Oh, all these accents!
Accentuation is perhaps the most basic of the principal determinants of style in performance, yet it is among the least thoroughly investigated and understood aspects of historical performing practice.
Clive Brown, Classical & Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900, Oxford 1999
If you’ve come across this article, you probably know that Arte dei Suonatori is a group that performs music from past centuries in a historically informed manner, meaning as close as possible to the way it was performed at the time of its creation. The musicians of Arte and thousands of other performers around the world are seeking knowledge about how a given piece was performed 200 or 300 years ago, believing that by cleansing it of later influences, just as historical buildings are cleaned of dirt, rust, and paint, they will restore their original brilliance and delight the contemporary audience. This task is very difficult because - of course! - unlike preserved architectural monuments, there are no recordings older than about 120 years. Moreover, reading old scores is burdened with the legacy of the performance practice of the last century. It is reminiscent of trying to recite Old Polish text when today we have very scant information about long and short vowels and other modulations used in speech by our ancestors. In performance practice, we often compare elements that could have evolved over the years, and forget about those that are different and have almost disappeared in the last century. Such an element in 18th and 19th century music is accentuation. The concept of accentuation has changed, and the concept of metric accentuation has almost completely fallen out of use over the last roughly 150 years. As a result, musicians involved in historical performance do not delve into or even are not aware of the existence of this - quoting Clive Brown - most basic determinant of style, especially the style of the Enlightenment era. The opening quote comes from an excellent book by this British violinist and musicologist published in 1999, and yet it remains unchanged. From numerous historical sources quoted in the extensive chapters of the book, we learn that for most of the 18th and 19th centuries, both practitioners and theorists of music discussed issues related to the organization of time in music through accentuation. In the further part of the article, I will briefly and very selectively present what the rules of accentuation were and outline the way of interpreting their implementation, which is increasingly boldly and vividly present in recent years in the performances of Arte dei Suonatori.
The foundation of time organization in the music of this period, at an almost subconscious level, is accentuation reflecting its metric structure. It is an integral part of the relationship between melodic figures and harmonic changes and between dissonance and consonance. This type of accent is most often referred to in historical sources as grammatical or metric. On this base, emphasizing the structure of the work, comes - and sometimes, or even most often, becomes dominant - an accent called rhetorical, oratorical or expressive. Some theorists distinguish further sub-divisions of these last accents, but one thing is clear: the expressive accentuation is key to conveying the emotional essence of music.
Let’s start with metric accentuation. As a rule, about differentiating between weak and strong beats, parts of the beat or their further subdivisions, all practitioners and theorists write throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, up to the work published in 1883 by Hugo Riemann, who was the first to emphatically propose building phrases based on the dynamics of crescendo-diminuendo.
A clear and fairly precise description, along with an extensive scheme of accent hierarchy, can be found in the work of music theorist Johann Georg Sulzer in the early 1770s in the work General Theory of Fine Arts.
Most authors do not provide more detailed instructions on how to implement divisions into strong and weak parts, but numerous comparisons of music interpretation to spoken language and constructing statements suggest that this division does not necessarily refer to operating dynamics, i.e., to the way we realize accents in music today. In the description of example (a) Sulzer writes: “A duple meter consists of two basic units of time, the first of which is long, the second short.” In the commentary to example (c) Sulzer explains: “This last example clearly shows the differences between long and short notes in duple meter…”. The hints of this theorist suggest to us the way of realizing metric accents - similar to modifying and emphasizing vowels in speech - namely by slightly lengthening in time the strong measures. This way of emphasizing can remain completely independent of dynamics and length realized by articulation. Despite the lack of “forceful” emphasis on strong measures, we will still perceive elongated units in time as strong.
Among the authors discussing oratorical or expressive accents, comparisons to the syntax of language and the construction of statements appear even more often. The highly valued theorist of his time, Heinrich Christoph Koch, in the Musical Lexicon published at the dawn of the 19th century, begins the discussion of this topic with a comparison between the nature of accentuation in speech and in music:
“Just as in speech - especially if the speaker speaks with feeling - some syllables in words are highlighted with additional emphasis, making the message of the statement clearer to the listener, so too in performing a melody, which has a certain character, some notes should be played in a more expressive way, so that the emotions it carries are clearly expressed.”
According to Koch and many other authors, expressive accents are much more audible in performance than metric ones. Using an analogy to painting, he writes: “Just as there are light and shadows in the color palette, so in the performance of music, the listener will perceive the melodic line in an obvious way through these accents.” He also explains that, unlike metric accents, this type of emphasis is not assigned to a specific part of the beat. It is to reflect the composer’s intention, the proper reading of which depends a lot on the performer’s education and taste. After all, the influence of the performer’s taste on the realization of an interesting interpretation while conveying the composer’s intention is emphasized by many practitioners of those times. Leopold Mozart in the Thorough School of Violin Playing with his characteristic emphasis writes:
“Reading the musical works of good masters and playing the affects presented in them in accordance with the composer’s intention is a much greater art than studying the most difficult solo or concerto. (…). You should play with appropriate feeling, get into the affect that is to be expressed and play in the appropriate way all sequences, connected and separated notes, weaker and stronger sounds, in one word - everything that depends on tasteful performance of the work.”
Leopold Mozart, due to the size of his school of play, does not provide more detailed tips helpful in this “tasteful performance”. The example given in the School of Piano Playing by Daniel Gottlob Türk explains more. He writes that “the initial note of each segment of the melody should receive an emphasis greater than the strong measure usually receives.” This general remark is supplemented by a hint that the performer should also give a certain hierarchy to these additional emphases. To illustrate this sentence, Türk in the musical example marks expressive accents with a cross - the more crosses, the greater the emphasis.
This example seems to well represent the view of most practitioners and theorists of the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, according to whom the more significant expressive emphasis is received by strong, not weak measures in the beat. As a complement to this general rule, there is a whole range of exceptions, from which we learn that different, and even reverse shaping of the phrase was not alien to contemporary performers, even if the composer did not mark this exceptional treatment of the melody in the musical notation. Already in Türk’s textbook, we find an example in which the expressive expression of the melody can change the accentuation by giving it a dynamic shape:
Examples of different from the rules shaping of melodies are provided to us by such meticulous composers, for example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Ludwig van Beethoven, who precisely mark the accentuation, especially in places where it is essential for expression. Numerous tips and examples from theoretical and practical works of the discussed period show that a whole range of factors can influence expressive accentuation. Among the most important are: connecting notes the a slur, harmony, dissonances appearing in the course of the melody, chromatics, an unusual turn of the interval drawing of the melody, syncopation, and even grouping of notes.
It seems that the application of rules regarding accentuation in music, combined with the awareness of constructing sentences and musical phrases in the likeness of speech, should be a fundamental means of assisting us - contemporary performers in reading the composer’s intentions, both in the course of the entire work and in its conclusion. Careful study of them can certainly bring us closer not only to understanding the language of music of the time, but also to conveying to the contemporary recipient the emotional charge that the music of past epochs carries.
Ewa Golińska
