INTRODUCTION

The notation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music is often a puzzle to performers. The symbols of notation appear tantalizingly similar to modern ones, but their meanings are not, a fact that can lead to bewilderment and misinterpretation. Yet when the original notes are translated into their equivalents in modern notation, as in any phonetic pronunciation scheme, something vital is lost. By learning to read the original notation correctly, one can enter more closely into the composer’s thoughts and his performers’ traditions.

The right musical pronunciation is sought avidly today by scholars and performers because the music is so rewarding when the language is spoken correctly, and also because there is an increasingly demanding modern audience. Understanding the language makes it possible both to perform from and to edit the original notation; a knowledge of musical meter is crucial to this understanding.

Meter is considered to be the regular flow of the beat, its subdivisions or pulses, and the organization of the beat into bars or measures. Larger rhythmic units, phrases and periods, which encompass many measures, are usually not regular. They are perceived as the resolution of tensions produced when some of the smaller metrical units are rendered more prominent than others, but the dynamic artistic irregularity in the construction of phrases and periods is founded on a substructure of regular pulses, beats, and measures.

Although little attention to larger rhythmic units is found among theorists and writers until the late eighteenth century, the notation, perception, and performance articulation of meter is a topic few omit from their discussions and instructions. The reason for this interest may have been their heightened consciousness of music’s metrical flow.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, musicians frequently discussed meter in terms that are obscure to us, such as quantitas notarum intrinseca, or “good” and “bad” notes, but these terms have the virtue of defining the beat and measure without reference to accent or any other articulation. Performers were left free to enhance the listener’s perception of meter by using a variety of articulation techniques, according to the medium of performance and the style of the music.

As the mensural tactus was replaced by a beat that could be slower or faster in response to diverse notation symbols, the beats and measures became units of notation upon which articulation formulas were based. These formulas were learned by instrumentalists as part of an elementary performance technique and were the basis of articulation and phrasing, akin to a singer’s use of pronunciation. The effect of the various degrees of separate articulation that could be used for each note is lively and clear and establishes a basic continuity through the music’s varied rhetorical figures.

Accent, defined as dynamic stress by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, was one of the means of enhancing the perception of meter, but it became predominant only in the last half of the eighteenth century. The idea that the measure is a pattern of accents is so widely held today that it is difficult to imagine that notation that looks modern does not have regular accentual patterns. Quite a number of serious scholarly studies of this music make this assumption almost unconsciously by translating the (sometimes difficult) early descriptions of meter into equivalent descriptions of the modern accentual measure.

Articulation of meter and melodic figures in nineteenth- and twentieth- century music is carefully specified by the composer in his score, and if he has been lax in this regard, the deficiency is remedied by the editor of his collected works. The music’s public appearance is, so to speak, with hair combed, buttons fastened, and tie straight. Notation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appears to be not so well groomed because of its greater reliance on the performer’s traditional articulation formulas.

Notation summarizes the composer’s individual vision of music as well as the performance traditions of his time. Fortunately, seventeenth- and eighteenth- century music is generally allowed to appear in modern editions without transcription, so that the composer’s vision and hints are preserved and the performer can learn to read them.

The performer must come to this music with more than just the right attitude, right historical understanding, and right instrument. Without proper performance technique, a vision of the inspiration of this music cannot be found. This achievement can only result from careful, informed preparation, founded on the directions and comments in the technical manuals of the time. It is not a simple matter to replace modern habits and techniques, themselves painfully learned and joyfully mastered, with others that may seem awkward and clumsy until they are mastered as well.

A performer who can impart to music the lilt, grace, and drive of the underlying structure of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music has command of a powerful force. Creating a persuasive beat in performance requires a paradoxical mixture of precision and flexibility that avoids both mechanical regularity and incoherence. Otherwise, the music can seem to be either machinelike or a series of small music-rhetorical figures, lacking architectural integrity. With an understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perceptions of meter and a mastery of the musical techniques of the time, we will be better able to perform this music with the verve, passion, and authority it deserves.