Metronome

For other uses, see Metronome (disambiguation).

Mechanical metronome

A metronome is any device that produces regular ticks (beats). More precisely it produces a regulated aural, visual or tactile pulse. It dates back to the early 19th century. A metronome is used by some performing musicians for practice in maintaining a consistent tempo; it gives composers an approximate way of specifying the tempo. From its inception, however, the metronome has been a highly controversial tool (see Criticism of metronome use), and there are musicians who reject its use altogether.

Etymology

The word metronome first appeared in English c.1815 and is Greek in origin:

metron = measure, nomos = regulating

History

A mechanical wind-up metronome in motion

In the 1600's Galileo Galilei first employed freeswinging pendulums in simple timing applications, such as a metronome for musicians. The more familiar mechanical metronome was invented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in Amsterdam in 1812. Johann Mälzel copied several of Winkel's construction ideas and received the patent for the portable metronome in 1816. Ludwig van Beethoven was the first notable composer to indicate specific metronome markings in his music, in 1817.

Usage

Metronomes may be used by musicians when practicing in order to maintain a constant tempo; by adjusting the metronome, facility can be achieved at varying tempi. Even in pieces that do not require a strictly constant tempo (such as in the case of rubato), a metronome "marking" is sometimes given by the composer to give an indication of the general tempo intended, found in the score at the beginning of a piece or movement thereof.

Tempo is most always measured in beats per minute (BPM); metronomes can be set to variable tempi, usually ranging from 40 to 208 BPM; another marking denoting metronome tempi is M.M., or Mälzel's Metronome.

Types of metronomes

Mechanical metronomes

One common type of metronome is the mechanical metronome which uses an adjustable weight on the end of an inverted pendulum rod to control the tempo: The weight is slid up the pendulum rod to decrease tempo, or down to increase tempo. (The mechanism is also known as a double-weighted pendulum. There is a second, fixed weight on the other side of the pendulum pivot, hidden in the metronome case.) The pendulum swings back and forth in tempo, while a mechanism inside the metronome produce a clicking sound with each oscillation.

Electronic metronomes

Electronic metronome, Wittner model

Most modern metronomes are electronic and use a quartz crystal to maintain accuracy, comparable to those used in wristwatches. The simplest electronic metronomes have a dial or buttons to control the tempo; some also produce tuning notes, usually around the range of A440 (440 hertz). Sophisticated metronomes can produce two or more distinct sounds. Tones can differ in pitch, volume, and/or timbre to demarcate downbeats from other beats, as well as compound and complex time signatures.

Many electronic musical keyboards have built-in metronome functions.

Software metronomes

Metronomes now exist in software form, either as stand alone applications or often in music sequencing and audio multitrack software packages. In recording studio applications, such as film scoring, a software metronome is often used to generate a click track to synchronize musicians.

Use of the metronome as an instrument

Perhaps the most famous, and most direct, use of the metronome as an instrument is György Ligeti's 1962 composition, Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes.

The clicking sounds of mechanical metronomes have been sometimes used to provide a soft rhythm track without using any percussion. Paul McCartney did this twice: in 1968 on "Blackbird", included on the famous "White Album" The Beatles, and in 1989 on "Distractions" (Flowers in the Dirt) , where McCartney, following the metronome's regular beat, performed the whole rhythm track by hitting various parts of his own body. Also, in Ennio Morricone's theme "Farewell to Cheyenne" (featured on Once Upon a Time in the West), the steady clip-clop beat is provided by the deliberately distorted and slowed-down sound of a mechanical metronome.

Criticism of metronome use

A metronome only provides a fixed, rigid, relentless pulse; therefore any metronome markings on sheetmusic cannot accurately communicate the pulse, swing, or groove of music: The pulse is often not regular; e.g. in accelerando, rallentando; or in musical expression as in phrasing or rubato.

Some argue that a metronomic performance stands in conflict with an expressive culturally-aware performance of music, so that a metronome is in this respect a very limited tool. Even such highly rhythmical musical forms as Samba, if performed in correct cultural style, cannot be captured with the beats of a metronome.

A style of performance that is unfailingly regular rhythmically may be criticized as being "metronomic."

Many notable composers, including Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Johannes Brahms, have criticised the use of the metronome.

Quotes

... this series of even, perfectly quantized, 16th notes, is no more evocative of samba, than a metronome would be. In fact, this representation neglects what makes up the samba essence in the first place — the swing!

