Marking Mensural Time
Graeme M. Boone · Music Theory Spectrum · 2000
When discussing rhythm in common-practice music, twentiethcentury writers have often relied on punctual temporal markers as organizing principles. Schoenberg, for example, defines rhythm as motivic ordering of stressed and unstressed attacks; Cooper and Meyer define meter as the measurement of number of pulses between more or less regularly recurring accents; Lerdahl and Jackendoff define meter as involving regular alternation of strong and weak beats at a number of hierarchical levels.' Beat, accent, pulse, attack: such terms suggest points of reference that mark time but, in themselves, take no time.2 It is self-evident that punctual abstractions, in themselves, are insufficient to any representation of fullness of musical rhythm.3 But it is equally evident that, distilling as they do