Pulse in verbal rhythm / by Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, Philadelphia, P.

  • Mary Hallock-Greenewalt
Date:
[1905?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

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

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