Description

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For the past four decades, the concept of hypermeter has been routinely applied to eighteenth-century music. But was this concept familiar in the eighteenth century? If so, how is it reflected in writings of eighteenth-century music theorists? And how does it relate to their discussion of phrase structure? In this book, a follow-up to the award-winning Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart, author Danuta Mirka unearthes a number of cues that point to eighteenth-century recognition of what today is called hypermeter, and retraces the line of tradition that led from eighteenth-century music theory to the emergence of the modern concept of hypermeter in the twentieth century.

Mirka describes the proto-theory of hypermeter developed by German music theorists, recounts the recent history of this concept in American music theory, evaluates contributions made to it by authors working within different theoretical traditions, and introduces a dynamic model of hypermeter which allows the analyst to trace the effect of hypermetric manipulations in real time. This model is applied in analyses of Haydn's and Mozart's chamber music for strings, which shed a new light upon this celebrated repertoire, but the aim of this book goes far beyond an analytical survey of specific compositions. Rather, it is to offer a systematic classification of hypermetrical irregularities in relation to phrase structure and to give a comprehensive account of the ways in which phrase structure and hypermeter were described by eighteenth-century music theorists, conceived by eighteenth-century composers, and perceived by eighteenth-century listeners.

About the Author

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Danuta Mirka is Harry N. and Ruth F. Wyatt Professor of Music Theory at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University. Her main research interests include theory and analysis of meter and rhythm and study of musical communication in the late eighteenth century. She is the co-editor, with Kofi Agawu, of Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, which received the Citation of Special Merit from the Society for Music Theory in 2015. Her books include The Sonoristic Structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki and Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787-1791, which won the 2011 Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory. A former vice president of the Society for Music Analysis, her articles have appeared in such scholarly journals as The Journal of Musicology, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, Eighteenth-Century Music, The American Journal of Semiotics, Semiotica, and The Musical Quarterly. Her article "The Mystery of the Cadential Six-Four" received the 2017 Roland Jackson Award from the American Musicological Society.