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TRANSCRIPT
THE METRONOMIC PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: A HISTORY OF RHYTHM,
METRONOMES, AND THE MECHANIZATION
OF MUSICALITY
by
ALEXANDER EVAN BONUS
A DISSERTATION
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Music
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
May, 2010
CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of
_____________________________________________________
candidate for the ______________________degree *.
(signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.
Alexander Evan Bonus
Doctor of Philosophy
Dr. Mary Davis
Dr. Daniel Goldmark
Dr. Peter Bennett
Dr. Martha Woodmansee
2/25/2010
Copyright © 2010 by Alexander Evan Bonus
All rights reserved
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CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi
ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xviii
Chapter
I. THE HUMANITY OF MUSICAL TIME, THE INSUFFICIENCIES OF
RHYTHMICAL NOTATION, AND THE FAILURE OF CLOCKWORK
METRONOMES, CIRCA 1600-1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. MAELZEL’S MACHINES: A RECEPTION HISTORY OF MAELZEL,
HIS MECHANICAL CULTURE, AND THE METRONOME . . . . . . . . . . . . .112
III. THE SCIENTIFIC METRONOME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
IV. METRONOMIC RHYTHM, THE CHRONOGRAPHIC BIAS,
AND THE SCIENTIFIC REDEFINITION OF MUSICIANS
AND MUSICAL ACTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
V. THE METRONOMIC INFLUENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
VI. THE METRONOMIC EDUCATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
VII. THE ORIGINS OF A CHRONOGRAPHIC MUSICAL CULTURE . . . . . . . . 463
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539
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FIGURES
Figure page
1.1. Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s pulse-sense diagram, 1828 23
1.2. John Wall Callcott’s weighted-accent notation, 1810 & 1817 24
1.3. Köhler’s rhythmical genealogy 25
1.4. Riemann’s graphical-rhythmical notations, 1884 26
1.5. Grove’s “Accent” in music of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, 1879 27
1.6. Gottfried Weber’s “revulsive sensation” of rhythm 28
1.7. Joshua Steele’s accents, 1779 29
1.8. Liszt’s “a-rhythmical” melody in Christus 32
1.9. Tempo d’imbroglio examples from Haydn and Beethoven 35
1.10. Detail of the autograph manuscript, Beethoven’s Op. 111 39
1.11. Steele’s invisible accents in duple and triple meters 41
1.12. Caccini’s 1602 instructions on gestural, rhythmical embellishment 52
1.13. Christiani’s non-metronomic, “falling” rhythmical gesture 53
1.14. Mattheson’s poetical notation, 1735 & 1874 56
1.15. Christiani’s correlation between and musical rhythm 57
1.16. Poetical-musical gestures interpreted in Beethoven’s and Mozart’s music 58
1.17. Czerny’s bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time 60
1.18. Caccini’s bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time 61
1.19. Interpretations of eighteenth-century rubato from Türk’s Klavierschule 65
1.20. Czerny’s “four different ways of interpretation” for his “Andante” 68
1.21. An example of Hauptmann’s rhythmical schemas 71
1.22. Christiani’s example of “confused” music notation 74
1.23. Christiani’s example of improved rhythmical notation 78
3.1. The Greenwich Chronograph 187
3.2. Mercury contact metronome, 1884 202
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Figure page
3.3. Mercury contact metronome, 1888 202
3.4. MIT observatory chronograph, 1900 206
3.5. Wilhelm Wundt’s electro-magnetic metronome 215
3.6. “Apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables” 219
4.1. Ebhardt’s chronographic piano-apparatus, 1898 268
4.2. Ebhardt’s chronographic record of rhythmic passages 270
4.3. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a gymnast-subject 274
4.4. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a conductor-subject 275
4.5. Scripture’s “Measuring the Simultaneity in Actions of a Piano-player” 279
4.6. Scripture’s chronographic record of a pianist’s performance 280
4.7. Scripture’s interpretation of a non-metronomic performance practice 281
4.8. Sears’ chronographic data underneath a notated Hymn, 1902 301
4.9. Seashore’s metronomic, musical-memory test, 1919 319
5.1. Liddell’s soundproof “Animal Room,” 1926 349
6.1. “Landing of Metronome and Sub-division” in Shedlock’s Music-land 368
6.2. General Metronome, King Harmony, and the Court of Music-land 370
6.3. Watson’s gymnastics studio performs “The Indian Club Race,” 1864 375
6.4. Example of Albert Ross Parsons’ musical-gymnastic exercises, 1886 384
6.5. “Teacher’s Pocket Metronome,” advertisement in Etude, c1890s 402
6.6. Detail, “Tests and Measurements in Child Study,” 1901 411
6.7. “Zeckwer Metronome,” U.S. Patent #360,550 416
6.8. U.S. metronome patent #923,094 by C. A. White & E. R. Hunter, 1908 422
6.9. Standard ergograph for endurance tests, 1914 434
6.10. Jaques-Dalcroze’s reinvented time-signature notation 445
6.11. Example of Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics exercises 446
6.12. Jules Amar’s chronographic work-fatigue experiment, 1918 452
iv
Figure page
6.13. “Apparatus for Testing the Aptitude of Keyboard Operators,” 1926 453
6.14. U.S. Patent #1,496,258, “Music Time Indicator,” 1923 461
7.1. Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics students perform an exercise, 1913 472
7.2. Two of Bartók’s folk-music transcriptions in manuscript, 1906 478
7.3. Historical reconstruction of Bartók’s music room, c1940 480
7.4. Walt Disney’s apparatus for recording movie soundtracks, 1931 524
7.5. Two scenes from Walt Disney’s Music Land, 1935 526
7.6. Man Ray’s “Object Indestructible,” 1923-1975 537
v
TABLES
Table page
4.1 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 294
4.2 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 294
vi
Preface: Convergences In Time
Temporality and the elements intrinsic to temporality—which include duration, instant,
movement, speed, pulse, and rhythm—are not under the purview of any lone academic
discipline. Nor is temporality a subject strictly contained within academia itself.
Everyday, people recognize and function with their own senses of temporality, perhaps
unaware of the science of time telling, the multiplicity of clock technologies, or the
history of time-telling machines. One does not need to be a scientist, engineer, or scholar
of time to perceive and live with a sense of time. The same holds true for musical time.
Across the world, musicians from non-Western cultures have been performing highly
complex rhythms and rhythmical patterns for centuries—without ever reading a single
treatise on the subject or referencing a metronome. The reasons are obvious: temporality,
along with musical temporality, is not fully contained within text. Temporality transcends
text. Thus the present document takes this phenomenon as its basis: musical temporality
is first and foremost a manifestation of individual beliefs and actions that, due to the
variability of individual beliefs and actions, changes over time.
In the field of musicology as it concerns performance practices, all-encompassing
histories of rhythm are few and far between. Any detailed history of musical time
requires an epic scope, not only chronologically but also conceptually. For this reason, I
do not lay claim to a definitive realization of what musical time is for all places and ages,
for conceptions of time and musicality, as I argue in this preface and following chapters,
continues to change. I offer “a history of rhythm” in contrast to some previous studies
implicitly presenting “the history of rhythm.” The most significant models for a musical-
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time history remain Curt Sachs’ Rhythm and Tempo (1953),1 and George Houle’s more
recent Meter in Music 1600-1800, published in 1987, but certainly the culmination of
decades of scholarship.2 The current study does not intend to overthrow the importance of
these works; indeed, they hold much primary-source evidence and commentary that
remain relevant today and will remain relevant into the future. But the current project
takes a different tack, recognizing that even these musical-time histories are tempered by
their authors’ own beliefs about “rhythm” and “tempo,” beliefs born out of a twentieth-
century bias for clockwork reference and regulation. This cultural-mechanical bias, how
it came about and why, forms the major narrative arc of the present history of musical
time. In order to answer a seemingly simple question—“What does the clockwork
metronome and beats-per-minute indications have to do with musical education,
performance practices, and research at all?”—this dissertation seeks to offer a history of
musical-time and mechanical tempo references that crosses centuries, nations, and most
importantly schools of thought. For the subject of “time,” as numerous histories of time
culture and technology have argued,3 is a vital aspect of human civilization that is
gleaned from the beliefs in “time” before all else.
1 See Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953).
2 See George Houle, Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Stephen Hefling’s Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Music (New
York: Schirmer, 1993) and Richard Hudson’s Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) are also essential source-studies dealing with more specific
aspects of “musical time” that this dissertation does not tackle in such great detail.
3 For two of the most prominent histories of time culture, see Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum,
History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Orders (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1992) and David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
(Second Edition, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2000). For a more critical history with a
sociological perspective, see Lawrence Wright, Clockwork Man, the Story of Time, its Origins, its
Uses, its Tyranny (Reprint, New York: Marboro Books Corp., 1992).
viii
The tensions that this history explores lie in the distinctions between the
mechanically objective versus the internally subjective reference, between the
externalized “truth” of time versus the immanent meanings of “musical time” as they
changed over the centuries due musicians’ changing relationships to tempo technologies.
Thus, a primary impetus for writing the present history comes from other texts that
explore, in Thomas Kuhn’s coinage,4 a modern “paradigm shift” towards positivism,
alongside the positivistic, scientific treatments of time and mechanical measurement in
general. In the 1940’s Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno recognized that modern
scientific methodologies, which they found to be a culmination of “Enlightenment”
ideals, transformed modern culture and seemingly homogenized the once-variable
activities of individuals—although the authors did not always specify how, why, or to
what extent this phenomenon occurred in twentieth-century music performances.5 The
present study seeks answers to these questions.
Recent science histories have documented reasons for modern society’s ever-
growing reliance on objective measurements, mechanical references, alongside the
increasing desire for temporal precision in many human activities.6 Perhaps the science
history most relevant to the present dissertation is Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison’s
4 See this influential science history, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(Third Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5 See Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), edited by
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002).
6 For an important collection of science-history essays that describe cultural trends towards
precision measurement, see M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995).
ix
Objectivity (2007), which explores the trend of “modern” scientists in the nineteenth
century to view natural phenomena though more abstract visual schema and mechanical
measurements, ever-distanced from the “truth to nature” imagery and subjective
aesthetics of natural historians and philosophers educated in non-mechanical traditions.
Datson and Galison detail a “quest for objectivity” that refutes any trace of personal
experience in the scientific method; their history parallels closely—and serendipitously—
with the present study exploring the trend towards musical-temporal objectivity in
education and performance.7 Prior to Objectivity, science historian Theodore Porter
questioned the value of this “objective truth” defined by machines and mechanical
regulations in Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(1995). There, he often argues against “technoscience” as a practical and useful pursuit.
Porter occasionally criticizes the positivistic “scientific mentality” of the twentieth
century—seldom challenged within the self-vindicating culture of some academic
disciplines—which he considers to be problematic and incommensurate when compared
to subjective, sensory experience.8 These science historians’ assessments of a twentieth-
century “culture of objectivity” resonate in the methodology of present musicological
study.
That there has been a marked change in the performance “tempos” of Western
music during the twentieth century has been voiced by other musicologists and perceptive
7 See Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
8 See Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ix, 12, 17, 213, 225-6, 230.
x
cultural critics, most prominently by Richard Taruskin in his collection Text and Act:
Essays on Music and Performance (1995).9 In these various writings, he often expresses
a disparity between the positivistic interpretations of “early-music” ensembles and the
more “traditional” performance practices of symphony orchestras. But where Taruskin
often considers the primary culprits of fast, metronomic-sounding performances to be
from the so-called “authentic-performance” movement of the 1980s and 90s, I claim that
the aesthetics of musical-temporal objectivity—which often mistakes metronomic data
and regulation for absolute composer intention—conspicuously began during the early
twentieth century for Western musical culture at large. I argue that so-called “traditional”
and “early-music” musicians often share equally in this “metronomic metamorphosis”
(originally Anton Schindler’s assessment) whenever they mistakenly justified their
performances of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and others through objective
“readings” founded solely on adherence to the printed page, which often results in
performances either “too fast” or “too slow” against an implicit metronomic standard.
While the present history largely ends in the mid-twentieth century, I suggest at the
conclusion of the dissertation that this metronomic metamorphosis continues to gain in
precision today within many prominent musical circles. For those who find Taruskin’s
observations compelling and justified, however, this dissertation might afford more
concrete evidence as to why performance practices of our day—for both “Classical” and
“early-music” genres—often sound so radically different in “tempo” than those from a
even century prior.
9 See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
xi
Where cultural histories are concerned, this dissertation takes as a model Stephen
Kern’s monograph The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, which, through ample use
of historical images and source readings, vividly describes the emerging concepts of
“time” in modernity.10
The present history, likewise, attempts to construct a broad-
ranging discourse on musical time, detailing notable cultural-historical changes over
time.11
It approaches issues of musical time, alongside composers’ assumed temporal
intentions, through the language of those perceiving, practicing, and prescribing tempo,
movement, pulse, and rhythm for their respective ages and audiences.
In order to better contextualize a pre-metronomic ontology of historical musical
time, this study approaches temporality through various conceptual lenses. It alternately
takes on qualities of a reception history, a biography, a theoretical analysis, a technology
study, and an aesthetics tract. Since meanings of time change over time, this document
occasionally approaches the format of an historical “source reading” similar to the
musicological editions by Strunk and Donington, as well as the important philosophical
collection by Charles M. Sherover entitled The Human Experience of Time, the
10 See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Second Edition, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
The interdisciplinary methodology of this dissertation can be seen as a search for consilience in
the meaning of musical time as it relates to metronomic references and regulations. Perhaps
Laurens Perseus Hickok’s nineteenth-century definition of consilience is most pertinent to the
present cultural history: “THE CONSILIENCE OF FACTS. When facts, which have apparently a
very remote bearing from each other, and which at first seem widely disconnected, and would
induce the expectation that if they are ever made explicable it must be from reasons and
principles very diverse from each other, are yet found to leap together, as it were, in colligation
with facts more manifestly allied, and which may have already been brought together in an
induction, we have a case of what we here term the Consilience of Facts. The confidence in the
general law thus deduced is augmented in proportion to the number of the facts and the distance
whence they thus jump together within the same hypothesis.” See Laurens Perseus Hickok,
Rational Psychology or The Subjective Idea and Objective Law of All Intelligence (Auburn:
Derby, Miller & Co., 1849), 266.
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Development of its Philosophic Meaning.12
Since much importance is placed on primary-
source passages in this dissertation, it is my hope that it can occasionally be referenced as
a performance-practice treatise on time and rhythm in its own right.
This seven-chapter dissertation seeks to document a cultural-historical
consilience, a convergence in two seemingly disparate performance practices. It is a
temporal connection that took a century to develop, between the time of the music studio
and the scientific laboratory, between the heartless clockwork click and the rhythmic
pulse of Western musical performances.
Chapter One has a dual purpose. First, it provides a brief introduction to the
culture of “time knowing” while exploring the dichotomy between words and what they
insufficiently signify for vastly more complex cultural beliefs and practices. Second, it
depicts some lasting traditions of musical time in theory and practice, unbroken into the
twentieth century: a “pre-metronomic” time of music, which is analyzed in both notation
and language. Through sources spanning the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, I
argue that musical temporality and metronomic sound bore little resemblance to each
other, either in concept or actualization. This chapter presents the various subjective and
immanent values of musical time, which form a temporal ontology of pre-twentieth-
century music—one that existed prior to the widespread employment of simple
12 See W. Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, edited by Leo Treitler (New York:
Norton, 1998); Robert Donington, The Interpretation of Early Music (New York: Norton, 1992);
and Charles M. Sherover, ed., The Human Experience of Time, the Development of its
Philosophic Meaning (Reprint, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001).
xiii
pendulums and later clockwork metronomes. In the process, the chapter seeks to question
some assumptions regarding time, tempo, and rhythm, which find their basis in modern
mathematical-mechanical references to the printed page. Through a musical-temporal
hermeneutics spanning over four centuries, non-metronomic epistemologies of musical
time coalesce, which were accessed through subjective thought, sensation, and action—
not clockwork sound or motion. This introductory chapter presents shared values of a
long-standing Western musical culture in which an individual’s pulse was considered of
the greatest precision, in which a musician’s various rhythmic sensations conclusively
defined temporal truth.
Chapter Two references many of the same topics presented in the first chapter,
now through the prism of a nineteenth-century cultural history that highlights Johann
Maelzel, the most prominent champion of clockwork machines in the burgeoning
Industrial societies of Europe and America. This chapter explores a past culture in which
clockwork machines, including Maelzel’s iconic metronome, were still uncommon, seen
as uncanny, and found to be decidedly untrustworthy when compared to human thought
and action. Maelzel and his machines are placed against a contrasting culture, espoused
by playwrights, musicians, and cultural critics, who readily acknowledged that artificially
moving inventions failed to reflect the desired subjectivities found in living creativity. In
a history that spans over a century, I show how performers and pedagogues—intimately
aware of the pre-metronomic ontology of musical time analyzed in Chapter One—offered
ominous and damning assessments of Maelzel’s mechanical-performance culture, one
that eventually sprouted throughout the industrializing world. As documented in
following chapters, Maelzel’s once-uncustomary metronome would eventually stimulate
xiv
a radical paradigm shift, redefining the theories and practices of musical time throughout
modern society.
Chapter Three points to the origins of that rhythmical paradigm shift for modern
performance culture through a science and technology history that runs chronologically
parallel to Chapter Two. Within the nineteenth-century astronomical observatory, the
germ of a new cultural tradition in time, rhythm, and action was planted, which displayed
contrasting temporal values, practices, and intentions for both clockwork machines and
people. This study provides a history of time telling in stark contrast to the previous
chapter; a scientific-cultural history in which clockwork machines were not only trusted
but also inseparable from a new methodology, a new field of research intended for new
modes of objectively “precise” action. In the experimental nineteenth-century sciences,
far afield from the composer’s desk or the performance hall, clockwork machines defined
new goals in time for once-subjective perceptions and actions. Yet the two contrasting
histories are very much connected through one significant commonality: Maelzel’s
metronome. This single invention—a technology shared in these parallel histories—
illuminates a cultural phenomenon pivotal to the present study: Different individuals or
communities, valuing different belief-systems in time, entrust identical machines with
different intentions. Thus, this chapter uncovers the foundation of a metronomic
performance practice in Western civilization, established by nineteenth-century scientists,
that less than a century later actively influenced twentieth-century students and
professionals in a uniquely modern performance culture.
