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Scan 208
An Encyclopedia of the Violin, 1925
10 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. Printed page 180. See the scan on archive.org.
1"Design corresponds to honesty and sincerity in painting" (Ingres). In the same author's History of Musical Notation, written together with Ernest David, he adds:
3"Since rhythm bears the same relation to music that design does to painting, we in turn declare that rhythm is the honesty of music. . . ."
5To this I might add that without rhythm music could not exist. Rhythm and balance are synonymous. A musician without rhythm is no more than an amateur, but an amateur without rhythm is a destroyer. Aristide Quintillian in his De Musica declares: "Time is the measure of movement and pausation," and again, "Rhythm is an aggregation of time arranged according to certain rules." Aristogenus, the disciple of Aristotle, regarded as the greatest musicologist of ancient Greece, said: "Rhythm is made recognizable to us, and perceptible to our senses by means of one or more measures. We do not constitute measure by means of indeterminate periods of time, but rather by periods fixed and determinable as regards their relative size and number, and the symmetry and order which reign among them. Nor do we constitute rhythm by means of indeterminate time-units, because all rhythms are formed by the assembling of determined measures. The essence of rhythm lies in the perception, by the listener, of a division, a dismemberment of the time or duration preferred, which the execution of a musical or poetic work may take." And Westphal, in his Elements of Musical Rhythm, defines rhythm as follows: "When we recognize a movement, we recognize it owing to the fact that its time or duration may be regularly divided into various small fragments or parts: we then say that it has a rhythm."
7Again Gaevert, in his Histoire de la Musique de l'Antiquité states: "The laws of beauty demand that the time occupied by the performance of a musical work be divided in such a manner that the feeling of the auditor is able to discern, without effort, a regularity in the various groups of sounds and of words, as well as in the periodical return of pausation. Such an order is nothing less than rhythm, the manifestation of the principle of unity, of symmetry applied to the arts of movement." And, according to Charles Lévêque, "Rhythm is order in time or measure."
9Lussy qualifies, in part, what has already been said by asserting: "It should not be thought, however, that it is enough to introduce large values of movement and pausation into a succession of sounds, in an irregular and fortuitous manner, in order to lend them meaning. It is necessary that these notes coincide with the physiological moments which impress upon our soul the sensation of repose, of an end; it is also necessary that the sounds be obedient to the laws of attraction, of appellation, which rule our tonal system." As Charles Gounod admirably put it, writing in "Le Ménestrel" of January 22, 1882: "Sounds in themselves alone no more make music than words alone constitute language. Words make a sentence, an intelligible phrase, only when
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