In music, notes inégales is a performance practice, mainly from the Baroque and Classical music eras, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short. The practice was especially prevalent in France in the 17th and 18th centuries, with appearances in other European countries at the same time. It reappeared as the standard performance practice in the 20th century in jazz. The phrase "notes inégales" means "unequal notes" in French.
History
Pre-modern era
The practice of notating pairs of unequal note lengths as pairs with equal notated value may go as far back as the earliest music of the Middle Ages; indeed some scholars believe that some plainchant of the Roman Catholic Church, including Ambrosian hymns, may have been performed as alternating long and short notes. This interpretation is based on a passage in Saint Augustine where he refers to the Ambrosian hymns as being in tria temporum (in three beats); e.g. a passage rendered on the page (by a later transcriber) as a string of notes of equal note value would be performed as half note, quarter note, half note, quarter note, and so on, in groups of three beats.
The rhythmic modes, with their application of various long–short patterns to equal written notes, may also have been a precursor to notes inégales, especially as they were practiced in France, specifically by the Notre Dame School. However the gap between the late 13th century ars antiqua use of the rhythmic modes and the middle of the 16th century, when Loys Bourgeois first mentioned notes inégales, is a large one, and little trace of the practice can be found in the fluid polyphony of the intervening period.
French origins
It was in France, beginning in the late 16th century, that notes inégales began to take on a critical role in performance practice. The earliest treatises that mention inequality of notes in performance indicate that the reason for this practice is to add beauty or interest to a passage which otherwise would be plain. Over 85 music theory and performance treatises from France alone mention the topic between 1550 and 1810, with the large majority written between 1690 and 1780. Within this body of writing there is considerable inconsistency, but by the late 17th century a consensus practice began to emerge.
The typical rule, from the late 17th century until the French Revolution, is that notes inégales applies to all notes moving stepwise which have a duration of one quarter the denominator of the meter, for instance, eighth notes in a meter of , or sixteenth notes in a meter of ; and one half the denominator of the meter in cases of triple or compound meter, for instance, eighth notes in , sixteenth notes in , and . In addition, the inégales could only function on one metrical level; for example, if sixteenths are to be played long–short, long–short, an even eighth-note pulse must be carefully maintained for the music to retain its shape.Steve O’Connor Notes Inégales and rhythmic alterations of the 18th and 19th centuries
In Georg Muffat's codification of notes inégales in the Lullist tradition, he says it is the first level of diminution that is subject to inequality procedure.
Sometimes the notes inégales are notated as unequal, for example in some of the keyboard works of François Couperin, where he uses a dot to indicate the lengthened note. This and similar passages by Rameau (in his first Gavotte) clearly show that this means to apply an even greater amount of inequality to dotted eighth–sixteenth note pairs than to eighth–eighth pairs, which are already understood to be played unequally. The exact amount of inequality required is also unspecified, and most of the treatises leave this detail to the taste of the performer. It may have varied from double-dotted to minimally perceptible, depending on the context. Some recent papers and books include a full analysis of this topic as well as practical guides for the performer. Also, musical clocks have been discovered from the period that show the dotting very clearly"Performance Practice, a Dictionary Guide for Musicians" page 243Mechanical Musical Instruments as a Source for the Study of Notes Inégales as such devices have "preserved performances of notes inégales that are often as subtle as a 3:2 ratio (i.e. three fifths of a beat for the first note, two fifths for the second in the pair), as well as the more obvious 2:1 ratio (triplets), and 3:1 (dotted eighth–sixteenth pairs and their multiples).Dirk Moelants The Performance of Notes Inegales: The Influence of Tempo, Musical Structure, and Individual Performance Styleon Expressive Timing Music Perception Vol. 28, No. 5, June 2011Dirk Moelants Notes Inégales’ in Contemporary Performance Practice Engramelle, La tonotechnie: ou L'art de noter sur les cylindres et tout ce qui est susceptible de notage dans les instruments de concerts méchanique 1775 (Google ebooks)Robert L. Marshall Eighteenth Century Keyboard Music — "Engramelle introduces a large numbers of ratios to represent uneven notes (such as 2:2, 3:1, 3:2 and even 7:5), but he ultimately concedes that his mathematical and mechanical constructs at best can only approximate the subtleties of the art"
There were situations which were understood to be exempt from application of notes inégales. A broken arpeggiated figuration in the left hand, such as an Alberti bass, was always understood to be played regularly. Sometimes one sees the explicit marking: croches égales meaning equal quavers or eighth notes. Passages which mixed note values may have been exempted from the practice. Occasionally a long slur printed over a series of notes was understood to imply that all the notes should be played evenly, except that the first note under the slur could be accented. Passages which were highly disjunct were also less likely to be played unequally than conjunct passages, although the sources are not unanimous on even this.
