BFi-75 &7 ^03 W*5t«Hfli HHB~" NHS&S PULSE AND EHYTHM. By MAEY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT. PHILADELPHIA, PA. [Reprinted from The Populab Science Monthly, September, 1903.] [Reprinted from The Populab Science Monthly, September, 1903.] PULSE AND EHYTHM. By MARY HALLOCK-GREENEWALT, PHILADELPHIA, PA. nnHE close connection between pulse and rhythm has been specu- -■- lated upon since the fourth century before Christ. Herophile, Avicenna, Savonarola, Saxon, Fernel and Samuel Hafen-Eefferus have successively conjectured that the rhythmic phenomenon of pulse is in some way responsible for our sense of 'beat.' The speculation was fascinating. It could not become convincing without the help of data capable of being furnished only by very recently invented instru- ments and by recently accumulated knowledge. A sense of rhythm, probably due to instinct, is found well developed low down in the animal series.* This fact is significant when one considers that the theory usually advanced and accepted is that physical activities of a regularly recurrent nature have created this sense in man. The beat of the pestle used by primitive man to crush grain, the blows of the flail, the rhythm of the quern and the spinning wheel, the rock of the cradle, and in short the entire series of industries where a regular beat or reciprocal motion suggests alternate action have been put forward as the probable origin of the dance, musical and verbal rhythm, and at length of the beat of music, f Tempting as is this theory which associates the origin of rhythm with the development of ordered human activity, a rhythmic sound, call or cry is first found coexistent with the first complete circulatory system, heart with valves and blood vessels. This first appears in the insect family and there too, in the saltatoria of the orthoptera (com- monly known as crickets, grasshoppers and locusts) appears this con- junction of hearing, ability to call or stridulate, a nervous system and valvular heart. The common existence of these phenomena does, not prove that the beat of the rudimentary insect heart led to rhythm, but it suggests, at least, that this combination has been subjectively fruit- ful of recurrent sound as a form of sexual and probably of pleasurable activity. Mr. S. H. Scudder has put down the songs of these little creatures in musical notation,! giving them after careful consideration the attribute of rhythm. Unfortunately the circulatory system of the insect world * ' Descent of Man,' Darwin, D. Appleton & Co., p. 566. f ' Bhythmus und Arbeit,' Karl Bucher, passim. $'The Songs of the Grasshoppers,' Am. Nat., Vol. II., p. 113. 426 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. has scarcely been investigated. As a curiosity, yet as a possible venture, a parallelism may be suggested between the stridulations of a cricket, which have been counted as occurring at the rate of between two and three chirps per second* and the number of pulse waves peculiar to very active insects or one hundred and fifty closures of the heart valves in one minute, f Inspecting in a very cursory manner the higher phylums of the animal kingdom, the authority of numerous investigators can be given for the perfect rhythmic quality of bird songs. The writer can vouch for it that the cackle of one guinea hen during an entire summer went with clock-like regularity at the rate of eighty-eight to ninety-two cackles per minute. The faster cackling being a laughably accurate sign of the growing excitement attendant on the laying of an egg, said by the owner to occur at about eleven o 'clock every morning. The scientific study of rhythm, so far as man is concerned, has been approached almost wholly from the side of its conjunction with literature. Looked at from that side, it is not strange that the testi- mony could never be mathematically exact and emphatic. The only data which are of sufficient accuracy to prove that the rhythmic phenomena of pulse first impressed on our consciousness that which can accurately be called rhythm, are to be found in the metronomic denotations of musical compositions. It is there and there only that the brain has been able systematically to externalize the rhythm most natural to it with a sense of method and order approximating instrumental exacti- tude and capable of an exact expression and measure in number. These furnish only a trace, but a trace sufficient when one keeps in mind the havoc that conscious intellect can always play with things strictly natural. While making a bibliographical search for anything treating of this musical side of the subject, one suggestive title only was found. It was under 'pulse' in the Larousse Encyclopedia and covered the subject to a degree alarming to a new and anxious investigator. It read ■ Nouvelle methode facile et curieuse pour connaitre le pouls par les notes de la musique. ' (New method, easy and curious for gauging the pulse by musical notes.) Francois Nicolas Marquet, Nancy, 1747. When found, the quaint little book proved lamentably insufficient. In its time there was neither metronome nor sphygmograph. In the introduction to this little treatise which in its day seems to have created quite a stir — ' amateurs in search of novelties bought it for fun, and kept it by good taste,' M. Marquet naively tries to disarm his critics by saying that he already seemed to hear them object: 'it is certainly a very bizarre matter this learning to know the pulse by musical notes,' adding, 'one could answer them, it is not more strange * Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., October 23, 1867. t'A Text -book of Entomology,' Packard, Macmillan, 1898, p. 401. PULSE AND RHYTHM. 