Historical trends in the rhythm of Western European instrumental classical music between ∼1650 and 1950 have recently been studied using the nPVI equation. This equation measures the average degree of durational contrast between adjacent events in a sequence (such as notes in a musical theme). These historical studies (e.g., Daniele & Patel, 2013, Hansen et al., in press) have relied on assigning each composer’s music a mean nPVI value in order to search for broad historical trends across composers. Here we address how mean nPVI might vary across different compositional periods within a composer’s lifetime, focusing on four famous composers whose lives have been demarcated into different epochs by historical musicologists, and who were part of Daniele and Patel’s original study: J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. For these composers, we find that the mean nPVI does not vary dramatically across compositional periods. Nevertheless, there are interesting trends within the lifetime of each composer which reflect the larger ‘rising nPVI’ trend seen across all Austro-German composers studied by Daniele and Patel (2013). These findings demonstrate the utility of studying historical patterns in musical rhythm at two distinct timescales: within the lifetimes of individual composers, and across composers from divergent musical eras.

This paper introduces a new approach for the historical study of musical rhythm based on an empirical measure of rhythm known as the nPVI (‘normalized pairwise variability index’). The nPVI is an equation that measures the degree of durational contrast between successive events in a sequence. While the nPVI is increasingly used for comparative studies of rhythm in music and language, we show that it can also be used for historical research. A historical analysis of musical nPVI values from German/Austrian and Italian instrumental classical music between ∼1600-1900 reveals different patterns in the two cultures: German/Austrian music shows a steady increase in nPVI values over this period, while Italian music shows no salient increase. These patterns are discussed in light of the idea (from historical musicology) that the influence of Italian music on German music began to wane in the second half of the 1700s due to a rise of musical nationalism in Germany. The nPVI data prove to be consistent with this idea, illustrating how nPVI analysis can reveal patterns that enrich and inform historical research.

Linguists have long distinguished between ““stress-timed”” and ““syllable-timed”” languages. Using new methods for comparing rhythm in language and music (A. D. Patel & J. R. Daniele, 2003) and new data on musical rhythm from a range of nations (D. Huron & J. Ollen, 2003), one can begin to address whether stress-timed and syllable-timed languages are associated with distinctive musical rhythms. In conducting such studies, it is important to be aware of historical influences on musical rhythm that might run counter to linguistic influences. An empirical method for studying historical influences is proposed.