Monsieur de Saint-Lambert

In the Baroque, beating time was a musical gesture par excellence: it physically embodied and visually transmitted musical meaning.  Today, however, the beating of a tactus has largely been neglected in research into the history of musical interpretation.  As approaches to early music become more historically informed or inspired, the question of the importance and effect of the timekeeper becomes more pressing.  In today’s historically-informed performances, it is now common to see a harpsichordist or first violinist leading the ensemble, yet most early music conductors still use a baton—a development of the nineteenth century.  The practice of beating time has yet to be rediscovered.
First, therefore, I will investigate the ways in which tactus-beating was practiced in different areas.  In Catholic and Lutheran church music, for example, musicians were divided into multiple choirs, which necessitated the role of two timekeepers coordinating beats—it was this system, in fact, which made polychoral music feasible. 
Then, I will show how the timekeeper’s beating patterns, which varied over time, plainly manifested changes in the musicians’ sense of bar and musical meaning.  The time-beating figure of Monsieur de Saint-Lambert (Les Principes du Clavecin, 1702) and Étienne Loulié (Éléments ou Principes de Musique, 1696) will then be compared with the bowing rules of Georg Muffat (Florilegium secundum, 1698), revealing an interesting parallel.  The accented bow strokes of the strings almost always correspond with the downward movement of the timekeeper, and the unaccented with the upward movement, so that the beats felt as heavy are also played with more emphasis.  As Monsieur de Saint-Lambert puts it explicitly in his treatise, the hand of the timekeeper shows to the eye an image of the cadence which the ear must hear.