The Short

The number of signs introduced during the last few decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the
nineteenth century was considerable. A glance at treatises published during this period reveals a mixture of signs that
became widely adopted and others that failed to gain acceptance and are seldom encountered in music of the period.
The accent signs proposed and employed during these years reflect the growing preoccupation of composers and
theorists with conveying ever finer levels of expressiveness to the performer. As suggested in Chapter 1, it was
accepted in the eighteenth century that the metrical accentuation was often overridden by the accentuation necessitated
by the shape and character of a particular melody (rhythmic accentuation) , and many theorists stressed that
recognition of the accentual character of a melody was vital to musical performance. Musicians working under the
composer's direction and experienced artists might not find this problematic; the average musician was more
dependent on notational guidance.
While late eighteenth-century composers began to acknowledge the desirability of specifying rhythmic and expressive
accentuation more precisely, some musicians considered the problem of finding a means of indicating the desired
pattern of emphasis in a melody. Since this was generally seen as necessitating a degree of accent less powerful than
would have been suggested by such markings as fp, sf, or fz, a number of graphic signs and instructions were proposed
and employed. Most of these either failed altogether to gain currency or, after a period of sporadic use, achieved more
widespread acceptance, though often with significantly different implications than those originally envisaged. Reichardt
proposed ? to indicate where a stress should fall. He considered that it should ‘merely signify that a note, whether alone
or with several in one bowstroke, should be brought out with a somewhat stronger pressure of the bow. Its form
shows, at the same time, the increase of pressure. This has the same effect as a small light point in painting’ [Ex.
3.45]. 176 But in neither Reichardt's own scores nor those of other musicians does this sign seem to have been adopted
in practice, despite Koch's sponsorship of it in his widely read Lexikon. 177 Domenico Corri's use, in his A Select
Collection, of a similar sign ? above a note, to show that ‘particular strength is to be given to it’, 178 was probably
independent of Reichardt. Türk proposed ⌃ to denote an accent less intense than would have been implied by sf. He
described it in his 1789
Ex. 3.45. Reichardt, Ueber die Pflichten, 82
176
Ueber die Pflichten, 81.
177
Musikalisches Lexikon, art. ‘Accent’.
178
3 vols. (Edinburgh, [c. 1782]), i. 8.
NOTATION OF ACCENTS AND DYNAMICS 97