Accent (music)

“ Accents are always required to mark the entrance of a theme, a phrase or a melody. Where there are several voices, or parts, as in a fugue, each voice denotes its appearance with an accent. Every daring assertion hazarded in music, as in speech, demands special emphasis. ”

“ Regular rhythm involves accent. Whether or no there be any such emphasis as a thing in itself, the listening ear supplies it to meet a need. When we attend to a clock ticking, the tick-tock, tick-tock, however even it may sound at first, soon resolves itself into a rhythm with the accent on either the tick or the tock. So does the beat of an engine, or the hum of a railway train, merge itself into some definite sound picture, with the accent for relief that the ear demands. Thus out of rhythm grows very naturally an accentuation which gives balance, structure, and form. ”

“ The natural accent of all instruments is different, but may be varied by certain methods of playing. This is particularly the case with the violin, upon which, by means of the bow, every variety of accent may be produced. As no characters have been adopted that will sufficiently express these vane-tie ,, is evident that accent must depend principally upon the taste and fancy of the performer. Accent is a modulation of the voice to express a passion. Every bar or measure is divided into accented and unaccented parts. ”

“ In music, as in speech, we may designate several distinct kinds of accent. The grammatical or measure accent, the rhythmical accent, and the descriptive, or accent of feeling, are perhaps the most important of all the various kinds. Accent is a peculiar tone, or natural expression, given to certain parts of each measure in every species of time; and without accent there is no more melody in song than in the humming of a bee ”

“ At a time when poetic originality in England might seem to have had its utmost play, here was certainly one new poet more, with a structure and music of verse, a vocabulary, an accent, unmistakably novel, yet felt to be no mere tricks of manner adopted with a view to forcing attention—an accent which might rather count as the very seal of reality on one man's own proper speech ”

“ The poetry of the ancients differed from the mass of that now written in nothing more than in this, that it was considered as a living element of the existing music, and exercised in subjection to the laws of that divine art. Now the singing of words in music has the effect of bringing out more prominently the mass of vocal sound in the words, or what the prosodians in their technical style call quantity, while the spoken accent—unless it be identified with the musical accent or rhythmical beat—is apt to be overwhelmed altogether and superseded. ”

“ There is no way of giving expression to words but with accent, and without accent we cannot make music. All monotonous sounds are very disagreeable to the ear, and it is certain that the different degrees of loud and soft give the greatest pleasure to the ear. ”

“ What they really prove is that the musical accent is not so invariable as the stress accent in English or German, but may depend upon the collocation of the word, or upon the degree of emphasis which it has in a particular use. ”

“ It will be observed that in all these examples the strong accent is on the first note of the bar. It has been already said that this is its regular position; still it is by no means invariable. Just as in poetry the accent is sometimes thrown backward or forward a syllable, as for instance in the line
‘Stop! for thy tread is on an Empire's dust,’ where the first syllable instead of the second receives the accent, so in music, though with much more frequency, we find the accent transferred from the first to some other beat in the bar. Whenever this is done it is always clearly indicated. ”

“ When a figure or motive starts at the accented beat, it begins, so to speak, in the right place; any tone or tones which precede the accent are merely preliminary or introductory tones. While they are very desirable and necessary, in the fulfilment of certain purposes, they are not an essential part of the motive ”

“ The ancient Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity. Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where there is more than rhythm,—where there is music,—quantity is a very important factor. ”

“ Accent is the arithmetical order by which the contents of a bar are divided and arranged. Although the principles of the accent belong chiefly to the composer, yet the performer ought not to be unacquainted with them. To accent is to utter a note or syllable with a particular stress or modulation of voice ”

“ The Germans divide accent into two principal species—grammatical and rhetorical; and the first of these we term here accent, and the last emphasis. The Italian words Rinforzando, Sforzato, or their contractions, Rinf, Rf., Sforz., Sf., are often used to mark the emphasis, and sometimes are placed over accented notes. As every species of measure may be subdivided by accents, according to the degree of quickness in which it is performed, so also the weak parts of every measure may be occasionally made emphatic at the pleasure of the composer. ”

“ ACCENT. As in spoken language certain words and syllables receive more emphasis than others, so in music there are always some notes which are to be rendered comparatively prominent; and this prominence is termed ‘accent.’ In order that music may produce a satisfactory effect upon the mind, it is necessary that this accent (as in poetry) should for the most part recur at regular intervals. Again, as in poetry we find different varieties of metre, so in music we meet with various kinds of time; i.e. the accent may occur either on every second beat, or isochronous period, or on every third beat. ”

“ Of all this in our elocutional poetry we do, and must, in the nature of things, do the very reverse. Poetry composed primarily for recitation must follow the laws of spoken speech; and the spoken accent being the most prominent element in that speech, becomes of course the great regulator of poetical rhythm. Quantity, as the secondary element of spoken speech, though the principal thing in music, is not indeed neglected altogether, but left to the free disposal of the poet, so that the technical structure of his verse is in no wise bound by it. ”

“ Accent, in its primitive sense, is an affection of the voice, which gives each syllable of a word its due pitch, in respect to height or lowness. By accent we learn the manner in which sounds are uttered, without reference to their loudness or softness. ”

“ In so far as music is an accompaniment rhythm is brought into essential relation with poetry. In the most general way I will on this merely venture the observation that the accents of the musical beat ought not to directly contradict those of the metre. If, for example, one of the unaccentuated syllables, relatively to the rhythm of the verse, is placed in a strong accent of the beat, while the arsis, or it may be the caesura, falls in one of the weak accents of the music, then we get a false opposition between the rhythm of the poetry and that of the music which it is better to avoid. ”

