On Time and Tempo. Notes from the Editor

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1 Notes from the Editor On Time and Tempo Readers of MQ should be warned that what follows is speculative. It is written without the expertise of the theorist or the philosopher. It is in fact the musing of a practical musician who struggles constantly with the question of determining the right tempo. When this search takes place within the repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, vexing questions arise: How does one define and weigh historical evidence? What might the connection be between past habits and the cognitive and emotional processes of apperception and response to music by modern audiences? These issues become especially thorny when composers have left metronome markings that cannot be ignored even when they seem unconvincing or problematic. Robert Schumann's markings can be slow, as in Manfred particularly in the last scene, where the pace of spoken declamation over the music is carefully spelled out rhythmically and can strike the performer and listener as stilted and unnatural. Mendelssohn's markings in the chorales in St. Paul are unbelievably slow. Antonin DvoFaVs metronome marking for the last movement of the Sixth Symphony is an example of a tempo at odds with the overt energy and thrust of the music. And there remains that perennial and favorite issue of Beethoven's metronome markings, which until recently have seemed often too fast. Why do these markings often clash with one's first instincts? No doubt one can recoil at corrupt performance practice traditions and find a way to honor what the composer wrote. But to the extent that markings invite reflection, despite the obligation to be self-critical about how one "naturally" hears the material and structure of a work, one remains attracted to the idea that perhaps there are interesting explanations for such dilemmas. The argument that composers may not be the best judges of how to make their own music effective constitutes no useful general principle even if it occasionally can be true. Perhaps what seems to us an awkward or wrong tempo once seemed right. This leads to a historical inquiry into the perception of time and tempo. What were the sensibilities and cultural meanings associated with past uses and patterns of musical time? What is the historical relationship of time in music to time and its use and perception in ordinary life? 421

2 422 The Musical Quarter^ A few months ago I was in a great hurry to catch a train. I was driving a car on a backcountry road (actually in "elegant horse country") and found myself behind a black, semicovered carriage pulled by two horses. It was not unlike the Zweispdnner students of latenineteenth-century Vienna may encounter in their reading; such was the favorite mode of conveyance and recreation of the great Viennese piano manufacturer Ludwig Bosendorfer. What struck me was that the horses seemed to be going really quite fast. This was not a Central Park tourist drive. Yet as I tailgated the contraption, I became painfully aware how intolerably slow it moved. I was even more stunned when I began to approximate how long it would take me to get where I was going if this was the fastest this thing could travel. By the time I could pass it, my anger had turned to free association. Was it at all significant that Beethoven probably never experienced motion any faster than the velocity of this carriage that his expectations with respect to time, duration, and the relative possibilities of how events and spaces might be related to one another in time might be radically different from our own? We look at a clock or a watch manufactured in the late eighteenth century: it can keep time perfectly. We can conveniently assume that measured elapsed time in 1994 is, in some sufficient sense, the equivalent of the same unit of time in They are objectively equal. How might they be understood not to be equal in the matrix of social action, historically understood? What might that have to do with hearing music, writing it, communicating with it, and finding meaning in it, then and now? MQ published the English-language version of Rudolf Kolisch's discourse on tempo in Beethoven (MQ 77:1 and 2), and recalling this discourse, I wanted then to suggest two idiosyncratic and perhaps naive caveats that one might very well consider as a subject for normative psychoacoustic research. First, is there something to be learned from the time and tempo sense of individuals who are losing their hearing and of those who have become or are born deaf? The internal sense of time and pulse developed by a composer who can hear an acoustic realization may be fundamentally different from the range of expectations and internal patterns of an individual who is deaf and works with a memory or an image of relationships that can never be adjusted to the experience of hearing a text realized in performance. At the time I also mused upon what the consequences might be for understanding middle and late Beethoven if one took into account the significance of Beethoven's not being able to hear in time events beyond the realm of music elements in the acoustic environment of Vienna of the 1820s that, strictly speaking, were extramusical.

