User:Shlishke/Meter notation

A long entry on early music meter in the talk page of the shaky entry List of musical works in unusual time signatures
Rhythm and Meter; Early Music (very long): note conclusion Some of the problems above are the extremely difficult distinction between time and meter--still "unsolved," a state of affairs that perhaps will never be solved. Since we certainly can't make a dissertation (let alone making any sense), I suggest that a graf or two boiling down the following points be made. The greatest metric shift in Western music, with dance music and some frottola, hymns, and chansons leading the way--a shift, one might add, without which this Wiki entry would not exist--is the development of a rhythmically stable work. "Around 1600 a dramatic change took place in Western rhythmic notation: a shift from mensural practices which had been in place since the 14th century to modern, orthochronic notation in which the proportional relationship between any two symbols in the notational system remains constant. As Rastall (A1982) observes, this was not accomplished all at once, and indeed rests had been orthochronic since the end of the 13th century. The emergence of modern rhythmic and metric notation involved more than the streamlining of proportional possibilities down to the binary logic now in use." As to "early music" (again, that in general before 1600), two points are worth considering: "On a larger scale, the use of constantly changing patterns of rhythm and/or shifting metres adds another level of structural complexity. Elliott Carter has developed and described the technique of ‘metric modulation’, which he uses in his percussion piece Canaries [ex. ref. del).] Of this excerpt Carter writes that ‘to the listener, this passage should sound as if the left hand keeps up a steady beat throughout the passage … while the right-hand part, made up of F-natural and C-sharp, goes through a series of metric modulations, increasing its speed a little at each change’ (F1977, p.349). Canaries has its antecedents in the use of a series of proportional changes in mensuration in pre-tonal music." Now, as to music before 1600. I'm not going to go into Christian chant, which serves no purpose here. Essentially, the art music of the time has it's rhythm declared by a progression of articulation, essentially where the dissonant contrapuntal-harmonic coincidences are and the breathing points of the word underlay. The phrases--are clearly understandable as such, and that understanding of them is notatable. Here comes the hard part. To the performers of the time, accentual stress of the sequence of phrases--the series of accents, which nowadays determine the time signature (leaving aside exceptions of articulation and, famously, jazz), can be marvelously and seamlessly ignored: the music notation had no time bars whatsoever; rather, the conductor would provide a constant down-up motion of his hands, known as a tactus. So, was all the music "down up"? No because of the fluidity of the notation then--what is known as mensural notation--with which the shifts in accent--the meter, are easily marked and read out. That's why serious performance groups learn early notation, because its depiction of the music can be read easily and clearly.
 * "The rules of counterpoint also played a part: perfect consonances fell on strong beats in medieval polyphony (with imperfect consonances, but not dissonances, also permitted to do so in Netherlandish Renaissance polyphony). However, the treatment of dissonance in Palestrina’s time is also regulated in terms of accent: passing and incidental dissonances fall regularly on weak beats, whereas syncopated dissonances fall equally regularly on strong beats; this style displays a certain restraint in its employment of accent. By the early 17th century, secular vocal and instrumental polyphony was employing a regular alternation of strong and weak beats, although free rhythm was still prevalent in solo song and chant; even in Bach’s fugues the rhythm remains free from any slavery to the bar-line."
 * The bulk of the following excerpt, on Elliot Carter, serves two puporse. Naturally it is geared toward issues I brought up in my "Stravinsky" article above. But its last line can conviently serve as a segue to the issue of the "non-4/4" pieces.

Now comes the punchline: Modern transcriptions of early "art" music, in order to mark these shifts of accentuation, should have have a mind-boggling number of written-down meters. Most singing transcriptions are, were they to be followed as true 4/4 works as marked, make no sense. Rarely, in some of the scholarly editons (no cite handy) that attempt to capture the correct performance of the works, a mind-boggling number of completely different meters appear, changing at every bar and, as a real mind-blower, the meters change differently for different altos, tenos, etc.

So should these little cuties all go in the List of musical works in unusual time signatures? Obviously not. A blurb is needed.

Thanks for reading this. Shlishke (talk) 06:33, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

References