Chapter Four documents how scientific methodologies and machines—
promoting metronomic time above all else—were first actively applied to musicians and
xv
their performances in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. In seminal “rhythm”
studies, experimental scientists prescribed their laboratory culture, practices, and beliefs
in industrial-mechanical time and action (which, as witnessed in Chapter Three, spanned
nearly a century) directly to performers in controlled, reproducible settings. This
scientific “rhythm” research on living musicians exemplifies the very real hegemony—
alluded to throughout the dissertation—that temporal machines impose upon subjective
actions and perceptions. These new laboratory researchers regulated performers with
increasingly inhuman measures during mechanical-efficiency tests diametrically opposed
to the values of trained, skilled, and experienced musicians, whose subjective, temporal
beliefs were explored in the first two chapters. As this study charts in detail, late-
nineteenth-century laboratory scientists engendered a radically new meaning, practice,
and tradition of musical rhythm for the modern twentieth century—a metronomic
tradition that, as Chapters VI and VII document, some highly influential twentieth-
century musicians and pedagogues were instrumental in promoting.
Chapter Five continues the narrative of experimental science, technology, and
performance practices, while it furthers the evidence of a metronomic hegemony alluded
to in earlier chapters. Here, we find that the potentially damaging influence of the
clockwork metronome, claimed by nineteenth-century musicians and cultural critics, was
very much quantified by experimental scientists later in the century. The evidence
presented here strongly suggests that clicking metronome technologies exerted a real and
invasive influence upon performance practices. Maelzel’s machine, when used as a
regulative tool, created a new, mechanized species of musicality in human beings. This
chapter offers an historical analysis of the clockwork metronome and its lasting effects
xvi
upon individuals’ notions of time, rhythm, and action, with findings that might prove
equally important for performers, teachers, as well as historians of science and music.
Chapter Six is a social-cultural analysis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
pedagogies in relation to metronomes, and it represents the culmination of the myriad of
topics presented throughout this dissertation on mechanical motion and musical
movement. This chapter shows that the beliefs in time, metronomes, and educational
methods eventually created a new performance-practice tradition. The subjective and
variable culture expressed in the first two chapters recede in favor of the scientific-
industrial values expounded in Chapters Three to Five; the values of mechanical
efficiency, reproduction, and normalization first practiced in the experimental laboratory
were now prescribed for a new twentieth-century musical culture that paralleled the
pedagogical concerns of the larger Industrial World.
The final Chapter Seven first provides an overview of scientific pedagogical
methods as they disseminated throughout society by the 1920s. The remainder of the
chapter offers evidence to suggest that, through the increasingly popularized metronomic
education, a new metronomic notion of musicality emerged. This concluding chapter
documents influential twentieth-century musicians and researchers who redefined the
temporal values of performance for the music of all ages; they helped to found a new
scientific aesthetic, a new metronomic musicality in both theory and practice. The last
chapter is by no means an exhaustive survey of every significant composer-performer or
educator of the new century. Nevertheless, the examples given here provide compelling
evidence that many modern composer-performers and musicologists, who continue to
influence our notion of “musicality” in the Western tradition, embraced the “scientific”
xvii
species of musical time popularized in their age, in contrast to the pre-metronomic times
of previous centuries. Evidence presented here runs in contradistinction to the historical
arguments offered in Chapters One and Two. Through accounts of those both for and
against this new precision-based musicality, the chapter depicts a culture in which
mechanical objectivity became a prevailing aesthetic, a culture in which metronomes
became unquestioned primary references for musical time, the infallible sources of
accurate rhythm, along with the definitive indicators of even pre-metronomic composers’
temporal intentions. In this concluding section, I suggest that these twentieth-century
models of education and aesthetics still inform many in our performance culture today, a
predominantly precision-based culture that continues to endorse a mechanized “time” and
“rhythm” significantly altered from past, pre-metronomic traditions.
xviii
The Metronomic Performance Practice: A History of Rhythm,
Metronomes, and the Mechanization of Musicality
Abstract
by
ALEXANDER EVAN BONUS
Through the analyses of treatises, scores, letters, and technologies spanning four centuries, this
multidisciplinary history of rhythm charts the various, shifting meanings in musical time and
movement as pedagogies and performance practices became increasingly influenced by
clockwork machines—and Johann Maelzel’s metronome most conspicuously—over the course of
the modern age. Depicting how “musical time” constitutes an ever-changing belief system in
what “time” means, this study charts the ascendance of a new musical-temporal ontology brought
about by Western performance-culture’s increasing reliance on metronomes.
This history explains how scientific methodologies and machines—promoting
metronomic time above all else—were first actively applied to musicians and their performances
in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The influential work of modern scientists,
pedagogues, and only later composers—with their precision-oriented beliefs in metronomic time
and rhythm—eventually helped to create a new performance-practice tradition, a new musical
culture in which mechanical objectivity became a prevailing aesthetic in the twentieth century.
Highlighting the writings of philosophers such as Mersenne, Diderot, and Rousseau; musicians
such as Quantz, Beethoven, and Stravinsky; scientists such as Wundt, Scripture, and Seashore;
and pedagogues such as A. B. Marx, Christiani, and Jaques-Dalcroze, the narrative explicates
how and why this temporal revision occurred, and what outcomes followed when scientific
modes of metronomic action were imposed upon past, subjective musical practices.
As this history of musical time, metronomes, and musicality uncovers, the very meanings
and cultural values underlying “rhythm” and “tempo” have palpably changed since the twentieth
century due to a heretofore-unacknowledged paradigm shift: a metronomic turn in which the
once-innate musical “beat” became both conceptually and audibly mechanized.
1
CHAPTER I: THE HUMANITY OF MUSICAL TIME, THE INSUFFICIENCIES
OF RHYTHMICAL NOTATION, AND THE FAILURE OF
CLOCKWORK METRONOMES, CIRCA 1600-1900
Introduction: A Time before Metronomes
Malvolio: My masters, are you mad? or what are you? Have you no wit, manners,
nor honesty, but to gabble like tinkers at this time of night? Do ye make an
alehouse of my lady’s house, that ye squeak out your coziers’ catches without any
mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in
you?
Sir Toby: We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up!
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act ii, Scene 3
The complex sensory phenomena commonly reduced to the term “musical time”
preceded the invention and use of the clockwork metronome. As Shakespeare reminds us
through the banter between Malvolio and Sir Toby, performers conceived and actualized
musical measures, movements, and rhythms long before mechanical clocks ever dictated
precise beats-per-minute clicks to music students and professionals across the world.
Prior to the large-scale manufacture and distribution of clockwork metronomes towards
the end of the nineteenth century, the human performance-act of music making—not to
mention speaking, acting, and dancing—bore little active relationship to the second-by-
second clicks of a mechanical time reference.
Perhaps due to modern societies’ overriding reliance on temporal precision—in
which “time” is indistinguishable from clocks, clockwork, and the base-60 numerical
scale—Shakespeare’s pun is not as blatantly obvious today as it was for Elizabethan
audiences, for the Bard juggles two opposing “times,” two distinct temporal
epistemologies well understood to pre-industrial cultures: one of the day, and one of
music. To sing a tune “in time” was not to understand the time of day through hours,
2
minutes, or especially seconds, as referenced through the silent sundial, sandglass, or
typical Renaissance town clock—a non-clicking edifice with a single hand, hour dial, and
chime that bore little resemblance to the sound, vision, and portability of a clockwork
metronome circa 1897.1 Thus, while Sir Toby and his revelers lost track of the hour—a
common pre-Industrial problem in the darkness of night—he was justifiably offended by
Malvolio’s remarks. With clear ambivalence towards the clock, Toby’s group well knew
the other “time,” the musical time, which they faithfully maintained through a seemingly
innate, rhythmical sense of pulse and proportion, made all the more impressive given
their questionable states-of-mind.
As Shakespeare’s passage exemplifies, the term “time” often signifies many
conflicting or incommensurate meanings, which change through varying social contexts,
conventions, and practices. “Time” represents a fundamental set of values, culturally and
historically contingent, which are commonly shared amongst civilizations, communities,
or individuals. The argument between Malvolio and Sir Toby uncovers how different
communities or individuals think and function under these conflicting temporal value
systems. For Sir Toby, musical time was fundamentally a human process, unencumbered
and uninfluenced by constant mechanical rule, reference, or regulation. While Toby
rightly perceived the internal time-sense for his musical performance, Malvolio rightly
perceived that no such performance should be heard during an objectively late time at
night. Each character recognized his respective temporal construct, and neither one
misapprehended the “correct time;” they both understood the temporal truth as it related
1 See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Orders (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1992) for a comprehensive history of public clocks, their
development across Europe, and time telling through the early-modern age.
3
to their own perceptions and values, in their own contexts for their own purposes. One
valued the internal time for performing; the other valued the nightly time for sleeping.
This study documents the various, shifting meanings in musical time, rhythm, and
movement as performance practices became increasingly influenced by clockwork
machines over the course of the nineteenth century. In this history of rhythm—
documenting an intellectual and cultural shift in performance practices—I argue that true
or correct time is not merely an accurate or precise measurement based on objective
references; the present study enumerates how the phenomena of “time” is more
profoundly the personal or collective belief system in what “time” means. Indeed, it is an
anachronistic fallacy for moderns to believe that time always reduces to an unassailable
definition or objective constant based on reproducible data and mechanical
measurements—these are the exclusive temporal values of modern science, industry, and
education—a “time” referenced through modern clocks, watches, and metronomes. Only
in the modern age has “true time” become synonymous with exacting and precise
mechanical measurement. Yet as historians such as E. P. Thompson, G. J. Whithrow,
David Landes, Gerhard Van Rossum, and Peter Galison among others have shown, time
is much more than what precision machines tell us about the present, in our “time.”
Beyond clockwork measurements, “time” is an intrinsic trait of civilization; “time” is a
culture’s faith in temporality, one that alters over the ages. Indeed, “knowing the time”—
whether the time of day or the time of music—is more accurately considered “believing
in the temporal convention” being told. Thus, time can be likened to a secular religion;
yet it is a religion that offers its believers no conscious initiation, no clear right of passage
ritual, and no explicit tenets. We are born into our culture’s “time,” unconsciously and
4
unquestioningly accepting of it. Time-belief demands no conversion; to those living
within its constructs, “time” is a worldview with little competition.
Consider the historical differences in the “time” of daily living: Ancient agrarian
societies believed in the sun and the seasons as time tellers for sowing and reaping,
alongside the spiritual and metaphysical explanations of the world. Medieval monastic
societies believed in the temporary canonical hours ordained by the Creator to structure
the opus Dei, and by extension, the Temporale and Sanctorale. Contrastingly, modern
societies—whether conscious of it or not—believe in the equal, mechanized hour,
minute, and second as dictators of the work day, and as controlling factors for
intercontinental travel, industrial production, global communication, and nearly every
other standardized activity under the sun. For the sixteenth century, local sundial time
told the true time; for the mid twentieth century, Greenwich Mean Time referenced
“definitive” global time zones; and in the early twenty first century, a Global-Positioning-
System seamlessly beams “accurate” time-data across wireless networks to individuals
around the world. These times exist within specific historical contexts; they are not truths
for all ages, people, places, or activities.
For both the time of day and music, tools and techniques considered most
necessary and convenient for the historical age and cultural activity help to define
temporality. Prior to the large-scale synchronization of civic clocks and the spread of
pocket watches in the latter half of the nineteenth century,2 clockwork machines were not
necessarily the most reliable references for the time of day or duration. Devices such as
2 See Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.,
2003) and Ian Bartky, Selling the True Time, Nineteenth Century Timekeeping in America
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) for comprehensive cultural histories of clock
synchronization in nineteenth-century Europe and America, respectively.
5
gnomons, quadrants, sextants, sundials, sandglasses, water clocks, and bell towers all
successfully told various species time throughout history—marking either the duration of
an activity, the progress of the day or night, or a singular moment to reckon. Despite
these many temporal machines and methods available to past cultures—many of which
were readily trusted well through the nineteenth century—the initial time or tempo of
music was not defined by externalized means. Neither sandglasses, nor sundials, nor
sextants could define or document the motion of music, which was most often referenced
through the human pulse or tactus: the recurring rhythm of an individual’s heartbeat,
moving hand, or foot. Before the metronome, the time of music was definitively self-
referential.
Throughout history, external temporal tools, from ancient gnomons to modern
mobile phones, offer essential information for agrarian, civic, and industrial civilizations.
Time tellers, regardless of the specific era or device, afford standardized ways to
measure, quantify, and reproduce data about moments, durations, and—most importantly
for the present study—physical activities. To a great extent, time tellers make an
individual’s subjective perceptions about time unnecessary and negligible; one need not
guess the “time” to leave for work when a clock is present, or measure cooking “time” by
singing a popular hymn (a standard Renaissance practice) when a stopwatch is at hand.
Time-telling tools assist in better controlling and managing “time”—whatever the term
may signify in any given context; they dictate and describe activities with greater
uniformity and reproducibility, assisting organizations, communities, and individuals to
work with more efficiency and coordination. Yet, as time historians well recognize,
external time-tellers—with all of the importance they hold in the growth of
6
civilizations—contrastingly sublimate interpretive and sensory assessments about time,
and negate individual perceptions for the sake of mass standardization, control, and
reproduction, values necessary for civic, commercial, and industrial functions. The
hegemony external time-tellers place over human perception and action is well
documented throughout Western history. By 1969 British sociologist Lawrence Wright
went so far as to describe modern society’s increasingly precision-oriented time culture
as an “intolerable chronarchy.”3 And regardless of the rising levels of precision in time
keeping, this hegemony—in which external machines redefine internal perceptions and
consequent actions—has been documented since antiquity. Consider Plautus’ indignation
against the most precise time-telling tool for Romans in the second century B.C.:
The Gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sun-dial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions. When I was a boy,
My belly was my sun-dial; one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat.
But now-a-days, why even when we have,
I can't fall-to, unless the sun gives leave.
The greater part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the streets.4
In chiding the hegemony that the lone sundial places on individual choice, Plautus
expressed a significant theme that runs throughout this present history of musical time-
telling, one that applies directly to metronomes: With increasing mechanical-temporal
3 See Lawrence Wright, Clockwork Man, the Story of Time, its Origins, its Uses, its Tyranny
(Reprint, New York: Marboro Books Corp., 1992), 7.
4 This quote appears in numerous clock and time histories including Daniel Boorstin, The
Discoverers (New York: Random House, 1983), 28; also Wright, 29.
7
precisions and exactitudes, subjective qualities and perceptions of time become devalued
and even destroyed. As Plautus’ recounted, internal feelings once referenced time, even
his eating “time.” The “truth” and “perfection” Plautus once allied with personal
sensation and judgment receded in the face of greater mechanical and objective control.
For this Roman, the greater uniformity and precision seen in sundial time reinvented the
very nature of civic organization and Roman lifestyle. With the new sundial imposing a
reproducible solar measurement, once “true,” innate time telling became externalized.
Plautus’ ancient commentary allegorizes the fate of time-knowing in music as well. With
precise and reproducible mechanical measurements (which are becoming more precise
every decade), musical time has suffered the same fate as the time telling of day: the
subjectivities of intuitive temporality—the time Plautus understood before the sundial
and Sir Toby before the clock—has become increasingly subverted and simplified for the
sake of a new objective truth. Thus, this history of rhythm will show that metronomic
“time” devalues and disregards musical nuance, subjectivity, variability, and feeling once
recognized in past temporal practices. Clockwork metronomes imposed a mechanical
hegemony upon Western performance culture.
As this study charts in depth, only since the industrial age has modern societies’
temporal faith—for both the day and music—rested exclusively in the time told by
automatic machines in the form of synchronized clocks, precise watches, and now mobile
phones. The present study, perhaps for the first time in great detail, uncovers the
significant discrepancies that abound between modern and pre-modern performance
practices when telling the musical “time.” The clicks of quartz and computerized
metronomes, which now define modern musical seconds for the majority of music
8
students and professionals, do not correspond to the once “natural” and “true” values of
living musical performance, first experienced through the human pulse and the tactus.
Just as Plautus’ historical sundial hour does not correlate with our Cesium-clock second,
the historical musical tactus does not correlate with the modern metronomic blip. We do
not share identical musical “times”—conceptually or practically—with past or non-
industrialized cultures.
It was only in the twentieth century when theorists, pedagogues, and
musicologists, guided by many centuries’ worth of accumulated data, began to view
musical proportionality—and by extension, tempo, pulse, and rhythm—as absolute and
objective measurements implicitly based on metronomic precisions and exacting
temporal constructs.5 These modern, scientifically inspired methods often failed to reflect
the act of musical performance itself or the historical performer’s role as the primary
agent in creating musical time. Thus, with the study of rhythm and tempo as a modern
science, musical “time” transitioned from a subjective process to an objective precision,
in which human agency became devalued, and in some cases discounted entirely. Modern
academics’ exceedingly literal interpretations of historical notation often reduced the
once-living variables of musical time to the tick-tock of clockwork.
The present study explicates how and why this temporal revision came about, and
what outcomes followed when modern mechanical measurements were imposed upon
past subjective practices. While Lewis Mumford’s often-cited assertion holds true—the
5 See notably, Eugène Borrel, “Les indications metronomiques…du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de
musicology T.9c (1928): 149-153; and R. E. M. Harding, Origins of Musical Time and
Expression (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).
9
primary tool of modern civilization is the clock6—I maintain that modernity is shaped not
only by clocks, but specific communities’ reapplications of clockwork technologies,
which then influence and alter human actions towards increasingly mechanical values.
New uses for clockwork technologies result in new, hegemonic impositions on past
practices. The increasing adherence and faith in objective, exacting clockwork “time” has
considerably revised and indeed mechanized modern musical “time” over the Industrial
Age. Given the research presented here, one can argue that twentieth-century musical
culture cannot completely recognize the misunderstanding between Malvolio and Toby,
since the current “times” of the clock and music are often considered as one and the
same.
To study time, musical or otherwise, is thus to study the ideas grounding “time,”
those temporal meanings referenced in historical and cultural contexts. In the pursuit of a
more nuanced, historical understanding of performance practices, one discovers that the
understanding of musical time cannot escape the cultural belief system of time itself.
