Table of Tempo Markings

We mentioned in lesson 2 that musical notation is an example of proportional notation. The relationship between notes and rests is formalised but the duration or time value of any particular note is unquantified. Until the invention of a mechanical device called the metronome, the performance speed of a piece of music was indicated in three possible ways:

Contemporary Evidence

Georg Muffat (1653-1704), though of French birth and of Scottish ancestry, considered himself a German and was instrumental in bringing the musical styles of the French and Italian courts into German-speaking countries. As a boy he studied with Lully and others in Paris and so was familiar with the musical style of les Vingt-quatre violins du Roi. With regard to tempo, Muffat, writing in his Auserlesene Instrumentalmusik (pub. 1701), describes the Italian manner which he favours, "in which passages marked with the words Adagio, Grave, Largo, etc. are taken much more slowly than our [German] musicians would play [...]. However, those marked Allegro, Vivace, Presto, Piú Presto, and Prestissimo are taken much livelier and faster."

Pasquini, an Italian violinist/composer who worked in England in about 1740-50, gave suggested tempi for the performance of Corelli's Concerto da chiesa in G minor fatto per la notte di Natale Op. 6 No. 8, which have come down to us through a publication of 1785 by the English publisher Robert Bremner. These, too, offer guidance on the association between Italian markings and metronome marks for Italian music written in the first half of the eighteenth century.

While it might seem useful to ascribe a particular metronome mark to each tempo mark, you will notice that there is a wide variation associated with each mark and as Andantino demonstrates, not a little confusion. In general, these markings should be used carefully. Very often, the style of the piece of music or the skill of the musician, dictates the range of tempi within which a performance can be convincing and it is this, the 'conviction of the performance' which should be the judge, not rigorous attention to particular tempo markings, which are guides more to 'mood' than to 'speed'.

Andante

Charles Rosen has written an illuminating article on the tempo sign Andante. We quote from it below.

Fermata

The fermata (also called hold or bird's eye) is a semicircle containing a dot which may lie above or below a note or rest or over a barline.

there are three uses for the fermata:
to extend the duration of a note	a fermata placed over a note (regardless of note duration) signifies that the performer is to extend the duration of that note by an amount left to the player's or conductor's discretion
to extend the duration of a rest	a fermata placed over a rest (regardless of duration) signifies that the performer is to extend the duration of that rest by an amount left to the player's or conductor's discretion
to insert a silence	a fermata placed over a barline signifies that the performer ceases to perform for a period left to the player's or conductor's discretion

In the article on Performance of Bach's Vocal works, Ton Koopman's discussion with Bradley Lehman includes consideration of the meaning of the fermata mark in the music of J. S. Bach:

Fetura & Caesura

Sometimes the fermata may be followed by a pair of oblique lines, //, lying through the top line of the staff. This is called a fetura or caesura although some conductors may also call them tramlines, railroad tracks or a cut-off. The sign means that there is a silent pause in the onward flow of the musical line. We illustrate the sign below.

If the passage immediately following a fetura is to be played by a single instrument in free tempo, then it will be marked with the words Colla voce (It.: with the voice) or Colla parte (It.: with the part) meaning that the accompanying instruments should take their tempo from the solo voice or part. A horizontal line will extend above the whole passage to be treated thus.

In poetry, a caesura is a pause somewhere in the middle of a verse often marked with two vertical lines ||. Some lines of poetry have strong (easily recognizable) caesurae, which usually coincide with punctuation, while others have weak ones.

Pope was able to keep his heroic couplets interesting by varying the position of the caesurae, as here:

Alas how changed! || What sudden horrors rise!
A naked lover || bound and bleeding lies!
Where, where was Eloise? || her voice, her hand,
Her poniard, || had opposed the dire command.

Dance Tempi

If one wants to rely on a dance name to indicate tempo, you must remember that the same dance could have have been danced at different tempi at different times in history. In addition, there is good evidence that when accompanying dancers the tempo should be strict and unvarying.

The dancing master, Kellom Tomlinson, in 'The Art of Dancing' explained by reading and figures; whereby the manner of performing the steps is made easy by a new and familiar method: being the original work, first designed in the year 1724 ... , tells us:

Purely instrumental dance pieces generally have faster tempi than if they were to be used to accompany dancing although there are cases where the instrumental version is actually slower than when danced. Tempi may alter at appropriate moments during the performance, for example, in the last two bars there might be a slight retard. We give below general guidance to the character of the more popular early dance forms.

