Parallelism (rhetoric)

Parallelism means giving two or more parts of one or more sentences a similar form to create a definite pattern, a concept and method closely related to the grammatical idea of parallel construction or structure, which can also be called parallelism.

Parallelism as a rhetorical device is used in many languages and cultures around the world in poetry, epics, songs, written prose and speech, from the folk level to the professional. It is very often found in Biblical poetry and in proverbs in general.

Forms of parallelism

Parallelisms of various sorts are the chief rhetorical device of Biblical poetry in the Tristich and in multiples of Distich parallels and also in the poetry of many other cultures around the world, particularly in their oral traditions.Robert Lowth coined the term parallelismus membrorum (parallelism of members, i.e. poetic lines) in his 1788 book, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrew Nation. Roman Jakobson pioneered the secular study of parallelism in poetic-linguistic traditions around the world, including his own Russian tradition.

Parallelism

Parallelism may refer to:

Parallelism (philosophy)

In parallelism, mental events and physical events are perfectly coordinated by God; so that when a mental event such as Sally's decision to walk across the room occurs, simultaneously Sally's body heads across the room, in the absence of a direct cause-effect relation between mind and body. Mental and physical events are just perfectly coordinated by God, either in advance (as per Gottfried Leibniz's idea of pre-established harmony) or at the time (as in the Occasionalism of Nicolas Malebranche).

Parallelism is a theory related to dualism which suggests that although there is a correlation between mental and physical events there is no causal connection. The body and mind do not interact with each other but simply run alongside one another, in parallel, and there happens to be a correspondence between the two but neither cause each other. That is to say that the physical event of burning my finger and the mental event of feeling pain just happen to occur simultaneously — one does not cause the other. An example given by Janice Thomas is one of a punctual student who always arrives on time for his classes. One of his classes begins at four, so whenever he arrives in the room for that particular class a clock strikes four. However, it is not his arrival that causes the clock to chime — the two just happen to coincide. An appeal is made to God, as it is believed that at the beginning of time, God sets up a mental chain of events and a physical chain of events and ensures in his construction of them that they will always run in parallel.

Voicing (music)

In music composition and arranging, a voicing is the instrumentation and vertical spacing and ordering of the pitches in a chord: which notes are on the top or in the middle, which ones are doubled, which octave each is in, and which instruments or voices perform each.

Voicing is "the manner in which one distributes, or spaces, notes and chords among the various instruments" and spacing or "simultaneous vertical placement of notes in relation to each other."

For example, the following three chords are root-position C major triads voiced differently:

All three voicings above are in root position, while the first is in close position, the most compact voicing, and the second and third are in open position, which includes wider spacing. In triadic chords, close root position voicing is the most compact voicing in thirds which has the root in the bass. Open and closed harmony are harmony and harmonization constructed from open and close position chords, respectively.

Many composers, as they developed and gained experience, became more enterprising and imaginative in their handling of chord voicing. For example, the theme from the andante movement of Beethoven’s early Piano Sonata No. 10 (1798), presents chords mostly in closed position: