Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/431

Rh 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 minute 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 limitations, renders clear, tangible and visible the failure, already mentioned, 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 recolleotion by the mind from an indefinite number of beats per second of a certain stated number, 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 between 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 eighty. 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 movements undoubtedly marked slower on account of the difficulty the fingers would experience in performing the notes as fast as the imagination would direct. The average of the entire one hundred and forty-seven markings given by the four editors. Von Bülow, Steingräer, Köhler 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.