Ukrainian stress

[Chew G]

Paul B. Gallagher wrote:

> As I understand it, a "foot" is one stressed syllable plus whatever
> unstressed syllables it takes to get to the adjacent stressed syllable.
> In some poetry, the unstressed syllables occur before the stress, in
> some they occur afterward. The definition is similar to that of a
> "wavelength" -- the distance from crest to crest.
>
> In most Western musical notation, the assumption is that the stress
> begins a foot (ONE and | TWO and | THREE and...), but much of our poetry
> is iambic (and ONE | and TWO | and THREE...), so songwriters must go to
> some trouble to align their poetic stresses with the musical ones. 
 
Western musical _notation_ has no problems with upbeats and iambic feet -- it's very common for musical phrases to begin with one or more unstressed beats, and the convention is to have incomplete measures (in English usage, bars) to cope with them if they start a movement. There is never an assumption that the measure is the same as the "foot".  In fact there are no difficulties of notation standing in the way of songwriters trying to match poetic and musical stresses, although conventional western notation may not easily cope with extremely subtle nuances of timing if composers want to go down the road of extreme realism.
 
Western musical _rhythmic theory_ is a separate issue, but to be honest also hardly affects composers of songs or singers. Most rhythmic theory in English still uses the traditional vocabulary of iambs, trochees etc (old favourites are Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard Meyer, _The Rhythmic Structure of Music_, Chicago 1960; Maury Yeston, _The Stratification of Musical Rhythm_, Yale 1976), even though Hugo Riemann more than a century ago complained that it falsified the nature of musical rhythm. (What he proposed instead is like Paul's notion of waves, except that he wanted to measure from trough to trough rather than from crest to crest, making the basic unit one of growth and decay.)
 
Geoff
 
 Geoffrey Chew
 Institute of Musicology, Masaryk University, Brno
 chewg at seznam.cz
 
 Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
 g.chew at rhul.ac.uk

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