In 1611, Agostino Pisa used some of the most vitriolic language in the history of music theory to charge the city of Rome with what he saw as an absolute incompetence in the practice of “beating,” or conducting, musical meter. His indignation formed one important position in a lively debate concerning meter and the musical beat in Rome involving countless theorists and performers. My project addresses the terms of the debate on the musical beat in Rome, the temporal ideologies it intersected with, and the material practices of the hand that were pressed into its service. I seek to recover an understanding wherein the musical beat, la battuta, was connected not only to temporal measure, but also fundamentally connected to motion in the act of beating. Moreover, I hope to reposition the history of meter in a broader context, evincing aspects of the interconnected epistemologies of meter and time through history.