Music, Culture and Society: Stuart Grant
8 March 2008
On the One: Fundamental Rhythm
Stuart Grant
According to John Dewey, “rhythm is a universal scheme of existence” which “holds science and art in kinship”. Rhythm is a most fundamental ontological underpinning of human experience. But the term rhythm is used to designate a diverse, different, seemingly unrelated phenomena. The rhythms of day and night, sleep and wakefulness, the four seasons, walking, running, breath and blood, birth, senescence and death, menstruation, the moon and the tides, are rudiments of our social structures. Psychologists and biologists have studied rhythm from a systematic psycho-physical perspective, revealing how behavioural and mental structures emerge from biological and natural rhythms. Anthropologists have studied how musical and ritual rhythms express and give form to cultural and social phenomena. Philosophers have written about poetry and time as an essence of the human. Still, there is debate about what constitutes rhythm; what is rhythmic in rhythm, what makes rhythm rhythm?
This paper outlines how a phenomenological/intersubjective study of rhythm - musical, temporal, social, cultural, biological and natural – first from a theoretical perspective (using a worldly Schützian social phenomenological frame), then from a first and second person reporting conducted as a group phenomenological enquiry, and finally reducing to a transcendental/phenomenological study - might provide some eidetic constants of what we mean when we talk about rhythm, and give insight into how these different levels of understanding of natural, subjective and intersubjective rhythmic processes understood as rhythmic are intertwined to produce time, self and world.
Stuart Grant recently completed a PhD at the Dept of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney. His thesis Gathering to Witness, was a group phenomenological enquiry into being in Audience. His primary research interests are in the application of practical phenomenological methodologies in the study of performance, and Time and Performance.