Mensuration and Proportion Signs: Origins and Evolution

by Anna Maria Busse Berger

Overview

In the fourteenth century composers and theorists invented mensuration and proportion signs that allowed them increased flexibility and precision in notating a wide range of rhythmic and metric relationships. The origin and interpretation of these signs is one of the least understood and most complex issues in music history. This study represents the first attempt to see the origin of musical mensuration and proportion signs in the context of other measuring systems of the fourteenth century. Berger analyzes the exact meaning of every mensuration and proportion sign in music and theory from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and offers revisions of many currently-held views concerning the significance and development of early time signatures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198162308
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/18/1993
Series:	Oxford Monographs on Music
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	6.44(w) x 9.56(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

University of California, Davis

Editorial Reviews

"A major achievement in the history of discourse about music."—Speculum

"Probably essential reading for scholars and, in particular, performers specializing in music of the 14th to the 16th century."—Choice

"Busse Berger investigates a difficult subject in which she has already established herself as a virtuoso in both oral and written performance....This book has assembled much useful material on the theoretical and musical use of mensuration and proportion signs."—Early Music

"A welcome guide to this complex and fascinating subject....An important contribution to the growing literature concerning durational and temporal issues in early music. Its careful organization and rigorous scholarship will satisfy the most demanding reader, yet its concern for clarity and its plentiful diagrams and tables, will attract even the novice to this fascinating topic. It should be required reading for anyone who studies, performs, and enjoys this repertoire."—Fontes Artis Musicae

"[A] useful and provocative book....The book opens up as many avenues for further research as it sums up from past research, and for this reason it will be a useful reference work. It is written with authority and the presentation is very clear-not an easy accomplishment for a book devoted so rigorously to one of the most daunting topics in European music history....The book is overflowing with fresh insights, recastings of old debates, new ways to extrapolate evidence, realignments of theoretical traditions, improved translations, etc.....The interdisciplinary dimension makes a very fresh contribution to the topic....Fifteenth-century studies will benefit from its exploration, presented here in an important book on music and culture."—Renaissance Quarterly

From the Publisher