Tactus and Proportions around 1600 

A GREAT lesson and what an incredible video editing skills you have... thank you for sharing this!

2:20 what a absolute unit this Tactus is

Etam. You literally have some of the best videos on RU-vid dude. Seriously. Bravo. 🤘

everytime i hear the theme 🎶 i know i'm about to be enlightened or has just been... thanks Elam & team 👊 🙂

Some years ago I bought Fritz Rotschild's volume "The Lost Tradition in Music", dealing with these problems in XVII- and XVIII-Century Music; althought it's now out of printing (and as such you have to find an older, used copy for sale) I've found it to be a good starting point on the topic.

Sadly, choral directors generally have only modern editions to go on, and this adds to the difficulty. But thank you for this excellent exposition of the problem. As ever, the scholarship of the presentation is made incredibly easy to follow because of the clarity of the structure and the really polished use of graphics. Oh, and the choice of examples. And the wide-ranging sources. And the clear love of the music that is evident everywhere. In short - I wish that all instructional videos were like this!

I am very grateful that such wonder youtube channel like this exists!

These videos are such a joy to watch. Looking forward to a video about mensural notation! I suspect there will be some connection back to this one, regarding perfect/imperfect tempus and minor/major prolation (without knowing too much...)

Thank you, thank you! for your brilliant exposition of this recondite subject, and for your general open-minded, musicianly stance. I have several times in my career encountered people who have attempted to apply the theory of the tactus and of the proportions to the interpretation of much later music than you discuss, and have done so in a rigid and doctrinaire manner; and your presentation, aside from its historical brilliance, serves to remind us that we might profit from following the old masters' flexibility in our musical thoughts and deeds, particularly when dealing with a theoretical system which was subject to subjective, personal interpretation from the start.

Well, that explains it! LOL. This was a great program about a complex subject. I love the tortoise and the hare.

Yes! I look forward to the video. Everything you upload is great!

Que buena explicación, sin usar un lenguaje confuso y aburrido, muchas gracias por este aporte, saludos desde la República Dominicana, la tierra del Merengue.

I love your work. It's just exceptional.

This channel is pure gold! Thank you so much!!!!

This is an awesome series with great production.

Very helpful in understanding a difficult topic. Thank you for all of your good work!

I have been binge-ing on these for some days now. Thanks so much for all the hard work and interesting insights. Makes one feel so much easier about taking on and interpreting this music (especially the fact that confusions seems to have reigned for ever.) It also makes being dogmatic about the music much harder. Bravo!

Ô combien intéressantes, simples et clairement énoncées sont ces belles capsules historico-musicales ! Merci beaucoup d’offrir à tous de si beaux produits !

Please continue producing these extremely insightful videos. It is a wonderful source of knowledge - even for me, a classical saxophonist who focuses on much later composers.

Very great again! I'm beginning to understand and get a feeling for such notation.

You've just become one of my favortie channels. Subscribed.

I love this channel! Thank you

Fascinating and thank you!

Wonderful Video, Thank You!

so fascinating. It amazes me to some extent just how imprecise tempos and notations were at the outset of such a robustly productive and creative century. One can only wonder what the later Baroque titans like Bach, Handel and Scarlatti made of all the ideas that they inherited? How did they make their way through it and arrive at more consistent values, such as temperament and tempos.

You guys are amazing! Cheers

soy estudiante de música en concepción, Chile, y agradezco mucho sus aportes teórico musicales...estoy viendo todos sus vídeos, mientras estén subtitulados jejej..muchas gracias por sus aportes👏👏👏 saludos 😉😉

You mention the Renaissance association of the human heart pulse with the tactus. In the mid-18th century, Johann Joachim Quantz recommended using the heart beat rate as a basis for tempo, defining it as 80 beats per minute. I mentioned this to my physician, who was surprised, and said that the modern medical standard human pulse rate is 72 neats per minute.

Grazie, come sempre.

This is just amazing!!! I am sending it to everyone

Quite fascinating! I have to chuckle when reminded of a "hemiola" - my friends and I used to joke about a hemiola being a blood disease. It makes me smile to think about that.

Thank you Elam... Again ☺️

What an incredible video, thanks!!!!

Nice work! I dont understand how somoeone can dislike your videos...so many good research!

Really enjoyed your documentary.

Thank you very much! Great lesson!

Thank you as always for these fantastic explanations of complex and specialised topics. I wish this one had existed when I was a student trying to understand what on earth Roger Bowers was talking about.

