MiRKA (2009) HAS RECENTLY ARGUED THAT THE18th-century metrical theories of Heinrich Christoph Koch can be revelatory for a reconstruction of contemporary ways of hearing Viennese high classicism. Koch's claims revolve around interactions between the metrical placement of cadences and the articulation of specific beat levels, and these claims are most specific and testable for common time and 6/8. This paper reports two atatistical surveys of works by Mozart that were designed to gauge the fit between the corpus and Koch's theory. In the works examined, the theory was strongly supported for common time, strongly disconfirmed for 6/8, and weakly supported for the other meters encountered. It is argued that these results point toward caution regarding the use of Koch's theories but not toward their outright rejection, and that unexpected statistical contrasts within the corpus indicate the need for a finegrained approach to meter in music of the later 18th century.
This article extends existing approaches to hypermeter by introducing schemas that make measure-by-measure correlations between grouping units and hypermeasures. These schemas offer an account of how listeners track hypermeter through irregularities and discontinuities. In order to ground these schemas in a cognitive, listener-oriented framework, the article also introduces the concept of metrical orientation. Metrical orientation involves heard measures, measures that are organizationally similar to notated measures but that may differ from the notated measures of the score with respect to both period and phase. The downbeats of these heard measures are the hyperbeats that relate to one another by means of the hypermetrical schemas. Metrical orientation is top-down and schema driven; it thus complements low-level, bottom-up cognitive accounts of meter.
The hypermetrical schemas can give analyses considerable flexibility, but this flexibility presents challenges to rule systems and in particular to Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s Metrical Well-Formedness Rules. Two paradigms from cognitive linguistics are used to address this: radial structuring as a way of organizing prototype categories, and approaches to well-formedness that have also been used in examining the interpenetration of syntax and semantics. These concepts function together to provide an alternative to rule systems that is both rigorous and flexible.
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