Mensuration and Proportion Signs

In the fourteenth century composers and theorists invented mensuration and proportion signs that allowed them increased flexibility and precision in notating a wide range of rhythmic and metric relationships. The origin and interpretation of these signs is one of the least understood and most complex issues in music history. This study represents the first attempt to see the origin of musical mensuration and proportion signs in the context of other measuring systemsof the fourteenth century. Berger analyzes the exact meaning of every mensuration and proportion sign in music and theory from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and offers revisions of manycurrently-held views concerning the significance and development of early time signatures.

“"A major achievement in the history of discourse about music."--Speculum "Probably essential reading for scholars and, in particular, performers specializing in music of the 14th to the 16th century."--Choice "Busse Berger investigates a difficult subject in which she has already established herself as a virtuoso in both oral and written performance....This book has assembled much useful material on the theoretical and musical use of mensuration and proportion signs."--Early Music "A welcome guide to this complex and fascinating subject....An important contribution to the growing literature concerning durational and temporal issues in early music. Its careful organization and rigorous scholarship will satisfy the most demanding reader, yet its concern for clarity and its plentiful diagrams and tables, will attract even the novice to this fascinating topic. It should be required reading for anyone who studies, performs, and enjoys this repertoire."--Fontes Artis Musicae "[A] useful and provocative book....The book opens up as many avenues for further research as it sums up from past research, and for this reason it will be a useful reference work. It is written with authority and the presentation is very clear-not an easy accomplishment for a book devoted so rigorously to one of the most daunting topics in European music history....The book is overflowing with fresh insights, recastings of old debates, new ways to extrapolate evidence, realignments of theoretical traditions, improved translations, etc.....The interdisciplinary dimension makes a very fresh contribution to the topic....Fifteenth-century studies will benefit from its exploration, presented here in an important book on music and culture."--Renaissance Quarterly”

A major achievement in the history of discourse about music. Speculum
Probably essential reading for scholars and, in particular, performers specializing in music of the 14th to the 16th century. Choice
Busse Berger investigates a difficult subject in which she has already established herself as a virtuoso in both oral and written performance....This book has assembled much useful material on the theoretical and musical use of mensuration and proportion signs. Early Music
A welcome guide to this complex and fascinating subject....An important contribution to the growing literature concerning durational and temporal issues in early music. Its careful organization and rigorous scholarship will satisfy the most demanding reader, yet its concern for clarity and its plentiful diagrams and tables, will attract even the novice to this fascinating topic. It should be required reading for anyone who studies, performs, and enjoys this repertoire. Fontes Artis Musicae
[A] useful and provocative book....The book opens up as many avenues for further research as it sums up from past research, and for this reason it will be a useful reference work. It is written with authority and the presentation is very clear-not an easy accomplishment for a book devoted so rigorously to one of the most daunting topics in European music history....The book is overflowing with fresh insights, recastings of old debates, new ways to extrapolate evidence, realignments of theoretical traditions, improved translations, etc.....The interdisciplinary dimension makes a very fresh contribution to the topic....Fifteenth-century studies will benefit from its exploration, presented here in an important book on music and culture. Renaissance Quarterly
A major achievement in the history of discourse about music. Speculum
Probably essential reading for scholars and, in particular, performers specializing in music of the 14th to the 16th century. Choice
Busse Berger investigates a difficult subject in which she has already established herself as a virtuoso in both oral and written performance....This book has assembled much useful material on the theoretical and musical use of mensuration and proportion signs. Early Music
A welcome guide to this complex and fascinating subject....An important contribution to the growing literature concerning durational and temporal issues in early music. Its careful organization and rigorous scholarship will satisfy the most demanding reader, yet its concern for clarity and its plentiful diagrams and tables, will attract even the novice to this fascinating topic. It should be required reading for anyone who studies, performs, and enjoys this repertoire. Fontes Artis Musicae
[A] useful and provocative book....The book opens up as many avenues for further research as it sums up from past research, and for this reason it will be a useful reference work. It is written with authority and the presentation is very clear-not an easy accomplishment for a book devoted so rigorously to one of the most daunting topics in European music history....The book is overflowing with fresh insights, recastings of old debates, new ways to extrapolate evidence, realignments of theoretical traditions, improved translations, etc.....The interdisciplinary dimension makes a very fresh contribution to the topic....Fifteenth-century studies will benefit from its exploration, presented here in an important book on music and culture. Renaissance Quarterly
Painstaking and wide-ranging work such as Berger's, grounded in the dialogue of theorists, helps us both to understand their ideas and concerns and to approach the musical sources of their eras with better questions to pose. Music & Letters, Peter M. Lefferts
[An] excellent book.... Current Musicoloy

Anna Maria Busse Berger is Distinguished Professor of Music, Emeritus, at the University of California, Davis. She has published articles and books on notation, mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations. She has won major awards from scholarly societies representing the three musicological disciplines: the American Musicological Society, the Society for MusicTheory, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Winner of the Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society (AMS) for best article by a young scholar, she has had fellowships at the Harvard University Centerfor Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence (twice); the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Stanford Humanities Center, the University of Vienna, and the Institute of Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin.Her book Medieval Music and the Art of Memory won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory for 2006, and has been translated into Italian. Her article "Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s" won both the Colin Slim Award for best article by a senior scholar from the AMS and the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2014. She co-edited (together with JesseRodin) the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015). In 2015, Busse Berger gave the Faculty Research Lecture at UC Davis, the Academic Senate's highest honor. In addition, she won the UC Davis HonorsTeaching Award in 2019.In 2019, Busse Berger was made an Honorary Member of the AMS. She also received $210,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation together with her colleague Henry Spiller to research a Music History of Indonesia. Her most recent book is The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961: Scholars, Singers, Missionaries (2020).

In the fourteenth century composers and theorists invented mensuration and proportion signs that allowed them increased flexibility and precision in notating a wide range of rhythmic and metric relationships. The origin and interpretation of these signs is one of the least understood and most complex issues in music history. This study represents the first attempt to see the origin of musical mensuration and proportion signs in the context of other measuring systemsof the fourteenth century. Berger analyzes the exact meaning of every mensuration and proportion sign in music and theory from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and offers revisions of many currently-held views concerning the significance and development of early time signatures.

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