Steele, Joshua. On the Melody and Measure of Speech.
Joshua Steele is known for his attempt to use an adjusted version of musical notation to represent the “melody and measure,” or tone and time, of oral delivery. His essay, republished in 1779 under the title Prosodia Rationalis, aims to blend “the study of music and language together” (xvi), and builds on the premise that speech is essentially a variety of music, or melody, and can be studied as such. Steele takes as his point of departure a short chapter in James Burnett, Lord Monboddo’s 1729 publication Of the Origin and Progress of Language, a chapter on “the ancient accents” arguing “that they were real notes of music, distinct from the quantity of the syllable” (Burnett vii). Steele develops a system of notation for the melody of the voice, which he claims is unique from instrumental music in that it “moves rapidly up or down by slides” (4) instead of incrementally by notes. The speaking voice, unlike the musical instrument, does not dwell “ distinctly, for any perceptible space of time, on any certain level or uniform tone” (4). His system accounts for this by substituting sloping or curving lines for the round and square heads on the music stave. He also adds various symbols indicating “quantity” (or time spent on a word), emphasis, or volume.
While Steele’s Melody and Measure of Speech is considered a seminal work in the elocution movement of the late 1700s, Steele himself saw the work as intervening in conversations concerning orthography and alphabet reform. He aimed to promote a “rational orthography” in which the letters of the alphabet actually expressed “all the lingual sounds of the European languages at least” (xiii). Steele’s wish to rectify what he sensed as an incongruity between the English alphabet and “our natural elementary sounds” (xiii) makes his essay an important precursor for nineteenth-century attempts to notate the sounds of speech, for example Isaac Pitman’s A Manual of Phonography; or Writing by Sound (1837) and Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech (1867). I am interested in these works as potential influences on or interlocutors with authors like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’s notation system also works to provide a kind of score for poetic pronunciation. I am also interested in examining Steele’s Melody and Measure of Speech in connection with the metapoetic musical instrument poetry of the Romantics and Victorians (from Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” to Browning’s “Abt Vogler”).
