Verse Structure and Musical Rhythm in Latin Hymn Melodies

Abstract

As Thrasybulos Georgiades in his book Music and Language has demonstrated, the “problem of the constant preoccupation of music with language” represents one of the major factors of European Music History. In order to deal with this problem adequately it is, above all, the question about rhythm on the language and on the musical level that has to be asked. In the Latin Hymn, the oldest song genre of European Music History, rhythm materializes on the language level in the structure of verses which has originally resulted from adding long and short syllables in some predefined constellation. Since the distribution of word accents, however, may differ considerably from this constellation, musical rhythm (if adopted at all) has the choice to what extent verse structure or divergent word accents should be regarded. Taking Spanish Hymn melodies as examples, it becomes evident what consequences for the rhythmic behaviour of music arise from these possibilities and what perspectives they include for the development of European Music History.