Historical Hypermetrical Hearing: Uncertainty, Floors and Trapdoors

Abstract

This article attempts a partial reconstruction of historical metrical hearing for late eighteenth‐century Viennese chamber music. Specifically, I build on two traits of the historical listener. First, eighteenth‐century listeners were first‐time listeners, a simple fact with significant consequences for how we understand composers’ intentions and listeners’ experiences. Second, eighteenth‐century listeners were saturated with the music of the day, to a much broader and shallower extent than the modern canon‐bound listener. This second trait enabled eighteenth‐century listeners to absorb the statistical regularities of their musical culture, giving them a set of norms through which to comprehend pieces on the first hearing. In this essay I discuss the consequences of these traits for hypermetre. Drawing on a corpus study of 1780s Viennese chamber music, I offer answers to several questions: How does the first‐time listener respond to hypermetre, compared to the more experienced listener? What consequences does this have for analysis? And what are some of the stylistic regularities underlying hypermetre in chamber music from 1780s Vienna? To answer the latter question, I posit a special level of the metrical hierarchy called the hypermetrical floor, against which hypermetrical phenomena are measured.