Thus the essential questions that are pursued here: What are the appropriate and sufficient
belief systems of time within specific cultural and historical contexts? How do these
belief systems alter over the ages for different communities? What emerging concepts
stimulate these changes? And what effects do these conceptual changes have on
performance practices? The guiding methodology behind the present research seeks to
expose the musical “time” regarded of the greatest value for that age, community, and
6 See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934) for
one of the first and most influential of twentieth-century histories on time telling and technology.
10
performance context. “True” musical time is best sought through an intellectual and
cultural history untainted by modern temporal values—and modern temporal machines—
that cannot help but to revise and reduce historical and cultural conceptions of “time” for
modern intentions alone. (It goes without saying that Monteverdi, Lully, Bach, and
countless other musical masters needed no such metronomic certitudes for their musical
education, compositions, or performances.)
Applying anachronistic measurements and machines to past practices does not
lead to more profound knowledge, but only to mistranslations and misconceptions of past
temporal values. Indeed, it can be argued that the beats-per-minute descriptor is a failing
of the modern imagination when compared to past musical conceptions and practices; the
modern reduction of musical rhythm, meter, and tempo to clockwork clicks often reflects
the temporal limitations and constrictions of the modern age. Modern scholars,
pedagogues, and performers often ignore and discount historical-temporal meanings
when guided by this “metronome methodology”—the seemingly objective, scientific act
of temporal translation—which assumes that wristwatches, wall clocks, and metronomes
tell the same time as historic sundials, sandglasses, public clocks, or the individual’s
sense for pulse and proportion. Yet no modern machine, whether a wristwatch, mobile
phone, or a metronome, truly explains the “time,” the temporal meaning of musical
cultures that flourished prior to these technologies. As this study exposes, playing “in
time,” “in measure,” and “in rhythm,” means something drastically different today, for a
more scientific and precision-oriented culture, than it did prior to the twentieth century.
As Shakespeare and a host of others often recounted well through the nineteenth
century, musical performances maintained a separate species of temporality, with
11
temporal references quite apart from sundials, clocks, or sandglasses. Before the
twentieth century, definitions and meanings of musical time most “accurately” and
“faithfully” relied on subjective, sensory, and personal measurements. Musical pulse and
movement comprised a uniquely human variety of time, gauged through subjective
senses, perceptions, and actions. Where musical time telling was concerned prior to the
twentieth century, external timekeepers such as sundials or sandglasses—not to mention
nineteenth-century clockwork metronomes—had little if nothing to do with the
practicalities of musical performance in rhythm, meter, and proportion.
The differences between the “time” of clocks and the “time” of music appear in
early-modern references across Europe. As with “time,” the term mouvement, which in
the present day is often misconstrued simply as a French-style rate of metronomic tempo,
contains various meanings, both mechanical and musical. Diderot’s Encyclopédie
distinguishes the mouvement of clocks and music using two separate definitions, one
unaffected by the other. Mouvement as a terme d'Horlogerie, references the various
components of a clock or watch, including a pendulum, escapement, dial, and pivots.
Alternately, mouvement en Musique again concerns qualities of liveliness or slowness
and the characteristics of each air—during each bar—which was most often related by
French or Italian words. It is significant to note that the Encyclopédie defines another
mouvement, that of rhetoric, as it concerns the fluctuating passions and emotions elicited
through skillful oration.7
7 Encyclopédie, Vol. 10, 842. “Mouvement, s. m. en Musique, est le degré de vîtesse ou de lenteur
qu'on donne à la mesure selon le caractere de l'air. Le mouvement s'exprime ordinairement par les
mots gai, vîte, grave, lent, &c. ou par les mots italiens allegro, presto, grave, adagio, &c. qui leur
correspondent. Voyez tous ces mots.”
12
The early Encyclopædia Britannica (1778-83)—which owes much of its musical
content to the Encyclopédie—also makes a clear distinction in the entry on “Time”
between astronomical time, which necessitated precision clock measurements, and
musical time, which did not require machines at all, but instead relied upon subjective
characteristics, movements, expressions, through various degrees of liveliness or
slowness: qualities gleaned by creative interpreters that were unrelated to exacting,
reproducible clockwork quantities. The standard for measured musical “time” was, as it
always had been prior to the twentieth century, human in origin:
Time in music is concerned, either with respect to the general movement of an air,
and in this sense it is said to be swift or slow: or it is considered with respect to
the aliquot parts of every bar; these parts are marked by motions of the hand or
foot, and in a particular sense are called times8…all the bars should be perfectly
equal, and all the times contained in each bar perfectly equivalent to another.
Now, to render this equality sensible, every bar is struck, and every time
distinguished, by a motion of the hand or foot; and by these motions the different
values of notes are exactly regulated, according to the genius and character of the
bar.9
The “exact” equality of musical time—“perfectly regulated” by human movement and
sensation—was not the equality of mechanical time—perfectly regulated by redundant
“tick-tock” clockwork. Confirming the distinction, the Encyclopædia Britannica presents
an entirely separate discussion of “Time Keepers for finding the Longitude,” highlighting
John Harrison’s famed chronometer, the first portable machine that could maintain the
mechanical second with near-unerring constancy and precision during sea travel. It
dictated seconds accurately enough to be considered for maritime, mercantile, and
8 Encyclopædia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, &c. The second edition; greatly
improved and enlarged, Vol. 9 (Edinburgh, 1778-83), 8612.
9 Ibid., 8612-8613.
13
military requirements. A supplement for insufficient onboard astronomical readings,
Harrison’s state-of-the-art chronometer was intended for naval activities far from the
values, contexts, and conceptions of eighteenth-century musical performers.10
Harrison’s
precise watch had nothing to do with the time of music. Yet by the modern age, as Lewis
Mumford acknowledged in 1944, “precision must be commonplace.”11
Thus it should be
recognized that mechanical precisions far exceeding the Harrison chronometer are
commonly available today in every store-bought quartz metronome, and ubiquitously
employed in some way around the world for modern music lessons, practice sessions, and
recording projects.
Prior to the modern world in which mechanical-temporal precisions became both
ubiquitous and commonplace, experienced performers’ practiced and perceived a
nuanced, living “time.” Prior to the modern belief that redundant, clockwork “time”
could and should regulate pulses, proportions, and rhythms—alongside harmonies,
melodies, ornaments, and gestures—of musical action, skilled performers willfully
created musical temporality. This chapter—an introduction to this modern history of
rhythm, metronomes, and musicality—reveals that faith in past musical time rested in
more variable, subjective perceptions and practices than could be gleaned through
clockwork. In opposition to the externally measured time of day, humanity thrived within
the time of historical music.
10 Ibid., 8613 -8616.
11
Quoted in M. Norton Wise, ed. The Values of Precision (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), 353.
14
On the Pre-Metronomic Pulse-Sense
From 1600-1900, music treatises and references such as the eighteenth-century
Encyclopédie and Encyclopædia Britannica define proportionality as the conceptual basis
of all mensural and metrical music in the Western tradition. These texts depict how
sounds divided into duple or triple patterns represented the rhythmical alphabet of
measured, musical time. But the measurer of that proportionality—the temporal agent—
made musical time audible. And it is historically obvious that these temporal agents, at
least through 1815, were not clockwork metronomes but performers themselves. For
three centuries at least, musical time originated through measures more vital than those
represented by notation, schematics, quantified data, or metronomic references. Musical
time was born of the subjective, sensory qualities intrinsic to living temporal agency.
The remainder of this chapter documents this largely forgotten, pre-metronomic
ontology of musical time, which ultimately relied not on a literal adherence to rhythmical
notation, mathematical computations, or mechanical measurements. Prior to the twentieth
century, musical temporality was ultimately defined through subjective perceptions and
actions, referenced through living variables of pulse, speech, physical sensation, and
gesture. These seemingly antiquated, anti-scientific notions do not suggest some vague
“musical-temporal chaos,” for historical documents instead expose many rich definitions
of rhythm far more practical than absolute formulas or schemas could offer: they relate an
aesthetics of time neglected in the modern age, in which subjective, rhythmical qualities
transcended the clicks of clockwork, proportional calculations, and even musical notation
itself. Indeed, as Sir Toby asserted, one could keep the time of tunes without keeping the
time of day.
15
In his 1618 treatise Compendium Musicae, the young philosopher René Descartes
explained a “time” that was similarly conceived by Shakespeare’s fictional Sir Toby, an
actual temporal epistemology that extended well through the nineteenth century. At the
age of 22, Descartes described how musical proportionality was neither born of physics,
nor mechanics, nor was it the product of pure intellect:
Time in sound must consist of equal parts, for these are perceived most easily
according to [the sense of small divisions], or it must consist of parts which are in
a proportion of 1:2 or 1:3, this progression cannot be extended, for only these
relations can be easily distinguished by the ear…if time values were of greater
inequality, the ear would not be able to recognize their difference without great
effort, as experience shows.12
Descartes knew that the aural sense of pulse, the sonic perception of proportion, defined
musical time before notation ever existed. To prove this, Descartes writes out a figure
that was impossible to feel or sense as musical rhythm during his age. Descartes instructs,
“should I, for example, place five even notes against one, it would be almost impossible
to sing…[and] I cannot write such notes individually if the second [note] is a fourth [the
duration] of the first one:”13
| w q | For Descartes, this figure was an insensible rhythm, an indecipherable musical
proportion. No duple or triple feeling could be ascertained in what seems a clearly
performable figure—if modern, objective standards of mechanical-temporal addition
were applied. Descartes explained that the sonic experience of pulse defined both musical
12 René Descartes, Compendium Musicae (Ms., 1618; Utrecht: Jansson, 1650); translation by
Walter Robert ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 13.
13
Ibid.
16
time and musical notation. Thus “rhythm,” for his age, was not merely the objective,
mathematically precise notation and replication of discreet sound units. Active feelings
and perceptions delineated musical proportionality.
More than just hearing musical proportion, Descartes described musical time as
physical intuition, an internal rhythmical sense:
Singers and instrumentalists observe [proportion] instinctively, especially in
connection with tunes to which we are accustomed to dance and sway. Here we
accompany each beat of the music by a corresponding motion of our body; we are
quite naturally impelled to do this by the music.14
Descartes’ epistemology, one obscured in the twentieth century, valued subjective
perception and movement before temporal objectivity, calculation, or rhythmic
exactitude. This great philosopher of the mind so readily believed that musical time was
an instinctual phenomenon—set apart from notation, mechanics, and physics—that he
strikingly asserted:
It follows that even animals can dance to rhythm if they are taught and trained, for
it takes only a physical stimulus to achieve this reaction.
Descartes, who linked man’s existence with his profound ability to intellectualize,
ironically also linked man’s musical creativity to his primal, animalistic ability to “feel
the beat.” Nevertheless, he ascertained the fundamental living quality of musical
proportion that would reappear in performances over the ages—that sonic pulse-sensation
known as the measured or mensural accent. He states:
Since the sound is emitted more strongly and clearly at the beginning of each
measure, we must conclude that it has greater impact on our spirits, and that we
are thus roused to motion.15
14 Ibid., 14.
15
Ibid.
17
For over three centuries, descriptions nearly identical to Descartes’ expose this sensory,
subjective reality of musical time. The eighteenth-century Chambers’ Cyclopædia—for
which Charles Burney wrote many of the musical entries—noted: “Rhythmus, in the
general, is perceived either by the eye or ear, and may be either with or without metre;
but the strict musical rhythm is only perceived by the ear, and cannot exist without it.”16
Nineteenth-century theorist Gottfried Weber also relates these long-standing temporal
values, unbroken since Shakespeare’s and Descartes’ age:
DIVISION IV. MUSICAL ACCENT. § LXVI. It is not alone the symmetry of the
exactly measured lengths of the times, that constitutes the essential nature and the
peculiar charm of the rhythmical arrangement; but our internal feeling superadds
still a certain other property. That is to say, we as it were involuntarily (and
instinctively) lay more stress on the first time...than on the following time [in a 2-
meter], or on the two following times [in a 3-meter]…which in fact gives definite-
ness, life, and meaning to the whole performance.17
Nineteenth-century pedagogue Adolph Bernhard Marx also recognized that rhythmical
proportionality was formed by an internal, non-notated sense for musical pulsation: “The
feeling of measure and sensation of rhythm—we repeat it,—are innate in every human
being gifted with understanding, but, like every other faculty, in different gradations.”18
Like Descartes, Chambers, Weber, and Marx, speech pedagogue Andrew Comstock
16 See Ephraim Chambers, “Rhythm,” Cyclopædia: or, an universal dictionary of arts and
sciences. In four volumes, Vol. 4 (London, 1786-88), [165]. Eighteenth Century Collections
Online. Gale. Case Western Reserve University. Accessed on 12 Oct. 2009
<http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&contentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tab
ID=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW3314759369&source=gale&userGroupName=cwru_main
&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE>.
17 Gottfried Weber, General Music Teacher: Adapted to Self-instruction, Both for Teachers and
Learners; Embracing Also an Extensive Dictionary of Musical Terms, trans. by James Franklin
Warner (Boston: J. H. Wilkins & R. B. Carter, 1841), 89.
18
Adolph Bernhard Marx, General Musical Instruction (Allgemeine Musiklehre), trans. by
George Macirone (London: J. Alfred Novello, 1854), 120.
18
knew that human agency was the guiding principle underlying musical time, a distinctly
non-mechanical epistemology, as he certified in A System of Elocution:
It is rhythmical pulsation which enables a band of musicians to perform in
concert. It is this also which enables a company of soldiers to march
synchronously, and which governs the movements of the feet in dancing.19
This fundamental, commonly understood sensation of measured musical time was
variously described over three centuries. Christiani defined it as, “pulsation…formed of
the interchange of rising and falling, [which] is necessary to give a clear sense of the
rhythm, and lend to the [musical] movement its wavy outline.”20
Some English
pedagogues labeled it the Ictus metricus. “Arsis and thesis” was perhaps the most
common designation, owing to the relationship between tactus-reference and ancient
Greek poetic meters. Riemann called it the “agogic.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, some French musicians considered it alternately an aspect of mouvement,
mesurée, or cadence. The eighteenth-century linguist Joshua Steele described it as
“emphatic and remiss.” Hummel marked it as a stress of “heavy and light:” a sensation
that did not reflect volume change. Hauptmann strikingly called it “the energy of
beginning.” Weber as the regular recurrence of “internal weight.” Perhaps the first
edition Grove Dictionary defined this essential, physical sensation of meter most directly
as the “quiet dwelling” upon the bar.21
19 Andrew Comstock, A System of Elocution (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1855), 63.
20
Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1885), 33.
21
“Time,” in George Grove, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. IV (London:
MacMillan and Co., 1889), 120, n3.
19
Yet in all these verbal descriptions, it becomes evident that this rhythmical sense
of pulsation, stress, or emphasis was not explicit in notation—it was an assumed element
of musical proportion that resided off the page, and only actualized in performance. The
eighteenth-century Encyclopædia Britannica confirms that, “of the different times
included in a bar, though all are equal [in notation], yet some more strongly, and sensibly
marked than others. This distinction is expressed in execution by emphatic or accented
notes, and by such as are unaccented or common.”22
Prior to the mechanical regulation of
musical time, there existed an experiential, interpretive element to the movement, pace,
and accent of meter; a sonic measure, an aural pattern of recurring rhythmical pulsation.
Well through the nineteenth century, the “beat” that defined the musical proportion was
first and foremost a physical, sensory process. George Grove’s first edition Dictionary of
Music and Musicians states:
BEAT. The movement of the hand or baton by which the rhythm of a piece of
music is indicated, and by which a conductor ensures perfect agreement in tempo
and accent on the part of the orchestra or chorus; also, by analogy, the different
divisions of a bar or measure with respect to their relative accent.23
With no discussion of the clockwork metronome as an intrinsic aspect of performing to
the beat, an ensemble’s “perfect agreement” in time should not be misconstrued as
“perfect mechanical consistency.” Indeed, a special term for a musician skilled in the
sense of musical time was commonly employed prior to the invention and application of
the clockwork metronome; a performer who “accurately” or “perfectly” expressed the
musical proportion, meter, and accent was considered a good timeist—pedagogues and
22 “Time,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 8613. Emphasis added.
23 “Beat,” Grove I (1879), 158. Emphasis added.
20
critics used the term throughout the nineteenth century; it curiously and perhaps
ominously receded by the twentieth century.24
To be a timeist was to have an innate
rhythmical skill disassociated from mechanical precision. According to an early
nineteenth-century edition of the Cyclopædia; or, Universal dictionary of arts, sciences,
and literature this innate rhythmical sense was recognized since antiquity:
“Rhythm”…was the principal point in [ancient Greek] music, without which they
regarded melody as wholly unmeaning and lifeless. Hence Plato refuses the title
of musician to every one who was not perfectly well versed in rhythm, as we
should now to a bad timeist. It is of such importance, that, without it, music can
have no power over the human passions.25
A translation of August Heinrich Julius Lafontaine’s novel the Village Pastor (1810)
summarized these qualities in one character:
She was a perfect timeist, and had a great deal of expression both in her execution
on the instrument, and in singing; but when she played extempore, which she did
frequently, not having any written or printed music, the slow melancholy strain
was what she preferred.26
Linguistic philosopher Joshua Steele had much to say about the innate rhythmic sense
that made someone a skilled timeist. Steele, similar to so many musicians and theorists
over the centuries, found every bodily movement in some way rhythmical. Thus the
24 See, for instance, “TIMEIST. A performer who preserves a just and steady time,” in H. W.
Pilkington, A Musical Dictionary (Boston: Watson & Bangs, 1812), 77.
25
See Abraham Rees, “Rhythm,” The cyclopædia; or, Universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and
literature. In forty-one volumes (Philadelphia: Samuel F. Bradford, and Murray, Fairman and Co.,
1805), [n.p.].
26
See Augustus La Fontaine, The village pastor and his children, translated from the German
(New-York: D. Longworth, 1810), 106-7.
Evidently, the term could describe dancers and orators as well. See, for instance, Sarah
Harriet Burney, Geraldine Fauconberg (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Son, 1817), 240: “The good
old-fashioned tune of ‘Come hast to the Wedding,’ being called, our dance began. William,
though perhaps wholly untaught, was far from being a clownish or perplexing partner: there is a
surprising degree of native ease, grace, and propriety in every thing he does; and he proved as
good a timeist as Caesar himself.”
