Universal Harmony, Volume I

of Universal Harmony.

XIX. To reduce all kinds of movements into verse, and to explain for this purpose the true French pronunciation of the letters of the Alphabet. 376.

XX. To explain all the syllables that are long, common, or short, and to provide rules for establishing French Prosody. 381. Prosody is the study of the rhythm and sounds of language, particularly in poetry.

XXI. To explain everything related to feet and measured verse, and particularly the Dactylic Hexameter and Pentameter, and the Sapphic. 384. "Measured verse" (vers mesurés) was a movement in the 16th and 17th centuries that tried to apply the "long" and "short" syllable rules of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry to the French language.

XXII. To explain Phalaecian, Iambic, Trochaic, Alcmanian, and Asclepiadean verses. 387. These are specific rhythmic patterns, or meters, borrowed from classical antiquity.

XXIII. To explain Anapestic, Paeonic, Major and Minor Ionic, Choriambic, Antispastic, and other meters. 389.

XXIV. To explain the attempts made in this century to establish French Prosody and Metric Poetry for the sake of Music. 393. Wherein one sees an Ode by Horace set to Music.

XXV. To determine the great multitude of movements made by changing the time or the notes of a measure used in singing. 396.

XXVI. To explain the use of the preceding variety of movements or times; and to show that practitioners misuse the terms "ternary" and "binary" when they speak of their measures. 398. Mersenne is critiquing how musicians of his time used the terms for triple and duple time.

XXVII. To explain Rhythmopoeia, or the method of creating beautiful movements for all kinds of subjects. 401. Wherein one sees an excellent branle à mener. Rhythmopoeia is the art of composing rhythms. A "branle" was a popular French folk dance; the "branle à mener" was a specific lead-style version of this dance.

XXVIII. To provide examples of all kinds of movements used by the ancients, and to show those of our rhymed verses, and the art of finding them in all kinds of verse. 406.

XXIX. To provide examples of the diminution and embellishment of songs, and the art of adorning and beautifying them. 410. Wherein one sees examples by Messieurs Boësset and Moulinié. "Diminution" refers to the practice of breaking a long note into many shorter, faster notes as a decoration. Antoine Boësset and Étienne Moulinié were the most famous composers of the French "air de cour" (courtly song) in the early 17th century.

XXX. To explain the manner of singing the Odes of Pindar and Horace, and of rendering French verses—both rhymed and measured—as suitable for Music as the verses of Greek and Latin Poets. 415. Wherein one sees an Ode? by Pindar and another by Horace set to Music; and another example of French measured verse.

XXXI. To explain the Major and Minor Mode, Perfect and Imperfect Time, and Perfect and Imperfect Prolation, with the proper symbols used by practitioners. 420. These terms refer to the complex system of "mensural notation" used before modern time signatures were fully standardized.

XXXII. To explain the manner of singing all kinds of measures under all kinds of time, without using the preceding symbols, and to propose what seems most difficult in the Rhythmics of the ancients. 423.

XXXIII. To explain the most unique aspects of Saint Augustine’s six books on Rhythmic Music. 424. Wherein one sees an excellent Paraphrase of the Psalm original: "Super flumina Babylonis" "By the Rivers of Babylon," in French verse, and several remarks on our measured verses.

XXXIV. To determine if it is appropriate to use any species of the Greek Chromatic or Enharmonic Genres to sing rhymed and measured verses with as much perfection as they did. 438. Wherein one sees the Octave divided into 24 Enharmonic Diesis, and the faults of this 6th book, along with several others that must all be corrected before reading these books, as I have already said in several places. The Chromatic and Enharmonic genres were ancient Greek ways of dividing the musical scale that used intervals smaller than a semitone. A "diesis" here refers to a quarter-tone or similar microtonal interval.

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