Bruckner's Metrical Numbers

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.No element of a poem is more basic ... than the metrical element, and perhaps no technical triumphs reveal more readily than the metrical the poet's sympathy with that universal human nature-conceived as a system of physiological and psychological uniformity-which exists outside his own, and to which the fullest understanding of his own is the key. . . . It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.Paul Fussell'The importance for both analytical and musicological studies of the metrical numbers Bruckner used in many of his autographs has yet to be fully appreciated. Reconstruction of Bruckner's detailed rhythmic analyses by means of the metrical numbers facilitates new perceptions of chronological, genetic, and analytical-theoretical issues. Bruckner's conception of the relationship between small-and large-scale metrical structure in his own music is adumbrated by the following remark from 1875: 19th-Century Music XIV/2 (Fall 1990). O by the Regents of the University of California. Notes for this article begin on p. 127. 101 This content downloaded from 91.229.248.204 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 07:43:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19TH CENTURY MUSIC and later inserts. The numbers generally appear beneath the lowest musical staff to represent the number of measures within component phrases of from two to thirty-four measures.3 (As early as his Requiem of 1849, Bruckner also counts the number of measures in the composition as a whole, or in its larger sections.4) If, in the course of composing or revising, Bruckner adds or subtracts measures, he is almost always careful to renumber as appropriate.In this paper I present three studies examining, in turn, the Adagio from the First Symphony, the Andante from the Second Symphony, and the motet Vexilla regis, works in which Bruckner shows a consistent approach to metrical numbers. I advance three general hypotheses, which are supported by these works and which could be tested against Bruckner's practice in other compositions:1. Although Bruckner employs metrical numbers intermittently as early as 1861, his systematic use of an all-encompassing "metrical grid" dates from his first revision period 1876-80.5 2. Among the metrical grid's various compositional and revisional functions, one of its more important is to pinpoint the "downbeat," i.e., first, accented measure of the individual phrase. Research into the metrical numbers has practical value; as is shown by my study of the Second Symphony...

Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy l. Jackson (eds.), Bruckner Studies

“…7 Analysis has followed slowly. Isolated articles by Timothy Jackson, Stephen Parkany and William Benjamin aside, 8 the detailed analysis of Bruckner's music remains unpopular in Britain and America, in part because of the apparent editorial complexities.…”