Rhythm as schema: in search of a mature theory of rhythm in visual art (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Levinas’s “Reality and Its Shadow” is the only monograph on the condition of aesthetics in art and its use in society among his writings. His key terms are ‘resemblance’, ‘morality’ and ‘rhythm’. Levinas warns that ‘resemblance’ in art is immoral when accompanied by the enchantment of rhythm. To understand Levinas’s arguments on the ethical condition of art, it is useful to reference Bakhtin’s concern about the condition of rhythm in terms of the single subject (spirit/id) and in relation to others (soul/super-ego), and how these co-exist. Kristeva’s understanding of Plato’s ‘chora’ provides theoretical grounds for consideration of the role of rhythm and the independent condition of aesthetics and art, which she argues in terms of rhythm’s pre-linguistic (pre-symbolic) importance in the developmental stage of the soul. This paper will address how the condition of the artwork has been taken for granted; how naive (or disingenuous) the proponents of modern art have been by advocating ...
Rhythm as an Integral Part of Mathematical Thinking
In M. Bockarova, M. Danesi, D. Martinovic and R. Núñez (Eds.), Mind in Mathematics: Essays on Mathematical Cognition and Mathematical Method (pp. 68-85). München, Germany: LINCOM GmbH., 2016
The topic of this chapter is rhythm. The argument that I will be defending is that rhythm is an integral part of mathematical thinking. The argument rests on the idea that mathematical thinking is something akin to temporal art, like drama, poetry, and dance-mathematical thinking happens in time. The argument goes even further. Mathematical thinking not only happens in time but its most striking feature is movement. This conception of mathematical thinking is at odds with traditional conceptions that portray thinking as something happening in a kind of mental repository containing ideas: We cannot speak of ideas as being in the mind in the sense in which furniture is in the room; an idea is an active thing constituted by its activity, coloring other ideas and in process of internal modification; it must be conceived as a form of energy (Demos 1933: 273) Thinking, as I conceptualize it here, is rather "an effluence of creativity; it has come about and it may give place to some other manifestation of life" (Demos 1933: 273). To assert that mathematical thinking is movement brings us close to the topic of rhythm. Rhythm has a convoluted etymology. It was defined in the 16 t h century as something related to the manner in which the accentuation of syllables affects the oral reception of language; it might not be a surprise then, that thus conceived, rhythm remained entangled for many years with its measuring form-metrics. Referring to the linguistic tradition, where rhythm has been investigated through prosody, that is, the linguistic patterns of stress and intonation, Richard Cureton (2004: 113) notes that "The prosodic tradition has always been primarily interested in the voice, how it moves rhythmically from syllable to syllable, stress to stress." Rhythm, however, went beyond the linguistic tradition and started being applied to other domains like music, and natural and social phenomena. In its general sense, the concept of rhythm tries to characterize the reappearance of something at regular intervals and attempts to capture the idea of regularity, alternation, or something oscillating between symmetry and asymmetry. Here, rhythm appears as a complex of conflicting "components," each one exploring and expressing our experience of the world in a different manner. Each one of these components creates a different sort of subjective time:
NOTES ON PERCEPTION OF TIME IN ANTIQUITY: ARISTOXENUS ON RHYTHM (in Russian)
‘Notes on perception of time in Antiquity: Aristoxenus on Rhythm,’ Filosofiya nauki [Philosophy of Science] 2(65), 2015, 99-118 (in Russian) Abstract. Rhythmical phenomena are very widespread: “rhythm is applied to bodies that do not move, as when we speak of a statue having ‘good rhythm’, to anything that moves, as when we speak of someone walking with ‘good rhythm’… in general rhythm is perceived by three senses, which are these: sight, as in dancing; hearing, as in melody; and touch, by which we perceive, for instance, the pulsations of the arteries” (Aristides Quintilianus, De Musica 1.13, Barker’s translation). In his Elementa Rhythmica the Peripatetic philosopher Aristoxenus (the 4th century BCE) builds a general and quite abstract theory of rhythm, treating it as a phenomenon, quite distinct from metre and musical intervals. Indeed, the latter are perceived as quantifiers, inherently characteristic of verse and melody. On the contrary, rhythm does not inhere in a poem or musical composition and must be imposed on them: in order to perform a piece of poetry or music, especially if they involve a bodily movement, dance, one has to apply quite an empirical art of rhythmical composition (rhythmopoiia), which allows to structure fluid and unstable temporal events. In the paper, I offer a translation of the Elementa Rhythmica into Russian and, commenting on it, adduce contemporary evidence for the psychological aspects of time perception and structuring of spatial and temporal patterns. Keywords: Ancient music, temporal duration, rhythmical patterns, composition, the foot, ancient medicine, Herophilus, harmonious pulse.
Musical and extramusical aspects of the rhythm concept as interpretative
DIFFERENT RHYTHMS Atti VIII convegno FKL sul paesaggio sonoro, 2019
One of the earliest definitions of rhythm in the philosophical field (the rhythm as «the order of the movement», Plato, Le leggi, II 664E), was provided in reference to musical phenomena. Even today, when we speak of rhythm it is almost inevitable to refer to the world of music and to the musicological paradigm. In turn, this paradigm has been employed since the very beginning of soundscape studies as a model in which to find analogies and similarities with the soundscape, from which to draw tools for understanding the sound landscape in its various manifestations. Sometimes the musicological model has shown some limitations that have caused sound-scape studies either to seek tools from other disciplines (i.e. anthropology and linguistics), or to create their own. Recently, there has also been a growing scientific interest in promoting the rhythm concept (see rhutmos.eu), which is why some scholars have begun to hypothesize the emergence of a new scientific paradigm based on the concept of rhythm as "modality of flowing". From these considerations, the following questions arise: what conceptions of rhythm in the musical and extramusical context can be productive as instruments for surveying, interpretation and understanding of the soundscape.