427 to paint the pulse with notes than to paint the sound of music with those same notes; to paint numbers with figures, and finally to paint words with letters. ' In this way the good doctor confounds throughout the treatise the idea that music notes and measures could make a very good sign-board on which to denote exactly where a morbid pulse fails of being normal, and his discovery that a minuet of his time was usually placed at the same rhythmic rate per minute as accompanies a normal pulse, which pulse, for want of a better chronometer than the long hand of a clock, he places at one beat per second. This little work, imperfect as it is, and in spite of all its limita- tions, renders clear, tangible and visible the failure, already men- tioned, made by those who thus far have occupied themselves with the question, to give consideration to the statistics furnished by musical compositions through their metronomic denotations. Even the ear aided by the metronome and the pulse recorded by the sphygmograph need to prove the influence of the latter on the former, the unconscious record made in musical composition of the recollection by the mind from an indefinite number of beats per second of a certain stated num- ber, which repeats itself in one form of union after another by different composers at different periods and in different lands. The material from which statistics can be drawn is so unlimited that, for want of space, two examples only will be considered, the first dealing with the metronomic markings of the Beethoven Sonatas and the second with popular music. Out of forty-three metronomic markings, taken straight through from the beginning of the first volume of the Beethoven Sonatas — the four standard editions as a working basis — nineteen are set to a rhythm of seventy-two and seventy-six beats to a minute, a rate exactly that of the average normal, healthy, adult human pulse; a pulse given by the best authorities as lying betwen seventy and seventy-five pulsations in the same time. According to fuller statistics, the physical pulse, varied by the time of day and the effect of meals, ranges from a little below sixty to a little over ninety. Within this limit all the rhythmic markings of these sonatas lie. Three standing at fifty-six and fifty- eight beats per minute, contrary to expectation, belonging to fast move- ments undoubtedly marked slower on account of the difficulty the fingers would experience in performing the notes as fast as the imagi- nation would direct. The average of the entire one hundred and forty- seven markings given by the four editors, Von Biilow, Steingraber, Kohler and Germer, was sixty-four and four tenths rhythmic beats per minute. The one sonata marked by Beethoven himself bearing the figures 69, 80, 92, 76, 72 for the different movements, Allegro, Vivace, Adagio, Largo, Allegro risoluto. 428 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. If with the eye fixed on the second-hand of a watch or a clock the long meter doxology be sung, every one of the equally accented notes entering simultaneously with the tick of each consecutive second, it will become at once apparent that the melody is delivered at a rhythmic rate of sixty beats to the minute. Should one in the same breath hum Yankee-doodle, sounding each of its accented notes, at the same rate, it will be found that these two melodies, standing at the extremes of the sublime and the ridiculous, the one in character slow, the other fast, the first combining the utmost dignity and breadth, the second ludi- crously vapid and thoughtless, are both set to precisely the same length of rhythmic time by the clock. In the same manner the adagios, allegros, prestos of the great master's sonatas unfold to pretty much the same span of a passing moment. In his sonata 'Les Adieux,' op. 81, the adagio or slow movement and the allegro or fast movement are both set to one rhythmic unit to the second. The impression of slow- ness or rapidity in the music is due rather to the character of the con- text and the number of notes to be played in the divisions within the minute than to the actual clock time it takes to perform the rhythmic unit. Seventeen letters were addressed to as many band-masters asking them for the 'beat' iisually used in their conducting. The answers invariably brought 'from 64 to 72 rhythmic beats per minute,' that being probably the time to which countless soldiers had found it most convenient and agreeable to march. Those wishing to investigate on their own account will find it interesting to clutch at their pulse, whenever a whistling street boy passes, and even a jangling hotel piano might in the same connection -have sometimes a 'reason for being.' More often than accident warrants, it will be found that these also ' with nature 's heart in tune ' were ' concerting harmonies. ' Metronomic Markings per Rhythm of the Different Movements of Twelve Beethoven Sonatas. c4 oi 1— 1 CO d 6 CO o4 CO 6 6 CO t^ GO OS § 1—1 oq OJ i>^ r-T Hi W t- t~ of of t» CO w OJ CO 03 m w m in p P P P P P p P« d. p< Ph P- d, p-i P* Ph Ph Ph Ph o O O o O o O o O o O o <£ of cf cf cf cf cf if £ cf cf cf -*j -u -l-J -t-> -IJ +J -IJ -t3 H-> +J