The Psychology of Beauty by Ethel D. Puffer (good non fiction books to read TXT) 📕

color contrast; and it is perhaps even more valid in the realm of motor activity. Whatever in sense stimulation gives the condition for, helps, furthers, enhances the natural function, is felt both as pleasing and as furthering the particular activity in question. Now, the objective stress in rhythm is but emphasis on a stress that would be in any case to some degree subjectively supplied. Rhythm in music, abstracting from all other pleasure-giving factors, is then pleasurable because it is in every sense a favorable stimulation.

 

In accordance with the principle that complete explanation of psychical facts is possible only through the physiological substrate, we have so far kept rather to that field in dealing with the foundations of our pleasure in rhythm. But further description of the rhythmical experience is most natural in psychological terms. There seems, indeed, on principle no ground for the current antithesis, so much emphasized of late, of “psychical” and “motor” theories of rhythm. Attention and expectation are not “psychical” as opposed to “motor.” Granting, as no doubt most psychologists would grant, that attention is the psychical analogue of the physiological tendency to motor discharge, then a motor automatism of which one is fully conscious could be described as expectation and its satisfaction.

Indeed, the impossibility of a sharp distinction between ideas of movement and movement sensations confirms this view. When expectation has reference to an experience with a movement element in it, the expectation itself contains movement sensations of the kind in question.<1> To say, then, that rhythm is expectation based on the natural functioning of the attention period, is simply to clothe our physiological explanation in terms of psychological description. The usual motor theory is merely one which neglects the primary disposition to rhythm through attention variations, in favor of the sensations of muscular tension (kinaesthetic sensations) which arise IN rhythm, but do not cause it. To say that the impression of rhythm arises only in kinaesthetic sensations begs the question in the way previously noted. Undoubtedly, the period once established, the rhythmic group is held together, felt as a unit, by means of the coordinated movement sensations; but the main problem, the possibility of this first establishment, is not solved by such a motor theory. In other words, the attention theory is the real motor theory.

 

<1> C.M. Hitchcock, “The Psychol. Of Expectation,” _Psychol.

Rev., Mon. Suppl._, No. 20.

 

Expectation is the “set” of the attention. Automatism is the set of the motor centres. Now as attention is parallel to the condition of the motor centres, we are able to equate expectation and automatic movement. Rhythm is literally embodied expectation, fulfilled. It is therefore easily to be understood that whatever other emotions connect themselves with satisfied expectation are at their ideal poignance in the case of rhythm.

 

It is from this point of view that we must understand the helpfulness of rhythm in work. That all definite stimulus, and especially sound stimulus, rhythmical or not, sets up a diffusive wave of energy, increasing blood circulation, dynamogenic phenomena, etc., is another matter, which has later to be discussed. But the essential is that this additional stimulus is rhythmical, and therefore a reinforcement of the nervous activity, and therefore a lightening and favorable condition of work itself. So it is, too, that we can understand the tremendous influence of rhythm just among primitive peoples, and those of a low degree of culture. Work is hard for savages, not because bodily effort is hard, but because the necessary concentration of attention is for them almost impossible; and the more, that in work they are unskilled, and without good tools, so that generally every movement has to be especially attended to. Now rhythm in work is especially directed to lighten that effort which they feel as hardest; it rests, renews, and frees the attention.

Rhythm is helpful not primarily because it enables many to work together by making effort simultaneous, but rhythm rests and encourages the individual, and working together is most naturally carried out in rhythm.

 

To this explanation all the other facts of life-enhancement, etc., can be attached. Rhythm is undoubtedly favorable stimulation.

Can it be brought under the full aesthetic formula of favorable stimulation with repose? A rhythm once established has both retrospective and prospective reference. It looks before and after, it binds together the first and the last moments of activity, and can therefore truly be said to return upon itself, so as to give a sense of equilibrium and repose.

 

But when we turn from the fundamental facts of simple rhythm to the phenomena of art we find straightway many other problems.

It is safe to say that no single phrase of music or line of poetry is without variation; more, that a rhythm without variation would be highly disagreeable. How must we understand these facts? It is impossible within the natural limitations of this chapter to do more than glance at a few of them.

 

First of all, then, the most striking thing about the rhythmical experience is that the period, or group, is felt as a unit.

“Of the number and relation of individual beats constituting a rhythmical sequence there is no awareness whatever on the part of the aesthetic subject….Even the quality of the organic units may lapse from distinct consciousness, and only a feeling of the form of the whole sequence remains.”<1> Yet the slightest deviation from its form is remarked. Secondly, every variation creates not only a change in its own unit, but a wave of disturbance all along the line. Also, every variation from the type indicates a point of accentual stress; the syncopated measure, for instance, is always strongly accented. All these facts would seem to be connected with the view of the importance of movement sensations in building up the group feeling. The end of each rhythm period gives the cue for the beginning of the next, and the muscle tensions are coordinated within each group; so that each group is really continuous, and would naturally be “felt” as one,—but being automatic, would not be perceived in its separate elements. On the other hand, it is just automatic reaction, a deviation from which is felt most strongly. The syncopated measure has to maintain itself against pressure, as it were, and thus by making its presence in consciousness felt more strongly, it emphasizes the fundamental rhythm form.

