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When we open a choral score today, one of the first things we tend to look for is the tempo indication. Andante, Allegro, or perhaps a precise metronome marking: quarter note = 72, 80, 100. We are used to thinking that a composition possesses a particular speed, and that the interpreter’s task is to identify it and, with a certain degree of expressive flexibility, maintain it. With Renaissance music, however, this way of thinking can be misleading. The sixteenth-century musician obviously had no metronome, but more importantly, did not conceive musical time exactly as we do today. The main concern was not to establish how many beats should occur in a minute. Rather, it was to organize the durations of notes within a system of recognizable and shared relationships.
To enter fully into Renaissance polyphony, we therefore need, at least for a moment, to set aside our modern idea of the bar.
The concept of time was closely connected with that of measure. A note had meaning not only because of its pitch, but also because of the relationship between its duration and that of the other note values around it. Music thus became a kind of temporal architecture: note values were organized in relation to one another according to precise proportions. Here we immediately encounter a terminological difficulty. When Renaissance treatises use the word tempus, they do not necessarily mean what we today call “tempo” or speed. In mensural theory, tempus referred to a very specific relationship: that between the breve and the semibreve. If a breve contained three semibreves, the tempus was called perfect. If it contained two, it was imperfect. The same principle applied at other levels. Prolation established the relationship between the semibreve and the minim, while major mode and minor mode regulated the relationships between the larger note values. The result was a hierarchical structure in which each level could be organized according to either binary or ternary division.
But why was ternary division called “perfect”?
The answer takes us directly into the culture of the period. The number three carried powerful symbolic meaning: it represented perfection and was inevitably associated, within Christian culture, with the Trinity. Ternary division was therefore not simply one rhythmic option among others, but carried with it a much broader cultural significance. Binary division, by contrast, was described as imperfect. One of the most surprising aspects for the modern musician is that the value of a note was not necessarily fixed. Today we know that a half note always equals two quarter notes, and that a whole note always equals two half notes. In the Renaissance mensural system, by contrast, a breve could contain either two or three semibreves; similarly, a semibreve could contain either two or three minims. The graphic shape of the note, therefore, was not always sufficient to determine its duration. The singer had to understand the context. And this brings us to the heart of the matter: the tactus. In Renaissance polyphony, the individual voices were normally written in separate partbooks, or at least without the regular barlines to which we are accustomed today. A common temporal reference was therefore essential if the singers were to proceed together. That reference was called the tactus, or, in Italian treatises, the battuta.
We should not imagine, however, the modern beat pattern of an orchestral conductor. The tactus was above all a regular gesture of the hand: a downward movement and an upward movement, downbeat and upbeat. Its fundamental purpose was to keep the various voices coordinated and ordered. Contemporary descriptions frequently make use of a particularly interesting comparison: that of the human pulse. The movement of the hand was expected to possess something of the natural regularity of the heartbeat.
This image is fascinating, and in modern times it has inspired many attempts to determine a “correct” speed for the tactus. It has sometimes been imagined at around seventy beats per minute, more or less corresponding to the pulse of a person at rest. It would, however, be risky to turn this into a kind of universal Renaissance metronome.
The real value of the image of the pulse probably lies elsewhere: it suggests stability, naturalness and continuity. And it is precisely this stability that makes the extraordinary freedom of polyphony possible.
Think of a motet by Palestrina, Victoria or Lassus. One voice introduces a phrase; shortly afterwards another voice enters with the same melodic idea, while a third may still be completing the previous phrase. The parts appear to move independently, entering and leaving the musical texture. As listeners, we do not perceive a succession of bars in the modern sense. What we hear instead is a continuous flow. Yet beneath this apparent freedom there is a common measure. The tactus is almost an invisible gravitational force: it does not necessarily make itself heard, but it holds the whole structure together. From this point of view, syncopation becomes particularly interesting. In Renaissance practice, a note beginning on the upbeat and continuing across the following downbeat came into tension with the regularity of the battuta. Syncopation therefore acquired genuine temporal force.
It was not simply a rhythmic effect. It was the result of the interaction between the melodic line and a common pulse continuing underneath it. This mechanism has extremely important consequences for the way we perform this repertoire today. If every tactus is turned into a strong metric accent, the polyphony risks becoming heavy and square. Renaissance battuta should not necessarily be “felt” like the first strong beat of a modern measure. Rather, it acts as a constant reference within which the individual voices are free to breathe. The music can move through the tactus instead of being forced onto it.
Another essential element is represented by the mensuration signs found at the beginning of compositions. The circle and semicircle, for example, do not simply correspond to our 3/4 and 4/4.
The circle traditionally indicated tempus perfectum: the breve was divided into three semibreves. The semicircle indicated tempus imperfectum, that is, the binary division of the breve. A dot added inside the sign could indicate perfect prolation, causing the semibreve to contain three minims rather than two. The system becomes even more fascinating when proportions come into play. At certain moments in a composition, the relationships between note values could change. A proportional sign might, for example, require three notes to be fitted into the temporal space previously occupied by two. This is the principle of sesquialtera, the ratio of three to two. For the modern musician, the temptation is simply to say: “the tempo changes here.” But this is not necessarily what happens. Often, what changes is the number of notes moving within the same underlying unit of time. The tactus may therefore continue regularly while the density of musical movement changes within it.
This is a very different way of thinking from our own. We tend first to establish a speed and then to distribute note values within it. The Renaissance musician appears to think more in terms of mathematical relationships: two against three, three against two, perfect or imperfect division. Time becomes proportion.
It is also important to remember that this system did not remain unchanged throughout the Renaissance. Between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the relationship between written note values and their actual sounding speed gradually evolved. A semibreve in the early fifteenth century should not automatically be performed at the same speed as a semibreve at the end of the sixteenth. Signs of diminution, strokes through mensuration signs and proportional devices also acquired different meanings over time and in different geographical areas. For this reason, it is very difficult to formulate a single rule valid for the entire repertoire.
There is, in other words, no single “Renaissance tempo”. There is rather a Renaissance way of thinking about time.
And this distinction is perhaps the most useful one for the modern performer. A conductor approaching a polyphonic composition might therefore ask a little less often, “What is the correct metronome marking?” and instead ask: “What is the natural pulse of this music? How are the note values organized within it? How do the text, imitation, dissonances and cadences interact with that pulse?”
A concrete choice of speed must, of course, still be made. The choir has to breathe, articulate the text, make the imitative entries intelligible and allow dissonances to acquire meaning. The acoustics of the performance space may also have an enormous influence: singing in a small room or in the long reverberation of a basilica inevitably changes the perception of musical motion.
But all this should arise from an underlying pulse that remains sufficiently stable. Here Renaissance music can teach us something surprisingly modern. Stability is not the enemy of expression. On the contrary, a steady measure allows phrases to unfold, syncopations to create tension, imitations to overlap and cadences to reach their points of arrival naturally. To conduct this music by systematically slowing down at every cadence, speeding up every imitative passage or constantly emphasizing metric accents may sound expressive according to a later, more Romantic sensibility, but it risks concealing the deeper structure of the polyphony.
The tactus suggests another path. A calm, shared pulse; above it, the freedom of the individual voices.
Perhaps this is one of the most fascinating experiences that Renaissance repertoire can still offer to those who sing it and those who listen to it. Time is not a rigid grid dividing music into boxes, nor is it a speed to be measured obsessively. It is an invisible measure. A common rhythm that allows each voice to follow its own path without losing its relationship with the others.
Five centuries before the metronome, polyphony had already grasped something essential:
in ensemble singing, time does not belong to a single voice. It is the shared space in which all voices are able to meet.
