Meter and tone

Victor Zuckerkandl contrasts post-polyphonic Western music with Gregorian chant. In both there are longer and shorter tones in a succession in time. But in “our music,” another layer is added: “the succession also gives rise to the metrical wave, whose uniform pulsation is perceptible through all the changes of the tonal surface. Both are always present simultaneously – the uniformity of the wave, the variegated pattern of durations, of long and short, in the actual succession of tones.” This is what gives “our music” its particular rhythm: “not the succession of longer and shorter tones as such, but their succession supported, borne along by, the regular rise and fall of the continuing metric wave.” This combination of succession and meter is not separable from the pitch of the tones that make up the music. The rhythm and melody work together.

Citing the beginning of Chopin’s A-major Polonaise, he notes that the four sixteenth notes at the end of the first measure “would be quite inadequately described as four tones of equal length in rapid succession, together filling up the last third of the triple measure. What we feel is, rather, four tones of equal length in rapid succession, carried along by the ascending phase of the wave to a goal , the wave crest. The rhythmic quality of the tone at the beginning of the second measure does not rest upon its comparatively longer duration, nor upon the accent it carries, but upon the fact that in it the wave attains its goal, the wave crest, and at the same time is carried beyond the goal, to a new cycle. ”