timelets

Rhythm has always been an imprinting device, and remains one to this day. That is why so many rules and aphorisms are cast as jingles. (Cross at the green,/Not in between; or Red sky at morning:/Sailor, take warning!; or Early to bed and early to rise/Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.) It is why no medieval treatise on anything from shipbuilding to organum-singing was without rhyming rules. It is why the poet Leonius, who may or may not have been Leonin, gave as his reason for writing his 14,000 lines of biblical verse that it helped ‘‘the mind, which, delighted by the brevity of the poetry and by the song, may hold it more firmly.’’

--- Richard Taruskin. Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century.

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