Gertrude Stein’s Baroque Beats: Measuring Counterpoint and the Science of Rhythm

At the turn of the twentieth century, discourses of rhythm came to stand in for an embodied self underwritten by scientific understandings of music. This article demonstrates how Stein’s work complicates our understanding of this connection, in The Making of Americans, by interrogating rhythmic repetition in ways illuminated by a consideration of ideas of musical counterpoint that emphasize multiple, simultaneous lines of melody. In this it offers one avenue of departure from the way that rhythm was seen as an “authentic” and transliteral representation of the body. Considering counterpoint as a figure for mechanical rhythm/composition technique, Stein’s work challenges the bodily paradigms of organic wholeness and liberal individuality, countering the discourse of a natural embodiment of “right” rhythm that in Stein’s era becomes an authoritative standard against which some bodies are constructed as deviant and pathological. This essay also considers the way that in Tender Buttons Stein’s text takes up both the scientific discourses and the measuring procedures that work to pathologize cognition. Where such discourses underwrite the transparent naturalness of the body, she counters them by highlighting their artifice.