The metronome—pros and cons
For the sweltering summer months of July and August, I have decided to write about somewhat simpler, more circumscribed topics—almost “light summer fare”—that I hope will nonetheless be interesting. Next month’s column will be a potpourri of brief ideas, anecdotes, and questions modeled in part on my long-ago experience as a student in the organ pedagogy class at Westminster Choir College. This month I offer a few thoughts about something that for some people is almost a symbol of music or of being a music student, namely, the metronome.
I’ve always had a sort of love/hate relationship with metronomes. I tend to like mechanical things, especially old ones: clocks, telescopes, some kinds of pens, some kinds of umbrellas—come to think of it, even harpsichords and organs fall into this category! I like metronomes for this sort of reason—that is, old fashioned, wooden, pendulum-driven metronomes. Back when they were still common, I would often feel tempted by one when I happened to be in the kind of music store that had a display of them. This is chapter 1 of the “love” part of the story.
On the other hand, I grew up in music hating metronomes because of what they do. Early on, I thought the problem was that I just found the noise distracting if I was trying to read or play music. In fact, I think that what I really had trouble with was the inexorability of the beat. It didn’t let me get away with taking those extra hundredths of a second to remember my fingering or successfully read what the next note was supposed to be. (This discipline, of course, is what some people like about metronomes!) A bit later on, I disliked metronomes because I disliked playing that was “metronomic.” In the latter part of my student days, I was afraid that if I ever used a metronome, I would be in danger of permanently losing my ability to be flexible as to rhythm, that I would develop the instincts of a metronome rather than those of a musician. Early on in my work as a teacher, I had the same exaggerated fear about my students, and I strongly discouraged any metronome use.
The second part of the “love” is more recent. Over the last eight or ten years, I have begun to discover ways in which metronomes can be used in practicing and learning that are very fruitful and helpful. In particular, these uses of the metronome do not have any tendency to lead to “metronomic” playing. They also avoid various other pitfalls of metronome use—ways in which metronomes can actually undermine basic rhythmic steadiness.
There are a couple of points about the history of the metronome that I think are interesting. First of all, when the metronome was invented and marketed in the early nineteenth century, it was considered to be primarily a device for conveying, across space or time, what the tempo of a piece should be. That is, it was not at first considered to be an aid in practicing a piece or in learning how to play. That came later. The need to convey tempos to someone—an anonymous someone—outside of the composer’s musical community was correlated with the spread of publishing and also with a generalized increase in world travel and trade. This was the same need that gave rise—at about the same time—to a general increase in printed performance instructions: more detailed tempo markings, phrasing and articulation marks, dynamics where appropriate, and, in organ music in particular, printed registrations. All of these things had existed before the early to mid-nineteenth century, but they proliferated then.
I had always assumed that the reason that the metronome wasn’t invented until the early nineteenth century was that the technology of earlier ages was not sufficiently advanced—the same reason that we would give for the failure of the eighteenth century to invent cars or computers. Technological change is—we assume—progress, and of course as soon as something can be invented it will be. I later realized, however, that with the metronome (if not necessarily with the car or the computer) the causality may well have been in large part the other way around. There were ideas put forth by inventors at least as early as the late seventeenth century for metronomes, but they (in the words of the New Grove) “did not attract much attention.”
Quite possibly the technologies that permitted the creation of accurate clocks several hundred years earlier still could have led to the development of a metronome. That this did not happen was probably largely because of what I suggested above, that spelling out performance details on paper is only important to the extent that the music is going to be sent out into the world, away from the composer’s milieu. It may also reflect, at least in the area of keyboard music, the then still strong link between the composing of keyboard repertoire and improvisation. It could be assumed—more strongly the farther back you go in the Baroque era—that anyone playing a piece of keyboard music was also, or even primarily, an improviser of keyboard music and thus had an inner understanding of the compositional process. Such a player, it could be assumed, needed little in the way of performance suggestions or aids.
The main pitfall for players who want to keep a metronome going during practice is this: if the metronome beat is too slow or represents a note too far away from the fastest prevailing notes (for example, quarter-notes in a passage with many eighth- and sixteenth-notes), then there is a significant danger that the player will place many or all of the notes incorrectly as to timing, and actually play less steadily with a metronome than he or she would without it. The most common form that this takes is that someone will play with the metronome on a given beat, then play all of the notes prior to the next beat a bit too soon or too quickly in order to focus on listening for that next beat. Then the player will (probably) successfully play with the next metronome beat, rush the subsequent notes, wait up again, and so on. This can be a slight or subtle effect, but, to the extent that a player cannot just shake it off when the metronome is turned off, it is training the player to play unsteadily and also to ignore the rhythmic shape of the notes that don’t happen to be “on the beat.” Those notes, of course, are just as important as—and usually more numerous than—the notes that are on the beat.
Another form it takes is that of waiting for a tiny fraction of a second after each metronome beat before playing the notes which should be on that beat, in order to make sure that those notes are not early: that is, playing the notes once you have heard the metronome rather than mentally preparing them infinitesimally in advance and playing them exactly when the metronome is (so to speak) playing its note.
