German Barring

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German barring is a practice of placing bar lines popular in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It generally refers to bar lines that frame cadence points rather than introducing them (that is to say, cadences do not necessarily occur on beat 1 of a measure). Generally, the melody in a piece with German barring begins on beat 1 and rarely utilizes upbeats. German metric practices focus on measuring the number of pulses in a bar.

An important note to keep in mind for this description is that, by definition, a cadence is completed wherever the bass note of the second chord is placed.