21
cultivation of rhythm was fundamentally a self-referential process. Hearkening to
Descartes’ epistemology, Steele reflects in Prosodia Rationalis:
Our animal existence being regulated by our pulse, we seem to have an intuitive
sense of rhythmus, as connected with, and governing, all sounds and all motions;
whence it follows, that we find all people feel the effects of rhythmus, as they do
those of light and warmth derived from the Sun; so that, without searching for the
reason, it has generally been passed over as a first principle, or self-evident truth.
The swing of the arm, and other such motions, made by public speakers, are
derived from their instinctive sense of rhythmus, and are, in effect, beating time to
their orations.27
Steele, throughout Prosodia Rationalis, suggested that Western rhythm had a long and
rich tradition, in which the human body was the primary reference for the insufficiently
documented practices of musical and spoken time. For Steele, as with Descartes before
him, rhythm was one of the most fundamental of human experiences:
Our breathing, the beating of our pulse, and our movement in walking, make the
division of time by pointed and regular cadences, familiar and natural to us. Each
of these movements, or cadences, is divided into two alternate motions,
significantly expressed by the Greek words arsis and thesis, raising and posing, or
setting down; the latter of which, coming down as it were with weight, is what we
mean to call heavy, being the most energic or emphatic of the two; the other,
being more remiss, and with less emphasis, we call light.
So when we lift our foot, in order to walk, that motion is arsis, or light;
and when we put it on the ground, in order to proceed, that aft of posing is thesis,
or heavy.28
As Steele recognized, to be a timeist was to hold an innate—and pre-metronomic—sense
of musical time, one that allowed for the subjective, creative interpretations of musical
accent, pulse, and proportion.
Confirming the subjective, sensory pulsation of musical time, early-modern
pedagogical treatises occasionally documented these internal, quiet, emphatic, or
27 Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, an Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of
Speech (London: T. Payne, 1779), 67.
28 Steele, 20.
22
invisible accents, which every good timeist ought to recognize. Taken alongside standard
definitions of musical time, a wide variety of musical treatises attest to the insufficiency
of traditional notation in defining the fundamental sensory qualities of musical time,
rhythm, and proportion. They attest to a pre-metronomic ontology of musical time, in
which a successful timeist’s rhythmical feeling preceded mechanical rules or references.
In his Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel
(1828), Johann Nepomuk Hummel explicitly dictates for the musical novice, one who
strived to be a good timeist, where the heavy and light stresses fall in each meter.
Hummel also provides a telling graphic, a visual suggestion of physical weight, strength,
and velocity when beating time in two-, three-, and four-meters, both simple and
compound.
23
Figure 1.1. The invisible weight of the musical pulse, made explicit by Johann Nepomuk Hummel. As
depicted, each meter is distinguished through the recurring sense of heavy and light. Hummel portrays the
standard knowledge of skilled musicians: measured music was conceived, heard, and performed with these
pulse-senses, which transcended rhythmical notation. From Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ausführlich
theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, volume 1 (Wein: Tobias Haslinger, 1828), 62-63.
It is significant to note that Hummel’s explication of musical weight, accent, and the
beating of time bares no relationship to his instructions on the metronome—mainly
derived from the Maelzel’s own words—that appears towards the very end of the
24
composer’s treatise. (In his early London advertisements, Maelzel claimed that his
clockwork machine alongside his “Metronic Tutor” were “calculated to render the pupil a
steady timeist.”)29
Nevertheless, the implied sensory qualities of musical time preceded
and predominated the very new mechanical-tempo contrivance recently being introduced,
and critiqued, in the publications of Hummel and other skilled performer-composers.
Similar to Hummel’s important musical-time examples, Callcott’s popular A
Musical Grammar in Four Parts documented how repetitive-looking notations do not
contain mathematically or mechanically equal rhythms in performance; due to varying
degrees of emphasis within the bar, visually identical notes do not share audibly identical
“times.” As Hummel and Callcott both depicted, the meter or time signature implied the
auditory sensation of pulsation and accent—not the precise, mathematical equality of
every note within every bar.
Figure 1.2. With knowledge of the invisible, weighted accents common to all music in measure, Callcott
shows how seemingly identical musical passages take on completely different rhythmical qualities when set
in different meters. The capital “S” depicts the weightiest parts of each measure, in what amounts to a
minuet (3/4) and jig (6/8) rhythm, respectively. From John Wall Callcott, A Musical Grammar in Four
Parts, First American Edition (Boston: West & Blake and Manning & Loring, [1810]; Third Edition.
London: Robert Birchall, 1817), 258.
29 See [Classified Section,] Times, Feb. 19, 1817, 1.
25
Intimately aware of the insufficiencies when relating the feeling of musical pulse to
notated rhythms, Christiani cited Köhler’s rhythmical-notational interpretations, in which
the traditional, sensory hierarchy of accents was likened to a husband-wife relationship,
extended through a rhythmic genealogy of sorts—with subdivided offspring.
Figure 1.3. Köhler’s rhythmical genealogy. Note that “m” and “f” are not volume indications, but signifiers
of the strong-weak, arsis-thesis, or “male-female” pairings commonly heard in rhythmical proportions.
From Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1885), 48.
These subjective references for musical time were not lost on theorists later in the
nineteenth century, including Hugo Riemann, who was greatly concerned with the
problems of notating sensory, rhythmical nuances. He employed directional markings,
26
not to be confused with dynamics or articulation marks, to express the weight and energy
of pulse for any given meter.
Figure 1.4. Two of Riemann’s graphical notations that depict the many nuances of rhythmical movement.
The indications above the note values represent directional “energy” (not dynamics) in which the most
emphasis or weight appears at the beginning of each bar. He also includes pause marks to express the
rhetorical qualities of breath, or lift, in any rhythmical arrangement. From Hugo Riemann, Musikalische
Dynamik und Agogik (Hamburg: D. Rahter, 1884), 71 (left) and 139 (right).
Similarly, the first edition Grove Dictionary depicted the weight of the musical accent,
fittingly enough, through heavily weighted strokes above the usually invisible metrical
pulse. The entry “Accent” also suggests that this temporal weight, a quality dissociated
from volume, was common to all music in classical traditions.
27
Figure 1.5. Further depictions of the weighted pulse-sense in measured music. From the entry
“Accent” in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume 1 (1879), 15.
Gottfried Weber offered a striking confirmation of the non-notated feelings fundamental
to metered music by documenting how the visceral sensation of the invisible,
proportional accent was thwarted through dynamics. Weber depicted duple and triple
meters in which the internal emphases were occluded through loudly placed “weak
beats,” which opposed the customary sonic experience of musical time. He thus related:
What is here said of heavy and light parts of the measure is not to be so
understood as that a so called heavy or light part of the measure must really in all
cases be delivered more heavily and strongly (more forte) than the so called light
or weak part; we here speak rather of an internal weight which our rhythmical
feeling spontaneously gives to every heavy time. — Still however, so much as
this is true, that a kind of shock — a revulsive sensation is produced in our
feelings, if, on the contrary, a lighter time is rendered more prominent by a
greater external strength of tone than a time that is internally more heavy.”
28
Figure 1.6. The “revulsive sensation” produced when uncommon volume changes counteracted the
traditional, non-notated pulse-accent. In the second bar of the bottom line, two volume indications are
absent, because the strong-weak pattern is already implied on those two notes through the time signature;
this is the one point when the volume corresponds to the invisible pulse-sense. From Gottfried Weber,
General Music Teacher, trans. by James Franklin Warner (Boston: J. H. Wilkins & R. B. Carter, 1841), 90.
Weber exposed the significant difference between the internal “weighted” sense of
musical time and an external emphasis created through volume. Accents, for Weber,
Steele, and the Grove Dictionary, were natural effects implied through the meter, whereas
strong dynamics—when placed on naturally weak beats—were often rhythmical
impositions, false accentuations that destroyed the metrical feeling (that sometimes were
intended by the composer). In Weber’s example the traditional feelings for musical time
were entirely effaced, thus creating an entirely uncommon and “shocking” rhythmical
aesthetic when compared to traditional, sensory epistemologies of musical time.
Steele, too, mentioned the essential distinction, seemingly known for ages, that
the weighted measure-accent and volume-emphasis were two different musical qualities:
29
The affections of heavy and light were always felt in music, though erroneously
called by some moderns accented and unaccented; however, the accented, or
heavy note, was never understood to be necessarily loud, and the other necessarily
soft; because if it were so, there could be no occasion for separate directions,
where to apply the forte and piano, in as much as the affections of heavy and light
are continued in every cadence of every air, from the beginning to the end:
whereas the forte and piano are often applied directly contrary to heavy and light;
as in the following example, almost all the heavy notes are piano, and the light
notes, forte.30
Figure 1.7. Steele depicts how the invisible, arsis-thesis rhythm intrinsic to the bar need not correspond
with volume. He marks this passage with solid triangles ( ) that signify the strong pulse-accent, while the
figures underneath them ( ’ ) indicate softness, thus showing that the weight of the bar was a sensory-
temporal quality unrelated to dynamical strength. From Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, an Essay
Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London: T. Payne, 1779), 69.
Steele points to discrepancies, not in the traditional feeling of rhythm in speech and
music, but in the limited terminology and notational conventions at musicians’ disposal
for articulating the aural sensation of accent. For pedagogues concerned with musical
time, the complex practices that comprised an artistic performance were primarily non-
verbal and anti-notational. Words and ink dots were not enough to ensure the subjective
feeling of musical time. The end goal of musical time as suggested by many pedagogues
was expression, not exactitude, prompting Christiani to remark: “It has been said with
truth, ‘Upon accents the spirit of music depends, because without them there can be no
30 Steele, 68-9.
30
expression. Without them, there is no more melody in song than in the humming of a
bee.’”31
As these sources relate, musicality, expressivity, and living rhythm ultimately
eluded any exacting description. Thus, the proportional rules of subdivision, as described
for centuries by theorists from Descartes through Riemann, were not, and could not be
performed as strict mathematical absolutes where human time-dictation and rhythmical
sensation were concerned. In support of an anti-scientific epistemology, the eighteenth-
century Encyclopædia Britannica criticized Rousseau’s concept that all note values
however minutely subdivided contained a strong-weak (thesis and arsis) rhythmical
quality. The source claimed that any such exacting distinctions mentioned by Rousseau
were impossible to perform as note-values became more rhythmically infinitesimal.
Before the metronome dictated the musical beat, this significant eighteenth-century
reference questioned how such human-derived rhythmical actions could achieve such
seemingly inhuman precisions:
[since] notes may be so minutely subdivided, as by the shortness of their duration
to be rendered incapable of emphasis; and we should be glad to know how
[Rousseau], either with his hand, his foot, or this thought, could distinguish the
perfect [strong, heavy] and imperfect [weak, light] times of a demi-semiquaver.32
Joshua Steele, in his Prosodia rationalis, offered answers as to why such rhythmical
precisions were both uncommon and nearly impossible to conceive through traditional
human references, such as the hand, foot, or intangible temporal conceptions. Steele
asserted late-eighteenth-century performers, when they perceived and actualized the bar
31 Christiani, 22.
32
See “Time,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 8613.
31
through an initial pulse-accent, valued something other than the small and mathematically
equal subdivisions of notated rhythms. He stated, “when modern musicians refer to any
thing like a standard for time, it is to a maximum, which they suppose may be subdivided
to infinity by sub-duples or sub-triples.”33
He maintained that musicians defined time
through the larger feelings of pulse, not the mathematical equation of small metronomic
rhythms. Steele related a temporal epistemology drastically opposed to mechanical
precision or mathematical subdivisions, which instead relied upon broad rhythmical
sensations to define and dictate a more human variation of musical time. Such human
references to rhythmical movement, as Steele well understood, were inherently variable:
The beating of our pulse, which we must feel whenever we are silent and inactive,
prones us to rhythmical divisions even in the series of our thoughts; as soon as we
begin to move, our steps succeed in the government of rhythmical pulsation, and
the measure may then be at our option faster or slower; for while we were silent
and motionless, the measure of our thoughts must have been regulated by the
cadences or our pulse, which is an involuntary motion…If the step or pace
[governs the time or length of a cadence], then between walking and running there
is a latitude for great variety.34
If there was any temporal constant in the reference to pre-metronomic musical
performances, it was in this subjective sensation for accent, not in constant speed or
precise beat-per-minute regularity. Moreover, many sources noted that when the regular
pulse sensation was lacking, it elicited visceral problems of rhythmical perception for
both auditors and performers. Apart from notating the usually invisible accent for the
sake of education, the nineteenth-century Grove Dictionary documented a “curiosity” of
33 Steele, 131.
34 Ibid., 118-119.
32
musical time from Liszt, in which mixed meters belied any regular pulse sensation. The
musical dictionary concludes:
It is impossible to reduce this passage to any known rhythm; but when the first
feeling of strangeness is past there is a peculiar and quaint charm about the music
which no other combination would have produced.35
Figure 1.8. A passage from Liszt’s oratorio Christus, which the first edition Grove dictionary exemplified
for being a curiosity of indecipherable rhythm; the unusual and strange pattern of musical meters, accents,
and gestures made any pulse-sense unrecognizable and ambiguous. From the entry “Accent,” Grove’s
Dictionary, Vol. 1 (1879), 15.
The terminology here is telling: “Rhythm” and “accent” were often synonymous or
interchangeable when defining musical time. Throughout the nineteenth century,
musical-temporal terminology remained exceedingly ambiguous, and in the entry
“rhythm,” the same publication concludes: “In short, Rhythm is the Meter of Music.”36
As Descartes mentioned centuries prior, perceiving meter through the sense of accent
made rhythm knowable, real, and expressive. Without musical accent there could be no
meter; without meter there could be no musical rhythm. Given Liszt’s Christus and other
a-rhythmical excerpts, in which no “rhythm” or accent was consistently decipherable, the
35 Grove, I (1879), 15.
36
See “Rhythm,” Grove, IV (1889), 123.
33
Grove Dictionary politely suggested that they “are in no way to be recommended as
models for imitation.”37
The sensory curiosities of musical rhythm extended to odd meters such as 5/4—a
time that, for many pre-twentieth-century theorists, held no consistently conceivable
pulse-emphasis. While a metronomic-mathematic equivalence could certainly be adduced
from unusual meters such as 5/4 and 7/11, the fact that these meters could neither be
perceived nor actualized with any collective degree of understanding verifies that
physical sensations—not precise, metronomic calculations—grounded musical time prior
to the twentieth-century in both theory and practice. Indeed, Descartes mentioned the
sensory-temporal problems in executing such odd beat-groupings as early as 1618.
Steele, over a century and a half later, went so far as to state that “rhythmical time is only
capable of being generically divided either by the even number two, or by the odd
number three; but that the numbers seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, &c., are
non-rhythmical divisors.”38
Prior to the twentieth century, notable pedagogues found odd
meters beyond the triple-bar to be interpretively problematic and rhythmically
ambiguous; they often heard these irregular bars as a non-sensory and anti-intuitive
collection of beats—lacking in any perceptible “rhythm.” For each bar of 5/4, for
instance, the measure could be ascertained in the following ways: with a sense of triple-
duple, duple-triple, a quintuple with initial accent, or as a uniformly monotonous
quintuple without an initial accent—which negated the purpose of the time signature to
37 Ibid. An acquaintance of the composer, Walter Damrosch attested that Liszt’s influence for
Christus was the flowing “rhythmical” qualities of non-metrical Gregorian chant. See Walter
Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 49-50.
38
Steele, 128.
34
begin with. For Weber, this 5/4 arrangement was highly unnatural to both hear and
perform:
Such a rhythm has an especially halting and dragging character, arising from the
fact that a grouping of this kind has too little of emphasis, that is to say, too many
light parts of the measure for one that is strong. In five-fold measure, e.g. only the
first part would be heavy, while all the following four would be light; and in
seven-fold measure there would be even six light parts to one heavy one, etc.
Such a scantiness of accented parts of the measure cannot be otherwise than
wearisome to the ear.39
Given the sensory problems with odd meters, Weber prophesized—for a musical culture
pre-dating ubiquitous metronomic references—“those species of measure will never meet
with general acceptance, or come into general use.”40
However, he considered that under
certain compositional instances, when special effects were required, the visceral
weirdness—the “unrhythmicalness”—of such odd meters could be used to an emotional
advantage. Through this realization, Weber again exposed the living fundamentals of
musical time:
In the course of a piece of music, our rhythmical sense sometimes tolerates
quintóles, septoles, and the like, in which, on account of the quickness of the
transition over them, the unrhythmicalness of the division is almost imperceptible,
(at least to the hearer, though by the player the difficulty, and I might say,
unnaturalness, of such quintóle or septole division is very sensibly felt.)41
Beyond uncustomary meters, the composer’s intentional muddling of the recurring pulse
sense was known as Tempo d'Imbroglio. Imbroglio was a rhythmical technique that again
attested to the expected, non-notated sensations of time—common to all measured
music—that could be thwarted for specific emotional-temporal effects. John Wall
39 Weber, 105.
40
Ibid., 106.
41
Ibid., 107.
35
Callcott described the “embroiled” style, in which the prevailing pulse sensation overrode
the time signature—and the implicit accent indication: “To the same species of effect
which is derived from Emphasis, may be referred the Tempo d'Imbroglio (della
Confusione) of modern Music, in which the Music, although written in one kind of
Measure, is really performed in another.”42
But as with all terms concerning time and
rhythm, meanings change drastically over the decades. Weber later suggested imbroglio
and rubato shared temporal similarities due to the composer’s (not the performer’s)
skewing of the basic pulse sense, traditionally gleaned from the meter. Exemplifying a
minuet passage by Haydn, Weber relates, “Such revulsive, jerking, jolting rhythmical
movements frequently occur. They are sometimes designated by the expression tempo
rubato, i.e. stolen or robbed time, and also by the word confusion.”43
Figure 1.9. Two examples of Tempo d’imbroglio—the “revulsive” displacement of the traditional, non-
notated pulse-sensation. Above, a Haydn minuet, reprinted in Weber’s A universal dictionary of musical
terms, 49. Below, A passage from Beethoven’s Third Symphony reprinted in Christiani, 72. Weber
alternatively considered Haydn’s passage an example of tempo rubato, attesting to an imprecision or
generality in the use of these terms.
42 John Wall Callcott, A Musical Grammar in Four Parts, First American Edition (Boston: West
& Blake and Manning & Loring, [1810]; Third Edition. London: Robert Birchall, 1817), 261.
