Le 28 juin 2017
de 15h00 à 15h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3203
Séance - Issues of Rhythm and Metre
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Julian Caskel
The development section of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony includes a famous passage of thinned-out orchestral chords that has been of some importance both in older and in recent theories of musical metre.
A first reading conceives this texture as a suspension of metric pulse (the passage does not display any regular metre). But a reverse reading conceives the same texture as a suspension of all other parameters to the preserved metric pulse (the passage can only be explained through a reference to its metric design).
In a preliminary step it will be shown that the decision for or against one of these two readings does not seem to be haphazard. In a second step this decision possibly also can be detected as a historical shift in recordings of the symphony. But in a final step this shift might be confronted with still another source: An analysis that refers to a sound record exhibits different preferences than an analysis that primarily refers to a piano reduction (that heightens harmonic progressions but obliterates orchestral colors).
The combination of these complementary threads of analysis allows a final hypothesis: The metre in this passage might be a different one today than it was hundred years ago. Thus the history of music theory has to combine different species of investigation: The “positivist” analysis of the written score, the “empiric” analysis of performances and the “cultural” analysis of the media prerequisites.