 

<1> R. MacDougall, “The Structure of Simple Rhythm Forms,”

Harv. Psychol. Studies, vol. i, p. 332.

 

This is well shown in the following passage from a technical treatise on expression in the playing of music. “The efforts which feeling makes to hold to…the shape of the first rhythm, the force which it is necessary to use to make it lose its desires and its habits, and to impose others on it, are naturally expressed by an agitation, that is, by a crescendo or greater intensity of sound, by an acceleration in movement.”<1>

If a purely technical expression may be pardoned here, it could be said that the motor image,<2> that is, the coordinated muscular tensions which make the group feeling of the fundamental rhythm, is always latent, and becomes conscious whenever anything conflicts with it. Thus it is that we can understand the tremendous rhythmical consciousness in that music which seems most to contradict the fundamental rhythm, as in negro melodies, and rag-time generally; and in general, the livening effect of variation. The motor tension, the “set” becomes felt the moment there is objective interference—just as we feel the rhythm of our going downstairs only when we fail to get the sensation we expect.

 

<1> M. Lussy, Traite de l’Expression Musicale, Paris, 1874, p. 7.

<2> Gestaltsqualitat, literally form-quality.

 

This principle of the motor image is of tremendous significance, as we shall see, for the whole theory of music. Let it be sufficient to note here that expression, in the form of Gestaltsqualitat, or motor image, is, as a principle, sufficient for the explanation of the most important factors in the experience of rhythm.

III

But we have dwelt too long on the general characteristics.

Although our examples have been drawn mostly from the field of music, the preceding principles apply to all kinds of rhythm, tactual and visual as well as auditory. It is time to show why the rhythm out of all comparison the strongest, most compelling, most full of emotional quality, is the rhythm of music.

 

It has long been known that there is especially close connection between sounds and motor innervations. All sorts of sensorial stimuli produce reflex contractions, but the auditory, apparently, to a much higher degree. Animals are excited to all sorts of outbreaks by noise; children are less alarmed by visual than by auditory impressions. The fact that we dance to sound rather than to the waving of a baton, or rhythmical flashes of light for instance—the fact that this second proposition is felt at once to be absurd, shows how intimately the two are bound together. The irresistible effects of dance, martial music, etc., are trite commonplaces; and I shall therefore not heap up instances which can be supplied by every reader from his own experience. Now all this is not hard to understand, biologically. The eye mediated the information of what was far enough away to be fled from, or prepared for; the ear what was likely to be nearer, unseen, and so more ominous. As more ominous, it would have to be responded to in action more quickly. So that if any sense was to be in especially close connection with the motor centres, it would naturally be hearing.

 

The development of the auditory functions points to the same close connection of sound and movement. Sounds affect us as tone, and as impulse. The primitive sensation was one of impulse alone, mediated by the “shake-organs.” These shake-organs at first only gave information about the attitude and movements of the body, and were connected with motor centres so as to be able to reestablish equilibrium by means of reflexes. The original “shake-organ” developed into the organs of hearing and of equilibrium (that is, the cochlea and the semicircular canals respectively), but these were still side by side in the inner ear, and the close connection with the motor centres was not lost. Anatomically, the auditory nerve not only goes to those parts of the brain whence the motor innervation emanates, and to the reflex centres in the cerebellum, but passes close by the vagus or pneumogastric nerve, which rules the heart and the vasomotor functions. We have then multiplied reasons for the singular effect of sound on motor reactions, and on the other organic functions which have so much to do with feeling and emotion.

 

Every sound-stimulus is then much more than sound-sensation.

It causes reflex contractions in the whole muscular system; it sets up some sort of cardiac and vascular excitation.

This reaction is in general in the direction of increased amplitude of respiration, but diminution of the pulse, depending on a peripheral vaso-constriction. Moreover, this vasomotor reaction is given in a melody or piece of music, not by its continuity, but for every one of the variations of rhythm, key, or intensity,—which is of interest in the light of what has been said of the latent motor image. The obstacle in syncopated rhythm is physiologically translated as vaso-constriction. In general, music induces cardiac acceleration.

 

All this is of value in showing how completely the attention-motor theory of rhythm applies to the rhythm of sounds. Since sound is much more than sound, but sound-sensation, movement, and visceral change together, we can see that the rhythmical experience of music is, even more literally and completely than at first appeared, an EMBODIED expectation. No sensorial rhythm could be so completely induced in the psychological organism as the sound-rhythm. In listening to music, we see how it is that we ourselves,