Hannah Eldridge
Assistant Professor of German, UW-Madison
In this talk, I show that there are two conflicts running through Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on rhythm that prove illuminating for contemporary understandings of rhythm. Shaped by Nietzsche’s amalgamation of cultural and intellectual influences, the conflicts in his work uncover—and are the result of—tensions or paradoxes internal to the conceptual field of rhythm itself as it is located at the intersection of culture, history, and the body. In Nietzsche’s work, this rhythm-internal tension takes roughly the following forms: first, Nietzsche both argues that Ancient Greek and Latin metrical and rhythmic resources are irrevocably lost to modern culture and gives advice for replicating Ancient bodily effects of rhythm and tempo, especially in his discussions of style and reading. Second, Nietzsche valorizes two kinds of rhythm across his career: he praises both macro-rhythms structures to the “Periodenbau” of Eduard Hanslick and the small-scale, leitmotiv-based, Wagnerian handling of rhythm for their physiological and cultural efficacy. Nietzsche’s conflicting rhythms thus highlight competing claims that persist in (but are not always acknowledged by) contemporary debates on rhythm: rhythm seems both to create direct physiological effects and always to be culturally and historically mediated. Taking the conflicts within Nietzsche seriously foregrounds the complicated interactions between culture, history, and physiology in the ways we describe and engage with rhythm as a practice and in how we experience it.
Posts
