Accented Bach: Linguistic Influence on Organists' Rubato in Early 20th-Century Recordings

In a study of organ recordings from 1913-32, Ludger Lohmann (1996) noted a 'fundamental difference between French and German rubato', speculating its cause to be 'the different accentuation in the respective spoken languages'. However, the influence of linguistic prosody on rubato, which is essential to avoid unnatural regularity, has not yet been analysed. Organ requires rubato more than any other instrument as its binary sound production allows shaping primarily through adjusting proportional length, enabling unique examination of rubato. For this MPhil dissertation, she will compare recordings from 1911-39 of J.S. Bach works played by at least two organists with native stress- (German, English [UK]) and syllable-timed languages (French). Through statistical analysis and historical treatises on oration and performance, she will study relative pacing and proportionate note length. She proposes using methodologies that quantify cross-linguistic prosodic variation, including the normalized Pairwise Variability Index, to compare relative durations between successive notes in these recordings with those between vowels in the players' spoken languages, mapping the tempi of each performance and taking relative rubato and structurally-significant moments into consideration. This will allow her to test the hypothesis that organ rubato reflects language, as well as expand the limited research into how linguistic context can influence a player's translation of written note into sound.