43 James F. Warner and Gottfried Weber, A Universal Dictionary of Musical Terms (Boston: J. H.
Wilkins & R. B. Carter, 1842), 49.
36
Christiani confirmed, “An imbroglio is caused by irregular accentuation, sometimes by
syncopation, but more frequently by the intermingling of several voices, each voice
accenting its phrases independently, as though a room full of people were talking together
at the same time, the result being that the grammatical [invisible and weighted metrical]
accents are no longer to be detected by the ear. Hence, a rhythmical confusion.”44
Thus,
to perceive the visceral, rhythmical juxtaposition called “imbroglio” was to acknowledge
its distinction from the traditional pulse feeling, the sensory accent that was once
implied—but seldom notated—in measured music throughout the Western tradition.
The term for the traditional perception and actualization of musical meter in the
Western tradition was sometimes called tempo ordinario. As with “imbroglio” and even
“rubato,” the word “ordinario” did not simply reduce to a metronomic rate of speed; this
realization is especially apparent when considering that these terms existed before the
metronomic scale came into use. Tempo ordinario implied a “time” commonly sensed in
duple or triple meter; it was a rhythmical quality, not an exacting or consistent beats-per-
minute number. With this understanding of the term, Beethoven, in his final year,
considered metronome numbers as a necessary rehearsal expedient because performers
could not often glean this “ordinary” pulse-sense from the composer’s most challenging
later-period works. Additional guidance seemed warranted, since—as his creativity
demanded—Beethoven intentionally obscured or thwarted the metrical accent, the
implied and expected pulse-sense, altogether through techniques such as imbroglio,
44 Christiani, 72.
37
rubato, phrase fragmentation, or syncopation.45
Clearly suggesting that compositions with
traditional meter-to-pulse relationships did not require mechanical guidance, Beethoven
wrote to Bernhard Schotts Söhne in December 1826, admitting “such things [metronome
markings] are certainly necessary…We can scarcely have any more tempi ordinari, for
one must follow the ideas of unfettered genius.”46
Indeed, Beethoven’s unique treatment of musical rhythm seemed difficult to
interpret for many during his age, and due to his “unfettered” or idiosyncratic meters,
phrase structures, and rhythmic gestures, an external measure may have provided a
“necessary”—but still incomplete—aid for novitiate performers of his more complicated
music. During the very same month in which he wrote the above comment, Beethoven
received a letter (dated December 12, 1826)—perhaps prompting the composer’s
realizations of a “metronomic necessity”—from Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee, who
attested to the temporal confusion engendered by some of Beethoven’s latest works.
Wartensee reports that within the variations of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.
111, certain time signatures “[produce] various opinions here [Frankfurt am Main?] and
occasions an aesthetic dispute.” The composer and educator Wartensee proceeds to
inquire about,
45 In at least one music publication, Beethoven used the term “ordinario” as a temporal indicator
(again, without metronome numbers). In his Serenade for flute, violin, and viola, Op. 25,
Beethoven states “Tempo ordinario d’un Menuetto,” which attests to the common pulse-sense
that this particular dance movement ought to project.
Ironically perhaps, the term “tempo ordinario,” by the twentieth century, had become
synonymous with 4/4, duple, or alle breve meters, not triple meters. See for instance, Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians V (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910), 70.
Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven's letters: a critical edition, with explanatory notes by Dr. A.
C. Kalischer, translated by J. S. Shedlock, Volume 2 (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 458.
38
the second variation, which you designated 12/16 [actually 6/16]…and wrote
‘l’istesso Tempo,’ did you mean it in regard to the beat and want for the sixteenth
with the thirty-second to be played exactly as fast as the eighth with the sixteenth
in the [introductory] theme; or did you want the whole figure played just as fast as
[an eighth and sixteenth] where ‘l’istesso Tempo’ then does not designate
individual notes but the primary division of the bar. Likewise, in the third
variation, which is designated 12/32 in the figure where ‘l’istesso Tempo’ occurs
again, did you want the two notes [a 32nd
and 64th
] played exactly as fast as the
aforementioned figure [an eighth and sixteenth] in your theme;—or did you want
the whole passage played in the same time?47
Upon reading this letter, Beethoven may have recognized that certain levels of confusion
would always exist for those who could not ascertain a tempo-sense from his more
modern publications, and that many consumer-performers were not up to the rhythmical
challenges presented by his “genius.” Under these circumstances, metronome numbers
might have assuaged further inquiries similar to Wartensee’s. Yet, even with Beethoven’s
occasional statements in support of the beats-per-minute scale, contradictory evidence
abounds in the practice and publication of Beethoven’s music during his lifetime. For
instance, Wartensee did not request any metronomic indications or translations in the
above correspondence; he oppositely considered tempi though a more traditional
epistemology based on the printed meters, “the primary division of the bar,” and their
corresponding pulse-sense relationships. And while Beethoven told Bernhard Schotts
Söhne that the metronomic numbers were now “certainly necessary” for music that
extended beyond an ordinary pulse-sense, the majority of Beethoven’s compositions,
including the autograph manuscript of Op. 111,48
contained a host of Italian time and
47 See Theodore Albrecht, ed., Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, Volume 2
(Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), Letter 448, 159-160.
48
See Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, reproduction of the
autograph manuscript (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1968).
39
affect words while failing to offer such “necessary” mechanical markings. In the end,
Beethoven never answered Wartensee’s or the aforementioned “disputers’” tempo
questions with metronome numbers or words49
and inconsistencies abound in interpreting
Op. 111 to this day.50
Figure 1.10. Detail of the autograph manuscript of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32, Op. 111, last
movement, which begins in an unusual meter of 9/16. Throughout the rhythmically and metrically
challenging set of variations, Beethoven provides ample Italian descriptions of tempo and affect, yet not
one metronome indication.
Decades prior to Beethoven’s unique rhythmical inventions and intentions as displayed in
his Op. 111, Joshua Steele presented one of the most telling notations of the traditional
sensory and subjective musical accent—likely alluding to Beethoven’s tempi ordinari—
unadorned by rhythmical complications such as imbroglio, rubato, syncopation, or
49 Albrecht, 161, fn2. Albrecht quotes Anton Schindler as confirmation.
Perhaps adding to the confusion, Schindler considered that works similar to Op. 111
necessitated playing in a “tempo di bravura,” which seemed to be a more unwavering and rapid
tempo than an ordinario. Schindler comments on this uncustomary and specific approach to
Beethoven’s music: “There are several [sonatas] in which a strict observance of time [tempo] is
indispensable; scarcely permitting, much less demanding, any deviation from regularity. Those
compositions require to be played in what is termed bravura style; they are Op. 106, 111, 57, and
some others.” Schindler also considered “bravura movements…few among [Beethoven’s]
compositions” and suggested these display “mechanical” effects opposite to those based upon
sentiment and expression. See Schindler, ed. Moscheles, 130, 107-108, 120.
50 For a comprehensive analysis and discussion of the interpretive issues, see Joanna Goldstein, A
Beethoven Enigma: Performance Practice and the Piano Sonata, Opus 111, American university
studies, Series XX (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).
40
unusual time signatures. While he was ultimately concerned with applying musical-time
concepts to speech notation, Steele considered the fundamental duple or triple sense of
rhythm to be so ingrained in skilled performers that—if given a lengthy series of quarter
notes without a notated time signature—they would instinctually perceive the
proportional pulse of arsis and thesis—again without any visual guidance. Steele, like
Descartes, Weber, Marx, and Christiani, described a rhythmical sensation, an “instinctive
sense”51
inaccessible within the text, which was only realized through experience. Steele
states:
The metronomic appearance of the above passage is uncommon and striking: a redundant
succession of quarter notes with no notated meter, no prescribed weighted accent. For
eighteenth-century musicians, Steele’s example offered no “rhythm” to speak of, only a
general rate of movement gauged through a self-referential stride. Given this scant
printed information, Steele asserted that musicians’ natural rhythmic sense would
eventually lead to either one of two interpretations, printed below, in which the solid
triangles depicted the invisible weight, the “quiet dwelling” of the sensory accent, either
in a duple or triple rhythmical proportion. Due to the subjective, sensory foundations of
musical time, Steele depicted how visually redundant notes would “naturally” transform
into audibly rhythmical passages:
51 Steele, 220.
41
If this series be repeated, without intermission, the singer or player will be led
instinctively to lay the emphatic pulses so as to divide into cadences or bars of
common measure, or [depending upon the length of the final note] the player will
be instinctively inclined to divide it into cadences of triple-meter. 52
Figure 1.11. Steele’s depiction of the invisible, weighted sense of meters, gleaned by skilled musicians out
of visually redundant series of quarter notes. The solid triangles depict the heavy tones of thesis. The dotted
triangles depict the light sense of arsis. Another degree, the two-dot symbol, is the “lightest” rhythm in this
triple meter. This common epistemology of musical time predates the metronome and the metronomic
regulation of musical time.
Steele, in order to express more directly the time of speech, exposed the time of measured
music in the process—the “time” of Shakespeare’s Sir Toby, Descartes, and Christiani: a
traditional and lasting epistemology in which meter and rhythm flourished far afield from
the tick-tock time of the clock. Steele’s two musical “times” depicted above were defined
not by mathematical or metronomic rates of speed, but by two alternate perceptions of
human pulse and rhythm. As others documented as well, the fundamentals of musical
time transcended notation, mechanical measurement, and even the composer’s intentions.
The various elements of musical time, including metric pulsation, accentuation, alongside
the effects of rubato and imbroglio were fundamental rhythmic expressions beyond the
52 Ibid., 219, 220.
42
mere and limited conventions of notational and mechanical reference. For those who
actively sensed and experienced “rhythm,” the human subjectivities of pulse, nuance, and
movement grounded all of music notation. As Descartes through Christiani related—and
before the metronome helped redefine the musical measure with mechanical
consistency—rhythmical feeling trumped rhythmical notation. Prior to Maelzel’s
metronome, musical “time” was first and foremost within the timeist.
The Self-Referential Tempo
The sensory accent was the common guide and reference of measured, musical time. But,
as witnessed in Steele’s above example, meter and its necessary pulse-emphasis did not
always prescribe another quality of “tempo,” defined as the general pace of that recurring
emphasis. As noted for centuries, the primary techniques to find basic tempo-rates were
still self-referential, subjective, and personal. The traditional tactus reference—certainly
practiced since the Renaissance—made visible that recurring pulse-accent. Thus for
many musicians and theorists of pre-metronomic performance culture, conceptions of
accent, measure, and tempo were intricately linked through implicit or explicit human
tactus-indication. Considering the interconnectivity between pulse, meter, and tempo,
Christiani believed that since the musical accent was an absolute, albeit variable quality
of measured musical performance—and that all duple or triple meters should sound as
such—the pulse-sense alone set the quality and rate of movement for any given work. For
this late-nineteenth-century pedagogue, tempo and tempo variations were always
beholden to the traditional sense of pulse, meter, and the corresponding rhythms in any
composition:
43
The rhythm is the chief carrier of the composer's idea, and cannot be
changed without impairing that idea.
The grammatical [weighted] accents, which follow the rhythm, cannot be
changed either.
If, therefore, time [tempo] and rhythm, or time and rhythmical accents, do
not agree…it must be the time [tempo] which is wrong. It may, in fact, be laid
down as a general principle, that
It is always the rhythm that decides the time [tempo], and not the time
which prescribes the rhythm.53
The audible rhythm as defined through the invisible accent, as Christiani explained,
projected the correct tempo. He alludes to the prevailing pre-metronomic aesthetic: tempo
was an experiential process, not a mechanical absolute dictated through printed tempo
indications, either through words or metronome numbers. (By the time of Christiani’s
publication, Maelzel’s metronome was being manufactured for nearly 60 years.) While
the pulse-accent was an expected quality, the speed or rate of movement was always
interpretive. Such realizations appear for nearly three centuries prior to Christiani’s
assertion: tempo was not an infallible rule imposed by words, machines, or numbers.
Beyond the sense of tactus or pulse as indicated by the meter, the most common
references for the rate of movement stemmed, yet again, from physical processes such as
walking, limping, or running—such prevailing tempo conceptualizations are well
documented, and exist apart from the musical accent. For instance, Michel Saint-Lambert
in his Principles of the Harpsichord remarked of musical movement: “For myself I have
fixed it as much as possible in the method book by the comparison I gave of a man
walking [to a quarter note] slowly, sometimes fast. But what I was able to communicate
53 Christiani, 88.
44
by comparison is not definite enough.”54
Subjectivities were always present in tempo
reference, due to the self-referential nature of musical time and the insufficiencies of
musical notation, a fact which prompted Saint-Lambert to remark that “time
signatures…indicate the movement of pieces only very imperfectly” and that musicians
“all use the same terminology, but they do not all understand [affect words] in the same
way.”55
To find a tempo prior to the twentieth century was to find a “tempo
generalization” from the meter, melodic and harmonic contexts, occasionally aided by
words that conveyed emotions and actions, not mechanical precisions. Thus, as many
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists asserted, the techniques that offered the
greatest ease and convenience in realizing general tempos during musical performances
were often preferred to complex tempo-machines, such as pendulums and later clockwork
metronomes, which defined pulse-movements with increasingly precise and more
inhuman exactitudes. Jean-Philippe Rameau, who well recognized and agreed with
Descartes’ rhythmical epistemology for measured music,56
considered self-referential
techniques standard, simple, and accurate enough for musicians to glean necessarily
subjective tempos:
54 Michel de Saint Lambert, Principles of the Harpsichord (Paris, 1702), translated and edited by
Rebecca Harris-Warrick (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 44.
55 Ibid.
56
Jean-Philippe Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie reduite à ses principes naturels, livre second
(Ballard: Paris, 1722), 150.
45
We can hardly compare meter to anything simpler than the movements which are
natural to us; when these are repeated, they are always equal [regular]. We may
observe this in walking, provided that we walk naturally.
As the meter may be divided into several beats, each step taken in walking
may be considered to be one beat; just as we can walk faster or slower, the meter
may be faster or slower.57
Quantz similarly found that the ease of personal tempo-reference far outweighed the
incorporation of external, and often tedious new technologies, such as Loulié’s
experimental simple pendulum. In his Versuch, Quantz took great care to explain the
most sufficient human references for musical time:
The means that I consider most useful as a guide for tempo [in opposition to the
obscure, eight-foot chronomêtre of Loulié] is the more convenient because of the
ease with which it is obtained, since everyone always has it upon himself. It is the
pulse beat at the hand of a healthy person.58
Admitting to the long and trustworthy tradition of self-referential tempo dictation, Quantz
stated, “I cannot boast of being the first to come upon this device.” Similar to Rameau, he
suggested that musicians had the innate ability of finding what amounts to a personally
“correct” and “equal” tempo for any given work and performance. Due to individual
proclivities, Quantz explained that tempos would be slower or faster according to each
performer, and “it also would do no harm in any case if a melancholy person, in accord
with his temperament, were to play a piece moderately fast, but still well; and if a more
volatile person played it with greater liveliness.”59
Even with his knowledge of simple
pendulums and pendulum clocks, Quantz somewhat sarcastically announced:
57 Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie, translated by Philip Gossett (New York: Dover Publications
[1971]), 197-8.
58
Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (Berlin: J. F.
Voss, 1752); translated by Edward R. Reilly as On playing the flute (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 2001), 183.
59 Ibid., 289.
46
Beyond this [pulse-reference], if someone could discover a simpler, more
accurate, and more convenient device for learning tempos and establishing them,
he would do well not to delay in communicating it to the public.60
While Quantz indeed desired more methodical and definitive methods for establishing the
basic tempos in modern compositions, he nevertheless recognized that the heartbeat-
reference of musical tempo displayed a high degree of variability, regardless of the
performer’s wellbeing. The pulse fluctuated naturally due to emotions, temperament, and
other personal traits. Quantz recited standard knowledge that the pulse was an
exceedingly variable organ, prone to every subjective whim, action, and inclination. Thus
he reticently acknowledged that tempos were always somewhat personal, due to
variations in human-derived rhythm:
One might object that the pulse beat is neither constant at each hour of the day,
nor the same in every person, as would be required to accurately fix tempos with
it. It will be said that the pulse beats more slowly in the morning before meal-time
than in the afternoon after meal-time, and still faster at night than in the afternoon;
likewise that it is slower in a person inclined to melancholy than in an impetuous
and jovial person.61
He nevertheless prescribed techniques that seemed exceedingly unnecessary and
inconvenient for skilled musicians such as himself: “if you take the pulse beat as it is
found from the midday meal till evening, and as it is found in a jovial and high-spirited
and yet rather fiery and volatile person, or, if you will permit the expression, in a person
of choleric-sanguine temperament, as your basis, you will have hit upon the correct pulse
beat.”62
Quantz related through his instructions that the heartbeat was no clockwork
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid., 288.
