Everyone is familiar with the idea of strong and weak
beats. I remember reading that, at some historical
time and place, these were called "good and bad beats"
(perhaps not in English). Any info on this?
One should perhaps mention that there have been three concepts around, which got, as usual
in music history, mixed up somehow on occasion.
1) thesis and arsis
2) rhythmopoeia
3) quantitas intrinseca => aka good and bad notes/beats
Of course, the foundations had to be in what people thought GREEK theory was.
So arsis and thesis are derived from the terms for lowering or raising the foot, but the
more direct tradition would be through an inheritance from mensural notation.
tactus = thesis + arsis
(where in a 3 measure the 1 &2 are thesis and the 3 arsis, so there is a quantitative
meaning in it).
We have not enough material to see whether one thought of thesis and arsis also as a
hierarchical difference. Zarlino (1558)compares th. & a. to systole and diastole, which is
still taken over by Mersenne (1636-7) in France. and still in "A Musical Dictionary" by
Grassineau, London 1740. And Mattheson explains: The main nature of metre is build on the
fact that each bar has only two parts and no more. They have their source and basis in the
arteries, whose pulsations and and relaxations (Auf- und Niederschläge) are called systole
and diastole... (Der vollkommene Capellmeister 1739, §9.)
So, there we have quite a tradition..
The Rhythmopoeia wants to translate the Greek poetic metres to the musical context by
defining them as rhytmical/metrical patterns. The expression of the metrical foot is also
transferred to the "meaning" of the musical element. Mersenne gives a table but stays
skeptical, I think he finds that poets used different feet for the same subject and the same
metre for completey different topics. Athanasius Kircher (1650) also gives tables. The
tables in later baroque (Printz, Mattheson, Scheibe ) differ in many respects, so perhaps
the concepts was also differently understood by later writers.
In this period also falls the shift from beating a C (4/4) : down down [thesis] up up
[arsis] to the hierarchical bar that we have today. Lorenzo Penna (1672) is, as far as I
know, the first to teach beating a four-part tactus, whereas Matteson, as we saw, still
declares it utter nonsense.
Now to come to your question, ;-) the first one I know to speak of "good" and "bad" notes,
is -tatataTA-: Girolamo Dirula 1593. noto buona - nota cattiva
Banchieri also (1609) and the notoriouos Penna.
16th/ 17th cent.: In France knowbody knew about good or bad, the same applies of course to
England ;-)
But in the more German area we have Muffat (1698) and W.C. Printz (Satyrischer Componist
III, 1696),
[you can download quite some theoretician's stuff from links at my page:
http://www.symbol4.de/index2.htm]
In the 18th cent. the terms became widely popular , see Tartini ~1755, French version 1771,
Lorenzoni 1779 - which is a VonGuttenbergization of Quantz!, John Holden 1770, Joshua
Steele 1779, and in France Brossard (Dictionnaire 1703/1705) has it very clearly, In Germany
Walther (1732) has copied Brossard.
Quantz (1752) explains everythig very detailled and mentions that the Hauptnoten are
sometimes called, *following the Italians* GOOD notes, whereas die "durchgehenden" are
"called by some foreigners BAD notes".
One should not confuse the long/short scheme for the good and the bad notes with the concept
of "inégalité" - where the notes are moved away from their beats, so to speak..
best wishes
Bernd
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
