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Meter in Music

Performance, Perception, and Notation

by George Houle

The symbols used in the notation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music are tantalizingly similar to those of modern notation, but their meanings can be very different. The right musical pronunciation is avidly sought by today's scholars and performers and by an increasingly demanding modern audience. Transcribing earlier notation into our modern system, in which time signatures and bar lines indicate regular accents and dynamic stress, distorts music that may have been conceived quite differently.


Using theoretical treatises and instruction manuals of the period, George Houle provides a practical guide to the performance of Baroque and early Classic-period music, including discussions of notes inegales, keyboard fingerings, woodwind tonguings, and string bowings. Creating a persuasive beat, he advises, requires a paradoxical mixture of precision and flexibility that avoids both mechanical regularity and unpredictable caprice.


These principles are demonstrated on an unusual cassette tape, available separately. Realized by means of a computer program, it reconstructs fifteen examples of music from the late eighteenth century, reproducing not only the melodies but the metrical articulations of these pieces. When performed according to the conventions of its own time, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music has a wonderful lilt and grace and a compelling vitality.

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Table of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Plates
  • Indroduction
  • I. The Origins of the Measure in the Seventeenth Century
  • II. Time Signatures in the Eighteenth Century
  • III. Rhythmopoeia: Quantitative Meters in Poetry and Music
  • IV. Quantitas Intrinseca: The Perception of Meter
  • V. Articulation of Quantitative Meter
  • VI. Accent as Measure Articulation and as Measure Definition
  • Appendix: Rhythmopoeia According to Johann Mattheson and Wolfgang Caspar Printz
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Metadata

  • isbn
    9780253055514
  • publisher
    Indiana University Press
  • publisher place
    Bloomington, Indiana USA
  • restrictions
    CC-BY-NC-ND
  • rights
    Copyright © Trustees of Indiana University
  • rights holder
    Indiana University Press
  • rights territory
    World
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