62 Ibid.
47
metronome—far from it, as the nearly contemporaneous Encyclopædia Britannica also
considered the myriad ways in which the living pulse could fluctuate. A brief excerpt
explains:
PULSE, in the animal economy, denotes the beating or throbbing of the heart and
arteries…with regard to motion, the pulses are reckoned only four; great and little,
quick and slow. When quickness and greatness are joined together, it becomes
violent; and when it is little and slow, it is called a weak pulse…The pulses of
persons differ according to the largeness of the blood, the elastic force of the
canals; as also with regard to the sex, age, season, air, motion, food, sleep,
watchings, and passions of the mind. The pulse is larger and more quick in men
than in women, in the bilious and sanguineo-bilious, than in the phlegmatic and
melancholic…In children, the pulse is quick and soft; in adults, greater and more
violent. In the old, it is commonly great, hard, and slow…Intense speaking
increases the circulation, and consequently renders the pulse large and quick. In
watching, the pulse is more evident; in sleep, more slow and languid. After
drinking hot things, such as coffee and tea, or hot bath-waters, as well as after
meals, the pulse vibrates more quick. But nothing produces a greater change in
the pulse than affections of the mind.63
Beyond his knowledge that the human pulse was volatile and variable for every given
person and moment of the day, Quantz never conceived any heartbeat—even the stable,
jovial, or healthy pulse—to be a consistent mechanical regulator of rhythm, accent, or
tempo; traditional meanings of musical movement still held sway. Despite
misconceptions engendered through some twentieth-century tempo scholarship, he
outright acknowledged that the human pulse was not to be utilized as monotonous
clockwork for music making—an inconceivable practice for Quantz in any case:
63 See Encyclopædia Britannica, 6534-6535.
48
I do not pretend that a whole piece should be measured off in accordance with the
pulse beat; this would be absurd and impossible. My aim is simply to show how
in at least two, four, six, or eight pulse beats, any tempo you wish can be
established, and how you can achieve a knowledge of the various categories of
tempo by yourself that will lead you to further inquiry. After some practice, an
idea of tempo will gradually so impress itself upon your mind that it will no
longer be found necessary always to consult the pulse beat.64
Quantz did not offer his instructions for finding basic tempos through the heartbeat as an
infallible scientific method for performance. Although he attested to the usefulness of
referencing a long-case clock as a last resort, Quantz still encouraged a great deal of
personal leeway in the establishment of any specific tempo, which he believed should
take into consideration the performance circumstances. In his Versuch, Quantz’s temporal
epistemology—despite the assertions of some twentieth-century scholars—was never
metronomic, or transferable to metronomic standards; he never suggested that a clicking
machine defined musical pulse or the rhythm of each musical measure—either in sonatas
or dance music. Rather he related that the human heartbeat, as it always had in measured
music, could generally establish the initial “true” (not a mechanically exact, precise, or
unflinching) tempo of an instrumental composition. Indeed, Quantz explicitly condoned
performers to vary the tempo for certain works, relating that “It is common knowledge
once or more times consecutively, particularly a fast piece…is played a little faster the
second time than the first.” For significant reasons he left undocumented in his own
compositions, Quantz instructs this temporal fluctuation was necessary so as not to “put
the listeners to sleep.”65
64 Quantz, trans. Reilly, 284.
65 Ibid., 289.
49
Quantz did urge instrumentalists to rigorously adhere to French dance tempos for
the sake of dancers, but his techniques are telling: musicians, by “attending to the fall of
[dancers’] feet,” will attain an “accuracy of tempo.” Quantz describes a “time” equally as
volatile and variable during dance performances, stating: “It is well known that most
dancers understand little or nothing of music, and frequently do not know the tempo
themselves; for the most part they regulate themselves only by the mood at the moment,
or by their ability. Experience also teaches that dancers rarely require as lively a tempo at
rehearsals that take place in the morning before eating.”66
Yet again Quantz’s definition
of correct tempo was not in mechanical precision, but a far more complex, physical
correlation between the dancers’ physical movements and the musicians’ pulse-sense.
Despite the basics of music notation, these and many other sources relate a
complexity of experience beyond the reductions and limitations inevitable in any text,
complexities of meaning beyond any absolute mechanical calculations or measures of
time, beyond the fundamental schema of rhythmic proportionality. Weber recognized that
rhythmic basics he taught to amateur pianists did not encompass the reality of musical
time as actualized by performers and heard by audiences. Indeed, Weber forewarned his
readers that the comprehensive understanding of rhythm and tempo could not be
ascertained from pure theory or technical fundamentals alone, as he stated in his General
Music Teacher:
66 See Quantz, trans. Reilly, 289-290.
50
The divisions of the measure, together with all the other greater and smaller
distinctions in rhythmical measurement, as we have thus far attended to them, are
properly the mere dry frame-work, that is to say, merely the measure of
rhythmical structures, but by no means those structures themselves; in the same
way as the yard, foot, inch, and line-measure, and the proportions according to
which an architectural work is measured, or the pattern or dimensions according
to which a pillar is measured, are not the structure or the pillar itself. In other
words, we have thus far directed our attention to the rhythmical measure merely
as measure.67
Beyond the Musical Measure
The self-referential tempo, the basic pulse-sense associated with physical activities such
as walking, limping, running, or tactus-marking were not the final answers to musical
time: these, of course, were only the fundamentals, the points of departure for more
complex creative practices. Aside from the human measure of musical proportionality
and pulse, more advanced subjective processes actively guided and shaped underlying
rhythmical sensations for any given composition, genre, age, and national style.
Since notation often failed to expose the accent or precise nature of tempo, it
likewise could not depict the many rhythmical nuances and gestures of musical time that
went beyond the meter and rate of movement for each and every bar. Over the centuries,
various theorists and musicians alluded to the fact that musical time for any pre-twentieth
century composition was far more complex than could be seen through notation, or
referenced through machines. While a comprehensive survey of the many qualitative
rhythmical techniques—specific to various repertoires, nations, and eras—cannot be
approached here, a few verbal and notation documents spanning three centuries attest that
musical time held far greater human complexities and subjectivities than could ever
67 Weber, 109.
51
definitively, accurately, or absolutely be told through clockwork time, or beats-per-
minute dictations.
In the nineteenth century, Adolph Bernhard Marx expressed his own sense for
rhythm and alluded to the fact that musical time was a complex array of personal
perceptions only meagerly reflected in notation. In considering external references to
“rhythm,” Marx found that musical time was closely related not to clocks or metronomic
machines, but to the broad, recurring movements witnessed in the natural world. Perhaps
with an overt desire to romanticize all acts of musical creation, Marx recounted the
variable natural rhythms that most related to living performance—and most opposed
mechanical inventions—while offering his own subjective and volatile experiences of
pulse, proportion, and tempo:
In nature, we observe such a periodical succession of equal or unequal moments
of time and force in the beating of the pulse, in the rise and fall of the tide, in the
motion of the waves, &c. &c. In the doings of man, this succession reveals itself
in the form of "rhythm," with its two elements, time [duration] and ictus
(emphasis, accent). Every single moment is measured by these two elements. I
dwell upon a moment so long as it engages my interest and attention, or until I am
drawn away by another of greater force of attraction; I hurry from moment to
moment when a lively sensation impels me onward, and I expend a greater
amount of force and energy upon those moments which are to me the most
important. In this, we leave it out of consideration, for the present, whether in
dwelling a longer time and with greater emphasis upon certain moments, we are
guided by the intrinsic importance and objective contents of those moments (as in
prose declamation and in recitatives), or whether we do it merely for the sake of
variety or with a view to order and symmetry.68
In this passage, Marx expresses a significant and intrinsic element to pre-metronomic
rhythm: musical time, being self-referential, was always a living process informed by
individual choice. Active, motive expressions created musical time, which was often
68 Marx, 32-33.
52
tempered through the interpreter’s gestural, linguistic, and rhetorical affinities. As Marx
explained, musical time was born of willful, continual action, and not a passive reaction
to external, unwavering regulations.
From the same century, yet with far more utilitarian intentions, Czerny also
described the subjective, willful choices that shaped the course of musical time:
When any musical idea, any group, or phrase, or passage, recurs in various places
of a composition, then the performer is not only at liberty, but it should be his
duty, to alter the mode of rendering at each repetition, in order to avoid
monotony.69
Some of these volatile, temporal qualities alluded to by pre-twentieth-century pedagogues
were heard and experienced through the creative practice of improvisation: immediate,
nuanced musical expressions that were seldom, if ever, depicted through ex post facto
notation. As early as 1602, Giulio Caccini documented how the performer’s willful,
musical gestures altered even the simplest of notated rhythmical passages for the sake of
variation—practices extending well beyond Descartes’ fundamental descriptions of
pulse-sense.
Figure 1.12. Caccini’s 1602 instructions on gestural, rhythmical embellishment. Transcribed and translated
in Strunk’s Source readings in music history, ed. Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), 614.
69 Quoted in Christiani, 265. It seems that musical monotony was so detested in classical
compositions and performance practices, that references such as H. W. Pilkington, A Musical
Dictionary (1812), 74, offer the term “Tautology: A tiresome repetition of the same passages.”
53
Caccini’s rhythmical “falls” and “breaths” signify physical gestures, not mathematical
computations. And while the invisible pulse-accent was still implied, Caccini showed
how musicians could perform the rhythms between the musical pulse-sense in variable,
improvisatory ways; in practice, the sense of fall, the duration of breath—neither of
which imply mechanical precision—related rhythmical gestures beyond the fundamental
sense of proportionality.
While such improvisatory rhythmical embellishments had precedent in Italian
vocal and instrumental style, and can be heard in the diminution music of Bassano,
Rognoni, Virgiliano, dalla Casa, de Selma, and others, it is significant to note that the
treatment of rapid rhythmic passages as a series of non-calculable—and non-
metronomic—gestures extended well through the nineteenth century. Compare, for
instance, Caccini’s instructions (Fig. 1.12) to Christiani’s striking similar examples that
expose improvised, gestural “falls” and “breaths” in the “new music” of his century:70
Figure 1.13. Christiani’s depiction of a falling gesture as it contrasts from the notated indication
on the left. The rhythm as Christiani would have it performed on the right is decidedly non-
mathematical and non-metronomic. From Christiani, 157.
70 Also see Christiani, 174-175, for additional performance instructions that expose greater
inconsistencies between notation and the performance of nuanced, gestural rhythms.
54
As Christiani explained centuries after Caccini, musical time as seen was not musical
time as heard. Even while these two treatises document very different compositional
genres, they share similar understandings of musical time, relating common rhythmical
qualities of accent, emphasis, breadth, and poise only actualized in willful performance.
They exposed that living gestural affects, whether in an early Italian monody or a
nineteenth century sonata, prevailed over the redundant look of notation.
The Linguistic Movement of Musical Time
Another long-lasting tradition, uncovering a more nuanced pre-metronomic
understanding of musical time, appears in the speech-epistemology of rhythmical
movement. As late as 1879, the Grove Dictionary confirmed the fundamental, self-
referential connections between musical and linguistic time:
As in spoken language certain words and syllables receive more emphasis than
others, so in music there are always some notes which are to be rendered
comparatively prominent; and this prominence is termed ‘accent’. In order that
music may produce a satisfactory effect upon the mind, it is necessary that this
accent (as in poetry) should for the most part recur at regular intervals. Again, as
in poetry we find different varieties of metre, so in music we meet with various
kinds of time.71
A century prior, the Encyclopædia Britannica likewise stated:
Times and bars in music answer the very same end as punctuation in language.
They determine the different periods of the movement, or the various degree of
completion, which the sentiment, expressed by that movement, has attained…the
first of these gradations [of sentiment] may be called a time which is likewise the
most convenient division of a bar or measure into its elementary or aliquot parts,
and may be deemed equivalent to a comma in a sentence; a bar denotes a degree
still more sensible, and may be considered as having the force of a semicolon; a
71 Grove, I (1879), 12.
55
strain brings the sentiment to a tolerable degree of perfection, and may be
reckoned equal to a colon: the full period is the end of the imitative piece.72
As many late-sixteenth-century theorists of the Italian seconda pratica and French
musique mesurée traditions related, poetry and poetic recitation held deep connections to
musical performance since ancient Greece. From at least the eighteenth through the early
twentieth centuries, some pedagogical texts incorporated punctuation marks and poetical
symbols into typical musical notation—further highlighting the gestural nuances of light
and weight, arsis and thesis, rhetorical pause, stress, and movement that standardized
musical notation failed to convey.
A few notable examples suffice to confirm the linguistic-musical conceptions of
“time” described in the eighteenth-century Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1737, Johann
Mattheson annotated a typical French minuet with poetical figures, attesting to the
nuanced rhythm that transcended mechanical precisions and proportional exactitudes. He
applied asterisks underneath the half-notes to document an additional pulse-weight—a
“pathetic accent”—required for the graceful mouvement of the melody.
72 “Music,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 43-44, n4.
56
Figure 1.14. Mattheson’s poetical notation for expressing the many nuances of musical movement.
Originally from Kern melodischer Wissenschafft (Hamburg: C. Herold, 1735) and reprinted in Lussy,
Traité de l'expression musicale, Deuxième Édition (Paris: Heugel et Cie., 1874), 26.
Mattheson again exposed additional elements of time, poise, breath, and emphasis that
were usually inaccessible through music notation. As a host of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century musicians including Quantz, Rameau, and Rousseau, and others
skilled in the French style reiterated: rhetorical and gestural rhythmical qualities could
never fully be depicted in musical notation. This fact prompted François Couperin to
assert for the French-style compositions of his age:
In my opinion, there are defects in our method of writing music…we write
differently from the way we play, which is the reason why foreigners [Italians] play
our music less well then we play theirs.73
Evidence suggests, however, that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French
publications were not the only repertoire performed differently than viewed.74
In
73 François Couperin, L'art de toucher le clavecin (1717), translated by Margery Halford (Van
Nuys, CA: Alfred Pub. Co., 1995), 49.
74
See Daniel Gottlob Türk’s Klavierschule, oder, Anweisung zum Klavierspielen für Lehrer und
Lernende: mit kritischen Anmerkungen (Reprint, Leipsig und Halle: Auf Kosten des Verfassers,
in Kommission bey Schwickert, 1802), in which Türk interprets the various ways to perform
ornaments and graces in late-eighteenth-century keyboard music by C. P. E. Bach, Mozart,
57
following decades and in other lands, theorists applied linguistic notation to typical music
passages to express the often-hidden nuances of musical time. For example, Joshua Steele
in the late eighteenth century and Christiani in the late nineteenth century similarly
related the general qualities of metrical movement to strong-weak speech accents.
Figure 1.15. Christiani’s correlation between the movements of speech and the fundamental
movements of measured music. From Christiani, 38-39.
Christiani and the Grove Dictionary applied poetical indications to Mozart’s and
Beethoven’s thematic structures, further suggesting the long-standing traditions
connecting musical time, accent, and phrase to poetic meters and spoken inflections.
Clementi, and others.
58
Figure 1.16. Examples of poetical-musical gestures interpreted within the phrase structures of Beethoven
and Mozart. Above, from Christiani, 207. Below, from the entry “Rhythm,” Grove, III (1880), 318.
Again, these poetical-musical notations—which were employed in education through the
late nineteenth-century and were occasionally printed in periodicals such as Etude
magazine—hint at rhythmical qualities born of willful performance practices, qualities
that transcended mathematical absolutes or mechanical references.75
As exposed through
these annotated poetical-musical examples, few if any commonalities were shared
75 As late as 1919 Paul Verrier considered spoken and musical time intricately intertwined. See
Paul Verrier, Essai sur les principles de la metrique anglaise, Three Volumes (Paris: H. Welter,
1909-1919).
59
between the self-referential, linguistic movement of musical time and objective ticks of
clockwork rhythm.
The Active Rhetoric of Musical Time, or Tempo Rubato
Beyond the nuanced movement of metered music, further complexities often appeared in
the subjective treatment of musical time. Many composer, theorists, and performers
likened this enhanced musical-temporal expressivity to the art and act of rhetoric. As
documented at least as early as Joachim Burmeister’s Hypomnematum musicae poeticae
(1599),76
rhetorical effects further extended the possibilities of musical time, providing
volatile and expressive techniques that enhanced text. (It could be argued that rhetoric has
directly informed the structures, rhythms, and gestures of music compositions—and
likely performance practices—at least since the sixteenth-century Italian madrigalists
such as Verdelot and Arcadelt.) As Diderot’s Encyclopédie recounts, rhetoric contained a
subjective species of mouvement all its own, a movement allied with the passions.77
Thus
music treatises spanning three centuries occasionally explain and expose an even more
willful species of temporality in which rhetorical movement was a guiding principle
behind musical tempos, pulses, and rhythms. Piano pedagogue Czerny, for example,
found musical time in the piano compositions of his age so inaccessible through standard
76 While Burmeister’s musical-rhetoric concerned compositional techniques, often as they related
to text, it seems highly plausible that—in an age of self-referential musical time—they extended
to performance practices as well.
77 See Encyclopédie, Vol. 10: 842: “Mouvement, ou Émotion, en Rhétorique. Voyez Passion.”
60
notation that he analyzed a living interpretation, bar by bar, in terms of rhetorical
movements and effects.
Figure 1.17. A passage from Czerny’s bar-by-bar performance analysis of rhetorical-musical time.
Reprinted in Christiani, 268.
Despite the continual changes in musical aesthetics and compositional practices
throughout history, and regardless of genre, era, or national style, an ontological fact
remained: skilled performers actively and definitively shaped musical time, pulse, and
movement prior to the twentieth century. One striking correlation of this assessment
appears as early as 1602, in Caccini’s Le nuove musiche, a treatise that documented
performance aesthetics nearly identical to Christiani’s Principles of Expression.
61
Figure 1.18. A passage from Caccini’s bar-by-bar performance analysis of rhetorical-musical time from
1602. Transcribed and translated in Strunk’s Source readings in music history, ed. Leo Treitler (New York:
Norton, 1998), 615.
The anonymous treatise the Choragus (c1630) verified the fluidly of musical movement
in early-Italian monody when tempered by the performer’s willful rhetorical-musical
sense: “since the [singing] actor must stop to sigh at length as nature tells him and hold
on to the same note more or less according to the affect, he should not be tied to any one
62
else’s measure [beat], but should freely follow the impulse of feeling, which is of great
importance in reciting [music] well.”78
It is also important to note that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italianate
recitative, born out of traditions of early monody, retained a rhythmical freedom unlike
that of metered music, grounded on a recurring and regular pulse-sense. This greater
rhetorical freedom offered by non-measured recitative was not lost on nineteenth-century
theorists such as Moritz Hauptmann, who explained the significant distinctions between
metered music and recitative as late as 1865. Writing to conductor Carl Kossmaly,
Hauptmann related that recitative should not be confined by strict tempo considerations,
referenced through time words, the recurring pulse-sense, or metronomic rules.
Hearkening back to traditions and practices of Caccini and the Choragus, Hauptmann
recounted, “Recitative has no metre, only rhythm and accent—a valuable and naturally
artistic quality, which ought not to be sacrificed to the tempo used to mark the beginning
of the actual piece, when it starts upon the course measured out for it. Here the old state
of things is certainly more poetical, and the new is very prosaic, as compared with it.
Recitative has many forms which ought to be retained: they were founded on vocal
expression by word of mouth, and grew up naturally of their own accord, with
Recitation.”79
More than any other musical styles, recitative and unmeasured recitative-
like passages in other genres projected a subjective “time” that was decidedly non-
mechanical in concept, sentiment, and practice.
78 Reprinted, translated, and edited in Strunk’s Source readings in music history, ed. Leo Treitler
(New York: Norton, 1998), 631.
79
Moritz Hauptmann, The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, edited by Alfred Schöne and Ferdinand
Hiller, translated by A.D. Coleridge, Volume II (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., and Richard
Bentley and Son, 1892), 252.
