Hypermeter

Abstract

This chapter unearths a number of cues that point to eighteenth-century recognition of what today is called hypermeter and retraces the line of tradition that led from eighteenth-century music theory to the emergence of the modern concept of hypermeter in the twentieth century. It departs from the eighteenth-century concept of compound meter, related to hypermeter by some modern authors, and from the analogy between measures and phrases posited by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74). While compound meter proves irrelevant for the development of hypermeter, the analogy between measures and phrases, adopted by Gottfried Weber in his Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1817) and further refined by German music theorists, provides the point of departure for the development of the concept of hypermeter in American music theory. The further course of the chapter traces more recent history of this concept. It evaluates the contribution of Schenkerian theory and the cognitive study of music, and it introduces a dynamic model of hypermeter as an extension of the dynamic model of meter presented by the author in Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart (2009).