Metronomes and Musical Culture over Time. Over the course of history, the changing values placed upon metronome technologies reveal complex meanings of musical temporality, both in theoretical and practical terms. Not merely tools to define and dictate tempo, metronomes reflect changing western ideals about musical motion in ways scholars and performers are only beginning to recognize. Metronomes are forever intertwined with theories about rhythm and meter, performance practices, music pedagogy, aesthetics, and the history of time telling itself.
They act as prisms with which musicians, educators, and theorists express the aims of musicality in their own times. These machines and their indications therefore cannot be wrested from culturally specific educational, performance, and compositional practices.
The present study is an initial attempt to provide a broader historical approach to this exceedingly commonplace technology, one now familiar to nearly every student, researcher, and practitioner of music in the western tradition.
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the efficacy of all tempo machines was seriously questioned. At times they were heard to benefit or diminish or even destroy qualities of tempo, pulse, meter, and rhythm in traditional musical contexts.
Tempo scholarship must therefore seek to include intellectual and social histories, focusing on the myriad ways in which musicians have received, used, and reacted to these automatic-beat technologies across time and place. The search for one authentic metronome indication has more to do with what modern culture desires rather than what nineteenth-century composers actually intended or asked for when performing their works.
Why does the sound of automated clockwork hold so much relevance in performance and compositional endeavors today? Or, in other words, how did a continuous mechanical beat ever become so highly regarded in the human activity of music making? In seeking answers to these questions, this roughly year survey reveals a cultural paradigm shift, a metronomic turn in the way automatic tempo technologies have come to inform and influence the values of musical temporality.
This broader historical approach challenges any claim that clockwork and digital metronomes are merely the objective indicators of an absolute, objective musical beat. More accurately, our now ubiquitous metronomes are supporters of a culturally contextual belief system, an aesthetic of musical pulse and movement particularly suited to our age and for our time. By positioning these automatic technologies in relation to past rhythmic theories and practices, it is apparent that metronomes are not a priori indicators of historical musical movement.
Indeed, notions of musical meter, rhythm, and pulse existed well before precisely ticking clockwork technologies were readily available to musicians. Metronomes did not originate the idea of tempo despite the fact that they are the predominant tempo references in current compositional and performance practices.
Modern metronomes tell their own kind of musical time, which must be learned to be accepted. As contemporary educational methods verify, performing and practicing with the consistency of continuous clockwork rhythm is not innate or immediately intuitive to the musical mind.
All musicians can attest to the fact that playing to the metronome is an acquired practice; thinking about musical movement in beats per minute BPM is an acquired knowledge. If the clockwork metronome and its indications were the only way to define and dictate musical time, there would have been no understanding of rhythm or tempo prior to , the year Maelzel patented his device across Europe. The value placed on these time-telling qualities changes due to host of sociocultural and historical factors.
Who reads time from a sundial today? Who can even find a sundial today? Despite falling out of popular favor, a sundial charts the daytime differently than a digital clock.
A sandglass tells duration differently than a stopwatch. Modern time-telling devices are discernibly more precise temporal indicators than historical alternatives; their motion is more constant, perpetual, and divisible into smaller equal units the very meaning of precision.
It does, however, mean different, more exacting time telling. The digital clock is not a truer depiction of the time of day than the sundial. Through an automatic beat, modern metronome technologies make musical time concrete, objective, and repeatable. It is a beat that, while beyond personal idiosyncrasy, is not always desirable in every historical or creative context. If anything, the modern metronome is overly precise in relation to historical theories and practices of musical movement.
A perpetually ticking machine is but one reference among many technologies and techniques that might aid in the understanding and recreation of musical pulse and movement.
An automatic metronome is not the best or most sufficient reference for all repertoires. It is merely the machine that modern culture wishes to place its faith in for the specific type of tempo it tells—a tempo once heard as being distinctly artificial as opposed to naturalistic. A few swings of the tape or pendulum are quite sufficient for this purpose. Although the history of time telling cannot be addressed at any length here, suffice it to say that precise time telling machines are made necessary in a precisely ordered, rapidly moving, and globally connected world—a synchronized world of train and flight schedules, of radio and satellite communication systems.
The kind of time telling modern society requires tends to correspond with the activities and working processes of our modern scientific-industrial age.
Modern life is run on a timetable. The stop watch is perhaps the most typical modern invention, because it symbolizes the infinite subdivision of time that has come in since the industrial revolution… Really precise time telling has not been needed in the world until within a few years [before ]… It would be hard to run the Twentieth Century on a sun dial.
Western civilization became acculturated to automatic time-telling technologies in order to meet pressing scientific, social, political, educational, and economic needs.
The modern musical landscape has undergone a similar acculturation with metronome technologies, which help to fulfill distinctly modern pedagogical, aesthetic, and cultural requirements that have arisen within the last century. Evidence for this metronomic turn appears across a multitude of modern-age compositions, educational methods, and performance practices. It would be hard to run twentieth-century musical time on a simple pendulum.