The Elements of Harmony A neo-Aristotelean ontology of musical works
Forthcoming
The current work defines an Aristotelean approach to the ontology of musical works and other related abstracta. The theory would satisfy multiple conditions: 1) It would provide a workable theory of abstract artifacts. 2) It would be consistent with modern scientific naturalism (broadly defined), and 3) It is at least a possible reading of what Aristotle has to say as well as what he should say if he were to answer the questions concerning the coming-to-be of musical compositions.
St. Augustine's Metaphysics of Rhythm Метафизика ритма Аврелия Августина
The Latin concept numerus is extremely significant for it reflects the reality of antique spirit which entered into its imperial period. As the Roman state embodied in objectivity the substantial principle of antiquity – subordination of everything particular to universal (which is the core of metaphysical thought), the determination of rhythm in Latin culture as number evidences that in the form of this concept antiquity not only elevated particular beauty of existence to universal beauty but also immersed the beautiful into the logical as its substance. Nevertheless, in St. Augustine’s interpretation of rhythm numerus as the logical principle is not simply an ontological root of the finite. It is inwardly differentiated into the objective and subjective, being a concrete totality, the idea. Meanwhile, it lacks for the same thing as all antiquity: it is not known as a real contradiction, and that is the reason why the Absolute remains abstract and is not known as its own process in which finite subjectivity, I becomes necessity of the infinite substance. So, in his doctrine the contents of the science of music have not the value of man’s self-conscious activity. Initially St. Augustine’s logic of rhythm is divided into the aspects of nature and finite spirit. In nature the primordial logical stratum is mechanics, and the most exemplifying form of this rhythmic is regular celestial circulation forming the universe’s poem. In the sphere of physics rhythmic is obvious in the hierarchy of natural elements. In organics the highest species is animal rhythms manifesting animatedness by means of which one makes the transition to the rhythmic of self-knowing subjectivity – to finite spirit. Here one discovers the soul’s rhythms ascending from the corporeal to the incorporeal, and rhythms of state constitution and those of world history. However, within these frames the concept of rhythm does not attain its complete subjectivity, so it is required to pass on to rhythmic in art and science as forms of its self-consciousness. It is the theoretical aspect of spirit that is mostly realized in St. Augustine’s conception of artistic rhythms, so their classification is carried out in the moments of intuition, representation and thought. The rhythmic of artistic intuition is characterized by a complex intentionality and differentiation in accordance with which hearing and sight are recognized to be ideal forms of intuition. The most paradoxical is St. Augustine’s vision of rhythms of artistic representation. On one hand, he admits that images are superior to sensual perceptions; on the other hand, confessing exclusively the immediate way of spirit’s determination he views rhythms of memory, phantasies and phantasms as only shameful similarities and imitations of sensual bodies. Artistic thinking is formed by rhythmic of natural judgment which is not developed, though, in the determinacy of its element and is close to Kant’s aesthetic judgment. Its insufficiency as thinking is the condition of the further progress of St. Augustine’s metaphysics of rhythm to the level of scientific cognition of rhythmic. At the beginning its content does not manifest itself in the form of its perfect rationality and is not posited by but is given to thinking, so the reason of science is found in the form of external authority. This is the stage of grammar (metric). The highest (that is philosophical) stage is the science of music in which thinking of rhythmic is determined freely, depending on itself because rhythmic determinacy is viewed as reflected in its reasonable ground, substance for which are taken numbers and their correlations as purely intellectual entities. Thereby the metaphysical principle of spiritual formation, such as antiquity in general and St. Augustine in particular understood it, should be considered to be accomplished. But in spite of all the necessity of its metaphysical ascent logic of rhythm in St. Augustine’s thought is not realized in the full form of its concept as far as it is confronted by unsublated concreteness of finite rhythmic. That is why St. Augustine’s metaphysic of rhythm shows neglect towards the sphere of the particular, finite subjectivity and historical context. The 18th century German aesthetics of verse was to make up for this incompleteness. The new understanding of rhythm stated in opposition to St. Augustine’s metaphysical substantialism the modern principle of actual self-consciousness which was originally realized in the flesh of naturalism and genetic explanation of rhythmic and then purified and enhance to the form of its transcendental conception. The extremes of substantialism and subjectivism in the interpretation of rhythmic are joined by means of the concreteness of speculative thinking which is the standpoint of this research.
Rhythm and the Grasping of the General
2006
In this paper we deal with the genesis of students’ algebraic generalization of patterns. Our aim is to better understand the way students attend to the perceptually given (e.g. the three first elements of a geometric or numeric sequence) and start moving beyond it in their attempt to grasp a possible general mathematical structure. We provide a multi-semiotic microanalysis of the work done by one Grade 9 student and her small-group mates and show how rhythm accounts for a subtle semiotic device which helps the students project at the aural, kinesthetic and visual levels a regularity which proved to be crucial in conveying a sensuous meaning of mathematical generality.
Aesthetic and philosophical theories of the relationship between music and mathematics
Aesthetic and philosophical theories of the relationship between music and mathematics, 2019
The purpose of this research work was to delve into the curious but interdependent relation of music and mathematics. Beginning in ancient Greece and reaching the 20th century, I will examine various theories of music as well as mathematics with the apex of Pythagoras, the father of musical theory and Ianis Xenakis, the excellent and pioneering architect.