes are actually played, so the fifth level is that of rhythmic detail, the actual swung eight-notes, triplets, etc... that are played, and their relation to the pulse.

These levels can all be perceived easily at the same time because they are hierarchical (smaller units contained within larger) and interconnected. It is not like trying to keep track of five things at the same time, since keeping track of one thing (the pulse say) helps him keep track of everything else.

He can perceive these structures self-consciously, by counting to himself, or simply listen to the music and perceive them unselfconsciously. He could easily teach someone else to hear the music this way as well, if this other person did not already know how. In listening to less familiar genres he does not keep track of things quite as well, but still finds structures more or less "intelligible."

The harmony and melody are also rhythmically, structurally relevant. The listener understands some phrases as answers to others, for example, a falling melodic line as completing a rising one.

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Suppose there is an eleven-syllable line that is transparently 11 syllables, like Lorca's "Tu cuerpo fugitivo para siempre." The rhythm is immanent, not concealed. I don't count the number of syllables, but simply fit it into a pattern I have heard many times before. Now take the line "No está en mí, está en el mundo, está ahí enfrente." I accept it as an 11-syllable line in its metrical context, but it is not quite as transparent, because it contains seven elided syllables, with elision crossing over phrasal boundaries. "No es / tá en / mi es / tá en / el / mun / do es / tá ah / i en / fren / te." These elisions of "sinalefas" create stress clashes, with heavy syllables falling on positions 123468910. The metrical accents are on 3, 6, and 10, which makes it a nicely "melodic" hendacasyllable on paper.

So in the prosodic example what is the listener keeping track of? The basic meter, the instantiation of the meter in its actual syllables, and the larger structures. Jack DeJohnette can perform as many metric modulations as he wants, as long as I can still keep track of the pulse, there is no problem.

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If I can grasp the basic nature of the problem, then I will already understand it at an advanced level. If I can state the obvious, maybe I can see what is obvious and what is not.

Earl Hines, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Bill Evans are the pianists I associate most with rhythmic elasticity. Hines plays in the stride tradition, but with some nice rhythmic variatons. He often sounds very modern for a player of his generation. Monk has a rhythmic conception all of his own that made it difficult for him to comp behind soloists in a way comfortable to them. Evans opened the way for all the Herbie Hancocks, Chick Coreas, Keith Jarretts, of the world.

In contrast, I don't associate this elasticity as much with Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, Errol Garner, Nat Cole.

How is elasticity achieved? Rubato, metric modulation (implying a different time signature or tempo), fluidity of phrasing and articulation, maniuplation of phrasal boundaries, obscuring the underlying pulse, etc... Syncopation in and of itself does not have this effect, curiously.

Take Art Tatum's solo version of "You Go to My Head" from the Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces. I'd say it has a different sort of rhythmic elasticity from that of Bud Powell. The part that interests me start at about 1:24, when he settles into a stride groove after the opening rubato section. What's interesting is that there are times when he seems to lose the beat in a series of complex, arhythmic runs and ornaments. But if you were to snap your fingers on 2 and 4 and not stop even when Tatum seems to lose the beat, you will see that he comes out of the runs exactly on time, kind of like an olympic platform diver who enters the water perfectly despite all the twists and turns of the dive itself. He will mark the beat again with a return to the stride left hand, try to get the listener lost again, return again, etc...

For a poor musician like me it's a good excercise to try not to be thrown off by the seemingly rubato sections that are not actually rubato after all. If I can count without losing the beat, instead of trying to follow where I think he is going, I am successful. The two or four to which I'm snapping my fingers might seem to correspond to nothing at all in the music that Tatum is playing, so I have to rely on my unsteady internal metronome.

What happens when I am lost? Basically, it means that I am following the variable and not the constant, confusing the phrasing with the beat.

Repeat the same exercise with a Max Roach drum solo. Hear everything he's doing in relation to the structure of the song he's playing. I wish I could say I can do this with ease.