63
In defining the humanity of musical time through these sources, some
performance-practice questions linger: Did Caccini, the Choragus, Cernzy, Christiani,
and Hauptmann describe and endorse practices exclusive to their overly sentimental ages
and repertoires? Were they alone in condoning rhythmical flights of fancy—otherwise
known by that pejorative: the dreaded tempo rubato? Again, the problem can be partially
answered through the term tempo rubato itself, which has altered meanings alongside
“time,” “tempo,” and “rhythm” over the ages; Just as “time” is a relative indication based
on performance contexts and references, so too is the “stealing” of it. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century sources suggest there was no single rhythmical quality, no absolute
technique explaining what “rubato” actually signified. When considering Caccini,
Quantz, Christiani, and others, it seems that rubato—as “musical-temporal fluctuation or
variation”—was a common and desirable trait for a host of repertoires over the centuries.
Indeed, Paderewski was one of the last virtuoso performer-composers to maintain that
what many twentieth-century pedagogues and instrumentalists now derided as tempo
rubato, “is older than the Romantic school, it is older than Mozart, it is older than Bach.
Girolamo Frescobaldi, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, made ample use of
it.”80
Czerny’s contemporary Marx thought tempo rubato originated in French and
Italian vocal performances—both sacred and secular—from the mid-eighteenth century!
Yet he strongly believed rhetorical-rhythmical freedom and the historical tempo rubato
were two different considerations. In defining the “old” pejorative rubato, Marx cites the
80 See Louis C. Elson, Mistakes and Disputed Points in Music and Music Teaching (Philadelphia:
Theodore Presser Co., 1910), 96-97. Reprinted from Henry T. Fink, Success in Music and How
It’s Won (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909).
64
nineteenth-century musician who most exemplified the willful, rhetorical-temporal sense
cherished in his age:
The tempo rubato was a fashion of the eighteenth century, dating from the last
half, and came from the singers of Italy and France. It was intended to replace the
free, deep feeling which was wanting in the compositions themselves; this tempo
rubato was therefore an untruth, and was soon compelled to yield to the reaction
of reason. With this fashion (which amid other things became visible in
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater) Beethoven had nothing in common; he followed
entirely the inner impetus—the demand of the thing—when he resorted to free
movement.81
As Marx’s discourse on “rubato” relates, one musician’s “theft” of time is another
musician’s “freedom” from time. By the end of the nineteenth century, pedagogue Franz
Kullak recounted Schindler’s definition of “free interpretation,” once heard in
Beethoven’s performances, as a necessary musical-temporal act of rhetoric:
Although a poet writes his monologue or dialogue in a regular, progressive
rhythm, the reciter must, none the less, observe certain divisions and pauses in
order to bring out the sense, even where the poet could not indicate them by
punctuation; and this style of declamation is equally applicable to music, and is
modified only by the number of participants in the execution of the given work.82
Schindler, similar to Marx, recognized that nineteenth-century “free interpretation” was
not the eighteenth-century tempo rubato once heard in opera buffa. By the end of the
nineteenth century, Franz Kullak, in his treatise Beethoven’s Piano-playing, admitted of
this earlier performance practice, “We do not know what the buffo singer of the period
81 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, translated
by Fannie Louise Gwinner (Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1895), 73n.
82
Quoted in Franz Kullak, Beethoven’s Piano-Playing, translated by Theodore Baker (New York:
G. Schirmer, 1901), 24. Kullak quotes from Life of Beethoven (third ed., 213) that by 1858,
Schindler had asserted, “at the present time the true conception of free interpretation is utterly
lost.”
65
understood by ‘tempo rubato.’”83
Nevertheless, Kullak suggested that the “stolen” time
described by Türk and C. P. E. Bach might hold an answer to the eighteenth-century
interpretive practices. Kullak recounted that Türk’s tempo rubato comprised varieties of
voice separation—additionally nuanced, temporal qualities usually absent from
rhythmical notation.
Figure 1.19. Two performance interpretations of eighteenth-century tempo rubato. The original notation
appears on the left. From Türk, Klavierschule, Chapter, IV, Sect. 5, § 72. Reprinted in Franz Kullak,
Beethoven’s Piano-Playing, translated by Theodore Baker (New York: G. Schirmer, 1901), 25n.
Christiani cited three species of rubato: the first consisted of “any temporary retardation
or acceleration;” the second was the displacement of the invisible, weighted accent “by
which the time becomes robbed of its regular accents…(for example, syncopation).” He
defined the last rubato species as:
That capricious and disorderly mode of performance by which some notes are
protracted beyond their proper duration and others curtailed, without, however,
changing the aggregate duration of each measure, is a rubato. 84
Christiani’s third definition of rubato has two different species within itself, and one of
them is likened to voice separation: “It may be executed in two ways,” Christiani notes,
“1. Both hands in sympathy with each other, i. e., both hands accelerating or retarding
together. 2. Or, the two hands not in sympathy, i. e., the accompanying hand keeping
83 Kullak, 25n.
84
Christiani, 299.
66
strict time, while the other hand alone is playing rubato. The latter way is the more
beautiful of the two, and is the truly artistic rubato.”85
From these texts, it seems that the free interpretation of musical time—beyond the
sensory foundations of pulse, accent, and meter—was common practice in the music of
many traditions. Any rhetorical movement or performance technique diverging from the
regular pulse-sense could be considered “in rubato.” Indeed, references such as
Pilkington’s Musical Dictionary (1812), described tempo rubato as intrinsic to all
rhetorically affected interpretations:
TEMPO RUBATO. An expression applied to a time alternately accelerated and
retarded for the purpose of enforcing the expression.86
It can be assumed from this source that rubato was no less desirable or unwarranted an
interpretive technique than playing strictly and unwaveringly to the musical pulse: this
opposing temporal quality was tempo giusto, and according to Pilkington’s Dictionary, it
elicited a different temporal effect for specific musical passages or sections:
TEMPO GIUSTO. In equal and just time. An expression generally applied to the
manner of performing a steady, sound movement, less directed to the feelings
than to the judgment; more scientific than impassioned.87
According to this early-nineteenth-century source, giusto—the strict adherence to the
metric pulse—was a no more necessary or implied performance practice than rubato.
Each was used according to the musical circumstance, the composer’s occasionally
explicit indications, and ultimately the performer’s self-referential and rhetorical sense of
85 Ibid.
86 Pilkington, 75.
87
Ibid.
67
musical time. As Christiani recounted, even the strictness of a tempo-giuso performance
was an individual matter: ““Strict time-keeping involves naturally strict adherence to a
chosen tempo; though it does not imply that the tempo is the correct one. Thus, several
musicians may play the same piece in perfect time, yet, each one in a different tempo,
and neither in the composer's intended one.”88
Furthermore, as Pilkington’s Dictionary
suggested, Christiani considered rubato interpretations necessary for subjective,
rhetorically expressive performances:
Tact-freedom implies the faculty of hastening or slackening the tempo, knowingly
and intentionally, at such temporary moments as the character of the movement
not only suggests and justifies, but even requires. To which must be added the
ableness and certainty of returning to the normal tempo, whenever needed. This
shows expertness and masterly control.89
Christiani’s ultimate assessment was that artistry demanded a coexistence of rubato with
a strong sense of the tactus; A fine musician must understand and actualize both, thus
transcending the musical amateurism or vapid mathematical precision heard only with
beat-strictness: “Tact-freedom comprises all those transgressions and infringements of
strict time, including tempo, which are deliberately resorted to for the purpose of
imparting artistic variety to the stiffness of unchanging measured motion.”90
Caccini, Saint-Lambert, Christiani, Marx, H. W. Pilkington, and many others
consistently described musical time in these terms: as a living process, not a mechanical
precision. Thus, they implied that no document or machine could impart rhythmical
qualities to skilled musicians. In either a rubato or giusto performance, no metronome
88 Christiani, 260.
89
Ibid., 261.
90
Ibid., 263. See also page 300 for Christiani’s warning that neither technique should be
overdone.
68
could define living “expressions,” “feelings,” or “scientific judgments”—all of these
temporal assessments were still under the purview of the skilled timeist.91
As these
sources show, before the mechanical age of the twentieth century, there indeed existed a
truth to musical time, but it was based upon subjective realities, not abstract theorems or
absolute measurements. For Marx, “feeling may have an individual right, ‘its own
rhythmic progress,’ [which] is not scientific.”92
Not even a composer’s intentions
regarding time and tempo were absolute, as Czerny proved by offering the musical
novice some temporal variations for his very own “Andante” composition:
Figure 1.20. Czerny’s suggestions for expressive interpretation, which assumes standard performance
practices in rhetorical time. He exposes how musical time involves willful processes, not mechanical
precisions. Note that not one indication is labeled either “tempo rubato” or “tempo giusto.” Reprinted in
Christiani, 265.
91 Beethoven stated as much, as Marx relates: “In the autograph copy of the song ‘Nord oder
Süd’… there is distinctly written in Beethoven’s hand, ‘100 according to Mälzel; but this can
refer to the first measures only, for sentiment has also its peculiar rhythm; but this cannot be
entirely expressed in this grade.’” See Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven
Piano Works, 74.
92
Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, 74.
69
As the sources presented here confirm, the complete answers to musical temporality prior
to the twentieth century were found not in sight, but in sound. Rameau instructed on the
various speeds, meters, phrase structures, and beat-patterns of French airs, admitting:
“Every character and every passion has its own special movement, but this is more
dependent on taste than on rules.”93
Rameau, the renowned theorist of functional
harmony, maintained that no objective theory adequately defined the subjective qualities
of musical time. In matters of meter and time, musical taste trumped musical theory.
Christiani reiterated the longstanding aesthetic, that “As a rule, any group or figure, when
repeated, should be rendered in a different way, to avoid sameness.” He then described
how performers continually averted dreaded rhythmical stagnation through seemingly
anti-scientific practices: “Such alteration may be an augmentation or diminution of
emphasis, a lengthening or shortening of the extremes, etc… But the alteration may be
made in many other ways, as the occasion demands, and without following any
stereotyped rule.”94
Echoing composers of past centuries, Carl Maria von Weber understood that the
skilled performer held interpretive authority over the time, tempo, and rhetoric of even
the composer’s own works. Thus he too confirmed the necessary, underlying subjectivity
of musical time:
93 See Rameau, Traité de l'harmonie, livre second, 161: “Chaque caractere & chaque passion ont
leur mouvement particulier; mais cela dépend puls du goût que des Regles.”
94
Christiani, 159-160.
70
Every singer imparts, though unconsciously, the coloring of his own individual
character to the dramatic character which he sustains. Thus two singers…will give
the same composition in a manner widely different…and yet both may do justice
to the composer, inasmuch as both mark the gradations of passions in his
composition, faithfully and expressively, according to the nature and degree of
power possessed by each.95
Even a group of instrumentalists gauged their musical time through these highly nuanced
rhetorical activities, which, according to C. M. v. Weber, no notation could possibly
document:
The movement ought not to be a tyrannical check—a driving mill-hammer, but
must be to the composition, what pulsations is in the animal economy. There is no
slow movement in which passages demanding acceleration do not occur. On the
other hand, there is no quick movement but what requires, in many passages,
moderate retardation. These changes, in particular cases, are absolutely necessary
to expression.96
Others in the nineteenth century recognized that the best ensembles had pronounced
rhetorical-rhythmical abilities. Take for example, theorist Moritz Hauptmann’s letter to
his mentor Ludwig Spohr on December 1, 1842:
We had a wonderfully good performance of your Weihe der Töne in the
Gewandhaus the other day. It is a favourite Symphony with our audiences here,
and you yourself would have been delighted…the ensemble is very satisfactory,
and the rhythmical nuances are as animated as those of good Quartet players.97
Even Hauptmann, who theorized upon the perfect architecture of musical phrases—
grounded, of course, on the invisible accent—recognized that musical notation did not
truly reflect musical time. What Hauptmann related to Sphor was a rhythm transcending
95 C. M. Von Weber, “Letter By C. M. Von Weber on the Performance of Dramatic Song,” The
Harmonicon V, part 1 (1827): 220.
96
Ibid.
97
Hauptmann, 193.
71
both composer intention and Hauptmann’s own speculative rhythmic schemas. Even for
Hauptmann, living gestures presided over perfect symmetries.98
Figure 1.21. One example of Hauptmann’s rhythmical schemas that depict the usually invisible nuances of
musical accentuation for any given meter and phrase structure. From Moritz Hauptmann, The nature of
harmony and metre, translated and edited by W. E. Heathcote (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1888),
238.
98 Grove’s Dictionary also claimed that when this ensemble played in “strict” tempo, they were
not mechanically inflexible. Rhythmical nuances pervaded many of the Gewandhaus’ best
performances with Mendelssohn, who “held ‘Tempo rubato’ in abhorrence; yet he indicated
nuances of emphasis and expression—as opposed to the inevitable Accents described in the
forgoing article—with a precision which no educated musician ever failed to understand; and this
with an effect so marked, that, when even Ferdinand David—a Conductor of no ordinary
ability—took up the baton after him at the Gewandhaus, as he frequently did, the soul of the
Orchestra seemed to have departed…[Mendelssohn] knew how to beat strict Time with
expression.” See Grove, IV (1889), 125.
72
Prior to the vast incorporation of the clockwork metronome into modern pedagogies,
musical time was fundamentally formed from the variable, self-referential senses,
perceptions, and actions of experienced performers. Indeed, Shakespeare, in As you Like
It, again expressed pre-twentieth century performance aesthetics, extending from Caccini
to Czerny to Paderewski—in which variable human movement was not considered
temporal thievery—when Rosalind proclaimed far from the town clock:
Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles
withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still
withal.
Acknowledging the Limits of Musical Notation in Depicting
the Variable Qualities of Musical Time
The printed page seldom conveyed even the basic sensory qualities of time, affect,
movement, and gesture, and thus many acknowledged that rhythmical ambiguities would
always exist when performers read standard musical notation; these ambiguities were
especially problematic for the musical novice. Christiani confirmed: “Theorists say that
the irregular accents (emotional, aesthetical, rhetorical, or whatever name may be given
to them) have their root in the mood of the performer, and that can neither be anticipated
nor dictated. Moreover, lacking the appropriate musical indications for the emotions, a
composer cannot indicate them, hence the performer ought to divine them and accent
accordingly, although the accents are not indicated…This may be sufficient for the artist
or the master, but is quite inadequate for the majority of students and for teaching
purposes.”99
Over 150 years after Couperin assessed the problems between the page and
99 Christiani, 23.
73
performance of French music, Christiani likewise concluded there was an “old looseness
in rhythmic notation”100
following classical keyboard traditions:
With all due respect to the great pianoforte composers, from Mozart to Chopin, it
is quite plain, that, in point of rhythmic notation, the old masters were often very
inexact and careless…Rhythmic interpretation, of Chopin's passages, for example,
is often a sore puzzle, and rarely quite clear to the average player. And how could
they be otherwise, seing [sic.] that frequently a whole passage is suspended, so to
say, on the hook of a single note: 101
We cannot blame Chopin for writing his passages and cadenzas in a loose,
indefinite manner, inasmuch as he followed the custom of his time, according to
which his notation was quite natural and correct. Hummel, his predecessor, was
much more inexact.102
Christiani also recognized that the invisible musical accent transcended composer
intention or the vagaries of musical notation. In Principles of Expression in Pianoforte
Playing, he cites musical examples by Chopin and Schumann in which the sensory accent
of meter was obscured through odd time signatures or phrases “confusingly” placed in
relation to the metric pulse. Christiani nevertheless believed that the skilled performer’s
innate sense for musical time would prevail over the visual ambiguities of text, stating:
A composer may succeed in deceiving the reader's eye, but he cannot deceive the
listener's ear. Accents on a melody so plain as in this prelude will naturally assert
themselves, and fall together with the strong part of the time, in spite of
antagonistic notation.103
100 Ibid., 53.
101
Ibid., 52.
102
Ibid., 55.
103
Ibid., 91.
74
Figure 1.22. Above, Christiani’s example of “confused” music notation that obscures the performer’s
placement of sensory, musical accents. Below, Christiani publishes his own “natural notation” that allied
more closely to the rhythmic feeling of a triple meter, seemingly implied in Chopin’s melodic gestures.
Note that Christiani adds no metronome marks in the revision, only the emotional word “agitato.” See
Christiani, 89.
Marx—the theorist who codified Sonata form—also attested that the individual’s
rhythmical sense must transcend “a servile adhesion to the written directions.”104
Thus,
he strongly championed skilled performing “artists” of his age, because—similar to
compelling actors—they could creatively transcend the failings inherent in any printed
text, sonata publications included. In The Music of the Nineteenth Century and its
Culture, Marx asserted:
104 Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and its Culture, 267.
75
We have given and proved how…all writing, is necessarily defective and
insufficient. One who does not rely on his own feeling and perception, will not
gain the slightest security of correctness by limiting himself to written indications,
for he will at the same time be limiting himself to all their incompleteness and
poverty. Who would counsel an actor to recite his part in a lifeless way, just
because he might by instance take a false conception of it, or make an incorrect
accentuation?105
He concluded that machines such as “dynamometers” and metronomes must not
influence musical interpretations, rather, that “the feeling and perception of the executant
alone can supply all that in which written signs are defective.”106
Other notable theorists
throughout the nineteenth century recognized that the purely positivistic readings of
musical notation could not illuminate the nuanced qualities of rhythm; this was especially
true for older musical styles. Echoing Couperin’s realizations from the early eighteenth
century, the music researcher, editor, and composer Camille Saint-Saëns discussed the
peculiarities of eighteenth-century performance practices—primarily citing the French-
style vocal music of Handel and Rameau—in which sight and sound often failed to align.
Saint-Saëns keenly perceived a significant shift in rhythmical conception during his age:
In these days music is written almost exactly as it should be performed…In
former times, the ‘arithmetical’ value of the notes was not taken into account as it
is nowadays…there are innumerable signs the interpretation of which is
occasionally impossible, all contemporary methods indicating that they cannot be
described, and that to perform them one must have heard them sung by a
professor…a close study of these works has convinced me that the values of the
vocal parts are approximate, and that we must take into consideration,
declamation, not notation, if we are to interpret the melody part, and not merely
the recitative, in accordance with the real intention of the composer.107
105 Ibid.
106
Ibid., 257.
