sprung rhythm

Term invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins for displacements of metrical stresses in poetry – not new to his verse, but exploited by him consciously and with great persistence and variety – and transferred to musical terminology by Michael Tippett in the prefatory notes to his second string quartet, where sprung rhythm is used with a deliberation similar to Hopkins's in the finale.

Sprung rhythm may be said to include such devices as syncopation, transference of stresses to weak beats or by trying notes over bar-lines or beats, the omission of rhythmic units by rests, or the addition of them by triplets.