Why is rhythm an important feature in classical music?

Answer 1

Rhythm is the most important feature of any music. A simple thought experiment will bear this out. If there was no rhythm - i.e. if a musical sound like a note had no length - it wouldn't exist. On the other hand, if its length were infinite, you would only have one, because it could never be succeeded by another. (I'll leave the question of how it must also be infinitely old to the philosophers.) In order for musical sounds to exist at all, they must therefore exist in finite time. That means duration, and hence rhythm. The practical consequence of this is a fact I was taught in my enthnomusicology course during my music degree. The most prevalent music instrument is...human hands clapping. Conclusion: you can have duration without pitch (as Varese showed in his piece Ionisation (1929)), but not the other way around.

Having said which, rhythm is especially important in Classical Music because, like other parameters such as pitch and volume, it has been subject to often intensive experimentation and development in order to explore its possibilities. Listen to one of the minuets from Handel's Water Music (1717), for example, and then one of the most intense passages of the first movement of Mahler's 6th Symphony (1903-04), and you'll get the idea of how rhythm became more complicated as time went on. (That's something that's ebbed and flowed throughout the history of Western music. Earlier rhythms could be very complicated indeed.)