Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt.

  • Greenewalt, Mary Elizabeth Hallock, 1871-1950.
Date:
[1905]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    No demonstration is needed to show that at discretion each unit of time between these accented syllables may be made faster or slower at will. In music this shifting of the tempo is the spice of interpretation. One who inclines his attention to the pianola has told me that change in the tempo lever alone made expression; whereas change in the intensity lever alone did not. At one moment we may feel like hum- ming a few bars of a Brahms Rhapsody at the rate of seventy-six beats to the minute, again at eighty and again at eighty-eight in whatever motion may best fill the mood of the moment. These time rates are mathematically gaugeable by an instrument in universal use among musicians called the metronome. And just as a portrait magnified to gigantic proportions destroys the likeness, just so are the time variations which can uphold the feeling and not distort the form confined in music to certain well defined limits. Strangely enough the quantities of verse sound natural only when uttered within these same circumscribed time rates. No elocutionist will deny that different interpretations require a varying energy of word emission. Or that to linger over a verse of sentiment is as natural as to pass quickly over the words of an energetic and angry dismissal. Because a metronome is not in more universal use the second hand of a watch or clock will be made to answer every purpose of illustration. Recited at a ‘second’ rate jack and Jill will be found an old friend, possible and natural. With this rate doubled, however, with two quantities occupying the time space of one before an objection at once appears. Only the more or less nimble tongue can voice the syllables so fast. A little faster and the speed strikes the reciter dumb. A syllable is a tone. As a syllable-making implement the tongue is the least nimble of musical instruments. Whereas in pianism the necessity is not unusual for playing fourteen to sixteen notes a second, the utmost that a tongue can do in that line, and that for only a minute, is to reach eight syllables in the same time. Clearly time is necessary to verse. Too much of it is disastrous. Uttered at the rate of fifty quantities a minute an impossible drone meets the ear. One hundred and twenty quantities a minute, whether the quantity be composed of three or four syllables, is unnaturally fast; so that, roughly speaking, the limit of speed at which verbal quantities are possible stands at a time rate of between sixty and one hundred beats to the minute, just this is true of musical rhythms. Just this scope of beat confronts the physician when he feels the normal pulse. Some statements of the oldest reporter of the Senate (See ‘Dr.