To understand the tempo intentions of Beethoven and other nineteenth-century composers more fully, scholars and performers should account for the role that automatic machines played in nineteenth-century society. Indeed, many skilled nineteenth-century musicians placed far less value or attention on metronome numbers than current-day musicians might assume.
A more inclusive study of this occasional Beethoven collaborator yields insights into the novel, occasionally foreign, and decidedly artificial machine culture he promoted to many musicians and nonmusicians alike. Maelzel championed automatic sound and artificial motion well before western society utilized the many self-moving machines so commonplace today, such as automobiles, factory conveyor-belt systems, wristwatches, and even metronomes.
The drastic distinction between mechanical and living performance seemed obvious to many, since clockwork sound and motion failed to express the variable and volatile nuances of musicality.
Since European bourgeoisies heard the limited capacities of musical clocks and barrel organs in many urban and domestic settings, the unmusicality of machines was well known to early modern society.
In an early critique from October , an anonymous British musician explains the distinction between the metronome rhythm and the tempo of the living musician 15 :.
The constant loud ticking which it makes at every beat, though perhaps esteemed an advantage by some, who cannot measure equal portions of time in their mind, is disagreeable to those who have a real feeling for music, and will render those who use it constantly, too mechanically uniform in their performance, as it will not permit that judicious acceleration and retardation of the time according to the genius of the passage, in which a great deal of the expression evinced by a performer of taste consists.
Explained above is a premodern epistemology of musical time that stipulates the expressive authority of the performer, over and beyond the objective certainty of any mechanical reference. The writer relates a common performance practice in which tempo is an expressive characteristic, not a mechanical precision, one that fluctuates by the phrase, rhythmic gesture, and harmonic progression.
It is a musical time guided by creative will and intellect. Her object is to excite and to manifest the emotions of the heart and of the soul. Other critics heard rhythmical tyranny in the clockwork invention, one that especially influenced musical novices. Nineteenth-century conductors who lacked the skills to shape musical time expressively were especially chided when behaving like metronomes. Damrosch beat off the measures like a metronome, and the orchestra, following his lead, played like an assembly of artisans.
Let no orchestra attempt to play very fast, which is obliged to be merely mechanical in its playing; in which there is not a pervading feeling of the composition which dictates to every instrument, by a simultaneous instinct, when to retard a little, and when to accelerate. Mechanical execution and emotion are incompatible. He offered this damning assessment in How any musician could ever play with a metronome, passes my humble understanding. It is not only an inartistic, but a downright antiartistic instrument.
In order to prove this and to explain the vogue it has had in spite of it, we must regard the inventor a little closer and consider the time in which the misfortune of his invention happened.
But modern practices show the opposite to be true—metronome technologies are used now more than ever in pedagogies, research methodologies, and compositional practices. Metronomic Tendencies Since the Twentieth Century. The notion that automatic metronomes can completely define and dictate an absolute standard of musical time reflects a drastic aesthetic paradigm shift in modernity, a metronomic turn for western musical culture.
In this profound and lasting paradigm shift, mechanically aided and regulated behavior became seen as virtues rather than vices of individual human activity. It was an age when mechanical progress was thought to parallel societal progress, and a new wave of teachers were convinced that a scientifically informed, mechanically assisted education was essential for the modern-age musician as well. These educators, guided by the latest scientific ideals, began to revise what good rhythm and tempo meant for musical culture at large.
It was only in the past century that the use of metronomes transitioned from mere occasional references of musical time to essential regulators of a scientifically objective, mathematically constant, and mechanically reproducible tempo. Evidence shows that the rhythm and pulse of late-nineteenth-century scientific research ran counter to traditional musical sensibilities.
To take one example, researcher Thaddeus L. This general principle may be stated: The conception of a rhythm demands a perfectly regular sequence of [external, metronomic] impressions within the limits of about 1. As Britannica encyclopedia publishes , "Metronome is Maelzel but actually invented by Contribute an Article related to piano, and get full credit for it.
Please contact us at yongmeng thepiano. A lot of my music that I like puts energy in your body or makes you want to dance or break something or just go mosh or jump around. Skip to main content. History of the Metronome. Submitted by ThePiano.
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In , inventor Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel develops the musical chronometer yay! This allowed him to develop several musical inventions, such as the orchestrion and panharmonicon, both of which garnered him fame and notoriety throughout Europe. Fun fact : this first batch of metronomes could only go as slow as 50 BPM. However, as modern music became more complex and featured more complicated rhythms, patterns, and meters, metronomes became invaluable to untangle the music of composers such as Stravinsky.
If you think I have an odd obsession with metronomes, here are some…creations…to convince you otherwise:. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
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