The journal of Musicology, vol.

VII, n°1, winter 1989

Notes and inégales

Unjoined:
Defending a Definition
DA V ID FULL ER

E ede,ick Neumann (fo, whom ou' pu blished

excha nges have not p reven ted me from d eveloping a warm persona)
regard and whose imme nse contribution to our field 1 gladly acknowl-
edge) has invited me to "rethink" certain of my ideas about n otes
inégales as they appear in two essays he is kind enough to cali
"im portan t." • lt is with conside rable misgivings that 1 pile yet another
utterance o n a stack o f controversy that-like the disputes over dot- 21
ting, triple ts, a ppoggiaturas, and trills- has long since outg rown its
subject. Even thou gh inequality occupies an amazing pro portion of
the space in many Fre nch treatises of the eighteenth century, and
though its flagra n t d efia nce of the principle of Werktreue, with which
most o f us were brought up, has fascinated a ha ndful of the curious
(including me) ever since Eugène Borre) "discovered" it in 1 9 12 , it
occupies but a mod est corner of the performer's rh ythmic concerns

Volume VII • Nu rnber 1 • Winter 1989

T he Journal of Musicology ~ 1989 by the Regems of the University of California

' ''The Notes inégales Revisited," this J o urnal VI (1988), 137- 49· 1 wou ld like to
believe that 1 rethink my id eas every ti me 1 have to write abo ut them, and these '~ritin gs
include besides the two essays in The New G1·ove and The New Harvm·d Dictioncny (the
latter not a "condensation " of the fo r mer but a freshly "rethought" article that never-
theless con tains the principal id eas of the former) a little piece called "You Can't Prove
it by 1 otation: Thoughts on Rhythmic Alteration," The Diapason LXX II ( 198 1), March,
p. 3. a much longer one, " Rhythmic Alteration - If Any-in Bach's Organ Music," The
America Il Organist XX I ( 1987), Ju ne, pp. 40- 48, a sho n report o n Cappus's Etrennes de
musique ( 1732-6), Early Music XV [1 987], 384-85, as weil as a facsimile editio n to be
published by Minkoff , and a discussion of the subj ect in an essay on proble ms o f
Baroque performance emitled ''Beyond Notation: T he Performer as Com poser" in the
fonhcoming New Grave Handbook of Performance Practice, ed . Stanley Sadie and Howar d
Mayer Brown. 1 have also sun·eyed persistelll written dotting in "The 'Doued Style' in
Bach, Hand el, and Scarlatti," Bach, Ha 11del, and Scarlatti: Tercentenary Essays, cd . Peter
Williams (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 99- 117, and referred to inequality in sorne of my
work o n automatic instr uments .
 THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

by comparison to such vital and elusive matters as the declamatory

and choreographic aspects of musical delivery, the shaping of the
musical gesture, and the expressive nuance.• Nevertheless, since Pro-
fessor Neumann's article has me failing to escape pitfalls (p. 141),
swaying (p. 145), and falling victim to a snare (p. 148) like sorne boozy
rabbit, I felt 1 ought to try to show that my footing is surer than he
daims and that owners of Grove and The Harvard Dictionary need not
regret their investment after ali.
The central idea that I am to rethink is that inequality is a rhythmic
phenomenon in sounding music independent of questions of notation, and
that it is not always and necessarily the unequal rendition of notes
written in equal value, as Professor Neumann insists that it should be
considered. My definitions might have passed unchallenged if they
had not been followed (in Grove) by the warning that "to insist that
notes inégales are ... always written equal is to mask a great deal of
evidence that can help in mapping the geographical extent of the
convention ... " and (in Harvard) by the assertion that passages of
written dotting in Purcell, Corelli, Bach, Handel, and Alessandro
Scarlatti are sometimes to be understood as written-out inequality.
22 The danger in my "dangerous assumption" (the expression is Neu-
mann's) was that it opened chinks through which the virus of score-
tampering might seep out from quirky France into the performance
of world masterpieces. I seemed to be saying that if Purcell's streams
of dotted eighths in ~ time were written-out notes inégales, then per-
haps streams of undotted eighths could be dotted in performance, or
if Bach could write the ritornellos of the "St. Anne" prelude as he did,
maybe a similar relentless jerking could disfigure sorne other piece by
him. This was not the reasoning that led Dolmetsch to decree notes
inégales in Bach and Handel; he was mainly extrapolating (unjusti-
fiably, I agree with Professor Neumann) from Quantz. And it was not,
in fact, what I wrote. But the implications seemed to glow with the
baleful red of the "early music movement," a color calculated to un-
muzzle the whole array of the Neumann artillery, as no one who
heard his paper at the 1g88 meeting of the American Chapter of the
New Bach Society can doubt.
If, with Frederick Neumann, you state as a principle that inequal-
ity can exist only in passages that are written even, then there can be
no such thing as inequality apart from notation-that it is indeed a

