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18 � Meter and Tempo george houle We call the musical style of the seventeenth century “Baroque” in order to acknowledge the extravagant, glorious, sometimes even bizarre quality of this brilliant and emotional music. Innovations in the notation of seventeenth-century music gradually changed Renaissance mensural notation to accommodate this expressive and dramatic style. Three significant aspects of mensural notation changed: (1) the tactus, a down-and-up gesture of the hand to which note values were tied, was increasingly described as having various speeds, and over the course of the seventeenth century it encompassed a longer period of time and became what we call the measure; (2) note values smaller than those included in the mensural system were commonly used; (3) the proportions of mensural notation were still written in the course of a composition to change the relationship of notes to the tactus, but they also began to be freestanding signs, placed at the beginning of the composition and therefore not directly related to a normative tactus or note duration. Time signatures evolved from these but indicate instead what notes are to be included in a measure or bar. This discussion of seventeenth-century notation will center on that used for most genres of instrumental and vocal music: motets, Masses, madrigals, fantasias, sonatas, concertos, arias, and songs. In addition, three important genres of seventeenth-century music—dramatic recitative, compositions imitating improvisation, and dance music— required performers to interpret the notation of meter and tempo quite differently.1 Of these three genres, the first and most characteristic of a new style in the Baroque was the performance and notation of the recitative. This style, basic to the new opera, was sometimes called recitar cantando or stile rappresentativo. The notation uses the sign 𝄴 and more or less requires the performer today to think of a beat equal to the quarter note, since the singer’s part is written using half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes while the bass mainly sustains whole notes, except at cadences when the harmony moves faster. Despite notation that seems mathematically correct , descriptions of performance stress that the singer must disregard precise notation in favor of declaiming the text in music according to the cadence and sense 348 Performance Practice and Practical Considerations of the words. Because of the usefulness and popularity of dramatic declamation in opera, the recitative style was transplanted to other genres, including sacred music and even instrumental music, where the performer would strive to give the effect of declamation in a free and emphatic delivery. The notation of Claudio Monteverdi ’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda is a characteristic example of recitar cantando. Dance music, from the early seventeenth-century collection in Michael Praetorius ’s Terpsichore (1612), through Italian and French collections of dances, culminating in the dances of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marin Marais, and Louis Couperin near the end of the century, used the usual mensuration and meter signs of the period, with whatever tempo indications are found in lyrical music, but the performer was also guided by the dance itself, through knowing its tempo and metrical structure. Compositions imitating improvisation were characteristic of much solo music for instruments, mainly as versions of preludes that might have titles such as toccata , intonazione, intrada, and præambulum, among many other names. The French devised a special notation for their préludes non mesurés, using whole notes throughout , to avoid specifying duration or metrical structure, which was left entirely up to the performer. The notation used for other improvisational imitations was usually “correct” in regard to its mathematical accuracy on the page but was supplemented with verbal directions to interpret the notation freely in general as well as in specific instances. The genre itself became well enough known that freedom in performance, called stylus phantasticus by German writers, could be applied almost by rule to appropriate compositions.2 To turn to the mainstream of notation in the seventeenth century, let us first examine the historical notation from which it evolved. Introduction to Mensural Notation In the early seventeenth century (i.e., in the music of Monteverdi and Praetorius) and in the practice of some musicians well into the late seventeenth century (for instance, Marc-Antoine Charpentier), we find mostly a continuation of sixteenth-century mensural notation, a brief summary of which must suffice here; the interested reader may wish to consult more complete studies.3 In the late fifteenth century, treatises by Franchinus Gaffurius4 and Johannes Tinctoris5 described and reformed mensural notation practices...

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