Re: A note which is three measures long

[Simon Albrecht]

On 02.09.2017 00:34, David Kastrup wrote:
> > > Mensural music tends to be a lot less beat-centric (and chord-centric)
> > > than later music.
> > I used to think that as well, and many people did, and do. For several
> > reasons, I don’t anymore:
> > 1) There’s the „notationskundliche“ (‘notationological’…) aspect,
> > which I already summarized in this thread: Composers first wrote
> > scores with barlines and ties on slates, then extracted parts (without
> > barlines) and erased the score.
> So?  Engineers use rulers for making technical drawings but that does
> not mean that you need to glue the rulers to the page or that something
> not drawn on checkered paper isn't a technical drawing.  Composer
> tallying tools and execution scores are different things.

But doesn’t it say something important about how the music was thought 
about? The division of a piece in tempora always scans (in the sense of 
‘a verse scans’) in this kind of music – it’s a revolution when e.g. in 
Monteverdi (Lamento d’Arianna) it doesn’t anymore.

> > 2) One can equally argue that, without barlines, performers have to
> > think_more_, not less about the tactus, than if they were written.
> Sure, until things fall into place.  But if you have a polyrhythmic
> situation and a voice gets shifted by a quarter, you don't want to hack
> its inherent rhythm into unrecognizable pieces just to make it better
> sight-readable for musicians refusing to practise.  It loses its_inner_
> structure in that manner.

That situation you describe sounds more like 20th century than like 16th 
century to me.

> > 3) IMO much 19th-century music is hardly different from much
> > 16th-century music in that the real intrigue is in the suspense
> > created by stresses against the tactus; if the tactus is not present
> > at all, this suspense gets lost.
> The "tactus" in mensural music is far less absolute.  If a theme is
> shifted by a quarter note in a voice in mensural music and you hear it
> without the others, the shift will be hardly if at all perceptible
> because you_don't_  stress it "against the tactus" but rather keep its
> place in reference to the other voices.  In 19th century music, the
> metric relation will usually still hit you in the face, and that is
> reflected in the notation.

Of course, if e.g. a /soggetto/ in semibreves is imitated starting a 
minima later, the second entry shouldn’t be sung as ‘hard’ syncopations, 
but still be sung cantabile and according to word stresses.  But my 
point is that it would be wrong anyway to infer the former just from use 
of bar lines.  (Ultimately, there’s no way around being acquainted with 
the style in order to give a good performance.)

> > 4) It is an important virtue (for a large part of ‘classical’
> > repertoire) to make the music not sound as if encaged in equal
> > cages. So performers need to learn making music/in spite of/  the bar
> > lines anyway.
> It's not just the bar lines but also hacking durations into tied pieces
> at_every_  metric division.

Which is why I dislike editions of e.g. Schütz placing barlines after 
the semibreve instead of after the breve (the latter being done in the 
first scientific edition by Spitta, the former e.g. by the Stuttgarter 
Schütz-Ausgaben of Hänssler/Carus).

> That makes it rather hard for the
> executioner to bring out the_inner_  rhythmic and thematic structure
> without hanging every note from the rigid meter.

In my experience, the difficulty is rather outweighed by not losing any 
time with singers being confused by lack of bar lines (not to speak of 
the lost sympathies one faces as choral conductor if they have 
difficulty deciphering the rhythms in the first place). Now you could 
argue that this means adapting the music to reading habits stemming from 
19th century repertoire, but that’s ignoring the authentic practice of 
16th century Partitur.

Best, Simon