So clear... and confusing at the same time :D Thank you for these truly helpful videos, and congrats for the graphic work that helps to have a bit fun with these hard subjects 👍 Subscribed!

By the way, these video`s are extremely helpful and awsomely interesting :) thanks so much for taking the time and effort to upload them!!

Interesting and educational video. Quite useful. Ta! Greetings from Chile.

Excellent video, thank you! I research and reconstruct dances of that period and oh how many times did i that facepalm when trying to figure out what exactly these long dead people were trying to tell with their musical texts. Things are further complicated by the fact that most of them were dancers, not musicians, and had shaky understanding of contemporary musical theory and notation.

Regarding the discussion at 6:32, about de confusion between Sesquialtera and Tripla, Dr. Julia Dokter summarize Praetorius' teachings in the page 28 of her Doctoral Dissertation "Tactus and Tempo in Organ Music from the German Barroque". According to this, Tripla include three semibreves proportional to two semibreves in duplum meter, and it must be associated with Alla breve (cut C) and then with the Motet style. In the other hand, Sesquialtera include three minims proportional to two minims in duplum meter, and must be associated to Alla semibreve (C) and then with Madrigal style. According to the explanation that she previously made regarding the tempo relationship between Motete and Madrigal, it could not be the same Tripla and Sesquialtera. The confusion could be explained by following the italian tradition, Tripla was originally signed as cut C 3/2 (with three semibreves in a time of two semibreves); however, due to of the misuse of this time signature, Praetorius settled the notation convention: 3/1 or only 3 (with three semibreves), in order to distinguish from Sesquialtera, and not because it represents 3 notes in a time of one note.

This video cast light in places full of doubts, but, more important, they cast shadows of doubt in places of certainty.

one of the most controversial topic in HIP. Thank you for well-reasoned video. Lately it seems the conception of tactus is being so intensively promoted by some (group of) musicians as almost a 'must'. But I am not convinced yet really. Thank you

Insomma, per dirla alla breve, sono cut-c! Thank yo so much!

Thank you for these wonderful resources Elam! Any chance of a video about 17th-century aesthetics in vocal production/sound and technique at some point? It seems to be a widely debated topic and I'd love to hear what the sources really say about it.

Excellent, as usual! I am being tought this topic right now and it's a real pin in the eye! Thank you! Your videos are most helpful! By the way, I loved the last music sheet in Hebrew! I always wondered how would they underlay the text since the music is written right in the opposite direction. I'd like to see more examples of it.

Thank you for that excellent video! Only last week I wondered about the proportion signs in Alonso Mudarra's "Tres libros de musica en cifras para vihuela" (1546). The preface explains that a alla-breve-like sign signifies a slower(!) tempo ("ha de ir despacio") . But some recordings use definitely a faster tempo instead of a slower one. An interesting and baffling topic...

Frankly, if conducting in three, typically, indicating the second beat is more important than indicating the third. It's too late to get the group playing together by waiting until the third beat. They need to know where the second beat's tempo is, be it drawn out or moved ahead. I learned this decades ago thanks to a program about Seiji Ozawa that was on PBS, and, in one segment, he was explaining this very thing to someone, and I found, in my own conducting, that it really, really works.

Very interesting. I wonder if any of this is relevant to Wim Winter's theory on metronome marks, according to which the back and forth movement of the metronome's pendulum marks the two parts of the tactus. (See his RU-vid channel AuthenticSound for more.)

Wow, such beautiful videos! Just out of curiosity, can I ask you what kind of software do you use to make them? Thanks again!

Vicentinos remark is just great. Exactly how i think. Do you know how influential it was, and how long?

Really helpful and beautifully produced. Thank you! (I've emailed you with a question - hope that's OK)

since i don`t have thorough study in this business (though I understand and can, though not easily, execute these subdivisions) i I `m bound to sort of guess about the lengths of the notes in modern editions…. mostly a sound understanding of the text gives some idea about how to sing going from 2 to 3 or 4 to 6 or so…..

Hi Elam, how are you? I find your videos very satisfying to watch, interesting and fresh. Thank you very much. I have a question regarding the last part of your video where you have a text in Hebrew over a score. how this is matched, since hebrew is red from right to left and music from left to right? Thank you and Shana Tova!

Congratulation, great channel, which I visit very often. Your explanations are very clear and useful. But what's about pure instrumental music. Sometime I feel rather insecure in changing time...

