Margaret Fisher examines Ezra Pound’s Great Bass as a theory of rhythm and rhythmic influence against the backdrop of seminal works on harmony from medieval times to the twentieth century: Dante, Franco of Cologne, Thomas Campion, Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Hermann von Helmholtz, Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, among others. In this setting, Pound’s great bass joins the long-standing practical and theoretical inquiry concerning the bass part and bass function in music, itself part of a larger ongoing investigation of human perception informed by musical cognition.
This is the second of two volumes on the relationship of music to the poetry of Ezra Pound.
