When was 3/8 or 3/4 meter was first introduced to the western music?

[cosmogrill]

Hi,
Where can I find some information about the development of meters in western music?

[Gamma-UT]

Hi,
Where can I find some information about the development of meters in western music?

What do you actually want to know? Because if it's: when did 3/4 and 3/8 become ways of notating meter, that's easy to answer. It was as recent as the 17th Century. If the question is "when did that form of meter first get used in music in actual playing?", then that's a lot tougher to answer because I imagine it was used in folk songs way before then - and that part of music is not exactly well documented.

[cosmogrill]

Interesting, thanks.
I'm putting together a short presentation about meters in poetry and music. But I hardly found any information about the actual formation and establishment of the meter. If anyone knows of any related articles it would be nice.

But you had a good point, the early use of meter is not documented, so I guess it would be a hard to find information about it.

[standalone]

Google for "tempus perfectum".

[Gamma-UT]

Have a good look at the history of music in Ancient Greece: poetry and music were almost inseparable to them. However, IIRC I don't think regular musical metre was particularly important to them, the metre of the poetry dominated the music.

The history of the waltz might be instructive. It developed comparatively recently but was based on Austrian and Swiss folk dances with odd metres.

[frederik D]

Standalone gave you a good starting point: to understand the history of meters you should dive into the history of mensural notation, with "tempus perfectum" and "tempus imperfectum" and the like.

Here's a wikipedia link with a short artikel that can serve as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensural_notation

If you want to go to the part about the ancient metres and there modern counterparts, you should go to the section "Modes and mensuration signs".