This was both instructive and illuminating, in terms of how to count a bar line. I also know that in the realm of the 19'th century performance practices there are all kinds of discussions and fights going on about how to count music that was laid down with metronome markings. I know of a guy in Belgium, I won't give his name because it will only get me into trouble, who I initially was very supportive of until I saw, in my judgement, that he took the metronome markings and made them first into a fetish and secondly imposed a whole beat counting which lead to rather slow or very slow performance interpretations. It got so bad that I no longer comment on his channel and I find some of the interpretations, especially of Beethoven, to be unacceptable; they make me squirm with discomfort. I look forward to learning more from you about the historical patterns of counting. I love your material. It could not have come to me at a more opportune time in my life. HatsLacha.

ok, little notice: "inanes" (empty-handed) must not be pronounced with an aspiration, as in "inhanes", but without. All the rest, perfect, as usual.

Well done, as usual! One query: I would have expected (ca. 1600, and for quite a while afterwards) the penultimate note (G, imperfect breve) in the example of sesquialtera at around 7:15 to be black -- a consequence of the "similis ante similem perfecta" rule, which was still observed at least to the extent of causing coloration in contexts such as this. (And similarly, a black semibreve in the alla semibreve example.)

If you've already discussed this, I apologize, but - I couldn't help but think as I watched the video, how does Tactus relate to modern practices in regards to conducting? Most of my own musical experience revolves around choral performance, of course, including one course on the basics of conducting. (Which I almost failed!) So now I wonder a bit, how did we come to our modern way of directing a musical group? I recall in other videos of yours that some choirs functioned without ANY direction as such, because the standard of practice was much more demanding of those performers: they had to really, really know their stuff and knew they'd be expected to work together in performance in that way. So were directors in the "modern choir" sense even a thing?

Dank je voor deze uitleg. We zingen met het koor "Allons, Gay Bergeres" van Guillaume Costeley (?1531-1606) in moderne notatie. Het werk was genoteerd in 4/4 van begin tot het einde. Het was echter onmogelijk om het refrein vrolijk te laten klinken (volgens de tekst) en op het einde de zestiende noten nog betekenis te geven. Ik heb het refrein in "alla breve" gezet en de strofen in "common time". De harmonisatie, de woordexpressie en de stemvoeringen komen nu tot hun recht. Bedankt. Of is het Preatorius die ik moet bedanken ? ;-)

So is moving the hand to the tactus the renaissance version of the conductor waving his baton?

The original in the end with a text in Hebrew? Is that historical, or one of Rotem's newly composed pieces?

Thank you again for this excellent video of which I will feature a little bit in my video of today, of course referring to the link and asking my viewers to subscribe to your channel. It's a pity that in the pendulum and metronome discussions so few scholars want to make the obvious bridge to the obvious meaning of Tact when talking on a Metronome or Taktmesser. It's essential in understanding the use of the metronome as well (at least as I believe it is).

At 16:16, do you not take into account tempus perfectum vs. tempus imperfectum?

I hit like on your videos before I watch

What is the goal of notating it differently if it is exactly the same in 16:58?

Thank you very much! Very pecific topic for me. I understand the idea of proportion. But still the part about tactus conception as of stable ruthm (often measured by pendulum) stays a bit controversal for me. To me European musical tradition does not really operate with rythm as independent semantical element of music.... it is almost always a result of pitch realtions in time. I cannot understand implication of 'outside' timing that keeps beating irrespectively of what is going in music. What would you think about it?

2:20 lol

Thank you very much! Note that since your website update, the Footnotes link leads to an error page. The working link is www.earlymusicsources.com/youtube/tactus1600

What editing software do you use? Thank you!

I am a standard deviation smarter.

Amazing! Just noticed that at ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-otgXoa8QEWg.html alla breve is called 𝇋 [C] instead of 𝇍 [slashed C]...

Is it "fastidiosus in anes", or "fastidiosus inanes"? "In anes" mean nothing in latin, "inanes" mean "empty" or "empty-handed": "And sends the rich away with nothing". Just like in the Magnificat: "Esurientes implevit bonis, et divites dimisit inanes." "He has filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he has sent away empty."

"Alla breve" = "cut time"

did you say "cazzi meter" ?

I think I've always been playing a mistake.....

Have you seen Wim Winters' channel? His focus is a bit later than yours (Beethoven, Czerny, and Chopin) but he's doing some fascinating research into the way the concept of the two-part Tactus was incorporated into early metronome markings.

Now I realise that I understand nothing 🤯

This is a very ackward subject. The task of recreation of early music in general is very laborious.

Hi , you cold leave this discussion by focussing on "breath". The span of a gulp of breath must lead you the way!