The Short

CATEGORIES OF ACCENTUATION 15
themselves through their inner strength.’ 31 (However, it may be noted that some thirty years later G. W. Fink, though he
warned in general against excessive stressing of metrical accents, made quite the opposite point about accents in
singing, saying: ‘The metrical accents in vocal compositions, where they generally coincide with the long syllables [of
the text] should least of all be neglected.’) 32
The necessity of subordinating metrical accent to the accentuation required by the shape of the phrase and the
expressive content of the music was often stressed by writers throughout the period. In England in 1770 John Holden,
having remarked that ‘In the performance of music, there is a certain emphasis, or accent laid on the beginning of
every measure, which distinguishes one species of time from another’, observed: ‘There is no occasion to make the
beginning, or emphatical part of the measure, always stronger, or louder than the rest, though it is sometimes best to
do so.’ 33 And Johann Friedrich Reichardt cautioned his reader against interpreting Quantz's instructions for metrical
accentuation too literally:
Also, it would be extremely faulty if the accentuation of the notes—about which Herr Quantz says so muc—were
always to be marked with a particular pressure of the bow. This [accentuation] is nothing more than the slightest
weight, with which anyone with a correct feeling for the beat plays, which, of his own accord, without thinking
about it, he will give to the stronger beats, just as children on their coloured fiddles already give it to the notes on
which, if left to themselves, they will stamp with their foot. If the child does not get this right he should not learn
music. 34
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Heinrich Christoph Koch referred similarly to the metrical accent as an
‘almost unnoticeable stress’, 35 and Gottfried Weber, a musician of a younger generation, made much the same point
almost twenty years later when he cautioned that ‘What is said of the heavy and light parts of the bar is not to be
understood as that a so-called heavy or strong part of the bar must really in all cases be delivered more heavily and
strongly (more forte) than the so-called light or weak part; we here speak rather of an internal weight.’ 36
Johann Nepomuk Hummel's description of metrical accent, too, seems to emphasize the essentially notional quality of
strong and weak beats, rather than suggesting that the performer will automatically deliver them more strongly:
31
Neue Singe-Schule oder gründliche und vollstÄndige Anweisung zur Singkunst (Leipzig, [1804]), 134.
32
In Schilling, EncyclopÄdie, art. ‘Accent’, i. 36.
33
An Essay towards a Rational System of Music (Glasgow, 1770), 32.
34
Ueber die Pflichten des Ripien-Violinisten (Berlin and Leipzig, 1776), 8–9.
35
Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1802), art. ‘Accent’.
36
Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonkunst (Mainz, 1817–21), trans. J. F. Warner as Theory of Musical Composition (London, 1846) i. 90.