“ Aside from the instinct for time, and the desire to make a ‘tune’ of the chant, which is a part of human nature, it is a feature of the English language that in speaking we pass from accent to accent and elide the intervening syllables. The first attempts to adapt the Gregorian tones to English use proceeded strictly upon the plan of one syllable to a note. Of however many notes the mediation or cadence of the chant consisted, that number of syllables was marked off from the end of each half-verse, and the recitation ended when they were reached. ”

“ It is necessary to remember, always, the rule that governs the actual body of the phrase, and its possible preliminary tones; namely, that the vital, essential starting-point of a phrase (and other factors of musical form) is the first primary accent, the first beat of the first full measure. The length of the phrase is reckoned from this point, and consequently, the cadence-chord is entitled to all the beats that remain, from its accent to the very end of the final measure. ”

“ Dissonances need to be brought out in such prominence that they may not appear to be accidental misconceptions, and that confident expectation may be aroused of their ultimate resolution. Accentuation must be regulated by the claims of musical delivery. At all times too gentle an accent is without effect, too glaring an accent is to be condemned.
Hans von Bülow strenuously advised young musicians to cultivate their ears and strive to attain musical beauty in what is termed phrasing, which he regarded as the real beginning of greatness in a performer. ”

“ Steele made considerable progress in analyzing and recording the melody of speech, and could repeat a sentence as correctly as if it had been set to music. There is a musical accentuation observable in all pleasing declamation. When we utter the interjection Oh ! under the strong impression of wonder or surprise, we use a circumflex musical slide, first ascending and then descending through no less an interval than a whole octave, thus:—
When the musical accent denotes sorrow, the tone of the voice continues all the while at the same pitch ”

“ In reading verse, every syllable must have the same accent, and every word the same emphasis as in prose; and whenever the melody or music of the verse would lead to an incorrect accent or emphasis, this must be disregarded.
If a poet has made his verse deficient in melody, this must not be remedied by the reader, at the expense of sense or the established rules of accent and quantity. Take the following:
EXAMPLE. (41) O'er shields, and helms, and helme'd heads he rode,
Of thrones, and mighty Seraphim prostrate
According to the metrical accent, the last word must be pronounced "pros-trate'." ”

“ In slow common time, the accents are more frequent; but they are found in the same proportion on the first, third, fifth, and seventh quavers, which are the strong parts, while the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth are the weak parts. ”

“ impossible to follow their rapid utterance, or comprehend much of the purport of what they said—yet French, in the mouths of Frenchmen, or Belgians (I was not then sensible of the horrors of the Belgian accent) was as music to my ears. One of these gentlemen presently discerned me to be an Englishman—no doubt from the fashion in which I addressed the waiter; for I would persist in speaking French in my execrable South-of-England style, though the man understood English. The gentleman, after looking towards me once or twice, politely accosted me in very good English; ”

“ This many schoolmasters will not do, because it requires science, and will take a little trouble; but let such pass. Those who do so train the young classical ear, will find that in turning to poetry, and keeping time with their foot as they read any metre, the attentive scholar will not only readily follow the given rhythm, and appreciate the position of the musical accent, (very few human beings being altogether destitute of the rhythmical principle,) but will be able also to preserve the spoken accent in those places where the flow of the rhythm does not altogether overpower it. ”

“ They contribute to the melody, by giving it air and spirit: they contribute not less to the sense, by distinguishing important words from others. These two effects ought never to be separated. If a musical accent be put where the sense rejects it, we feel a discordance betwixt the thought and{416} the melody. An accent, for example, placed on a word that makes no figure, has the effect to burlesk it, by giving it an unnatural elevation. The injury thus done to the sense, is communicated to the melody by the intimacy of connection, and both seem to be wounded. ”

“ I am convinced more and more, that, as every nation has a particular accent and tone in discourse, so as the tone of one not to agree with or please the other, no more can the fashion of singing to words, for that the better the words are set, the more they take in of the ordinary tone of the country whose language the song speaks, so that a song well composed by an Englishman must be better to an Englishman than it can be to a stranger, or than if set by a stranger in foreign words. ”

“ Nothing is better, I well think,
Than love; the hidden well-water
Is not so delicate to drink:
This was well seen of me and her.
(Swinburne: The Leper.) [Pg 10]
These wrenched accents are characteristic of one phase of the so-called "pre-Raphaelite" poetry of the Victorian period; in part, no doubt, they are due to the influence of the old ballads. My colleague Professor Newcomer has suggested that they are partly due, also, to a dislike for the combative accent which would occur where two heavy syllables came together (accented as commonly) in a compound like "harp-player." ”

“ The chanting must have been much like the sing-song that some people fall into when reading verses now. The first thing in scanning a line of poetry is to drop into its rhythm,—to let it sing itself. When the regular accent is felt, the lines can easily be separated into their metrical feet. ”

“ Some of the most popular of our singers sing with the mouth nearly closed, with others the voice is forced and strained, proceeding not from the chest, but from the throat, the muscles of which are necessarily contracted in the effort. We have, no doubt, many difficulties to overcome in the structure of our language, in which the accent is thrown on the consonants rather than on the vowels. Unlike the Italian, which is thrown out, ore rotundo, directly from the chest, the English language is spoken from the throat, and, in general, also with the mouth nearly closed. ”