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VI COORDINATING RHYTHM Coordinating Rhythm TO COORDINATE ALL the factors and elements we have now studied in the preceding chapters we must enter into the real secret of Speech as a Power, identify ourselves with the central unifying factor which gathers together our technical knowledge and practice to produce the kind of speech which is at once effective and interesting enough for the audience to want to hear; arresting and provoking enough for them to want to understand; compelling -and inspiring enough for them to want to remember. That unifying factor is Rhythm. Page-57 Before we enter into the possible realms of rhythm, however, let us first review our technical apparatus. Our first concern was with the Respiration. Apart from the psychological understanding of respiration—the sincerity behind the use of breathing in the various circumstances of thought and emotion—we have to remind ourselves that the breath-supply provides the power which causes the vocal cords to vibrate. The resistance offered by the edges of the vocal cords must be sufficiently firm to balance the pressure of the exhaled breath. This is assisted by inhaling in small quantities, maintaining a fluid balance of "tidal air", breathing at frequent intervals to avoid the risk of having a breath-pressure too great for its control by the resistance of the vocal cords. Such undue pressure causes constriction of the extra-laryngeal muscles, which in their turn prevent the quality of tone of the resonators. The Resonance is further aided by opening the mouth freely, raising the soft-palate and allowing the lower jaw to " float " in a forward position.
The carrying quality of the voice is maintained by allowing a free flow of tone without effort, unbroken by over-excited movements of the mouth, such as is so often stressed in such unfortunate elocution classes where the students learn artificially exaggerated pronunciation of consonants. There should be a sufficiently restrained resistance of vocal tone to permit a smooth flow through the sentence.
Page-58 We have, then, three basic things to remember :
1)The exhaled breath resisted by the vocal cords forms voice and vocal tone, which is molded by the mouth to articulate words. 2)Remember to speak slowly at all times. Any nervous tension which urges you to hurry must be controlled by conscious pause and deliberately controlled breathing, for to hurry out of control means immediate inaudibility. 3)Remember that the formation of perfect vowels is as basic a necessity to effective speech production as exaggerated consonants are an obstruction. The average speaker speaks far too quickly to be heard effectively, and in consequence is not often very convincing; even if the subject be interesting, the wrong tone of voice can be emminently boring. Now we have arrived at the heart of the subject. Connected with and allied to speaking slowly is the realm of rhythm.
A shout, an excited exclamation, or even declamatory rhetoric, appeals to a certain type of
Page-59 people ready to be captured or impressed by a vital excitement, but usually it fails to have any lasting value on the majority of those of the audience who are open to hear and understand and perhaps remember. Rhythm is an inherent quality, fundamentally poised in everyone. In some it is apparent, in others latent; but even latent it can, nevertheless, be invoked by those who are sensitive to its various appearances, whether in surrounding nature, in terms of objective movement or in the inner worlds of thought and feeling. All life is an exuberance, " multi-coloured " rhythm expressing itself in form or non-form, infinite the movements of those worlds beyond the imagination of man. Perhaps the most direct way to get near to rhythm in language is to read poetry aloud until one feels an identification, not only with the sense-meaning, but with the sound-meaning. Rhythm is sound-movement, a sound-wave which carries the thought-movement in the word. And in the thought-movement there is a sound-image (which can be remembered) in which the musical tone-suggestion is carried to a higher level of cognition than the sense-level.
When poetry is chanted, intoned or sung as done by the ancients, in a proper manner, it is much more likely to be understood by more people; understood, but not necessarily mentally
Page-60 explained, for through the sound-values subtleties can be captured by the heart even though the intellect understands nothing at all. Speaking of Rhythm, Sri Aurobindo in ".The Future Poetry " 1 makes a very forceful distinction between the rhythm in intellectual lines of verse and the soul-expression of spiritual release found in the Gita. He quotes those sprightly-forcible lines of Browning's:
and the very intellectual lines of Pope :
and compares them with the Gita's :
Which also expresses the world sorrow, but where the difference in style and rhythm, the vowel quality and the distribution of consonants
Page-61 are all obvious elements pointing to the greater poetry without taking into account the substance of the words. It should not be thought, when we speak of sound-movement, that only metrical rhythm is meant; even with perfect technique that perfection is a part, i.e. the physical structure. It is the deeper and more subtle musical afflatus which in the finest poetry floods the metrical form and imbues it with an ecstasy of sound as to compel language to higher flights of expressiveness. " To improve one's sense of rhythm, one should read some of the great speeches of Shakespeare until there is that feeling that the true meaning of the words have been expressed. Another practical help is to read English hexameters. The hexameter, taken from the Greek, copied into Latin and again into modern languages, serves as a link between the fixed rhythm of poetic verse and the more complete freedom of prose. A good example is Longfellow's "Evangeline". Here are a few lines of my own composition which you might find amusing :
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