Beethoven writes his scherzos, and some very powerful other movements, in the shortest possible bars, and it is often difficult to tell whether the first of such bars is a main accent or an anacrusis. In the first movement of the C minor sonata (op. zo, No. 1) when we reach bar 2 2 it becomes manifest that bar 9 must have been in anacrusis; but we cannot have noticed that at the time, for when theorists go back to bar i and say that that initial bump was in anacrusis we can only smile. In three late works Beethoven helps the players by the words Ritmo di tre battute and Ritmo di quattro battute. The most famous of these pas sages is in the scherzo of the ninth symphony. Why did Beethoven not use there 4. or 1-2- bars so that his ritmo di tre battute be came self-evident as a change to 4 ? Because if you wish to ride this Pegasus you must please to rise on your stirrups once in Beethoven's bar, and not only once in 3 or 4. The change to 3-bar rhythm is obvious enough; but the return to 4 is not, as Grove said, effected by the drums , but comes where nobody can possibly detect it. And Beethoven, having helped the conductor at this point, is quite content, as in earlier works passim, that the listen ers should gradually become aware that the 3-bar swing is no longer in being. In the trio, Beethoven wishing to indicate that 2 of its crotchets correspond to 3 of the scherzo, first wrote in I time. But this made the lilt as unrecognizable as the true propor tions of Iceland at the top of a map on Mercator's projection. So he changed it to alla-breve bars The common sense of the whole matter is that hard accents and soft accents are equally liable in the long run to obliterate the distinction between the first and the third of four beats, and may go far to weaken that between the first and the second. We shall never find that Beethoven's short bars will fit any one interpretation throughout a piece, nor shall we often be able to fix the point at which the rhythmic angle is shifted. And when we have fixed everything some overlap will upset us or some extra bar make us hold our breath. Four-bar rhythm is more important to music than limericks are to literature, but the limerick is hardly more adequate or historically qualified to be taken as the fundamental basis for rhythm. And we must not take a lofty timeless view of rhythmic inequalities and changes. Farmer Giles is mistaken in the idea that the lady he finds sketching in the woods where you can't see round the corner would find a better subject on the top of a hill where you can see six counties.
6. Older Musical Rhythms.—In measuring the distance between the musical rhythms, the most familiar to us and those of the i6th and earlier centuries, the first thing we must dismiss is our strong body-rhythm. Only the lightest ballets and fa-las of our great madrigalists have any such element. The greater part of of Palestrina's Stabat Mater, which is as wonderful in rhythm as it is in harmony.
The music of the second line is identical with that of the first, and both lines are an exact quantitative rendering of the verses, with longs twice the size of shorts. The time signature tells us that the breve contains 2 semibreves and the semibreve two minims. Accordingly the modern editor draws bar-strokes at regular breve-distances throughout the score. Then comes the modern choir-master, warm from a rehearsal of Be Not Afraid in Elijah, and beats four in a bar, down, left, right, up, while the dutiful double choir sings the T6th century polyphony is held together by a time-system which merely counts semibreves and settles whether the semi breve is to be perfect and equal to 3 minims or imperfect and equal to 2, and also whether three or only two semibreves are to go to a breve. The law of accent holds with pairs of minims about as strongly as in modern music, but it is already very much weakened with pairs of semibreves. Examine the first two lines But now let each singer, at a starting signal from the con ductor, merely move one finger regularly up and down in minims, downwards for accented beats and upwards for unaccented. It
will then be found perfectly easy to override these gentle accents From this we can see Victoria's Miltonic art of finishing a big paragraph. The lower voices enjoy their own rhythms until the slow swing of the soprano draws the bass along with it. Then the alto joins, and the tenor is compelled to regard his own rhythm as a syncopation against this majority.
Little has been said so far about syncopation, and little now remains to be said. Its main point, even in the i6th century, as Ex. 7 shows, is that it requires a strong body-rhythm to contra dict. A common fallacy of self-centred composers is to write syncopations that never encounter opposition at all. We must not confuse this with the legitimate case of a rhythm the mean ing of which first appears later in the course of the music, nor with the case of an intentional vagueness. Nor, to return to the i6th century, must we put the unanimous speech-rhythm synco pations of Ex. 6 into the same category as those of the tenor at the end of Ex. 7.
Triple time in the i6th century was very different from what it. is in music with a strong body-rhythm. For one thing, it con The complexity is illusory, for the ear makes nothing of it, and the same is the case with the capacity of the ancient time-system of mode, time and prolation to multiply triple rhythms up to 27 beats. The fact that the process was by multiplication shows at once that no real rhythmic effects are concerned, and that the system is only a device by which the long-suffering tenors may count out the enormous notes of some unrecognizable canto fermo. If we want genuine highly compound times we must leave these multiplication tables and study the last movement of Beethoven's sonata Op. III, where the theme and first variation are in triple time divided by 3 (A) ; the second variation divides the half beat by 3, producing H (which Beethoven misnames the third variation divides the quarter-beats, producing it (misnamed H) ; and the fourth variation returns to time and divides it by a uniform triplet vibration of 27 notes to a bar, afterwards surmounted by the unmeasured vibration of a trill. All this is sublime in its cogent clearness.
Genuine complexity was achieved by Palestrina in the second Kyrie of his Missa "L'homme arme," a work as beautiful as it is ingenious. But Mozart achieved something unsurpassed in the ballroom scene in Don Giovanni, putting his vigorous body rhythms to the supreme test of making the characters actually dance and pass remarks in them.
7. Recent Rhythmic Developments.—Rhythms other than binary and ternary cannot develop a very strong ictus, though Hoist manages in the ballet of The Perfect Fool to make some good dance-rhythms of 8. But they tend to flow like speech rhythms, and they are very reluctant to change their pattern. A rhythm of 5 falls into either 3+2 or 2+3. The famous 5-time movement in Tschaikowsky's Pathetic symphony is 2+3 and is in absolutely square 8-bar rhythm throughout. Again 7-time will be some form of 4 and 3, or will suggest 8 with a beat clipped. Ravel, in his pianoforte trio, showed that it is possible to divide 8 into 3+2+3 so inveterately that no listener can possibly hear it as 4+4. The effect is excellent, and other versions of it are used in a much quicker tempo and with more variety by Hoist in his Fugal Overture. But we must call things by their right names and not say that a thing is complex when it clings like grim death to its one pattern and falls into phrases of 2+2 for pages together. The Pantoum of Ravel's trio blends an impish I with a sanctimonious -I very amusingly. An early piano forte sonata by Cyril Scott attempts to get away from all regu larities. Its 13s and 3s do not always succeed in avoiding straight ening out into plain 16 = 4 X 4 ; and when successful are con scientious rather than impulsive. The rhythms of Greek tragedy, interpreted syllabically, are suggestive, and so are many oriental rhythms. But they are not body-rhythms; and it may be doubted whether any great increase in variety of strong body-rhythms is imminent at present. (D. F. T.)