The use of Accent in musical performance, real or imagined. The term may refer to particular notes or chords, or more comprehensively to an entire performance; in the modern Western tradition, accentuation, together with phrasing, articulation, dynamics etc. contributes to ‘expression’, and in vocal settings since the 16th century at least this has often been taken to imply a responsibility of conforming expressively to the spoken accentuation of the text.
Over the centuries composers and theorists have offered more or less precise guidelines for accentuation. Some 13th-century writers (Anonymus 4, Franco of Cologne, Odington and Lambertus) stated that singers should moderate dissonances occurring at points of emphasis or at the beginnings of compositions. Keyboard composers up to the early 18th century advocated the use of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ fingers on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ beats. In general, however, polyphonic music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods is characterized by freedom in the accentuation implied by the separate parts: Rousseau observed that ‘there are as many accents as there are modifications of the voice; and there are as many kinds of accent as there are differences between such modifications’ (Dictionnaire de musique, 1768). Geminiani and others opposed the practice of stressing the beginnings of bars. However, the French style seems to have accepted the practice of observing the basic metre, which is advocated also in Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule (1756), ‘if the composer has not added any other expression’.
Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon (1802) already explicitly recognizes Agogic accent: it states that an accent consists either in an increase of volume or in a certain ‘expressive lingering, so that it seems as if one were waiting a moment longer than its duration requires’. Beethoven, like A.B. Marx, criticized the smooth playing of contemporary pianists; his fingerings reveal a preference for grouping, articulation and accentuation that militates against the simplicity of the basic metrical pattern. In a sense, this tendency persisted in the New Viennese school’s stress on the primacy of pitch over metrical organization; Schoenberg wrote:
The measure, which should be, after all, a servant of music-making, has set itself up as the master – so much so that an amateurish overaccentuation of the strong beats of the measure has come about, which stands in the way of every free-floating phrasing that satisfies meaning. This is precisely the reason why pianists and other instrumentalists, and even singers and conductors as well, have lost their feeling for a cantabile performance. Their musical insecurity requires them to shorten the distance from one fixed point to the next as much as possible… they are like swimmers who dare not leave the shore.
Any tendency to accentuate the final tonic chord in performance, for example, might similarly be thought to betray a misconception of the nature of harmonic tension and resolution; accentuation is an expression of the performer’s understanding of large-scale structure, informed by the music theory and performing practice of the period represented by a composition.
Writings on accentuation in the broader sense have developed in parallel to writings on musical expression, and are a product of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Metrical theory had begun to dictate that the bar-line indicated the position of the strongest accent in the bar as well as the division of the time, and in consequence many of the ‘convenience’ and traditional aspects of notation from the period up to about 1850 began to imply incorrect accentuation. So Lussy (1874), for example, raised the necessity for accenting dissonances and chromatically altered notes. Riemann (1884) discussed the need for allying accentuation, and dynamic rise and fall, with phrasing theory (see Articulation and phrasing). Lussy’s book represented an attempt to reproduce the practice of an earlier period (including accentuation) in modern terms; the same may well have been true of many of the phrasing editions of Riemann and other editors. For this reason they are worth scrutiny as a source of information about early 19th-century performing practice.
L. Mozart: Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule (Augsburg, 1756/R, 3/1787/R; Eng. trans., 1948, as A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, 2/1951)
J.-J. Rousseau: Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768/R; Eng. trans., 1771, 2/1779/R)
H.C. Koch: Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt, 1802/R, rev. 3/1865 by A. von Dommer)
M. Lussy: Traité de l’expression musicale (Paris, 1874, 8/1904; Eng. trans., 1885)
H. Riemann: Musikalische Dynamik und Agogik: Lehrbuch der musikalischen Phrasierung (Hamburg, 1884)
A. Schoenberg: Der musikalische Gedanke und die Logik, Technik und Kunst seiner Darstellung (MS, 1934–6); ed. P. Carpenter and S. Neff with Eng. trans. as The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation (New York, 1995)
C. Brown: Classical and Romantic Performance Practice 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1999)
MATTHIAS THIEMEL