[Smt-talk] punctuation form

[Vasili Byros]

Dear colleagues and friends,

Please allow me a few words on the subject of the term "punctuation form." In January of this year a query was posed on this list concerning the term's origin. I had wanted to address the issue then, but never got around to it. 

I'm not aware of its earlier use within the eighteenth century, but it's unquestionable that Heinrich Christoph Koch used the term on numerous occasions, and in order to describe large-scale musical organization in terms of various types of punctuation, which are based on certain conditions involving cadences and phrase-endings. Using search tools such as Google and OCR text-recongition, we can be quantitatively rather precise about his usage: in either its singular (interpunctiche[n] Form) or plural form (interpunctichen Formen), the term appears 21 times in volume III of Koch's Versuch (1793).

For your reference, at the bottom of this message I've provided section and page numbers to the German original as well as to Nancy Kovaleff Baker's English translation (1983).

As I deal with the concept of "punctuation form" elsewhere, I do not wish to say anything more about it here, except that it is important not to confuse "punctuation form" with Koch's term interpunctische Formel(n), which Baker translates as "punctuation formula(s)." The latter term refers to a local-level melodic-harmonic gesture that produces a particular kind of punctuation. Koch's other terms for the same concept are "punctuation signs" (interpunctische Zeichen) or "punctuation figures" (interpunctische Figuren).

In the same volume, Koch uses the more general term "form" in its singular or plural varieties (Form[en]) more than 100 times, often paired with some other interesting adjectival qualifiers: such as "customary form" (gewöhnliche[n] Form), "common form" (gebräuchliche Form), and "the most common form" (die gewöhnlichste Form).

As for the question of the eighteenth-century origin of "punctuation form," I believe it is a fairly straightforward one to answer in the positive.

With best wishes,
Vasili

••••••••••••••••••

Vasili Byros
Assistant Professor, Music Theory and Cognition
Northwestern University
Bienen School of Music
711 Elgin Road
Evanston, IL 60208
v-byros at northwestern.edu

Instances of "punctuation form" (interpunctiche[n] Form[en]) in Koch 1793, section and page number (English translation page numbers in parentheses):

1) §18, 49 (82)
2) §20, 52 (83)
3) §24, 57 (85)
4) §25, 66 (89)
5) §25, 67 (89)
6) §27, 71 (90)
7) §28, 72 (90)
8) §31, 82 (95)
9) §31, 84 (95)
10) §32, 103 (105)
11) §33, 107 (108)
12) §34, 111 (110)
13) §38, 124 (116)
14) §38, 124 (116)
15) §147, 381 (229)
16) §148, 394 (233)
17) §150, 395 (234)
18) §158, 423 (245)
19) §158, 423 (245)
20) §158, 425 (246)
21) §158, 427 (247)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.societymusictheory.org/pipermail/smt-talk-societymusictheory.org/attachments/20131209/20f26538/attachment-0002.htm>