The prominence given to a note or notes in performance by a perceptible alteration (usually increase) in volume (‘dynamic accent’); a lengthening of duration or a brief preceding silence of articulation (‘agogic accent’); an added ornament or pitch inflection of a melodic note (‘pitch accent’); or by any combination of these. The term is also used for any of the notational signs used to indicate that such prominence is required. On instruments capable of immediate dynamic nuance, including the voice and most strings, wind and percussion, an increase of volume is usually the chief element in this prominence, commonly at the start (with a more assertive effect), but alternatively just after the start (with a more insinuating effect, for which one specific term is Sforzando). On instruments not capable of much if any dynamic nuance, such as the harpsichord and the organ, prominence of this type can be given, and an effect of dynamic accentuation simulated, by agogic accents. In principle, any quality that distinguishes notes from their predecessors and successors can produce a ‘subjective’ or ‘perceptible’ accent.
MATTHIAS THIEMEL
Accent derives ultimately from singing and dancing: metrical accent can be associated with dance and motivic accent with speech rhythms. Indeed ancient Greek had a system of signs denoting accentuation, introduced by Aristophanes of Byzantium, though these probably originally denoted variations of pitch rather than dynamic stress. Wolf (1918–19) sought the origins of modern periodic metric accentuation in medieval dance; and displacements of metric accentuation, resulting from the interpolation of rests, can be found in the 13th- and 14th-century hocket.
The rules of counterpoint also played a part: perfect consonances fell on strong beats in medieval polyphony (with imperfect consonances, but not dissonances, also permitted to do so in Netherlandish Renaissance polyphony). However, the treatment of dissonance in Palestrina’s time is also regulated in terms of accent: passing and incidental dissonances fall regularly on weak beats, whereas syncopated dissonances fall equally regularly on strong beats; this style displays a certain restraint in its employment of accent.
By the early 17th century, secular vocal and instrumental polyphony was employing a regular alternation of strong and weak beats, although free rhythm was still prevalent in solo song and chant; even in Bach’s fugues the rhythm remains free from any slavery to the bar-line. And over a long period the stile recitativo retained the ideal of a rejection of metrical and periodic structure.
Zarlino in the 16th century had opposed violations of verbal accentuation in musical settings as barbarismi (Le istitutioni armoniche, bk I p.439); but it has been argued (Georgiades, 1954) that the turning-point in the association between musical accent and semantics came with the work of Schütz in the 17th century, on account of the fact that the German language, unlike Greek or Latin or the modern Romance languages, mostly retains verbal stress unchanged on word stems (compare the stable stresses in German ‘Veréhrung’, ‘veréhre’, ‘veréhrte’ with the changing stresses in Latin ‘adóro’, ‘adorátio’, ‘adoratiónis’). This, it is further argued, permitted the development of the pre-Classical and Classical styles (Eggebrecht, 1991, pp.499, 502), in which pivotal melody notes fall on strong beats within a primarily regular periodic structure.
Until the 18th century, the term accentus signified an ornament; Gottsched was responsible for transferring this concept to dynamic accents. The original sense is still primary in Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon of 1732, but he adds: ‘Accento also denotes the emphatic sound and tone of a word’. In English sources, however, ‘accent’ denoted emphasis and expression at an early date (see Strahle, 1995).
In the Classical style, accent is grounded in harmony, melody and rhythm, none of which enjoys a monopoly, and metrical and periodic structure are often at odds. Eight-bar structure may be the norm, but numerous other periodic structures are found, and extreme displacements of accent are tolerated. Mendel’s Lexikon (article ‘Accentuation’ by W. Tappert) offers a rationale for the undermining of periodic structure, in terms of the affections produced: ‘Voices from the grave, oracles announcing implacable Fate, shadows from the underworld, the utmost resignation, lethargy, anguished despair, silent madness… all these dispense with melodic accent’.
In the 19th century, Schumann was one of those most actively inclined to disturb the ‘tyranny of the bar-line’ by displaced accents and return to the supposed origins of music in ‘free speech, … a higher poetic form of punctuation, as in the Greek choruses, the language of the Bible or the prose of Jean Paul’ (Schumann, i, 1854, 74). Although Moritz Hauptmann, opposing Schumann, Wagner and Liszt, saw a moral principle at stake in his attempts to defend classical measure, no abolition of metre was envisaged by 19th-century composers such as Berlioz, Tchaikovsky or Richard Strauss, or even Wagner, who advocated a sparing use of heavy accentuation in favour of the ‘most diverse and finest transitions of expressiveness’ (1872, iv, 177). The consequences of Wagner’s application of ‘musical prose’ extend well into the 20th century, with the music of Berg and Ligeti.
Other types of rejection of periodic structure are found in Russian (e.g. Musorgsky) and French music (e.g. Debussy, who specified a greater range of different accents than can be found in any of his contemporaries). Accent is crucial in Webern’s music too: ‘every rhythm achieves unprecedented relevance, and must be apprehended as if the entire world depended on the smallest accent’ (Adorno, 1977, xv, 302). In Stravinsky, on the other hand, it has been argued that the rejection of Wagnerian ideals resulted in an absence of accent and hence a static rhythm (Benary, 1967, p.97). In the serial music of the 1950s accentuation was isolated from the other parameters of musical organization that were formerly interdependent with it, subjected to serial organization and in the process arguably reduced to merely mechanical significance; in 20th-century popular music, too, it has been argued that the unremitting reinforcement of crude metrical accent is merely an ‘outward sign of the degree of inner mechanization in musical life’ (Uhde, 1988, p.140).
