Rhythm and metre are among the chief means of communication in music, but communication about rhythm and metre is fraught with difficulty. Communication between North American and European scholars, for example, is made vastly more difficult by the different theoretical traditions from which they spring. Continental musicologists are often imprinted, whether they realize it or not, with the legacy of Hugo Riemann, for whom the musical phrase was invariably end-accented, with the cadence marking its strongest beat. American theorists tend to follow – again, often unthinkingly – the tradition of Gottfried Weber and Heinrich Schenker, for whom phrases are normally beginning-accented, allowing cadences to fall on relatively weak metrical positions, either a weak beat or a weak bar within a larger metrical unit, the hypermeasure.

This study grew out of my frustration over this impasse, which seemed to render impossible further progress in the theory of rhythm.