While my students were taking an exam, I came up with a proposal for deep rhythmic analysis:

Choose a poem. The poem must be on that you think will withstand this kind of scrutiny in the first place. The exercise won't work otherwise. It also won't work if it is approached in a perfunctory spirit. In fact it won't work unless you kick the bejeezus out of it. The value is in that last 5% of insight, not in the 95% of description.

(Get past all the obvious points quickly, the syllable counting. That's not the point of the exercise.)

Now talk about some of the basic rhythmical devices. Parallelisms? Alliteration? The length of phrases, the ways phrases are linked together. Just describe what's happening in the poem rhythmically. Some points might still seem obvious, but will lead to other insights a little later on.

Now try to describe the rhythmic style or approach of the poem in more holistic terms. What is the rhythmic feel of the poem? Nervous, calm, stately, breezy? What is its overall shape or form? What contributes to this effect? Go back to the basic scansion and see what the poet is doing on the level of syllable and line. How does your holistic conclusion relate to other poems by the same author? To the time period in which the text was written? You may even want to talk about other dimensions of the poem at this point.

Finally, draw some conclusions. Write a single sentence that sums up the most significant thing learned.

Interpret the holy shit out of the poem. (Do a close reading for meaning.) What aspects of your rhythmic analysis are relevant to this interpretation?

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Next, take your favorite musician and do an analysis of his or her rhythmic style. Write down as many ideas as you can. How much harder/easier was it to do this?

The class I'm teaching this semester is on anonymous and nearly anonymous oralature. Claudio Rodríguez, the poet I studied in my dissertation and first book, wrote his Master's thesis on a particular genre of children's poetry, the corro or game played in the round. While Claudio was no scholar, he could have been a brilliant one. There are two main ideas in his thesis, which has been published in collection of his prose writings.

There is a kind of magical thinking, or poetic nominalism, in which the word supplants the object which it refers.

Rhythmic and phonemic elements are predominant; texts are generated by sound rather than meaning per se. Meaning is often obliterated.

Taken together this results in a sort of Cratylism and "primacy of the signifier."

We see the influence of this in Lorca's work. "La monja / está dentro de la toronja." [the nun is inside the grapefruit]. The "logic" of this poetic utterance is in the rhyme itself. In Claudio's own poetry, where the river Duero is seen, phonetically, as "du[rad]ero" (long-lasting).

There's also a quite technical study of Rimbaud's rhythm, which Rodríguez wrote in 1953 when he was 19 years old, as an academic study. It's full of really keen observations about the prosody of Rimbaud's regular verse, his free verse, and his prose poems. What's interesting is that Rodríguez himself, in his own poetry, does exactly what he describes Rimbaud as doing. Rodríguez, then, is not the idiot savant that he is taken to be. He knew exactly what he was doing. Look at the jagged intonation of this passage, (which is metrically regular I think):

Et toute vengeance? Rien! ... Mais si, toute encore,
Nous la voulons! Industriels, princes, sénats:
Pérrisez! puissance, justice, histoire: à bas!
Ça nous est dû. Le sang! Le sang! la flamme d'or!

On a Joshua Redman recording I will tend to listen to Brian Blade more attentively than to Joshua himself. I find the drummer's ideas more interesting than the saxophonists. That's what got me interested in drumming in the first place. In the absence of soloists of genius, the rhythm section is more compelling than the front line.

I am more interested in Dewey Redman than Joshua anyway. It's kind of funny that the father was eclipsed by the talented but more conventional son.

Reading Whitman, I hear a lot of Koch there. In other words, I am reading Whitman back through the lens provided by KK's "Geography." And sometimes I hear Vicente Aleixandre of "Historia del corazón" in Whitman too.

I don't hear a lot of Ginsberg, on the other hand. Whitman is all about the balancing of phrases, the echoing patterns of sound and syntax. Ginsberg is after different effects.

Not all long lines are sloppy; not all short lines are taut. Not all long lines are inspired by Whitman.

