Beyond Rhetoric

The chapter starts with the discussion of the aesthetic category of “humorous music,” which emerged in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and links it to the theory of multiple agency, proposed by Edward Klorman (2016). There follow two case studies of hypermetric manipulations in the first movements of Haydn’s string quartets Op. 50 No. 3 and Op. 64 No. 1. These analyses reveal how such manipulations act in concert with ingenious deployment of musical topics and contrapuntal-harmonic schemata, and how they affect musical form. The chapter closes with remarks about the role of the first violinist in Haydn’s string quartets.

Hypermetrical Irregularities in Compound Phrases

The chapter is devoted to hypermetrical irregularities caused by techniques of phrase linkage, including overlap and elision. It traces the historical pedigree of these concepts and compares their use by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983) to that by William Rothstein (1989). It supplements the concepts of left and right elision, distinguished by the former authors, with the concepts of left and right deletion. It then concentrates on phrase linkages that occur at formal junctures marked by cadences and it presents a classification of all hypermetric scenarios at such junctures. In the final part it evaluates the concept of “shadow hypermeter.”

Hypermetrical Irregularities in Expanded Phrases

This chapter deals with hypermetrical irregularities in phrases expanded by means of parenthesis, repetition, and appendix. All these means of phrase expansion were recognized by eighteenth-century authors. The discussion of parenthesis reveals an uncharacteristically careless treatment of this concept by Heinrich Christoph Koch. It outlines its further development by Hugo Riemann and Heinrich Schenker and deconstructs the concept of parenthesis developed by William Rothstein (1989), thus restoring it to eighteenth-century perspective. The discussion of repetition engages with Rothstein’s discussion of this technique of phrase expansion and its effect upon hypermeter. The discussion of appendix compares Koch’s account of this concept to Rothstein’s concept of “suffix.”

Phrase Structure

This chapter focuses on phrase structure, whose discussion in the eighteenth century was subsumed under the theory of melody and based on the parallel between music and language. The first part is devoted to classification of caesuras and melodic sections contained by them. Since the former were equivalent to punctuation marks (period, colon, semicolon, comma) and the latter to grammatical units (sentences, clauses), the musical terminology adopted by eighteenth-century authors (Johann Mattheson, Joseph Riepel, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, and Heinrich Christoph Koch) was influenced by linguistic terminology and it developed for decades, with meanings of individual terms changing from author to author. The second part of the chapter treats the different lengths of phrases. It links the preference for four-measure phrases to regular hypermeter and it presents a classification of four-measure phrase rhythms.

Hypermetrical Irregularities in Basic Phrases

This chapter’s focus is on hypermetrical irregularities caused by irregular phrases. It addresses five-, six-, and seven-measure phrases, considers their use as recommended by eighteenth-century music theorists, and discusses their subdivision into shorter segments. It then shifts to much longer phrases without subdivisions. While not recommended by theorists, such phrases were used by eighteenth-century composers. A series of analyses in the final part of the chapter illustrates Haydn’s use of irregular phrases and illuminates their formal implications in minuet movements of string quartets Op. 50 No. 3 and No. 4 and in the first movement of Op. 55 No. 2.

Hypermeter Beyond Phrase Structure

This chapter explores hypermetrical irregularities beyond phrase structure. The discussion focuses on the perception of hypermeter in transition and development sections. It tracks hypermeter in sequences and fugato, then turns to augmented half and full cadences and posits their hypermetrical profiles as preference factors of hypermetric perception. Augmentation of rhythmical values in cadences is related to the augmentation of passing notes. While it was not permitted in strict style, such augmentation is discussed by eighteenth-century music theorists in relation to free style. This discussion provides further proof of eighteenth-century recognition of hypermeter and it supplements the remarks about historical origins of hypermeter in chapter 1.

Hypermeter, Phrase Structure, and Rhetorical Figures

The theory of music-rhetorical figures, originating with Joachim Burmeister and Christoph Bernhard, was relaunched by Johann Mattheson and further developed by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel. Its integration into the theory of melody was attempted by Heinrich Christoph Koch in Musikalisches Lexikon (1802). The renewed attempt, undertaken in this chapter, reveals an unsuspected bond between two conceptually interrelated but historically unrelated branches of eighteenth-century music theory. The chapter explores effects of rhetorical figures upon hypermeter. It focuses on two rhetorical figures—ellipsis and anadiplosis—and indicates that further rhetorical figures account for some of the phrase expansions discussed in chapter 6.

Hypermeter

This chapter unearths 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. It departs from the eighteenth-century concept of compound meter, related to hypermeter by some modern authors, and from the analogy between measures and phrases posited by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74). While compound meter proves irrelevant for the development of hypermeter, the analogy between measures and phrases, adopted by Gottfried Weber in his Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1817) and further refined by German music theorists, provides the point of departure for the development of the concept of hypermeter in American music theory. The further course of the chapter traces more recent history of this concept. It evaluates the contribution of Schenkerian theory and the cognitive study of music, and it introduces a dynamic model of hypermeter as an extension of the dynamic model of meter presented by the author in Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart (2009).

Further Means of Phrase Expansion

This chapter addresses further means of phrase expansion, not recognized by eighteenth-century authors. They include “overridden caesuras,” “twisted caesuras,” “loops,” “stretches,” and “written-out rallentando.” Their discussion refers to the concept of schemata introduced by Robert O. Gjerdingen (2007). Although he finds the origins of contrapuntal-harmonic schemata in the Italian partimento tradition, Gjerdingen’s account of cadential schemata takes for its point of departure the concept of clausulae in German music theory. The types of clausulae distinguished by Gjerdingen are compared to those mentioned by eighteenth-century authors and related to different types of caesuras in the theory of melody, discussed in chapter 2.