The Short

2 Accentuation in Practice
In his discussion of oratorical accentuation Koch had observed that although the notation of his day was ‘complete
and precise’ in showing pitch and duration, the things ‘by which the spirit of the piece must be made palpable in
performance can never fully be represented by signs’. Nevertheless, he took the view that since it is an ‘established
thing that the lively representation of the melody of a piece of music depends for the most part on the correct
performance of the oratorical and pathetic accents’, 58 a more sophisticated system for prescribing which notes should
be accented and in what degree would be highly desirable. He did not believe that his contemporaries were anything
like careful enough in marking the accentuation they required in their music. In this he was entirely in agreement with
Türk, who, in his Sechs leichte Klaviersonaten of 1783, had made use of a sign (⌃) to indicate accentuation where he felt
that it was not necessarily obvious. Türk remarked: ‘I still believe that the accent which is so essential to good
execution can, in certain cases, be as little left to the discretion of the performer as, for example, the extempore use of
forte and piano or of one of the essential ornaments.’ 59
Discussion of the subject by Koch, Türk, and others of their contemporaries makes it abundantly clear that the relative
scarcity of instructions for accent in eighteenth-century music carries no implication that expressive accents were not
envisaged where they are not specifically marked. As with much else in the music of that period, even the more
painstaking composers only indicated the music's most prominent and essential features, and many seem to have
neglected even to do that; thus it was left to the executant to supply most of the accentuation necessary for a fine and
tasteful performance. Despite the vastly increased use of various forms of accent markings by composers of
succeeding
58 Musikalisches Lexikon, art.‘Accent’.
59 Klavierschule, VI,§ 16.