Review of Roger Mathew Grant,Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era(Oxford University Press, 2014)

Abstract

[1] In this addition to the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series, Roger Mathew Grant presents a history of temporal regulation in European music from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. (1) Written and argued with unfailing finesse, Beating Time & Measuring Music pairs sophisticated readings of music-theoretical texts with lucid summations of historical trends. It offers music theorists valuable information and insight about meter studies, the history of music theory, and the wider history of ideas. (2) At the same time, the whole book stands to interest a broad academic audience, and performers will appreciate its lessons concerning analysis and performance practice.[2] In each of the monograph's three parts, addressing the sixteenth and seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries respectively, Grant examines three facets of meter: its description and conceptualization in theoretical writings, its mediation by techniques and technologies (of human or mechanical action), and its manifestation in notated musical compositions. That three-fold investigation is skewed neither to historically informed analysis nor to history with analytical illustration. Instead, the strands combine to tell of broad changes in how meter was imagined and realized in European music-making over three and a half centuries.[3] "Meter" bears unpacking here. At its core, Grant's subject is meter and its mensural equivalents as construed by American music theorists since 1980. (3) Beat, pulse, accent, measure, time signature, and hypermeter are integral concepts, whereas more complex and irregular aspects of rhythm are excluded (5). But the subject extends to elements of character, affect, and movement that were once wedded to meter. Grouping intervenes, too. The most important inclusion is tempo, which came to be notated and evaluated separately from the signatured meter only late in Grant's historical purview. Changing Times: The Eighteenth Century[4] Two epochal upheavals fascinate Grant, and explicit, eloquent reminders of these large themes recur throughout the book. The first concerns notions of time and motion (that is, physical motion and, more generally, any kind of change). Once the Scholastic tradition had been substantially dispersed by "natural philosophy," the category of motus lost its superior claim as that which conditioned tempus and gave it reality, and time came to be regarded as a universal dimension that extended irrespective of mobile or immobile things (15, 24, 93, 96-99). Insofar as people who made and thought about music saw