Should the End of a Phrase be Emphasized? An Essay in Musical Prosody

ABSTRACT For understanding eighteenth-century notions of “singing” on an instrument, modern standards of “classical” performance can be a source of confusion rather than clarification. Rather than simply calling for legato or vibrato, such notions tapped into a pool of ideas concerned with essential commonalities between music and language. Song, as understood in the eighteenth century, is the anthropological origin of music and language, a primitive vocal expression of emotion carried into verbal speech through its musical properties (prosody) and understood as working similarly in musical melody. At the same time, a trove of terms used in music theory—such as “rhythm,” “meter,” “accent,” or “phrase”—is concerned not with language (as is often claimed), but with the same intersection of music and speech, a gray area between these realms. It is in this field that the eighteenth-century theory of text setting operates. It can be said that, from an eighteenth-century perspective, every piece of instrumental music is a “Song without Words,” having all the music-prosodic features—accents, lines, phrases, even rhymes—with which the vocal composer would respond to a specific text. Such a perspective can illuminate and perhaps answer some questions that performers (especially historically informed performers) often struggle with and are forced to answer with theories indebted to more recent traditions, such as those associated with Schenker and Riemann.