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