Tempo, duration, and flexibility: Techniques in the analysis of performance

Journal of Musicological Research

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 111-156

  Bowen, José Antonio ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 31744450709     PISSN: 01411896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01411899608574728     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Ingarden classifies them as "intentional objects." Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity trans, by Adam Czerniawski, ed. Jean G. Harrell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 9-23, 34-40
2. José A. Bowen, "The History of Remembered Innovation: Tradition and Its Role in the Relationship Between Musical Works and Their Performances." Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 139-173
3. Richard Wagner, "On Conducting" in Richard Wagner Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 2nd ed. 8 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber & Co. Ltd., 1895) 4, 314
4. Beethoven's interest in tempo and metronome markings is well documented. In the Wiener Vaterlandische Blätter of October 13, 1813, he said "I look upon the invention of the metronome as a welcome means of assuring the performance of my compositions everywhere in the tempo conceived by me, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood." A detailed discussion can be found in William S. Newman, Beethoven on Beethoven: Playing his Piano Music his Way. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), 84ff
5. Anton Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, 2 vols, in 1, trans. Constance S. Jolly, annot. Donald W. MacArdle from the 3rd ed. of 1860. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 423 fn
6. For a more detailed account of the historical relationship between theory and practice see: José A. Bowen, "Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner as Conductors: The Origins of 'Fidelity to the Composer'," Performance Practice Review, 6 (1993), 77-88
7. For discussion of the twentieth-century battles see Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
8. The implications of these ideas for musicology and for performers are discussed respectively in two articles: José A. Bowen, "Finding the Music in Musicology: Studying Music as Performance" in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press)
9. and José A. Bowen "Performance Practice versus Performance Analysis: Why Should Performers Study Performance?" Performance Practice Review, 9 (1996), 16-35
10. Adolf Bernhard Marx, Anleitung zum Vortrag Beethovenscher Klavierwerke (Berlin, 1863), 105, or 3rd ed. (Berlin: Behncke, 1898), 62
11. Theodor W. Adorno, "Neue Tempi," (1928) in Moments musicaux: Neu-gedruckte Aufsätze 1928-1962 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag: 1964), 74-83
12. Richard Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," in Nicholas Kenyon ed., Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 187
13. rpt. in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 134
14. Gilbert Kaplan, "A Dirge? No. It's a Love Song" New York Times (Sunday, July 19, 1992)
15. Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental Performance 1900-1950. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 35-36
16. Joachim Braun's study of the Beethoven Fourth Symphony uses metronome markings to argue that modern performances are from 5% (in the fast movements) to 23% (in the slow movements) slower than Beethoven intended. Joachim Braun, "Beethoven's Fourth Symphony: Comparative Analysis of Recorded Performances," Israel Studies in Musicology 1 (1978), 54-71
17. For further discussion of Beethoven's metronome marks and the surrounding debate see Sandra P. Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
18. Nicholas Temperley, "Tempo and Repeats in the Early Nineteenth Century, Music & Letters 67 (1966), 323
19. That said, J. B. Steane cites compelling evidence to suggest that many very early recordings by singers were faster in the studio than they were on the stage: J. B. Steane, The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record (London: Duckworth, 1974), 10. I do not doubt that there are many more individual examples of this (it might even be the explanation for the lengthening of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2), but it is not a universal trend in symphonic music
20. I discuss the methodology for dealing with these problems at length in "Finding the Music in Musicology: Studying Music as Performance" (cited above, fn. 7)
21. Paul Banks, "Aspects of Mahler's Fifth Symphony: Performance Practice and Interpretation," Musical Times (May 1989): 262
22. A complete case study of the Mahler Symphony No. 4 is forthcoming in José A. Bowen, "Mahler, Authenticity & Authority."
23. Nelson Goodman, for example, finds that metronome marks are binding, but that, in general, tempo is an "auxiliary direction." Any performance at any tempo "however wretched," therefore, is still a performance of the musical work. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, 2nd ed., (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Co., 1976), 185
24. For a detailed discussion of this theoretical framework, see José A. Bowen, "The History of Remembered Innovation."
25. Henry Smart, "Review" Sunday Times [London] June 17, 1855. While Wagner complained about the overly fast tempos of his day, the balance of the evidence suggests that Wagner's own conducting exhibited new extremes of both fast and slow tempos
26. See José A. Bowen, The Conductor and the Score: A History of the Relationship Between Interpreter and Text in the Generation of Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner, 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994)
27. Instrumentationslehre, ed. Richard Strauss (Leipzig: G. Heinz, 1905)
28. trans. Theodore Front (New York: Kalmus, 1948), 246. Berlioz, therefore, encouraged composers to leave metronome marks
29. Hector Berlioz, Memoirs, trans. David Cairns (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 276. Of course even Berlioz must have allowed for some range of tempo
