![]() This separation of grid and ‘landscape’ is even more evident in the striking Lochhamer Liederbuch, a 15th-century collection of secular German song, where the barlines are printed in a different colour. They don’t govern the music’s unfolding, any more than the milestones on a country road govern the landscape. But the vertical alignment is very casual – there is a sense that the barlines aren’t part of the musical conception. ![]() Occasionally you find almost modern-looking barlines, as in the 11th-century Codex Calixtenus. The striking thing is how modest they appear, not like the domineering grid of modern-day music. They appear as short lines or dots marking off the perfections, and sometimes double barlines were used to mark the end of a section. It’s here that barlines make their first tentative appearance. Here we have proper quantities: longas, breves, semi-breves, related to each other in groups known as ‘perfections’, because they added up to the perfect number three. With the many-voiced music (polyphony) of the 13th century we move on to firmer ground. Were these and other notational mysteries signs that the musicians obeyed a proper metre you could actually beat out? Or do they point to accents within something basically free? We don’t know. For example the letter ‘p’ above a note means pressing forward, ‘t’ means ‘drag out’. A letter written at the end of the ninth century by Notker, a monk at the Swiss monastery of Gall, explains the meaning of some of these. Such a music hardly stands in need of barlines, and in fact rhythm as a whole is largely ignored – apart from the odd tantalising hint. It is this fluctuating, only partly quantifiable rhythm of prosody which governed the earliest form of notated music in the West, which was sacred chant. But though it is orderly, the rhythms outlined in prosody are hardly metronomic. The sorting of this rhythmic counterpoint into types and patterns is what we call prosody. The stream of irregular long and short beats you find in spoken rhythm becomes more orderly in poetry, where it is subtly overlaid with patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. There’s another model for musical rhythm, which is speech. If it does obey regular rhythms, they are the subtly fluctuating ones of the body: the in-and-out of breathing, which according to the great ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs was the bodily root of triple time, and walking, which provides the model for the up-down, arsis-thesis movement of duple time. Where music is improvised, it can indeed be a ‘divine arabesque’, as fluttering and changeable as the wind. It’s part of that complicated apparatus of notation which has developed such an iron grip on our musical practice. So if the barline is such a tyrant, why do we tolerate it? Most of the world’s musicians have lived and died in blissful ignorance of the barline, which reminds us that it’s a peculiarly Western thing. ![]() Busoni looked forward to a future where rhythm, like pitch, would admit finer gradations than our present cumbersome notation would allow. Debussy complained that music’s ‘divine arabesque’ cannot be imprisoned within its regular grid. Schumann dreamed of a music without barlines. Plenty of other musicians have chafed at the rule of this tedious musical traffic cop. But there have been many times since when I’ve felt the heavy presence of the barline squeezing the rhythmic life out of something (violinist André Rieu’s plodding waltz performances are a case in point…). I was trying to blow a tune on a fife, and can remember the teacher saying, ‘Come on now, it’s in three-in-a-bar! Where are the accents? It should be ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three!’ I have a distinct memory of thinking, ‘No it shouldn’t, it sounds silly like that.’ I was very young when I first felt the tyrant’s boot on my neck. ![]()
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