The Renotation of Polyphonic Music

Abstract

T is ironic that the recovery and transcription of polyphonic music from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries should have begun in the nineteenth century, at a time in Western music when the prevailing conceptions and relationships of pulse, meter, and rhythm had become vastly different. We cannot criticize musicians and scholars entrenched in a virtually unilateral world of equal-beat-oriented music (Bach to Brahms) for their limited vision of the music of Africa, the Far East, or even the folk music of the border regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nevertheless we must recognize that their mechanically accurate translations of an enormous body of polyphonic music into modern time-signature notation unwittingly produced many monstrosities. In eighteenthand nineteenth-century music, the period of common practice, melodic and harmonic rhythms are in bondage to regular schemes that began their substantive development in the dance music of the fifteenth century. The tyranny of the bar line, Schwerhebigkeit, and the persistent quality of agogic accents on the hierarchical beats in a regular time signature are features of a prevailing musical style that imbued Western music of the nineteenth century with a unique and all-encompassing force. Not only the impact of Nationalism, in unlocking the rhythmic heritages of Russia, Hungary, and the Balkan countries, but also an increasingly extensive contact with non-XVestern musical worlds have by now transformed and broadened our conceptions of meter in its relation to rhythm and pulse. It is a further irony that the performance of pre-1600 music has been facilitated by its conventional transcription: it is much easier