16th Century Rhythm and Meter
I. General Meter and Notation Considerations
  1. The basic pulse of the music — the tactus — is the semibreve.
  2. In tempus imperfectum there are two semibreves per bar making the meter equivalent to 2/1. (Tempus perfectum is three beats to a bar. Prolatione refers to the subdivision of the tactus, and can also be perfect or imperfect.)
  3. Most scholars believe that the tempo generally lies between m.m. 48 and 64.
  4. For pedagogical purposes, it is easier to think of the meter as 4/2 with four minims per bar (m.m. 96 - 128). This is because when discussing consonance and dissonance, one must consider four metric positions within the bar, and it is easiest to call them "beats 1, 2, 3, and 4."
  5. There were no barlines in the music (vertical lines were usually used to show phrasing), but to facilitate study of the music most theorists use tick marks ( ' ) to indicate barlines. (This notation is generally called Mensurstriche, and uses the modern note-value symbols).
  6. Ties between adjacent notes did not exist in 16th-century notation. The only way of adding extra value to a given duration was by using dot notation (punctus additionis). As a result, some durations (such as semibreve tied to semiminum) were never used.
  7. In Mensurstriche, one usually maintains the dot notation even if the note value extends across a barline. (In other words, the tick mark is a guide that indicates the location of the downbeat, not the presence of a barline).
  8. The maxima and the longa appear infrequently, and the semifusa is very rare. Thus, they are generally not used in student counterpoint exercises.
II. Rhythmic Conventions in Melodic Writing
  1. All note values longer than the semibreve (including the dotted semibreve) always occur on strong beats (1 or 3).
  2. This implies that minums on a weak beat cannot be tied to semibreves on a strong beat. A good way of avoiding this problem is to remember that dotted notes always represent the longer note followed by the shorter note (tied, of course), and never the reverse.
  3. Every piece of music in 16th-century style must begin with a semibreve or longer and end with a breve or longer. (This rule still applies if the piece's final cadence is on beat 3.)
  4. Because the music generally moves gradually from the long first note into shorter values, it is very rare to see a breve followed by a minim.
  5. Rests always occur on strong beats (1 and 3) and never on weak beats (2 and 4), regardless of the duration of the rest.
  • The rhythmic conventions regarding "black notes" are linked closely with the idioms and melodic figures in which they are used. Therefore, see the section on melodic conventions for black-note rhythmic use.
  • See the Text-Setting section for more rhythmic conventions.
    Return to 16th-Century Counterpoint Study Guide