Music: Rhythmic Engineering

When Joseph Schillinger, an energetic little Russian, bustled into the U.S. to teach his “scientific method” of music composition, he hit it just right. The harassed jazz composers and arrangers on the frenzied production lines of Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood and the radio studios were looking for somebody just like him. George Gershwin became a steady customer; so did his buddy, Oscar Levant. Soon many able musicians (Jesse Crawford, Benny Goodman, Vernon Duke) were juggling rhythms and harmonies into endless combinations. Long-haired music schools eschewed Schillinger and all his works: their students had plenty of time to court the muse.

Last week, 17 years after Schillinger came to New York and two years after his death, Manhattan’s classic-minded Juilliard School of Music cagily tested the Schillinger method on its summer students.* Behind its stately facade, soft-voiced, bespectacled Executive Director Arnold Shaw of the Schillinger Society gave the first Schillinger lecture in an American music school. His objective: to prepare 35 music teachers and students for 1950, when Schillingerites predict that orthodox composers will be old-hat and “pure music” will be created by music engineers on machines (like the Rhythmicon invented by Schillinger).

The Schillinger “scientific method” of composition, Shaw said, had its beginning in the teachings of the Greek philosopher-mathematician Pythagoras and of Johann

Sebastian Bach’s teacher. A Schillinger composer uses numbers for musical notes and rhythms, and geometrical figures for harmonies. He chooses a combination of numbers and geometrical figures which pleases his fancy, then plots this combination on graph paper to make a blueprint that looks promising. The blueprint, transcribed into musical notation, is the piece of music the “engineer” set out to construct. Shaw promised that the Schillinger system could provide 10,000 rhythmic combinations from the 19 basic rhythms used by Mozart and Beethoven.

White-haired Juilliard Director George A. Wedge had no fears that his students would be metamorphosed into engineers. He said cautiously: “I thought we ought to see what it’s all about. A student can get many interesting ideas from the Schillinger method . . . but he needs a firm classical foundation first. [The course] will not be included in our winter curriculum.”

*Several musical cuts below Juilliard’s winter scholars.