Beating Time & 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 ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionA History of Meter Theory, Or, the Rules of the RulesReading in the DarkPart I1. Beating TimeThemes in Meter Theory, 1500-1700The Theoretical Work of the BeatThe Organizing Principle of Meter Theory: Four Approaches"Honor Them All": On the Use (and Misuse?) of Meter Theory2. The Beat: A Technical HistoryA Technical and Physical Solution A Problem of ContinuityThe Techn? of the Beat.Re-reading Zarlino3. A Renewed Account of Unequal Triple MeterEqualityInequalityPart II4. Measuring MusicMeter, Measure, and Motion in Eighteenth-Century Music TheoryA Transformation in TimeA Multiplicity of MeasuresKirnberger's Contribution5. Techniques for Keeping TimeThe Problem of TempoTimekeeping Two Ways: 1. ChronometersTimekeeping Two Ways: 2. Taxonomies of Meter6. The Eighteenth-Century Alla BreveA Rather Vague IndicationLong-Note Music in the Eighteenth CenturyLong Notes in Eighteenth-Century MusicPart III7. The Reinvention of TempoA New Chronometer?Meter, Tempo, NumberLength Into Duration, Duration Into Length: A Crisis of MeasuresMaelzel's Metronome8. The Persistent Question of MeterThe Measure as MysteryMeter as Attention, Activity, AesthesisFétis and the FutureAppendicesBibliography

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 ... Grant offers his audience a much more integrated understanding of music and the broader social world, as well as a more specific understanding of the constraints upon musics temporal features in this era and what these constraints make possible. Interested readers will find ample reward.