Thinking (and Singing) in Threes

Abstract

This study explores the expressive role of triple hypermeter in music with text, using the songs of Fanny Hensel as a case study. Drawing upon work by Harald Krebs, Yonatan Malin, and Richard Cohn, I examine the musical and poetic contexts in which triple hypermeter tends to occur. Passages of triple hypermeter in Hensel’s songs, I argue, often result from the distortion of duple norms. Where the natural poetic rhythm of a text may suggest a duple setting, Hensel deviates from that hypothetical model, stretching and shortening hypermeasures to emphasize important words, to vary the speed with which lines are sung, or to create a feeling of instability or uncertainty that reinforces a related poetic idea. Distorted hypermetric states thus correspond with distorted emotional or perceptual states. Likewise, shifts from one hypermetric state to another correspond with poetic shifts from one mood to another, one perspective to another, or one poetic structure to another. By exploring how Hensel calibrates the hypermetric flow of her music to the sense and structure of the poems she sets, we can see that hypermeter functions not just as an abstract phenomenon but as a carrier of deep expressive meaning.

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