Time in Your Hands

Defined by movement and experienced only in time, music and dance are truly ephemeral.  Whether the art form is a three minute pop song or a two hour ballet, it cannot be performed without a clock and it cannot be perceived outside of the cradle of time.  Tempo, beat, and pulse are terms musicians routinely use to establish the time of a composition.

Since the Baroque period, musicians have developed a lexicon of Italian words to set the approximate tempo of music.  No fewer than twenty-eight terms are used in an effort to get musicians to play music at the tempos intended by composers. 

Written music resorts to words, symbols and mechanical devices to get musicians to play music at the tempo composers intended.  No fewer than twenty-eight Italian words are used to establish tempo.  Often at the top of a musical score a cryptic set of symbols involving numbers, letters and notes appear to establish tempo.  During practice systems musicians sometimes turn on a metronome to keep the beat.

The modern mechanical metronome came to market in 1816.  It was based upon Galileo’s 1581 discovery of the principle that a pendulum swings back and forth at a regular and predictable rate that is directly and simply related to the length of the pendulum.  By the middle of the 17th century, Christopher Huygens invented an escapement mechanism that allowed a swinging pendulum to become the engine of the mechanical clock.  Many inventors attempted to use a clock mechanism as the basis of a metronome but found that the relatively slow tempos of music required a long pendulum length.  That made the devices impractical and often unreliable. In 1816 Johann Nepenuk Maelzel brought the 1812, double weight, short pendulum invention of Dietrik Nikolaus Winkel to market as the first reliable metronome.  Nearly two centuries later, music honors Maelzel’s invention by stating tempo in beats per minute marked as “m.m.=” where m.m. stands for Maelzel’s metronome. Jazz, pop and other more casual forms of music often dispense with the tribute to Maelzel and write and equation such as:  Q= 120.  That means a quarter note gets one beat and there are 120 beats per minute.

Beethoven was thrilled with Maelzel’s invention.  No more vague Italian descriptions of tempo.  He set about putting metronome markings on many of Mozart’s compositions.  He put metronome markings on many of his own important works.  But eventually he decided that the metronome was an unwelcome master.  His markings were often inconsistent and his publishers often made mistakes in printing them on scores.  He abandoned strict metronome markings and returned to the Italian words that still dominate music notation to this day.

From the mid-18th century and into the early 20th century, collectors of folk music indicated tempo by noting the length of a pendulum that would swing in time with the music.  Melodies collected during this period often have tempo markings in inches.  To get the proper tempo, a musician would make a pendulum, say 4 ½ inches long, let it swing and take note of the tempo.

Today a working 19th century Maelzel metronome can cost upwards of $100.  Or a musician can buy a battery powered, electronic metronome for about $15.  Whether you wind it up and watch a short pendulum swing through the air or you switch it on and watch an LCD screen pretend it’s a pendulum, the metronome keeps a musician on time and makes sure that music remains an ephemeral experience.