30. Matthew Dirst has come to similar conclusions in his study "Tradition and Authenticity in a Bach Chorale Prelude," American Organist. Vol. 25, 3 (1991), 59
31. A conclusion shared by Braun, American Organist., op. cit., 55
32. K. E. Behne, Der Einfluß des Tempos auf die Beurteilung von Musik, (Cologne, 1972), 121
33. Braun's fn. 6 also includes references to N. Garbuzov, Zonnaja priroda tempa i ritma, (Moscow, 1950), 9
34. and A. Wellek, Musikpsychologie und Musikästhetik, (Frankfurt, 1963), 246
35. DeltaGraph Professional 3.5 (for Macintosh) was used but Excel would do many of the same functions. Neither of them can handle the entire data set of all performances of all works (a grid of 10,000 measures by 10,000 performances is needed), but Delta-Graph can handle a data set for a single piece (10,000 measures by 100 of performances). Excel cannot. Only SAS/GRAPH is capable of handling the largest data sets. More information is available in José Bowen, "A Computer-Aided Study of Conducting" in Computing in Musicology, ed. Eleanor Selfridge-Field and Walter Hewlett (1994)
36. Independent research has confirmed these levels of accuracy using similar methods and control tests. See Nicholas Cook, "The Conductor and the Theorist: Furtwängler, Schenker and the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," in ed., John Rink, The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114
37. More accurate measurements can be made when studying piano music. Piano rolls leave a physical trace (see Hermann Gottschewski's dissertation, Interpretation als Kunstwerk, Freiburger Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, hrsg. Hermann Danuser, Bd. 4 (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1996)
38. and there are a number of ways to extract timing data from disclavier pianos or MIDI files (see Bruno Repp "On Determining the Basic Tempo of an Expressive Music Performance" Psychology of Music 22 (1994), 157-167
39. and Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing, "POCO: an Environment for Analyzing, Modifying, and Generating Expression in Music" in Music, Mind and Machine, Studies in Computer Music, Music Cognition and Artificial Intelligence (Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers, 1992). Further information about POCO can be obtained from poco@psych.kun.nl.). Using frequency analysis to extract tempo data is accurate but extremely time-consuming for piano music. It is virtually impossible for any stretch of ordinary orchestral music. While it would provide slightly more accurate data, it is a measured accuracy beyond what most of us actually hear, and virtually all of the gain is wiped out when the times between beats are averaged to give an average tempo per bar (the measurement used in most of the graphs which follow). Finally, while most of the small "wiggle" in the lines (see fig. 7) comes from the human error, we might equally note that human listeners do not perceive any "wiggle" in these performances
40. Daniel Gottlob Turk, Klavierschule, oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen für Lehrer und Lernende. (Leipzig and Halle: Schwickert; Hemmerde und Schwetschke, 1789), 372
41. Carl Czerny, Über den richtigen Vortrag der sämtlichen Beethoven'schen Klavierwerke. Chapters 2 and 3 of Die Kunst des Vortrags. Facsimile ed. Paul Badura-Skoda, (Vienna: Universal, 1963), 87
42. Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ausführliche theoretischpraktische Anweisung zum Pianoforte Spiel vom ersten Elementar-Unterrichte an bis zur vollkommensten Ausbildung, (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828), 417-418
43. See José A. Bowen, "Rubato and the Second Subject: a Performance History" (forthcoming)
44. Richard Wagner, Über das Dirigieren (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1869)
45. in Julius Kapp, ed., Gesammelte Schriften. (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker Verlag, 1914) vol. 9, 153-229
46. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., 181. Like Czerny, Wagner prescribes it only for selected locations
47. He [Wagner] reduces the speed of an allegro - say in an overture or the first movement - fully one third on the entrance of its cantabile phrases." Henry Smart, Sunday Times (London), June 17, 1855
48. That, at least, would corroborate Toscanini's and Hanslick's view of Wagner's conducting and Weingartner's view of von Bülow's conducting as too much of a good thing. See Eduard Hanslick, Hanslick's Music Criticism, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 106
49. Felix Weingartner, Über das Dirigieren (1895) trans
50. Ernest Newman as "On Conducting" in Weingartner on Music and Conducting: Three Essays by Felix Weingartner (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 16-23
51. Tempo maps for this movement can be found in José A. Bowen "Can a Symphony Change? Establishing Methodology for the Historical Study of Performance Styles" in (in Bericht des Internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung: Musik als Text, (Freiburg: Bärenreiter, in press)
52. More detailed information about the cognitive nature of tempo fluctuations in music can be found in hundreds of journal articles and books about music psychology. (See Alf Gabrielsson's excellent overview and bibliography of music performance research in D. Deutsch ed. The Psychology of Music 2nd ed. forthcoming.) Musicological research into performance, however, is more focused on historical change and the cultural contribution to what performers do and why
53. Richard Taruskin argues that a desire for uniformity of metrical pulse and "true solidity" entered with twentieth century aesthetics. (Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present," 110-112)
54. See also Bowen "Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner as Conductors: The Origins of 'Fidelity to the Composer'."
55. See Richard Hudson, Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)
56. Note that this seems only to happen in large late-romantic works and not in Mozart, Beethoven, or any "early music." See José A. Bowen, "Mahler, Authority and Authenticity" (forthcoming)