Intrinsic to the termMusical Punctuationis the analogy between music and language: like language, music expresses ideas through various grammatical and rhetorical units, such as phrases, periods, and paragraphs; these units, according to the extent to which they convey completeness or incompleteness, are more or less separated from each other through the pauses, rests, and inflections of punctuation. Such an analogy is not conceptually difficult. We are accustomed to the exchange of terminology between language and music: music theorists analyze the “sentence” and “paragraph” structure of a composition; performers determine how best to “phrase” a given passage. In fact,...

The title for this chapter is inspired by an observation made by Park Honan in 1960 concerning the nature of English punctuation practices (pointing theory) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ I find the remark particularly apropos, in light of our discussion thus far, because it embraces not only the very vibrant nature of the subject, but also the sense of amazement we tend to have today that punctuation could be anything other than a rather tedious if necessary element of language, most effective when barely noticeable.

The concept of punctuation as a significant, fascinating, and vital element of spoken...

Heinrich Christoph Koch begins his chapter “The Nature of Melodic Sections” from Part II of hisVersuch einer Anleitung zur Composition(1787), with the following statement:

Certain more or less noticeableresting points of the spirit[Ruhepunkte des Geistes] are generally necessary in speech and thus also in the products of those fine arts which attain their goal through speech, namely poetry and rhetoric, if the subject that they present is to be comprehensible. Suchresting points of the spiritare just as necessary in melody if it is to affect our feelings. This is a fact which has never...

Stop, Breathe, Pause, Suspend, Take Time, Rest, Divide, Separate. . . . Such injunctions dominate eighteenth-century (and nineteenth-century) discourse on the Art of Punctuation. As we established in Part 1, the manner in which phrases are formed and differentiated (our “complex and lively picture of pointing theory”) encompasses a broad array of subjects: syllabic feet, metrical stress, accent, emphasis, dynamics, inflection, as well as considerations of gesture, affect, compositional type and style, etc. But a quick glance through the chart in appendix B reveals punctuation’s defining role as the delineation of phrase structure through pauses, or musically speaking, rests ....

Articulationin the daily discourse of the modern musician has acquired such broad usage that its significance is often obscured. We speak of “articulating” this or that passage in a kind of catch-all manner with any variety of meanings and on any number of levels, many of which easily merge into the realm of punctuation. Take for instance the following two definitions of articulation fromThe New Harvard Dictionary:

(1) In performance, the characteristics of attack and decay of single tones or groups of tones and the means by which these characteristics are produced. Thus, for example, staccato and legato...

Thus far in our efforts tointerpret rests, we have established that music is far more “pause-ridden” than might otherwise meet the eye; its notation expresses rests that are both written and unwritten. However, many of these rests do not always express pauses which are directly related to punctuation, and furthermore, their notation, explicit or implicit, must necessarily remain somewhat imprecise. This concerns where the pauses fall, how regularly or irregularly they occur, and where they lie on the scale from scarcely perceptible (including those that admit of no repose at all) to highly conspicuous. But if we demand too...

Music and language, as we established in chapter 6, agree on a general categorization of subject matter according to prose and verse, where in the strictest sense the one expresses strong subjects through an irregularity of rhythm, metrical accent, and phrase structure, while the other expresses milder subjects through a contrasting homogeneity. Music and language, however, inevitably disagree as to which category presents the greater challenges for the composer and performer. There is so much music in spoken verse and so much speech in musical prose, the basis for the continuing analogy between the two, that the nearer one medium...

In the previous chapter, on recitative, we discussed the way in which musical punctuation seeks to express the most predominant structures of language, those of prose. In this chapter, we now turn the tables to view musical punctuation, still as it seeks to imitate language, but from the perspective of music’s most predominant structures. The general consensus among eighteenth-century music theorists, as expressed above by Koch, is that the basics of musical punctuation are to be derived from the most recognizable and distinctly defined forms of the day, what we are describing as the verse-like structures of music. These verse...