Theoretical writers over the past 200 years have not found rhythm and metre easy subjects, and it is possible that they have been documenting a history of decline; Kirnberger already complains of a loss of musical sensibility in the conflation of 18/16 time with 9/8, even though earlier composers had drawn a distinction between the two in terms of rhythmic and accentual projection (1776–9, pt 1, i, p.129). In particular, an adequate modern view needs to be historically informed, rather than purely systematic in the manner of Riemann.
Among the ancient Greeks, Plato’s theory of rhythm was ethical in essence; Aristoxenus was concerned with physical measurements and arithmetic as a formative principle for rhythm, but distinguished these from rhythm as formed. The Greek principle of rhythmos is close to the numerus of medieval theory, which does not essentially take account of verbal stress accent and therefore had difficulty accommodating languages which (unlike ancient Greek and Latin) rely on stress rather than syllable length.
From the 17th century, strong and weak accents replaced long and short durations as the basis for rhythmic theory, although mensural notation and its tendency to contradict metre continued to influence practice into that century; metre became a central category for the first time in Kircher (1650, i, p.217). The question of the relationship between accent and metre was raised around the middle of the 18th century, but has arguably never been satisfactorily answered, since accent is so variable in character and so dependent on context; Steele wrote in 1779:
The affections of heavy and light were always felt in music, though erroneously called by some moderns accented and unaccented; however the accented or heavy note, was never understood to be necessarily loud, and the other necessarily soft…
18th- and 19th-century theory mostly adopted a concept of ‘graduated accents’, mapped on to metrical grids; Kirnberger set out the necessity for a ‘periodic return’ of strong and weak accents in the constitution of time and metre (1776–9, p.113). For instance, in 4/4 time each bar contains a notional grid of four beats in the sequence heavy – light – half-heavy – light, reproduced at the next hierarchic level in grouped bars, even though in reality graduated accents must occur as rarely as genuinely graduated dynamics, and the regular alternation of stress is arguably the ‘least typical characteristic of Classical music’ (Henneberg, 1974, p.268). On the other hand, various attempts were made from the 18th century onwards to theorize the differences between metrical and expressive accents. E.W. Wolf wrote of ‘internal’ metrical accents and ‘external’ expressive accents; Koch (1802) distinguished between grammatical, oratorical and pathetic accents; Momigny related accents to various different types of cadence; and Lussy drew very fine distinctions between different types of accent.
Riemann proposed an eight-bar model in his theory, exemplified also in his performing editions; this essentially maintains the traditional grid, and was still being reprinted in German encyclopedia articles as late as 1989. Nietzsche already in 1888 criticized Riemann’s assumption that a single ideal interpretation could be established which would do justice to the nuances of a composer’s inspiration; and his criticism arguably highlights the decline in musical understanding that was suggested above: ‘To the same extent that the eye adjusts to the rhythmic phrase, it becomes blind to broad, long, large-scale forms’.
Accent in non-Western music attracted comment in the early 20th century: Von Hornbostel drew attention to accented ‘weak beats’ in oriental and North American music, and similar deformations of predicted musical patterns of accentuation occur in the music of the Balkans, Turkey and Egypt; the Tala of Indian traditional music also offers some exaggerated accentual patterns.
The extent to which medieval (modal and early mensural) notation implies accent is still a matter of controversy, and in any case modern transcriptions (whether with or without bar-lines) falsify the complexity of the originals, either by strait-jacketing them in a metrical structure or by suggesting an exaggerated metrical freedom. Even up to the 17th century, bar-lines were used as simple guides to orientation, without implications concerning accentuation.
Up to the 20th century, there was great latitude in the notation of accents and the use of signs such as <, >, ^, sf or marcato. In Baroque music, accents are not generally specified directly, except in the use of Staccato dots and dashes. But it is not always easy to distinguish between a staccato dot or dash and an accent. The use of a dot for an accent is still normal in Mozart and Chopin, but became less common during the 19th century as finer distinctions were drawn between dots, wedges, horizontal strokes and so on. A small ‘hairpin’ wedge for an accent was in use by the early 19th century as an alternative to ‘sf’ or ‘fz’; and treatises on performance and instrumental tutors of around 1800 agree that this sign, and ^, denote a less sharp accent than ‘sf’. (Beethoven, however, specified that Act 2 scene 2 of Fidelio was ‘to be played very softly, and the sf and f must not be too strongly expressed’.) Schubert used a variety of accentual markings such as >, fp, >fp, fzp>, fzp, and fz, though on notational grounds alone it is often almost impossible to distinguish between accents and diminuendos in his music or in that of composers such as Berlioz and Chopin.
By the late 19th century (for example in the music of Debussy) an elaborate hierarchy of signs denoting various types of accent had come into use. The horizontal stroke, sometimes accompanied by a dot, was later termed a ‘weight-mark’, for a note or chord ‘intended to impress itself upon the hearer’s attention by a piano or pianissimo, instead of by a forte or fortissimo’ (Macpherson, 2/1932, p.30). Riemann invented the concept and term ‘agogic accent’, described in his Musikalische Dynamik und Agogik (1884) as a means of securing accent in phrasing where a dynamic accent is out of place (see Articulation and phrasing); he used a special shallow circumflex sign to indicate the agogic accent in his phrasing editions. Schoenberg adopted the marks ' and ˘ (taken from metrics) to indicate rhythmically stressed and unstressed notes respectively.
In 20th-century music attempts have been made to grade different accents precisely in terms of their weight or attack (Read, 1964); for a useful distinction of different types of accent in general (non-historical) terms, see Blom (Grove5); for other French and German uses of the term, see Ornaments.
Grove5 (‘Time’, E. Blom), esp. 473
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