Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era will appeal primarily to theorists, historians, and scholars of the history of ideas, though its insights are relevant to all lovers of European music from this era ... Grant offers his audience a much more integrated understanding of music and the broader social world, as well as a more specific understanding of the constraints upon music's temporal features in this era and what these constraints make possible. Interested readers will find ample reward. --Andrew Wilson, Music Theory Spectrum With this book, Grant (Wesleyan Univ.) sets groundwork for resolving the longstanding division in music theory between music perception and the history of theory, and he does so in ways music scholars at all levels should note. Essential. --Choice As a book that chronicles the development of meter theory, Beating Time is extremely well researched...Amid the growing multitude of rhythmic theories in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Grant's retrospective provides much-needed historical context. Through his thoughtful and thorough exploration of older treatises, theories, practices, and technologies, he puts us in a position to better understand our own inclinations in regards to musical meter, and provides an informed vantage point from which to critique many concepts we take for granted. He shows us not only how these theories developed, but also how musical meter itself changed in the early modern era, and for that, this book is a valuable addition to any musician's library. --Music Research Forum