Common-Time Displacement in Mozart

Abstract

n the music of Mozart and his central European contemporaries, the characteristics of common time generally agree with descriptions of quadruple meter found in moder-day treatises and textbooks. A hierarchic order of metrical accents dictates that within the four-beat measure, the first beat bears more weight or emphasis than the third. In late eighteenth-century music that conforms to this hierarchy of accent, the common-time measure constitutes a structural yardstick, and the phrasing may be counted in numbers of measures without recourse to fractions.