Spencer Heath Archive

Item 848

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

December 1955

There seems to be a close relationship between rhythm and rationality. Order and rhythm are closely related, and order and rationality are closely related. So when things are happening in some rhythmical manner, they can form even multiple numbers with relation to one another — without splitting off into fractions, as when musical sounds are carried on simultaneously. If they have specific rhythms, then there can /be/ specific ratios between them. Then there can be harmony. But where they lack rhythm, then it is impossible to have them organized with respect to one another in chords, or in harmony. Of course melody is similar too, because melody is a succession of rhythms one after the other, always bearing some kind of even number relationship. So that we might say that melody is moving harmony. Harmony is rather in the nature of a stasis (?) relationship, or a simultaneity between the elements of the harmony, whereas rhythm is characterized by the successiveness of its elements following in some rhythmic pattern one after another.

It all goes to show that whether you are examining an eel or an alligator, a flower or a biological cell, a musical note or a poetic stanza, whatever one examines, he finds there the same basic relationships and always a dominant tendency for those rhythmic, harmonic, rational relationships to prevail above those which are dis-rhythmic (if there is such a word) and collisional — frictional — which always tend toward disintegration and so have the contrary tendency /from/ that which is to prevail and from that which is necessarily by its nature the dominant trend.

You know, there is an aesthetic reaction to rhythm too — the sailors’ chantey, the stevedores’ ballads …