Rhythm and Movement: The Conceptual Interdependence of Music, Dance, and Poetry

Abstract

This paper argues that dance, poetry and music are conceptually interdependent in that rhythm is essential to each; none can be understood independently of rhythm.That is, these arts exhibit a conceptual holismmusic and human movement are simultaneously conceptualized in terms of rhythmic movement.What I call "sonicism", the idea that music is the sound, is refuted by the non-aural features of music, and the rhythmic nature of dance.The claim of conceptual holism implies that music, poetry and dance belong to an order of movement.This view rests on a humanist philosophical treatment that regards rhythm as essentially dynamic.At least from the theoretical writings of classical Greecenotably Plato's The Lawsmovement has been the basic conceptualization of music.In the 20th century, Messiaen defines rhythm as "the ordering of movement", which, he says, is "applicable to dance, to words, and to music.As Pound comments: "music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance…poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music…Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement".According to the movement criterion, making and responding to music involves moving rhythmicallybobbing one's head, tapping fingers or feet, gestures such as punching the air or leaping, as well as dancing.The article concludes by placing the discussion in the context of a philosophical anthropological investigation. 1.The conceptual holism of music, dance and poetryThe embodied nature of music-makingmore recently described as embodied cognition has for some time been an established concept in music psychology and musicology. 1 Thus for John Blacking, music begins "as a stirring of the body"; by getting into the "body movement of the music", one can feel it almost as the composer does, he argues.2 The embodied nature of music-making has taken longer to penetrate the world of philosophynot unexpectedly, given the latter's Cartesian heritage.Hence the position that I term sonicism, that seems to underlie much philosophical aesthetics of music: that music is essentially an aural art.On this view, music is the sound; it follows that rhythm is a pattern of sounds and silenceswhat I call a static conception, in that it neglects movement, though not of the passing of time, inherent in any experience of music.The result is a neglect of music's historic connection with dance.Rhythm is a fundamental feature of dance as much as music, and so cannot consist in a pattern of sounds and silencesa less exclusively aural characterization, one in terms of movement, is required.I argue that dance, poetry, and music are interpenetrating, unified practices and concepts; they form a conceptual holism, that is, they cannot be understood independently of each other.3 They are conceptually interdependent in that rhythm is essential to each; there is no hegemony of music over the other arts.Thus Ezra Pound:1 Embodied approaches in these fields have been strong at least from the early 1990s.See for instance See Baily (1985), Blacking (1973), Clarke ( 2001) and ( 2017), Godøy, R. I. (2003), Johnson (1997). 2 Blacking (1973), 111. 3 Levinson's interesting discussion of hybrid artforms makes a converse set of claims: "we can recognize traditional opera as a combination of song and drama, shaped canvas as a combination of painting and sculpture, concrete poetry as a combination of poetry and graphics" (Levinson (2011), 28).

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