• A new book on Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque by Betty Bang Mather
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987) and articles by Patricia Ranum, notably "Au-
dible Rhetoric and Mute Rhetoric: the Seventeenth-Century French Sarabande," Early
Music XXIV (1986), 22-39, can convey sorne idea of the range of rhythmic problems
in this repertory that are only beginning to be addressed in the literature.
 NOTES AND INÉGALES UNJOI NE D

matter of notation. But then you must agree that the li! ting rhythms in
the double you have just improvised on a cou rante by Chambonnières,
though they may have sounded just like the notes inégales th at le nt such
grace to the written double by D'Anglebert that you played previously,
were not notes inégales at ali, since your double was not written d own.
Let us now suppose that you want to write out your double using
dotted figures to suggest inequality. The dotted passages are still not
notes inégales according to Ne umann because they are not written
equal. 1f you had written them equal a nd said "pointez" over them,
then they would be.
1n 16go Gilles Jullien, organist of Chartres cathedral, published a
Livre d'orgue with a great many passages of even eighths and al most no
dotted ones-except in a Trio pour une élévation, writte n almost e ntirely
in dotted eighths and sixteenths. In the preface he wrote, " 1 have put
the dots after first eighths [of each pair] only in the piece on f. 5 1 [the
trio] to serve as an example of dotting the others in the same way,
more or Jess Iightly, according to the tempo which is marked."3 Fre-
derick Neumann would not, 1 believe, den y that in this case the dot-
ti ng is written notes inégales, since the intent is clearly explanatory, and
he admits that "authors of manuals explained notes inégales with dot- 23
ted note illustrations." But only five years earlier a collection by the
Parisian organist Nicolas Gigault bad appeared in which most of the
pieces looked very much likejullien 's dotted one. In fact, the numbe r
of dots in this collection is staggering, and the composer invites the
organist to add still more "to animate his playing" ! lt seems tome to
require a resolute suspension of common sense (and a very deficient
knowledge of this repertory) to see these rhythms as anything but
notated notes inégales, and indeed 1 have recommended them every
chance 1 have had to a nyone wanting to observe how inequality was
actually used in pieces of music at this period.4 Gigault was not a very
good composer, but he was far from being a non-entity and very
much in the musical mainstream, havi ng been one of Lully's teachers,
among other things.

3 Ed. orben Du fourcq with facsimilc of composer's preface, Publir:n ions de la

Société française d e musicologie XIII (Paris, 1932).
~ Archives des maîtresdel'orgue , ed. Alexandre Guilmam a nd And ré Pirro, IV (1902,
repr. e\v York, 1972). What is especially illuminating abom this collection is the
variety of figu res that are combined in sorne pieces. A fugue (p. 133) combines copious
d otted eighths and sixteenths with occasional even eighth s and sixteenth s, but the
dotting gradually ceases toward the end. In a trio, p. 64, there is more short-long than
long-short dotting. A Fugue poursuivie à la manière italienne (p. 77) has, as one mig ht
expect, almost no dotting.
 THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

