Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Roger Mathew Grant is Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. A recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (PhD 2010) his research focuses on the relationships between eighteenth-century music theory, Enlightenment aesthetics, and early modern science. His journal articles have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory. A former Junior Fellow of the University of Michigan's Society of Fellows, he was the fourth musicologist ever to hold a fellowship in the forty-year history of the Society.

• Table of Contents ; Acknowledgements ; Introduction ; A History of Meter Theory, Or, the Rules of the Rules ; Reading in the Dark ; Part I ; 1. Beating Time ; Themes in Meter Theory, 1500-1700 ; The Theoretical Work of the Beat ; The Organizing Principle of Meter Theory: Four Approaches ; <"Honor Them All>": On the Use (and Misuse?) of Meter Theory ; 2. The Beat: A Technical History ; A Technical and Physical Solution ; A Problem of Continuity ; The Techn? of the Beat. ; Re-reading Zarlino ; 3. A Renewed Account of Unequal Triple Meter ; Equality ; Inequality ; Part II ; 4. Measuring Music ; Meter, Measure, and Motion in Eighteenth-Century Music Theory ; A Transformation in Time ; A Multiplicity of Measures ; Kirnberger's Contribution ; 5. Techniques for Keeping Time ; The Problem of Tempo ; Timekeeping Two Ways: 1. Chronometers ; Timekeeping Two Ways: 2. Taxonomies of Meter ; 6. The Eighteenth-Century Alla Breve ; A Rather Vague Indication ; Long-Note Music in the Eighteenth Century ; Long Notes in Eighteenth-Century Music ; Part III ; 7. The Reinvention of Tempo ; A New Chronometer? ; Meter, Tempo, Number ; Length Into Duration, Duration Into Length: A Crisis of Measures ; Maelzel's Metronome ; 8. The Persistent Question of Meter ; The Measure as Mystery ; Meter as Attention, Activity, Aesthesis ; Fetis and the Future ; Appendices ; Bibliography

In Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, Grant successfully integrates a constellation of philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic issues. He shows a remarkable command of period musical discourse in Latin, Italian, French, and German; the historical inferences he draws are compelling and carefully argued; and his breadth of study is remarkable ... Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era will appeal primarily to theorists, historians, and scholars of the history of ideas, though its insights are relevant to all lovers of European music from this era.