3 On Time and Tempo 423 Second, is it worth remembering that, despite the constancy of metronome function in the 1820s, there was no experience or expectation of temporal and mechanical regularity in daily life such as we know today? With the exception of the clock, no gadget, no light source, no mode of travel, and no heat source led anyone to expect die sort of precise and sustained pattern and sequence of events in time we expect when we turn on the radio, switch on lights, start our car, travel in airplanes, and turn on our thermostats or use our metronomes. Perhaps I should have forgotten about all of this, but it came back to me as I struggled to pass the horse-drawn carriage. The methodological self-consciousness of contemporary scholarship in die field of music has succeeded in exploding many of the normative claims of music dieory and analysis. The discipline of die history of theory has helped give a historical cast to our habits of characteraing harmonic and structural events. A contemporary description of a cadence or of die relation of parts to die whole in a movement may be a necessary response to die question of meaning, historically considered, but it is not a sufficient one. The teaching of harmony, therefore, can take on at least two historical dimensions. First, the analysis of past practice, described in a seemingly standard descriptive language of harmony, can be located within a particular history of how theory was taught and how that teaching was related to then contemporary practices of composition; the perception of the normative is rendered historical. Second, the history of criticism and reception the history of listening and the perception or ascription of meaning through music can become historically differentiated by the reconstruction of expectations based on a historical understanding of accepted norms however locally defined with regard to harmonic practice and musical form. All this might help answer the questions of how musicians and listeners in the past heard and what sorts of meaning they attached to what they heard. All theoretical explanatory systems become historical artifacts. The hotly debated question of gender and sexuality with respect to compositional practice Susan McClary's reading of the Schubert Unfinished Symphony, for example invites a historical query about how the overtly "same" textual passages and sequences as those to which we have access today might have been heard and interpreted when performed in the past (e.g., in the 1820s or 1830s in Vienna). What meanings were associated with or derived from the musicmaking? Answers to such questions do not necessarily contradict the cogency of new contemporary readings, but they do clarify the standard by which the claims of music theory and analysis can pass as historical claims and therefore as keys to biographical questions and

4 424 The Musiad Quarterly issues of contemporaneous historical significance and authorial intention. In this issue, both Thomas Brothers and Marc Perlman indirectly extend the boundaries of the historicizing of normative analysis and music theory. They echo the premise of Jonathan D. Kramer's important book The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988). Pitch and harmonic practice have dominated as subject matter in theory and analysis. Rhythm and the consideration of time in music have lagged behind not only as analytic categories but as historical subjects. Tempo has received considerable attention but, ironically, more often than not as a subordinated consequence of the analysis of harmonic practice. An exception is Neal Zaslaw's discussion of tempo in his magisterial Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Performance Practice, Recep' tion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), where notational practice (e.g., "fixed tactus") and tempo are discussed. Despite his consideration of rubato, the construction of the problem remains focused on finding out the speed originally intended or what tempos were employed during the lifetime of the composer. Like the units of time on the clock, musical time as time elapsed, historically considered, remains construed as an unproblematic constant. We seem to be satisfied with quite simple but compelling historical evidence that tells us that yes, indeed, these are the metronome markings that composers placed in their music using the very same gadget we use, which beats time at the same rate today as it did more than a century ago; and that these are eyewitness reports from reliable people (ranging from Carl Czerny from the early nineteenth century to Gustav Mahler's friends in attendance at his concerts at the fin de siecle) that tell us that a movement was taken this fast or slow (describable by metronome markings) or took this long as measured by a clock whose second hand moves at the same rate today as it did then. It should become clear, however, that this consideration of tempo will not suffice. Our critical understanding of rhythm and time as historical categories needs to be developed further. The fields of psychology and psychoacoustics are inherently normative. Just as Perlman provides a cultural-historical critique of how advocacy for systems of tuning might be evaluated, a historical strategy for understanding the functions of musical time and time perception needs to be developed. Key to this historical consideration is the larger question of time and its uses outside of music. The history of time measurement has

5 On Time and Tempo 425 been studied (see David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modem World [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983]), as have the ways in which cultures accounted for time and conceived of its passage. Explanations of modernization and industrialization have included references to time measurement, including the tyranny of the clock, in terms of the rationalization and standardization of time units of labor, thereby mitigating the notion of time as contingent on natural distinctions such as night and day. There can be little doubt that the notions of time and duration in contemporary life differ greatly from those of the past. To place this otherwise banal observation in the realm of music, one might well ask what the significance of a tempo marking of "presto" at quarter note equals 144, with a resultant duration of a movement at six minutes, meant to a composer, player, or listener in 1790, when no individual at that time ever had the experience of traveling by any means of conveyance at the rates to which we are accustomed or witnessed moving pictures in the sense of television and cinema. It is true that indications such as "andante" might refer to relatively stable notions of how fast anyone might amble or stroll along. The same might be said for dance rhythms. Reference to the heartbeat and to the constancy of physiological reactions has been a favorite way of countering the notion of time and tempo perception in music as historically contingent. But as the indications "con moto" or "allegro ma non troppo" from nineteenth-century music indicate, the relative significance of such terms is vague at best. Furthermore, given the differences in the experience of time within history, might there be contrasts in the perception and understanding of regularity and deviation in tempo or in the relationships between tempo (and tempo changes) and musical rhetoric that derive from extramusical expectations that are assumed but never made explicit? In that case, performance practice with respect to the use of time may not be derived exclusively from the musical text as we now understand it. In a world of nonmusical events that are ordered differently than in the past, a nexus encompassing distances, rates of speed, expectations, including differentiated criteria concerning excitement and boredom, and the subjective perception of rates of duration may change dramatically. This in turn influences the time illusions, strategies, and sensations associated with listening, playing, reading, imagining, and daydreaming. What might then be the differential in terms of past eras in the effect or the significance of hearing the same music at different tempos? Conversely, in a world where the individual's experience of speed