If the effect of a passage was dotted, the compelling rhythm of the dotted notes, or notes inégales, would sometimes simply override all the rules. The Handel Fugue in D Minor from the First Sett of Suites 1709 in its first editions shows the first few notes of the theme with dotted rhythms, but the dots stop after 4 note for the first two entries; the next two entries Handel only bothers to dot the first two notes. The energy of the piece seems such that the dotted texture might best remain throughout, however the long–short notes inégales can occasionally be supplanted with some "short–long" moments, still retaining the dotted effect, or as John O'Donnell describes it, "The Majestic Style", but some variance can work quite effectively, and still adhere to many of the rules.
In particular, in much of French music, and a lot in Handel as well, there are problems the performer faces, and the most prevalent one is this: sometimes at the approach of cadences in an notes inégales texture, the composer suddenly writes some dotted notes out explicitly and sometimes then stops; the inconsistency of dotting has continued to be a problem for every musicologist, theoretical and performer. Anthony Newman has suggested in an article, that there was an undocumented convention that the dotted texture recedes generally at the approach to a cadence, all other musical factors and concerns being equal, and that is why the dots stop and start sometimes quite oddly towards the approach to cadence.
Slurred long–short pairs
Often, the long–short version of notes inégales was indicated by slurred pairs of notes throughout the French repertoire in François Couperin, Jacques Duphly, Antoine Forqueray, Pierre Dumage, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, Jean-François Dandrieu, and Jean-Philippe Rameau, to cite the more prominent keyboard composers from the French Baroque.
Lullist short–long pairs
Occasionally the long–short version of notes inégales was reversed to a short–long, known sometimes as the Lombard rhythm or the Scotch snap.
The practice of slurred pairs of notes being possibly an indication of short–long "notes inégales" has been suggested to extend further than France to "French (Lullist) modelled" compositions throughout Europe, especially Germany, Austria, and England, and even to influence the performance of slurred pairs of notes in the fast movements of Beethoven (and other non-French and non-Baroque composers), such as in the Sonata in F major, Op.78, among other sonatas, where the tempo and the slurred pairs can only result in a Lombardic or snapped short–long "notes inégales" performance.
In Restoration England, in the French modelled, Lullist influenced works of Henry Purcell, William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and their contemporaries, the short–long slurred pairs of notes inégales can be found throughout the musical literature, and often variant sources "write out" the short–long "snapped" notes inégales rhythms explicitly.
Imitation of the French style outside France
One of the best sources for understanding the situation of notes inégales in France is the notation of music by composers from other European countries who wrote imitations of it. Music from Italy, Germany and England all borrowed this feature of French music, with the difference that the inequality of note values was often notated, since not all performers could be expected to add the notes inégales themselves (though evidence from Georg Muffat and Telemann strongly suggests that German performers would certainly be familiar with them).
Prevalence outside France
Application of notes inégales to contemporary performance of music not written in France, for example the music of J.S. Bach, is extremely controversial, and indeed resulted in one of the most heated debates in 20th-century musicology. One school of thought attempted to show that the French practice was actually widespread in Europe, and performance of music by composers as diverse as Bach and Scarlatti should be suffused with dotted rhythms; another school of thought held that even-note playing was the norm in their music unless dotted rhythms were explicitly notated in the score. Evidence on both sides of the argument is compelling; for example 17th-century English writings recommending unequal playing (Roger North's autobiographical Notes of Me, written around 1695, describes the practice explicitly, in reference to English lute music), as well as François Couperin, who wrote in L'art de toucher le clavecin (1716), that in Italian music, Italians always write the notes exactly the way they want them played. Then again, the practice may have been more widespread in some areas, such as England, than others, such as Italy and Germany.
J.S. Bach famously imitated the style in Contrapunctus II from the Art of Fugue; however, in this piece the notes inégales are written out as dotted rhythms.
But in Contrapunctus VI, fully embracing notes inégales, a composition written in the complex texture of the "Ouverture", in Stile francese, Bach uses "the dotted style" in augmentation, and writes out the notes inégales although many treatises describe the assimilation of upbeat notes to have the slower rhythms become "in sync" with the shorter notes of the fast upbeat note groups, as well as the "short" notes of the inégales pairs.