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 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
Fétis and the Future
Appendices
Bibliography