And Lully himself-did he not dictate his operas to his secretaries

according to Le Cerf? If the story is true, how would they have de-
cided in the rush of keeping up with their employe r whether the
uneven notes he played on his filthy harpsichord were to be written
with dots? Related Lully sources show much disagreement in dotting.s
Who can say that sorne of it does not re present notes inégales?
The use of dotting to indicate inequality was not without prob-
lems, of course. On the one hand its look of rigidity and uniformity
ra n counter to the expressive Aexibility and the spontaneity that seem
to have been important features of the convention, 6 and on the other
it usurped the notation for strict d otting where the composer might
want that effect. Nor could it be distinguished from the inexact but
very common dotted notation for pairs of notes assimilated to triplet
rhythm. The situation became especially confusing if a careful com-
poser wished to use dotting in a cautionary sense to indicate inequality
where the character of the melod y might suggest even d elivery, or if
the rhythm was meant to change back and forth between equal and
unequal, or if one hand was to be played equal and the other unequal.
By far the most common problems for today's performer arise in
24 passages theoretically eligible for inequality and written in a mixture
o f even and dotted notation that does not seem to correspond to any
plausible pattern o f contrast between mild and sharp inequality. Is the
dotting redundant? A reminder to make the rest unequal? An indi-
cation that the undotted notes are to be played as written? Perhaps it
is up to le bon goût to decide, but in that case, where is the rigor of
Frederick Neumann's dichotom y?
A rare direct reference of this kind of uncertainty (as weil as to
the dotting of undotted music outside of France) is to be found in a
keyboard tu tor by the Amsterdamer Leonard Frischmuth ( 1758).
After specifying unequal sixteenths in allemandes and unequal
5 Communication from Lois Rosow.
6 1 know of one statemem to the effect that douing shou ld be consistent. l t is in
an anonymous la te sevemeenth-cemury treatise on organ playing (F-Pa MS.3042. ff.
1 oo- 1 tg) "th at would be thrown out o f court in any civilized society" (p. 145), but by
which 1 nevenheless allowed myself to be ··swayed" on another matter. ln fact, it
contains mor e detailed and concrete (though so metimes almost undecipherable) infor-
mation on organ playing of the period - however paniculat· and idiosyncratic-than
any other source in any language; it appears to have been taken clown from dictation
by a semi-literate swdent, and whatever its applicability to anything outside the tribu Ile
that engendered it, it is totally convincing as an account of what was said within . On
consistency in dotting trios (which are played "boldly but very slowly"): '·JI fau t fai re
une grande atention a bien pointer et couller etc. mais panicullieremem a p ointer
tOujours de la mesme fo rce car cela est de la derniene consequence afin d e maime nir
la piece dans wuue sa suiue d e la même force do nt on la commancée san s ce de mentir
[san s se démentir]" (transcribed and translated by William Pruitt, Em·ly Music X IV
[tg86]. 237-51).
 NOTES AND I NÉGALES UNJOINED

eighths in courantes he continued, "even if there are no dots (m y

emphasis) ... they must be played as if they were there." Pierre Mar-
cou ( 1782) observed that there was not "perfect agreement" on
whether notes inégales should be played on! y where dotting was written
or whether one should dot even notes lightly and dotted ones "in a
more marked fashion." Problems or no problems, however, d isagree-
ments or no disagreements, there are countless examples of contin-
uous written dotting in French baroque music and in foreign music
imitative of French styles which, played or sung with any musical
sensitivity, will be indistinguishable to the ear from notes inégales as
taught in French manuals.ï
Much of the case against me rests upon the author's notion of
notes inégales as "a unified, fully integrated, organic unit" (p. 137), "a
unified system," "an organic, Iogical whole," a "complex, sophisti-
cated, system" which was "mandatory," which " held together over a
period of a century and a half' du ring which writers "agreed and kept
agreeing on ali important points" (pp. 139-40). lt takes a very selec-
tive reading indeed of the theoretical sources and-again-a serious
Jack of experience with the music to come up with a description like
this. 8 1n Gr-ove 1 spoke, to be sure, of an "admirably rational, even 25
scientific code" emerging from the instruction books, but immediately
went on to say how illusory it was.9 First of ali, the completeness of the
sources varies from something as laconie as " Le Duo se joüe viste ...
et le pointer quand il est en croche" (André Raison, 1714) to the
elaborate treatments of a Démoz de La Salle (1728) or a Mercadier
de Belesta (1777)-"complex" and "sophisticated," up to a point, but
in a minority and far from agreeing on details. You cannot daim
agreement on matters about which many of your sources are sile nt.
Secondly, the area of agreemen t between even the more thor-
ough writers was narrow. The most fundamental rule was that ine-
quality a pplied to the quarter-beat in duple mete rs and the half-beat
in triple, a nd its elaboration through ali possible meters and note-
values is what gives the descriptions their look of exhaustive rigor.
(Dard, 1769, specified unequal sixty-founhs in 2/16!). But even here
7 For many examples out of an infi nity, sec G. B. Draghi , Harpsichord Music, ed.