There is/are only poetics, there is not "a poetic" of this or that. There are emphases within this, or statements of where one is "at" at a particular time. That's why a blog might state a different poetics every day, but in an evolving series. It's temporal and ongoing. You can't have a poetics, in the sense of possession; you can only participate in it. It's thinking I understood something the day before yesterday, but realizing it's only a partial understanding. That is why Alice is right to call poetics bullshit. It is an inherently provisional enterprise. (This is different from someone who never thinks about poetics in the first place.)

Poetics in the neoclassical sense of prescription, how boring is that? Poetics can only be descriptive, in the sense that linguistics is descriptive. Describing what good poets already do, not telling someone what to do. Or worse, what NOT to do.

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Cut down my MLA paper from 18 pages to 8. Ouch. But I could eliminate some "It could be argued that."

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Julia learned most of the first chorus of Rollins' improvisation on "St. Thomas." I found a transcription on the internet. It's 16 measures since the tune is in 16-bar AABC form. The ability to sit down for an hour and work on something like this. Who said kids didn't have concentration. The trick is finding something worthwhile for them to concentrate on.

What is the purpose of rhythm and sound in poetry?

The normal answer is that it is supposed to reinforce the meaning. But that is unsatisfactory, because the use of sound as mimesis is rather limited, in relation to the total sound and rhythm apparatus. In other words, a few isolated sound-effects do not explain or justify the more systematic use of sound patterns.

The answer i've come up with is that the function of rhythm is to teach us the rhythm in question. In other words, to get the reader to follow along, "acompasar" his or her reflections to those of the poet. To get the mind and body of the reader to dance to the right steps.

The way if you're walking down the street with someone you have to adjust your steps, whether in length or tempo. Or two people in a conversation with each other, they each have to adjust their rhythms if it is going to be one conversation.

Acompasar is a great verb for that, because it means adjust a rhythm. From the word "compás," beat or measure, we get a verb, a-compas-ar. I'm sure we've all had the experience of not understanding a poet because of not being able to get the poet rhythmically. Think of people who don't get Creeley, or Ashbery, or who think long lines are automatically "sloppy" just through length alone.

The most fascinating thing about rhythm is that we don't know what it is. I don't mean we're lacking in definitions. Obviously there are many definitions, but none seems wholly pertinent to the phenomenon itself. There are not even good metaphors for rhythm, that are not simply examples of it.

A few prosodic principles.

1) The asymmetry principle. Even classical and neo-classical forms will involve huge areas of asymmetry and irregularity. (Conversation with David Shapiro inspired this one.)

2) Inexhaustibility. Even a seemingly limited number of permutations will permit seemingly endless variability.

3) Poverty of means. You only need a few "pitches" to make verse musical. That is, intonational contours, combined with all the other phrasal and accentual business, are enough to create greatly varied effects.

4) The critical gap. Most literary critics will never care enough about this stuff.

5) The "Topeka Principle." When driving toward Lawrence, Kansas and thinking too hard about these issues, you will miss the exit and end up 15 miles to the West in Topeka, and have to retrace your steps to get home.

All these principles are really versions of the same basic principle.

My favorite rhythms are, I think


The walking bass--four quarternotes evenly accented. What could be more pure than that?

Spanish endecasílabo and heptasílabo in fruitful collaboration

Elvin's "Rolling Triplet" feel

Latin elegiac couplets. [see below]

Afro-Cuban cowbell in 6/8.

Son montuño

Bebop. Max Roach bass-drum accents

French alexandrine

A funk beat with swung sixteenth-notes under a James Brown track

Various flamenco rhythms in 6/8 (just getting into these)


There are others. Iambic pentameter? Octosílabo? Waltz? But these are my favorites. I'm surprised to find IP missing from the list, but what can I do? Don't blame me, I'm only reporting what I feel... I don't particuarly care for Englsh ballad meter or Reggae.

I've been obsessed with a certain polyrhythm since the weekend. It's a 2-3 rumba clave (a two measure pattern) against a 3/4 shuffle-like pattern (played three times in 4/4 time.) The entire thing resolves in six measures. I've almost got it down.