Both of these problems come about when the metronome beat is slow enough that it is difficult for the player to feel it internally or to follow it without subdividing. One solution—assuming that there is any reason to use a metronome in these circumstances at all (see below)—is to let the metronome subdivide the beat. We are all brought up to believe that it is usually better—more “musical”—to hear only larger beats and to let the smaller rhythmic units have as little weight as possible. Often it is said, for example, in a rehearsal or a lesson or coaching session, that a passage should be felt in 2 or even in 1 rather that in 4 or (especially!) in 8. This often makes a lot of sense as a matter of performance, helping a performance to flow. However, at a stage at which a piece is being played through with a metronome, the immediate goal cannot be a rhythmically persuasive or flowing performance (that is, not at that very moment: of course the goal is to make such a performance possible later on). The goal is for practice to be as accurate as possible rhythmically, and for it to feel easy to achieve this, with no sense of having to struggle or to pay undo attention to anything other than the notes and fingerings. For most people, metronome beats between about 90 and about 140 are easy to follow. In using a metronome to play through a piece or passage that is already essentially learned (i.e., comfortable as to notes and fingerings), the metronome should usually be set somewhere between those numbers, and then allowed to represent a note value for which that beat speed makes sense.
There is still a question as to why, at a stage when a piece is fundamentally learned and comfortable, it should be necessary or a good idea to play it with a metronome. I don’t see that it ever is, unless the reason for doing so is external. If, however, any player—student or otherwise—finds it useful or satisfying to do so, that is certainly OK as long as the concerns of the last few paragraphs are addressed, along with one further major pitfall. It is extremely important that you not assume that you need the metronome in order to develop an accurate inner sense of rhythm, and in so assuming, ignore that fact that you already have such a sense. This is common, especially for students, and most especially for students who have been told that they need a metronome. Whatever help a metronome may sometimes give, the message, given by a teacher to a student, that the student actually can’t hear accurate rhythm and needs an outside aid to do so is usually destructive.
(I believe that anyone who has ever spent any time walking, chewing, drumming fingers on the table, or listening to almost any kind of music, or who breathes, or who has a heartbeat, can learn to project accurate rhythm and timing on organ and harpsichord without using any external cues whatsoever. I will devote at least one future column explicitly to this.)
There are several external reasons why using a metronome might be a good idea. One of these is that it can stand in for a conductor when you are practicing a piece that will later on be conducted. Of necessity, the metronome beat cannot be any less steady (or even inflexible) than the conductor’s beat will be, and it can get the player accustomed to flattening out any rubato or other inner-derived flexibility. It cannot, of course, imitate any rhythmic shaping that a conductor might do: that must be worked out in rehearsal.
Another reason for using a metronome is to discover where you are speeding up or slowing down. A metronome will reveal this in a kind of mirror-image way. If you feel, with the metronome, that you are going too fast in a passage, then you were probably slowing that passage down beforehand; if you feel that you are going too slow, you were probably previously speeding up. It is important to remember that the speeding up and slowing down is not necessarily bad. The metronome can reveal it, but your ears and your aesthetic sense can evaluate it. The assumption that what the metronome suggests is correct musically—just because the technology of the metronome happens to exist—is the source of “metronomic” playing. That is, the metronome is not the source of metronomic playing, but the attitude that we sometimes bring to it is.
There is a stage of learning a piece at which a certain kind of metronome use can be extremely helpful and important. That is well prior to the time at which a piece is basically learned, but rather when it is still appropriate to be practicing very slowly. If someone is working on a piece that is tricky enough that it should be practiced at a “molasses” tempo—and I have a strong bias in favor of doing that with nearly all pieces—then the metronome can be used to make that process easier. The protocol for that is something like this:
1) For the piece that you are practicing—or the passage or the component of the piece, such as one hand or the feet or a contrapuntal voice—figure out a tempo that is so abundantly slow that playing the piece (passage, etc.) feels extraordinarily easy. At this stage overkill (too slow) is good, inadequacy (not slow enough) is very bad.
2) Find a metronome speed that is well within the range that you yourself find it easy to follow (again, this will probably be between 90 and 140, and within reason, faster is better) and that corresponds to some note value at your chosen practice tempo. If the metronome beat corresponds to a very small note value, that is good. For example, if you are practicing a passage that is primarily in eighth notes, and your chosen practice tempo is eighth note=65, then set the metronome to 130, and let each metronome beat be a sixteenth note. Thus you will listen to two beats for each eighth note. (If for this same passage at this tempo you were to set the metronome to 65 and let each metronome beat serve as an eighth note, then you might well fall into some of the pitfalls described above.) If your passage is primarily in notes that, at your practice tempo, should go at 90, then you should probably set the metronome to 90, and let each beat correspond to one of your notes, though setting the metronome to 180 and hearing two beats per prevailing note would also be worth trying. The two main points are that the metronome beat should be fast enough to be truly easy to follow, and that, all else being equal, it is better to have two metronome beats per shortest commonly occurring note than only one.
3) After you have played the passage (piece, voice, etc.) enough times that it feels truly easy—essentially automatic—then turn the metronome up by the smallest possible increment, and play at that speed until it again feels easy.
4) Repeat step three until you have got the passage up to or slightly above the performance tempo that you want.
5) Then, stop using the metronome.
This procedure is the essence of effective practicing. The role of the metronome here is optional but important. It both helps the process of speeding up actually to be systematic and gradual and, perhaps even more important, reassures the student that this is the case. I will discuss this approach to practicing— though with less emphasis on the role of the metronome in it!—at greater length in a later column.