— Understanding the Samba Groove by Pedro Batista

Liszt is distinguished for the most passionate declamation; Thalberg the most refined voluptuousness; Clara Wieck the most ardent enthusiasm; Henselt the most delicate lyrical taste: [...] Not one gives the character of a piece of music without the individual colouring of his own mind; not one plays according to the metronome.

— ... four great Pianoforte Players from "The Musical world", 1838

Paderewski plays the rhapsodies like improvisations — inspirations of the moment. It is the negation of the mechanical in music, the assassination of the metronome. When ordinary pianists play a Liszt rhapsody, there is nothing in their performance that a musical stenographer could not note down just as it is played. But what Paderewski plays could not be put down on paper by any system of notation ever invented. For such subtle nuances of tempo and expression there are no signs in our musical alphabet. But it is precisely these unwritten and unwritable things that constitute the soul of music and the instinctive command of which distinguishes a genius from a mere musician.

— Paderewski and his art (1895) by Henry T. Finck

[...] nothing in general can be more disagreeable than this species of brilliant accompaniment, where the voice is only considered as an accessory and where the accompanier, without regarding the taste, feeling, compass, or style of the singer, the pathos of the air, or sense of the words, either mechanically runs though the prescribed solemnity of the adagio, with the one two three precision of the metronome, or rattles away without mercy though the allegro whenever an occasion presents itself for the luxuriant ad libitum introduction of turns, variations, and embellishments.

— Almack's revisited: or, Herbert Milton (1828) by Charles White

Now for the idea that strict metronomic pulsation is the normal basis of music. Nobody could persuade me that this is true. If I believed it I would give up music tomorrow. Also, if it is true, then Time, which is quite half of music, is not artistic material, for why pretend we are shaping something when it is already made (by machinery)?

— The Musical times and singing-class circular (1927)

There is an immense amount of metrical playing and singing in the world [...] : there is too little rhythmic reality. And if you habitually play or sing thousands of metrical phrases without transmuting them into your own rhythms, you will become a metronomical musician.

— Music Worship (1935) by Walford Davies; Harvery Grace

Actual performance timings involve complex ratios that neither add nor multiply in any simple fashion.

— How to Talk About Musical Metre, Justin London

a letter I got recently from a seventeen-year-old reader [... who wrote]: "At once I was struck by the detached lack of warmth... Mr. Heifetz and his colleagues played perfectly in tune, and at an impressively swift pace. But the beat seemed metronomical; there was no coloring, no warmth... Yet, Jascha Heifetz and other musicians with his approach are extremely popular with the public. It upsets me to see such widespread lack of musical sensitivity. I have a [...] recording of this piece [with] Pablo Casals. Sometimes the musicians are not together and they are not always perfectly in tune. But the performance is musical... whereas the Heifetz performance was merely a shallow display of virtuosity".
[...] Today's young audiences simply know too much about music, from constant exposure and from their schooling, to accept the kind of performances that put men like Heifetz on the map, when the emphasis was less on the music than on how its technical problems could be solved. The rock age has destroyed much of the technique-worship that used to be an important part of the musical experience.
[...] The future audience for serious music is, at the present time, wise and suspicious. Since they have discovered other and better values than those of audiences who live on memories of having heard Heifetz, they don't accept the necessity of dressing up like those audiences. They want music, and they want it for what they have learned it can be - a communication of a spiritual state that existed in the composer, expounded by a performer who is capable of dealing with that spirit. Nobody is going to reach this audience until he understands that basic fact and learns to respect its immense knowledgeability.

— Alan Rich, New York Magazine 21. Aug. 1972

To be emotional in musical interpretation, yet obedient to the initial tempo and true to the metronome, means about as much as being sentimental in engineering. Mechanical execution and emotion are incompatible. To play Chopin's G major Nocturne with rhythmic rigidity and pious respect for the indicated rate of movement would be as intolerably monotonous, as absurdly pedantic, as to recite Gray's famous Elegy to the beating of a metronome.

