Metronomization
The natural essence of music does not give rise to any
timeless rules for notating instructions to its performers. Like musical performance itself, its notation
has its history—a history that reflects the varying tension between prescribed
form and personal freedom. Today it may
perhaps be taken for granted that we have reached a limit situation of a sort
that has entailed the disappearance of this tension. Accordingly the following should be said:
The benefit of metronomization is that the composer’s idea of
a piece’s tempo is rationally specified.
As no objective formal tradition bindingly determines how music is to be
rendered and at the same time works from this age do not allow the performer
any degree of free play, such specification is necessary even though it
admittedly could never assure the integrity of performances. The capriciousness of performers, which only asserts
itself as the bad antithesis of interpretative freedom, is drastically forestalled
by metronomization.
As to the chief drawback of metronomization: it must be admitted
that its very rationality exacts a certain rigidity of technique that threatens
to extinguish that vital life of a performance that is talked about so much. But in the first place, the application of the category of
life to works of art—which are constructions, not creations—is dubious. Moreover, there are grounds for suspecting
that that life is often no more than an ideology propounded by performers, who
feel affronted by the demands exacted by a self-contained work that does not
need to be constituted from the outset by themselves and in whose eyes their
own laxity is of greater importance than the life of the works, which
admittedly does not take place in the transition from ritardando to a tempo,
but rather is coextensive with the history of the works in the various ways in
which they have been interpreted by performers—as is confirmed by Schoenberg’s
essay on mechanical musical instruments.
That a work cannot be performed strictly by the metronome—unless the performer
himself has mechanistic intentions—but that instead the metronome marking approximately
supplies the modifiable basic unit of tempo, ought to go without saying and be unassailable
by any pedantic doubts. Incidentally,
Schoenberg has pregnantly described the ancillary function of the metronome
markings in his “George Lieder,” op. 15.
The performer’s liberal rule of thumb no longer suffices to define
interpretation; whereas by the same token the space between three “dead” but
exact chronometric units is imbued with better phrasing, better sound, a more
faithful apprehension of the work at an adequate stage of its history—in other
words, ultimately, more life—than the space between the poles of a private
oscillation whose individualistic origin belongs to a stage of musical history
that has outlived itself; a stage whose importunate vitality is in truth dead,
manipulated according to set patterns.
The benefits outweigh the drawbacks, decisively
and in praxis, which in this case probably cannot be contrasted with theory,
for the theory of musical notation alone specifies the requirements of such
notation. Only the metronomization of
older works strikes me as questionable, because they prescribe more to
interpretative freedom; although the history of the metronomization of Bach in
the nineteenth century, even if it is a history of errors, provides a good
representation of the history of the works themselves. But because the decline of interpretative
freedom is not only dictated by the structure of contemporary works but also
conditioned by the remoteness from tradition of the performers’ own situation,
it is impossible to foresee whether the metronomization of works from earlier
periods will soon also be necessary. The
question whether in entering a phase of metronomization older music would simultaneously
be entering a phase of antiquarian mummification, whether its history would consequently
draw to its conclusion, need not be discussed.
In individual cases the beat is compelled to gloss over many cognitive
contradictions.
The composer will give a wide berth to
misunderstandings “that may arise from the all too great precision of
metronomization” via, for instance, even greater precision—via, specifically, his
introduction of several counting units (Tempo I, Tempo II, Tempo III, all
metronomized) or his modification of the metronome count with every change in
tempo indication, e.g.: Bewegt [active or animated] (♩ =120) etwas ruhiger [somewhat calmer] (♩ =92) straffer [tighter] (♩=106), Hauptzeitmass
[principal tempo] (♩=120).
Apart from that, verbal descriptions—those regarding not just the tempo
of the performance but also its character—are capable of providing constant
assistance.
