On Apr 8, 2013, at 7:26 PM, Bruno Correia <[email protected]> wrote:
> How absolute metric time could have been acheived in the Renaissance? > The tactus was a constant pulse behind the rhythm, but it was an > organic motion not a strict measured time like a metronome. > Actually, the only genre of music (which comes to my mind) that really > plays in time is pop music... How do we know they valued absolute > strict time in the Renaissance? Who were "they"? If "they" were dancers, they probably valued musicians who kept strict time. I imagine a group of amateurs playing or singing multi-part music would keep fairly strict time just in the interest of staying together, unless there were good reason (in the words, for example) to alter the tactus. These were musical activities far more important than solo lute music, and lute players participated in them. Nobody spent the bulk of their musical time practicing solo lute music, which is something we can easily forget if solo music is the biggest part of our own musical efforts. I don't mean to suggest that you should set your metronome at the beginning of a polyphonic fantasy and stick doggedly with it. I think that variation in tempo would have been part of an approach that relied heavily on understanding music in the rhetorical terms that were part of an educated person's vocabulary. You might, for example, vary the tempo if you perceive a phrase as an anadiplosis or an anaphora, and two players might have differing views about such things. So there might not actually have been a "they." Is there any reason to think there weren't just as many views about how to play something as there are now? This was, after all, an age utterly without the homogenizing influence of recordings and radio. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