— Tempo Rubato by Ignacy Jan Paderewski - Chapter contributed to Henry T. Finck's book Success in music and how it is won (1909)

The musician who relies on metronomic markings has divorced himself from the inner life (which is a rhythmic life) of the music. He is no longer living out the drama from within, or singing the melody with his heart; he is immune to the 'sortilège'.
[...] rhythm as something organic and unpredictable [...]. But there is no doubt that it persists. It lies behind the notorious complaint, heard even from very skillful players, that the metronome 'sounds wrong'. A powerful expression of it is preserved in the recordings of Wilhelm Furtwängler, who 'deliberately cultivated an imprecise beat' so as to 'releas[e] from the printed score the essence of the performance of a classical piece'.

— Waking the face that no one is (page 12) by Louis Wirth Marvick

This does not mean, however, that the conductor shall be a mere time-beater; that time shall be rigidly hammered out according to the metronome marks. The machine could do that without the man, and more exactly. The degree of freedom and individual greatness of personality within [sic] these limitations determines the conductor as distinguished from the time-beater. The mechanical is never art; the metronome must never thake the place of the guiding brain and understanding heart. Brahms is reported to have said: "I am of the opinion that metronome marks go for nothing. As far as I know, all composers have, as I, retracted their metronome marks in later years."

— Choral music and choir direction by Clarence Dickinson (Essentials of Music - Volume I; ISBN 1443773697

A metronomical performance is certainly tiresome and nonsensical; time and rhythm must be adapted to and identified with the melody, the harmony, the accent and the poetry…

— Letter to Siegmund Lebert (10 Jan. 1870) by Franz Liszt

100 according to Maelzel, but this must be held applicable to only the first measures, for feeling also has its tempo and this cannot entirely be expressed in this figure.

— Ludvig van Beethoven

I do not mean to say that it is necessary to imitate the mathematical regularity of the metronome, which would give the music thus executed an icy frigidity; I even doubt whether it would be possible to maintain this rigid uniformity for more than a few bars.

— Hector Berlioz

The habitual use of the metronome is also to be rejected, since by this kind of use, even the beginnings of any rubato, based on an imaginative impulse, will be smothered, and the playing will wind up having a mechanical cast. There is a good reason to think of the term: "He plays like a metronome", as a condemnation.

— The art of violin playing, by Carl Flesch, Eric Rosenblith, Anne-Sophie Mutter

Two main ideas - both in out judgment the result of superficial thinking about unhappy experiences - are in the field against reform ; and they have to be conquered. The first holds that unanimous congregational chanting is impossible without agreed metrical design, not to say a musical metre of agreed rigidity. This has proved itself untrue, for the very good reason that natural accents of fervent utterance always will mean more to an inspired crowd than a metronome ever could mean, and when hearty enough such natural accents will teach them unanimity. The second idea is that singing in harmony is impossible without adding metrical design - that harmony, in fact, is inseparable from ideas of metre and accent. Here, again, the truth (proved in practice over and over again) is otherwise. Chanting in chords can be as beautifully and serviceably flexible as chanting in unison, though it is admittedly less easy.

— Music Worship (1935) by Walford Davies; Harvery Grace

From a performance perspective:

Another thing that becomes clear ..., is how much the listener's perception of rhythm differs from the reality of the metronome. While Feuermann's performances seemed to provide the clearest "feel" of the beat — meaning that to a listener, the rhythm and tempo seemed the most clear and compelling — when trying to set a metronome, one found a slightly changing tempo throughout almost every measure — a constant rhythmic "push and pull" — making metronome indications sometimes recordable only as a range between two or three adjacent markings or as an average. At the same time, other performers ... whose performances did not yield to the ear as strong a sense of tempo or rhythm, fit more easily within a specific metronome marking. From this, it is clear that the feeling and perception of rhythm are conveyed much more by the performers choice of emphasis or "pulse" than by strict adherence to any absolute metronomic rhythm.

— Brinton Smith, in a thesis of a recording of Emanuel Feuermann

On cultural aspects:

[...] This suggests that listeners who are steeped in a particular musical culture will have a repertoire metrical “templates” which allow them to readily grasp such patterns, both as the music starts and as it changes as it goes on.

— How to Talk About Musical Metre, Justin London

The uneven beats in African and North Indian Rhythms are no more complex (no less regular) than the patterns of expressive timing that occur in western music.

— How to Talk About Musical Metre, Justin London

Further reading

• Metronome Techniques, by Frederick Franz, New Haven, Connecticut, 1988

See also

• Rhythm
• Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes
• Beat
• Tempo rubato