Accordingly, Reger’s metronomizations of
ritardandi and accelerandi strike me as misguided, because they perforce regard
tempo modifications as being pieced together out of passages each of
which—however brief it may be—manifests a constant chronometric unit, whereas Reger’s
entirely functional music actually knows only continual transitions between
tempi. Just as in the course of a
passage of extended modulation in a Reger composition, it is scarcely ever possible
to identify a moment in a specific key with any certainty, during his
tempo-changes a passage can scarcely ever be said to have alighted on a
specific chronometric unit, even a merely ideal one. In cases of such continuous modification it
may suffice to metronomize the starting and ending points. Even here one can
differentiate via verbal expressions.
For example: when the conclusion of a stringendo is especially tightly compressed, the principal
indication (…accelerating from X [♩=92] to Y [♩=160]) may be subscribed by the sub-indication “Very tightly
compressed four beats before Y.” Thus may
one deal with continuous and relatively continuous modifications; in contrast,
those that are effected via abrupt modulations can be metronomized without
hesitation. Among such abrupt
modulations may be reckoned not only such sudden changes of tempo as occur in
the variations in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, but also “halting” ritardandi,
which maintain their continuity throughout the repetition of the same motif or
segment of a motif but require a different tempo for each of these repetitions. Paradigms of thoroughly metronomized halting
ritardandi are to be found in Anton Webern’s op. 2 song “Escape on Light Boats”
for a capella mixed chorus, and op. 5, the Five Movements for String Quartet.
Whether or not to forbear from including
additional tempo indications when the tempo is precisely metronomized depends
upon the specific character of the piece. Such forbearance is justified
when that character is evident thanks to the piece’s open avowal of its
instantiation of a specific form (for example, a rondo like the one in
Schoenberg’s wind quartet); when the music is so radically devoid of
intentional contents that no “character” other than, perhaps, the negation of
character has been assigned to it (a piece of such music is Stravinsky’s
Concertino for String Quartet); here the absence of verbal indications has a
polemical meaning; the characters are “left blank”; and finally when the music
is so self-differentiating that one cannot but fear that the addition of verbal
indications would do it violence.
Nevertheless and in any case, it would be as premature to pronounce a
general verdict on verbal indications as to predict the outright demise of
musical characters.
To rectify the insufficient clarity of the numbers via the
metronomic specification of “the concepts of largo, adagio, andante, etc., whose meaning is clear to
every musician” strikes me as impossible, because I am skeptical as to the
“semantic clarity” of such concepts, at least in relation to recent works. These concepts signify types, and their
objectivity is borne solely by the objectivity of the types to which they are
applied. Because the types are
disintegrating, the legitimacy conferred by their names is being diminished and
certainly no longer suffices to encompass the essence of constructions that are
breaking out of the typical sphere of order.
The application of typical indications to
works that are alien to the real validity of types—and these are the only works
that matter today—could only conserve the semblance of an objectivity that
falsifies the works before they have even begun; and it would only be fit for making
illusory the tidy efficaciousness of the metronomic specifications whose truth
consists in the fact that under the auspices of the eschewal of every typically
endorsed rule for performance and the eschewal of that freedom that would be
appropriate to such a performance, the modicum of regulatory capability that
inheres in the isolated ratio, and in the severity which solely via the precise
formulation of the subjective compositional intention safeguards the
interpretation from bad anarchy, is set in stone. Or do
you think it was merely by chance that the late Beethoven already often appended
to the stereotypical Italian terms an expression of his personal intention in German,
thereby honestly proclaiming the double significance of his overall situation in
linguistic doubleness? As schematic aids
to metronome counts the ontologically all too chock-full Italian words are
completely useless. They are legitimate
only when instead of playing out romantically in the stereotypes the composition consciously, transparently, and relevantly
plays with the stereotypes without
actually asserting their reality. Apart
from Berg’s chamber concerto, I would be hard-pressed to name many works that
deserve to have this legitimacy conceded to them.
1926
THE END
Translation unauthorized but
Copyright ©2019 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Werke, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan
Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1986; Directmedia:
Berlin, 2003), Vol. 17, pp. 307ff.