Robert Klakowich (Madison, Wise. , tg86), passim, also preface. pp. xivf.
8
lt is, moreover, a gross error of fact to say that ··aiJ French texts without excep·
tion ... explaincd the system" (p. 141 ). A quick check of my llOtes, yields the following
practical treatises where one might expect to fi nd mention of inequality but which are
si lent on the subject: Millet, t666; [Nivers], Méthode facile, t666ff; Borjon de Scellery,
1672 ; J ean Rousseau's singing method , 1683ff; Danoville, 1687 ; Berthet, 1695;
"Principes d e musique" for students at Saint-Cyr, MSS F-V; Moyreau , 1753; Bérard,
1755; Blanchet, 1756; De Lusse, 176 1; Francoeur, 1772; Cupis, 1772 ; Dellain , 178 1.
T here arc cenain ly many others.
9 1 also used the word "mandatory" (p. 425), but wish 1 hadn't.
 THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

there was disagreement about the foreign-seeming 214, 4f8, and 314
(as opposed to the native French "3"). There was also uncertainty
about ~ and about the "descent" of inequality to smaller note-values,
especially in passages of mixed values, where the larger values were
supposed to become equal. And there were exceptions even to the
basic rules (see the quote from Démoz in Grave, p . 421). Many authors
indeed seem to say that inequality was "mandatory" except under
certain conditions, but the lists of conditions varied. Dots over the
notes (like staccato dots) canceled inequality, but one could not de-
pend on them. 10 The quarter- and half-beat rules did not emerge un til
the end of the seventeenth-century and had a !ife of about a hu nd red
years: half-beats in C were unequal in Nivers (1665) and Perrine
(168o), as weil as Gigault (1685) and Jullien (16go), while Jean Rous-
seau (1687) was perhaps the first to specify equal eighths and unequal
sixteenths in C. 11

Hardly a rule, but characteristic of the m~ority of sources that

mention it, was the description of the ratio of long to short as being
milder than the 3:1 of strict dotting. A few writers distinguished
explicitly between notes inégales and sharper written dotting (e.g. ,
26 Vague, 1733, and La Chapelle, 1736). But David (1737), who con-
sulted with Campra and Rameau among others in the preparation of
his treatise, went to sorne length to explain that even notes were
altered to the precise equivalent of dotted ones. Georg Muffat ( 16g8),
describing the Lully style of playing, was nearly as explicit, and severa!
others said simply that one played eighths "as if they were dotted."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Dictionnaire, art. "Pointer") gave it both ways:
after describing the strict 3:1 dotting of a string of eighths he wrote, "to
dot them in performance, one takes them unequal according to these
same proportions, even if they are written equal." He then went right
on to say that in French music one always dotted them "a little."
(Professor Neumann cites-characteristically, 1 am afraid-only the
last bit, which is favorable to his argument, p. 145). There are even a
few instances (other than the poor organ scholar of the Arsenal MS)
that suggest overdotting, e.g., "piqué" where the meaning of
oo Cappus (see note 1) said of them, "It would be desirable if ali composers took
this trouble." He also authorized the alteration "at times" of trip lets to anapests or
dactyls (p. 25; cf. Neumann, p. 139: "never ternary"), and after fi lling five pages with
rules for inequality in the various time signatures, blew the whole system sky high by
saying that the signatures were often wrong and in the end it was the contents of the
measure that decided (p. 14).
'' Though it is true to say th at Bourgeois (1550) was the first to make a connection
between inequality and meter, there is no thread of theory to connect him with late
seventeenth-century practice (p. 140). His book was written in Geneva to instruct Cal-
vinists in psalm singing, and so far as 1 know was never reprinted. RISM lists only three
surviving copies.
 NOTES AND I NÉGALES UNJOINED

"staccato" is ruled out by written overlapping (Dandrieu, La Lyre d'OT-

phée, second harpsichord book, 1728). ••
Other features of the convention about which there was even Jess
una nimity in the the01·y books were its limitation to stepwise melodies
and its confinement to French music (on the latter limitation, see
Grove, p. 424). But the body of writte n theory is a madel of consistency
compared to the music, as has been suggested already. It is rare that
one cornes across a piece of French music in which one can say with
confidence that this passage would have been dotted, that one not,
these dots are written notes inégales meant perhaps to be underdotted,
those were meant to be strict or exaggerated. •3 (Ali the uncertainties
of text-transmission come into play he re , needless to say, dotting be-
ing one of the most variable features of variant readings-not only of
Lully.) Even passages that seem to fit sorne rule may turn out to Aout
it, as for example the two-octave arpeggios in the left hand of
Ramea u's La Livri, which are certainly disjunct and therefore accord-
ing to sorne writers ought to be played evenly. But when Rameau
arranged this piece in Zoroastre, he dotted the arpeggios.'4 1t is a
different matter with foreign music, which was not (so far as one can
tell from the the01·y books) subject to an y broadly accepted conve ntion 27
of inequality. Ought we to dot the sarabande of Bach's French Over-
ture, which has many points of similarity with the dotted, quasi-French
sarabande of the fifth Partita? We might, Bach might, but 1 doubt
whethe r he could have counted on purchasers of the ClavieTübung to
do so; if he really wanted them to play it that way, he would have had
to write out the dotting.

