In recent scholarship on nineteenth-century music, metric dissonance has received considerable and worthy attention. Analysts have revealed how varying types and intensities of metric dissonance produce structural narratives not unlike tonal ones. Foremost among these studies is perhaps Harald Krebs's virtuosic book-length exploration of metric dissonance in the music of Robert Schumann. Krebs's categories of “grouping dissonances”—those resulting from layers of motion whose cardinalities are not multiples/factors of one another—and “displacement dissonances”—those resulting from layers of motion whose cardinalities are congruent but which are nonaligned—as well as his nomenclature for distinguishing among different dissonances of each type are useful and widely employed.

Throughout the tonal repertoire and especially including the music of Brahms, the most frequently encountered metric dissonance is hemiola, a grouping dissonance that substitutes duple for triple groupings of pulses at some level(s) of the metric hierarchy. With its analogy to pitch structure, the term metric dissonance implies a state of tension that resolves when the contrametric elements recede. Yet despite its classification as a metric dissonance, hemiola often performs a stabilizing role. A frequent interaction of hemiola with tonal structure is well-known: hemiola sets up many important tonal arrivals and cadences; this is its characteristic usage throughout the Baroque repertoire and in Classical minuets, and one can quickly call to mind many similar instances in Brahms's oeuvre. Hemiola's ability to exert a stabilizing role on metric design, however, has not been as widely acknowledged. This paper explores hemiola's restorative metric function in the music of Brahms. After some introductory remarks on hemiolas, the paper demonstrates the potential of hemiola to facilitate the resolution of displacement dissonances and its ability to clarify or alter the relative hypermetric strength of adjacent downbeats. The paper's final section speculates on possible implications of hearing hemiolas that do not readily appear to perform a metrically restorative function as if they do.

Hemiola in Historical and Theoretical Contexts

The most extensive English-language treatment of hemiola occurs in Channan Willner's studies of the music of Handel and J. S. Bach. In his initial articles, Willner defines four types of hemiolas: cadential, expansion, contraction, and overlapping.