Review: “Tactus,” Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music, by Ruth I. DeFord

Abstract

“Tactus,” Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music , by Ruth I. DeFord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xii, 504 pp. Ruth DeFord's “Tactus,” Mensuration, and Rhythm in Renaissance Music is the latest and most comprehensive in a series of books that seek to describe the proper understanding of mensural notation.1 Although the title's key terms suggest a range of topics encompassing music making, composition, analysis, speculative thought, and philosophies of time, DeFord focuses primarily, and reasonably, on practical matters—theories of temporal organization and concerns that inform the performance and analysis of Renaissance music. Still, more abstract questions enter the discussions, granting the book a place alongside recent scholarship that addresses rhythm and meter more generally.2 Throughout this erudite study DeFord displays a control of the often contradictory theoretical literature that few can claim. She synthesizes where possible while doing justice to the variety of surviving evidence. This is a hard needle to thread; DeFord does so masterfully. Passages quoted from theoretical texts are elegantly laid out, with the original text and an English translation side by side. Musical examples are presented using original mensural symbols. This means, for example, that dots are used only when Renaissance notation requires them and not after every ternary note. Although some readers may initially find this approach frustrating, the voices are vertically aligned in score format, which clarifies note durations. Since DeFord's arguments often depend on the very elements that are true of mensural but not of modern notation, presenting musical …