For twenty-five years Frederick Neumann has

sought to insure that Bach's sarabande will not be dotted, and that the

,. Of the trio, the Arsenal scholar (see note 6) says, ·· ... il faut que ce poimem em
ce face avec grand feu et grande hardiesse ... on ne peut dont p as trop le poimer ;" "il
faut etremement pointer le duo." God forbid that the read er should imagine that 1 am
ad,·ocating sharp inequality as a norm; 1 am simply pointing out that not everyone
distingu ished between \Hitten dotting and a milder inequality (p. 144), and the dis-
tinction cannot in any case be used to prove that notes inégales were never written out
with douing.
· ~ See, for example, Moméclair 's cantatas, ed . J ames Amhony and Di ran Akma-
jian, (Madison , 1978) for a treasury of both puzzles and precise indications of equality
and inequality- the puzzles in spire of the fact that the composer was one of the most
prolific and lucid writers o n the problem.
14 T he two versions are printed side by side in Pièces de clavecin, ed . Kenneth

Gilbert (Paris, 1979), pp. 106-07. Sin ce the mcter is "2" (2/ 2), and the arpeggios are in
eighths, they satisfy the quarter-beat rule for du pie lime. Such dual versions are al ways
subject to the interpretation that they represent a change of mind and not rhythmic
alteration of the undou ed original, but they also show that inequality can not be ex-
cluded on the ground that dotted rhythm is unsuitable to the comext.
 THE JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGY

false ideas with which the devotees of Early Music would threaten
modern "mainstream" performing traditions will be "laid to rest" (p.
138) forever. He has pursued this goal with prodigious energy, and
his method has been to surround the masterpieces of the eighteenth
century with an impregnable fortress of rationalistic "proof' but-
tressed by huge quantities of documentary evidence. It is a measure of
his power and success that those who would refute him find them-
..
selves drawn into battle on his terms, become entangled in futile
argument, and retire discredited to toot their on-beat appoggiaturas
and jangle their upper-note trills.
Here the baule is over the nature of note inégales, and his purpose
is not so much to learn how the convention might have graced the
music of the past as it is to define that nature in such a way as to
demonstrate conclusively that it could not have been applied to any
music outside of France. My purpose has been not to argue that
evenly written notes were performed unequally in other countries
(though 1 think they probably were, unsystematically and on a limited
scale, in sorne places, especially England) but to show that Fortress
Neumann is heavily slanted and vulnerable to close inspection, that it
28 cannat protect Bach from open minds, and fin ally, th at my dictionary
articles are not wrong in severing the arbitrary bond tying notes in-
égales to undotted notation and in finding their effect in passages of
persistent written dotting.' 5

State University of New York at Buffalo

'5 Unlike Professor Neuma nn , I do not, however, "stand by every word" of these
a rticles (p. 138). In Grove, pp. 423f. the mention of inequality in a barrel-organ per-
formance of the overture to The Marriage of Figaro is wrong; the effect is probably due
to wear and tear. The reference to Couperin's Offertoire (p. 423), which is in C-time, is
inconsistent with my presentation of the quarter-beat rule on p. 421. It is the latter that
is faulty, as it omits to point out that (on the evidence of Nivers, Perrine, Jullien, and
Gigault; see above) the rule had not stabilized when Couperin wrote his organ music
and eighths were often unequal in 4"4 measures. Also, though I do agree with Neu-
mann that Walther's quantitas notarum has nothing to do with notes inégales (p. 141), I was
wrong in implying (Grove, p. 423) that French writers never connected strong-wea k
doctrine with inequality. See for example Mercadier de Belesta, pp. 66f, and the very
interesting but anonyrnous Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre à jouer du violon, (?c. 176o; F
TLm), p . 29.