Early dance is a very specialist field and we recommend two pioneering books for further reference:

Tempo through Notation

In his Interpretation of Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Arnold Dolmetsch wrote:

Dolmetsch was writing early in the twentieth century when there was little knowledge about early music, early dance or of the characteristics of the instruments on which it might have been played. Even today almost a hundred years later, many of us have never danced a Pavan or Polka and a piece of music bearing such a title would have us none the wiser as to the way it was danced nor how it might be performed.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Italian musical theorist Franchinus Gaffurius (1451-1522) commented that the tactus, the tempo of a semibreve (whole note), is equal to the pulse of a man who is breathing quietly — presumably about 72 beats per minute. Today, in order to make early music easier for modern musicians to read, many modern editors replace all the notes in a work with notes half their time value. Where the principal beat might originally have been a minim (half note), it is now rewritten as a crotchet (quarter note). This 'modernisation' of notation makes it impossible to use the fact that in the sixteenth century 'white music', that filled with breves (double whole notes), semibreves (whole notes) and minims (half notes) was generally played much faster than 'black' music, that filled with crotchets (quarter notes), quavers (eighth notes) and semiquavers (sixteenth notes).

There is good evidence from tutors published in the early eighteenth century that time signatures could indicate tempi. Some are given in the table below. The two sources are 'The Compleat Flute Master' (London c.1700) and 'The Compleat Tutor for the Violin by Mr. Dean' (London, 1707).

time signature	expected speed (Flute Master - c.1700)	expected speed (Violin Master - 1707)
	very slow motion from John Playford's Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London 1694), Christopher Simpson's A Compendium of Practical Musick (London 1667) and Thomas Mace's Musik's Monument (London 1676), Ephraim Segerman has estimated this to be about MM=60	very solid or slow movement
	somewhat faster	quicker
	brisk and light Ayres Ephraim Segerman has estimated this is equivalent to MM=120	as quick again as the first, and are called 'retorted time', shown, in French music, with a large number two sometimes crossed with a vertical line
some writers maintained that, reading from top to bottom, the three signs above indicated exact proportions of (4:2:1)
	grave movement	much quicker
	fast, for jiggs, paspies, etc.
		much quicker

Here again, considering only two methods published within a few years of each other, there is a certain amount of disagreement and it is a wise musician that uses this information carefully. Certainly, what evidence it provides can only be applied very narrowly to music performed in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Metronome Marks

Ascribing accurate tempi to music was something many musicians sought. In his Harmonie Universelle published in 1636, Mersenne gives the time value of a 'Minim' as that of a beat of the heart.

The first metronome was invented by Étienne Loulié in 1696. His device was rather tall; 2 metres high (almost 7 feet). A number of mechanical improvements lead to the modern (spring-operated) portable metronome. These were carried out by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (1780-1826) and Johann Nepomuk Maelzel (or Mälzel) (1772-1838). As they worked independently there was some dispute as to which had arrived first at the various technical improvements. In the end, Maelzel, the better business-man, made the metronome available to a larger public and, as a result, it is his name that figures in the famous tempo sign: MM=120 - MM is short for 'Maelzel's Metronome'.

Composers who insisted on their music being performed at exactly the right tempo welcomed the metronome because now they could give an exact number of beats per minute (bpm). They supplied recommended metronome markings above the published music so that everybody knew what they wanted. However, we must approach such marks with a degree of caution. We know, from a letter he wrote to a publisher, that Beethoven's metronome marks were only valid for the opening bars - it was not his intention that they persist through the movement as a whole. In addition, we know that many of the early metronomes were inferior and did not always run reliably. In other cases, the editors or publishers added their own marks with no regard as to the composers' intentions. These mechanical devices have now been superceded by solid state electronic devices that are more reliable and much cheaper to manufacture. Metronome marks should be treated just like any other tempo marking - as a guide, to be ignored if the result is impractical or unmusical. Brahms insisted on great tempo flexibility. One of his most famous statements on tempo relates to the metronome. He said, "I have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go together".

References: