CCM Thinking About Music Lecture: Musical Tempo

The Joseph and Frances Jones Poetker Thinking About Music Lecture Series

In a recent study, Roger Grant excavates the supercession of Renaissance mensuration by the measure in the concerted music of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Key to this is an abstraction, the early-modern conception of measure as constituted a coordinated system of isynchronous pulses. Balancing this abstraction is the notion that the measure creates rhythmic characters, joining specific meters to specific tempi. For Grant, the inherent contradiction in this tempo giusto system reaches a point of crisis in the early 19^th century, when the combinatorial possibilities for joining meter and tempo overwhelm the conventional list of rhythmic topoi. Thus a further abstraction, the introduction of naturalised time in the form of the metronome. We might extend Grant’s argument, noting that naturalised time in the 19^th century is itself balanced by the performative time of the tempo rubato. This, Blasius argues, gives rise by the close of the century to a new phenomenology of tempo, one predicated on the possibilities of mutable tempi, on a distinction between notated tempo and perceived velocity, and on the limit-case of the Durchgang, the breakthrough in which tempo itself is dissolved.

Location: Baur Room