6 426 The Musical Quarterly and time in motion, and therefore the visual experience of velocity, is different from our own, how can we assess the cultural meanings of time and changes in time usage, as well as in the psychological expectations and temporal associations with events such as contemplation, thought, travel, and work let alone the meanings attached to stretches of real time such as hours, weeks, months, and years? The relative sensation and meaning of a slow tempo might perhaps be different from our own, not because of textual issues but because of the cultural-historical context of time perception. The simple point is that, just as in harmonic practice, the seemingly objective fact of playing at the same tempo the same metronome marking in one cultural-historical context as in a radically changed one does not satisfy the historical question of the intentionality of a tempo assignment at the time of composition, or the meaning of the communicative gesture linked to tempo and the anticipated duration of musical sound. The unspoken habits of performance from the past that might derive from the transfer of meaning associated with specific tempo directions from outside of music should also be considered. We need to develop a differentiated scholarly understanding of the perception and function of time in history in order to grasp the significance of tempo designations and relationships in music. The same might apply to perception of rhythm. This sort of analysis can then aid performers in search of equivalents in their own performance environments if their intent is some sort of re-creative effort to approximate past practice. Reproducing what one regards as a replica of the manner and style of performance as it might have been in the past at a moment contemporaneous with the life of the composer is a valuable task that does not, however, offer the modern listener a sense of the psychological and cultural impact and meaning of the work in its own time. Performance practice that disregards historical evidence as to how the music might have been played in favor of a contemporary subjective reading of a text has, at least, the virtue of making no historical claims whatsoever. The least intuitive task of all is to gain a historical understanding of the perception of music as a temporal experience within a given social and cultural moment in the past and then make what may be an alteration of performance indications that one might argue parallels the "authentic" dynamics of meaning of the past. This might lead a performer, in the name of history, to deviate dramatically from historical metronome markings or to abandon the reigning imperatives in the name of scholarship for the consistent application of written indications and historical performance habits.

7 On Time and Tempo 427 Consider, for example, the London audience for the symphonies of Haydn in the 1790s and the Viennese audience for Bruckner a century later. Recent scholarly work on Bruckner (amply displayed at an excellent conference at Connecticut College this past winter organized by Paul Hawkshaw and Timothy Jackson, at which an earlier version of Bryan Gilliam's article in this issue of MQ was given) and the firstrate monograph Concert Life in London from Mozprt to Haydn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), by Simon McVeigh, can help us construct some hypothetical examples. Furthermore, William Malloch's article "Carl Czerny's Metronome Marks for Haydn and Mozart Symphonies" (Early Music 16, no. 1 [1988]) and contemporary accounts of performance practices in Bruckner's lifetime offer a strong basic background that is both empirical and historical. Our current penchant for self-consciously slow Bruckner tempos, even if historically justified by metronomic comparison, may camouflage a shift in the significance attached. In this case, a comparison of the time, duration, and tempo of Catholic liturgy and daily life and the associations with the tempo and perception of time at a Bruckner performance in the 1890s to present-day equivalents might lead us, in the service of engendering a historically comparable effect, to different tempos and a different approach to tempo fluctuations for the same text because of the character of changes in the habits of hearing and expectation in music linked to historical shifts in the perception and use of time. What seems now to us slow or fast may have changed decisively as have the associations with perceived slowness or rapidity. Likewise, the now fashionable rapidity of tempos in performances of Haydn a reversal of a late-nineteenth-century performance practice might inadvertently cancel out, so to speak, for modern listeners the effect Haydn intended and achieved with his London audience. How might one test such a claim? What sort of historical evidence and reasoning are required to understand the source and character of musical communication in specific contexts as communicated through the perception of time and tempo? The sort of differentiated analysis of time use and the perception of meaning linked to time use is suggested in part by the work of M. M. Bakhtin. Although it has become somewhat too fashionable to take cues for formal and historical analysis from literary theory, Bakhtin's analysis of the novel and the multiple functions of language within the novel seems highly appropriate for consideration of the larger instrumental forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bakhtin's most relevant essays are "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" and "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic

8 428 The Musical Quarterly Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). So much for speculation. The articles in this issue touch on numerology, the classic technique of analysis of watermarks and paper (in the service of clarifying the nasty question of Charles Ives's chronology), the investigation of stylistic influence (again for Ives), and the publication of reminiscences (David Tudor's). Together with the essays mentioned above, this issue reflects some of the imagination, insight, and discipline currently found in writing on music. Leon Botstein

PRESCOTT UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT District Instructional Guide January 2016

PRESCOTT UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT District Instructional Guide January 2016 Grade Level: 9 12 Subject: Jazz Ensemble Time: School Year as listed Core Text: Time Unit/Topic Standards Assessments 1st Quarter Arrange a melody Creating #2A Select and develop arrangements, sections,