107
Camille Saint-Saëns, Outspoken Essays on Music, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922), 92, 94-95. It must be stated that “almost exactly” is yet another
culturally relative assessment.
76
Saint-Saëns asserted that over the course of the late nineteenth century the actualization
of rhythm, gesture, and ornament had palpably changed through greater adherence to
more mathematical and precise rhythmical notations. These “contemporary methods” of
publication deemphasized the non-notated, rhetorical (“declamatory”) qualities once
provided by subjective interpretations alone.
The insufficiency and ambiguity that Marx recognized in music notation was
being reined-in by the last decades of the nineteenth century, made more definitive and
precise through revised rhythmical notation and corresponding educational techniques.
Waning from performance practices was the realization that rhetorical-musical time was
invisible, variable, and individual. Christiani confirmed Saint-Saëns’s assertion: rhythmic
notations were read in a more mathematical, positivistic light in their day, especially for
instrumental compositions, which now offered editorialized dynamics, articulations,
phrasings—with revised rhythms as well. As Christiani documents by the last decades of
the nineteenth-century, music publications—in part catering to the wave of amateur
consumer-musicians—left very little to individual, interpretive license:
Modern composers (whatever the contents of their compositions may be)
endeavor at least to make their rhythmic notation plain and accurate. Many of the
old abbreviations — for instance, the numerous signs for ornamentation — are
now generally written in full; and passages, cadenzas, arabesques, are no longer
left to the individual fancy of the interpreter, but are represented clearly and
unmistakably.108
Oddly perhaps, while Christiani championed skilled “artistic” performers for their
nuanced pulse-sense and rhetorical movement, he oppositely supported revised editions
for sake of the “average player,” in which rhythm became less interpretive and more of
108 Christiani, 53.
77
what Saint-Saëns recognized as “arithmetical.” The interpretive freedom Marx so
cherished often seemed a nuisance to Christiani, who recounted: “We have to be very
thankful, that the old laxity of rhythmic notation, notably of grouping together a long row
of notes without any distinct division, is more and more disappearing.”109
Primarily for
the sake of modern students’ education, Christiani preferred revised publications for
“their modern accuracy,” a contrast from the “old laxity”110
of rhythmical notation
upholding the “old ad libitum style of interpretation.”111
With the trend towards precision-oriented editorial standards—seen through more
meticulously subdivided rhythmical notations—came the loss of the interpreter’s
“individual fancy” in musical time. Subjective “ad libitum” choice gave way to a greater
mathematical and eventually metronomic definitiveness. Christiani provides many
examples of modern rhythmic revisions, perhaps in an effort to stimulate music sales, in
which the modern editor, not the skilled timeist, becomes the primary temporal agent,
choosing the many now-specified nuances of rhythmical movement.
109 Ibid., 52.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., 53.
78
Figure 1.23. One of the numerous examples Christiani provides of improved notational “accuracy” in
modern editions, in which rhetorical movements and rhythmical nuances are pre-interpreted by the editor,
in this case Hans von Bülow. Articulations, trills, phrasings, and proportional tempo equivalence—but not
metronome marks—are added to the once-improvisatory rhythmical passage, which is nearly
unrecognizable in the revision below. Christiani argues that these interpretations were necessary for the
“average player,” who was perhaps lacking in advanced rhythmical and rhetorical senses. Christiani, 59.
This modern trend toward the precise, rhythmical “pre-interpretation” of historical music
became so prevalent, and so detrimental to once-subjective rhetorical performances, that
Edgar F. Jacques considered modern editions such as these—alongside a newfound,
anachronistic adherence to metronome indications—were in no small part responsible for
the reduction of both singers’ and instrumentalists’ individual expression, invention, and
creativity in the concert hall by the last decade of the century. Speaking to the Royal
Musical Association on December 8, 1891, Jacques stated:
I need only ask you to remember how the progress [of music publication] has all
along been in the direction of definiteness…how, finally, marks of expression
were added and words used to indicate speed, these being supplemented later by
metronome-marks. We have, indeed, so clipped the wings of the executant that
we no longer expect extemporized cadenzas, either in an opera or in a concerto.112
112 See Edgar F. Jacques, “The Composer’s Intention,” in Proceedings of the Musical Association,
18th Sess. (1891 - 1892): 42.
79
While Jacques lamented the loss of rhetorical musicality through increasingly precise,
positivistic treatments of rhythm, Christiani justified the necessity of these rhythmical
revisions due to the swell of mediocre performers, who perhaps had no comprehensive
training in the nuanced perceptions of musical rhetoric. For Christiani it was “better to
have all doubtful cases interpreted by a master rather than to leave them to the mercy of
every petty musician or amateur.”113
Christiani’s primary concern was in teaching amateurs, not artists, the basics of
expression in musical time. Most significantly, the influential pedagogue recognized that
the truly skilled musician would not take any editor’s prescriptions for rhythmical
interpretation literally or conclusively. As Christiani maintained, a skilled interpreter had
final authority over all notation and editorial revisions of musical time, since rhetorical
rhythmical choices remained in the experienced performer’s hands. Justifying his
proclivity for modernized editions, Christiani argues:
Let rigorous musicians grumble at such innovations, on the ground that those who
attempt to play Chopin should be sufficiently advanced to interpret his rhythm,
each one according to his own conception, thus leaving room for many different
ways, and not keeping to one particular idea or precept.
It may, however, be replied, that a player who is so far advanced in
maturity and intelligence, as to be able independently and correctly to interpret
Chopin, is himself the best judge whether or not he will accept Klindworth's, or
any other editor's, rhythmical interpretation.114
As Christiani explained, it was the musically ignorant masses that required rhythmical-
notational assistance, continuing, “those who are not so far advanced — and their number
113
Christiani, 61.
114 Ibid., 55.
80
is by far the greater — will unquestionably derive a great benefit by having pointed out to
them positively what would otherwise have been doubtful.”115
For skilled musicians,
however, subjectivity in time still reigned beyond the modern educator’s penchant to
quantify rhythms with increasingly mathematical and metronomic precisions.116
For the
average mass of musicians who could not aspire to artistry, Christiani believed
rhythmical certitude was necessary beyond performer choice; an editor’s modernized,
rhythmical interpretation sufficed for amateur-consumers’ purposes. Christiani confirmed
the performance-practice distinctions between musical artists of classical traditions and
the modern, musical dilettantes of his day:
The only advantage which is to be recognized in free rhythmical interpretation
over positive reading, based upon precise [notated] rhythmical division, is that the
former (at the hands of a master) may be accomplished in many different ways;
while the latter is limited to the indicated way alone.117
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a waning collection of pedagogues still
confirmed the predominance of subjective, nuanced delivery—in which performers’
rhetorical-rhythmical sense shaped musical time beyond insufficient written indications,
bypassing those interpretative “limitations” seen in the published “way alone.” In
America, Oberlin Conservatory Professor Edward Dickinson continued to dispel the
fallacy that composers’ wishes ever fully resided in rhythmical notation. As late as 1911,
he too recognized, in an age when the clockwork metronome became a standard temporal
reference:
115 Ibid.
116
Somewhat contradictory, Christiani stated that, “Subjectiveness [emotion] and objectiveness
[intellect] — as the Germans are fond of saying — play a great role in the choice of tempo, and,
frequently, even a greater one than the composer's positive indication.” Christiani, 262.
117
Ibid., 61.
81
That the composer should say to the player that here and here, and thus and thus
shall he make these expressive alterations of speed, is impossible. Rarely does he
attempt to do so. Here and there he will write ritardando or accelerando, but
precisely how much slower or faster, or exactly at what instant these changes
begin, cannot be indicated. In the wide spaces of the piece, however, no directions
are given. The composer implicitly says to the player: In the matter of tempo I put
myself in your hands, your musicianship is the arbiter; if my music sounds dull
and monotonous you must take a part or the whole of the blame, if otherwise a
goodly share of the honor shall be yours.118
The Failure of Metronomes to Relate the Humanity of Musical Time
The two-dimensional schema, the written page, or the ex post facto metronomic
indication did not encapsulate the “true” meaning of musical time well through the
nineteenth century, for—as only experience could prove—lifeless things did not regulate
the many nuances of rhythmical expression for skilled musicians. As over three centuries
of knowledgeable performers, composers, and theorists relate, metronomes—those time-
dictating machines, simple or complex—consistently failed to offer sufficient,
meaningful answers to the nuances of rhythm, tempo, accent, or meter. By historical
accounts—by historical temporal values—mechanical motion, seen either in the swing of
a pendulum or heard in the tick of clockwork, was not translatable or transferable to the
living experience of musical time. Metronomes projected a temporal epistemology in
conflict with traditional, self-referential understandings of musical time as sensed,
conceived, and practiced for centuries. Even on the most fundamental level, adhering to
external metronomic precisions and sensing the weighted pulse-accent were opposing
temporal epistemologies; Mechanical measurement did not equate to human perceptions
and movements.
118 Edward Dickinson, The Education of a Music Lover (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1911), 118-120.
82
In the 1630s, Marin Mersenne first theorized that the simple pendulum could
perhaps be a reference to musical performances. But in an age without trustworthy,
precise, or portable mechanical timekeepers, he also postulated that a person’s variable
heartbeat could judge the hour of day.119
As science historians are well aware, the
isochronism—or equal-swinging quality—of the simple pendulum was first discovered
by Galileo Galilei, who timed a moving lamp at the Pisa Cathedral to an exceedingly
familiar tempo source for musicians such as his father: the self-referential heartbeat. The
subjective pulse was a common and accepted temporal reference for Galileo’s day,
apparently for both music performances and empirical observation. Informed by
Galileo’s discovery, Mersenne eventually discounted his own tempo-pendulum theory,
recognizing that a subjective, sensory world ultimately defined time in music beyond the
mechanical isochronism of the pendulum. For Mersenne, his own musical-pendulum
concept was completely wanting as a practical solution:
Because [musicians] change the measure [pulse] many times, either binary or
ternary, in performing a single piece of music, [and] by hurrying or holding back
the lowering and raising [of the hand] according to the character and the words, or
the different passions of the text which they treat, it is difficult to apply any
certain rule if they do not use as many different [pendulum] strings as they wish
to have different meters [pulses].120
119 See Marin Mersenne, Traite' de l'harmonie universelle ou est conteu la Musique Theoretique
et pratique (Paris, 1627); “Critical translation of the second book” by John Bernard Egan (Ph.D.
diss., Indiana University, 1962), 43-4. Mersenne states, “It is certain that the beating of the pulse
can be low and deep, rapid or slow, small and feeble, or vehement, equal, or unequal, like sounds,
so that one could find all musical intervals in the different pulse of the same person at various
times, in diverse moods, health, and sickness. Some maintain that one can tell what time it is by
the movement of the pulse. The pulse quickens its movement from midnight on or from six
o'clock in the morning until noon.”
120
Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle (Paris: Cramoisy, 1636); translated by Carol
MacClintock in Readings in the History of Music Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1979), 154.
83
The tactus—the movement of the hand itself—as Mersenne clearly explains, was not a
pendulum, and certainly not a ticking clock that measured proportions in any objective or
exacting fashion. Mersenne confirmed the rhetorical-temporal practices of his day: the
tactus was beholden to the will of the interpreter alone. The objective pendulum and the
subjective musical pulse portrayed two different “times.”
For a time-telling culture that recognized clear imperfections in personal time-
keeping machines, self-referential standards remained for many the most precise and
reliable references available, well through the eighteenth century. Etienne Loulié, the
“inventor”121
of the first seemingly practical tempo machine, the chronométre, also
acknowledged the preeminence of human interpretation, and suggested that his six-foot
simple pendulum, which he promoted in his 1696 treatise Eléments ou principes de
musique, was an still an approximation of the initial human tactus—a reference especially
necessary for the new and foreign music of his day. In Eléments, Loulié explains the
chronométre is, “an instrument by means of which composers of music will henceforth
be able to indicate the true tempo of their compositions and their Airs, will be able to be
performed in their absence as if they themselves were beating time.”122
Even the early Encyclopædia Britannica realized—over 150 years after
Mersenne and nearly a century after Loulié’s Elements—that the self-referential tempo
121 As early-modern inventor, Loulié promoted a design and description based largely on
Mersenne’s tempo-pendulum theories. He did not manufacture the chronométre for distribution
or sale.
122 Etienne Loulié, Eléments ou principes de musique, trans. and ed. Cohen (New York: Institute
of Mediaeval Music, 1965), 85. (Italics mine.) Loulié assumes the composer-performer to be the
primary dictator of tempos.
84
was a more desirable, “precise,” and “sensible” standard for music making than a
swinging simple pendulum could ever offer:
It is a surprising phenomenon to observe with how much precision, by the
assistance of a little habit and practice, initiates may be brought to follow and
distinguish the times, with an equality so perfect, that no pendulum can vibrate
more justly than the hand or foot of a good musician, and that even the internal
perception of this equality is sufficient to conduct them and to answer with
accuracy every purpose of sensible motion; so that, in a concert, every performer
plays or sings the bar [the pulse-accent] with the utmost exactitude, without
hearing the time distinguished by any other, or distinguishing it himself any other
ways that by the succession of his own ideas.123
The Encyclopædia Britannica asserted that human time was more perfect, more “precise”
than mechanical motion. For a pre-industrial musical culture, the prevailing belief
seemed to be that the “precision” of qualitative rhythmic sensations, the “sensible
motion” of living musical time, trumped clockwork consistency. The “perfect” and
subjective “internal perceptions” of time formed through a “succession of ideas”
predominated over simple-pendulum oscillations in concept and practice.
These early-modern sources suggested that musical-temporal “perfection” was
inherent in human-derived references. If perfect early-modern tempos could be derived
from the physical movement and pulse-sense of living interpreters, then William Tans’ur,
in a telling irony, defined objective pendulum swings using astoundingly apt
comparisons:
123 “Time,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 8613.
85
Four Pulses of a Pendulum [are] nearly the Space between the Beat of the Pulse
and Heart; (the Systole or Contraction answering to the Elevation or Lifting up of
the Hand, and its Diastole or Dilation, to the Letting it down, &c.) The like being
understood of the Pendulum both Course, and Recourse, is such a certain Space of
Time.124
In the early-modern age, the fundamental tempo reference was the individual pulse-sense,
a measure validated during the discovery of the isochronous pendulum swing by Galileo,
who only perceived this external, equal-moving phenomenon through the comparison
with his own heartbeat. Rousseau also described how the “perfect” technique for
dictating musical time stemmed not from any beat-per-minute designations or pendulum
swings, but from fundamental, long-understood physical processes:
Beating of time is the manner of marking the time by the motion of the hand or
foot, which regulates its duration, and by which all its measures of the same
degree are rendered, in the execution, perfectly equal in the chronic value of
time.125
For Rousseau and others in the early-modern age, the living pulse-sense contained the
appropriate and desirable temporal precision. Consequently, any externalized, mechanical
musical-temporal guide—whether it was a pendulum swing or a clockwork click—was
often looked upon as an impossibility for performance practices, seen as a less “accurate”
form of musical time and action, due to the stagnant or lifeless mode of tempo, pulse, and
rhythm that machines conveyed.
Thus, almost a century after Quantz stated that it was impossible to play exactly
under an exactly and continuously regulated pulse-standard, and that the chronométre
124 William Tans'ur, A new musical grammar, and dictionary: or, a general introduction to the
whole art of musick, (London: Robert Brown, for James Hodges, 1756), 49.
125 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Beating of Time,” translated in Appendix to Grassineau’s Musical
dictionary, selected from the Dictionnaire de musique of J. J. Rousseau (London: J. Robson
1769), 6.
86
was an ineffectual substitute, Hector Berlioz similarly described the proper use of
Maelzel’s clockwork metronome—the first widely promoted and produced tempo
reference—as a mere, mechanized reflection of a more “perfect” living sense. Like the
late eighteenth-century chronométre, the more precise clockwork metronome was still a
substitute for initial, “human” beat indications; it was not to be mistaken for a mechanical
regulator, as Berlioz explains:
I do not mean to say…that it is necessary to imitate the mathematical regularity of
the metronome; all music so performed would become of freezing stiffness, and I
even doubt whether it would be possible to observe so flat a uniformity during a
certain number of bars.126
Despite the composer’s recognition that neither the metronome, nor any machine, was a
regulator of subjective musical time, misconceptions in the use of the machine abounded
during Berlioz’s lifetime and well through the nineteenth century. Richard Storrs Willis,
in an 1853 article “On Musical Tempo,” confirmed:
There are many persons, however, who mistakenly think that the intention of the
metronome is to have its unvarying beat followed throughout an entire piece,
denying all freedom to the play of feeling.127
The metronome projected an alternate species of “time,” an anti-human time now
imposed through clockwork regulation. Prior to the twentieth century, when the musical
126 Hector Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary
Cowden Clarke, (London: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1856), 246. As musical visionary, Berlioz was
one of the only composer-directors to claim a significant practical purpose and use for the
clockwork metronome. Berlioz personally employed metronomes during his opera rehearsals so
that offstage chorus directors—with meager musical abilities—would be more likely correspond
to the tempo of onstage performers. Such use of Maelzel’s metronome was uncommon, and
Berlioz admits that not many French opera companies employed his suggestions.
127
Richard Storrs Willis, “On Musical Tempo,” Musical World and New York Musical Times,
June 11, 1853, 82. After this initial caveat, the article provides an introduction in the use of the
metronome, derived from earlier documents, including Hummel’s and Maelzel’s own
instructions.
87
performance adhered strictly to the beat—as the term guisto implied—tempo was still
connected to the pulse-sensation, not to mechanical references. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Franz Kullak reminds musicians that exactitude in musical time is a
culturally contextual variable, not a mechanical-temporal constant for all ages:
We, and probably Ries, too, understand by ‘strictness in tempo’ only the strictness
of a steady musician, and not an invariable and absolute coincidence with the
strokes of a metronome, hardly needs to be added. We are also well aware that
even the steadiest musician warms to his work, and calms down at a fitting
opportunity; and it may be said, in general, that occasional slight ritardandi at
transitional passages, on the resumption of the main theme, or before fermate, are
most to be recommended among all subjective deviations from the tempo, and
may be employed in concertos, in so far as they are applicable, in unaccompanied
passages.128
Marx also expressed the drastic differences between mechanical motion and musical
time:
In truth, however, music is little concerned with the mathematically exact division
of quarters. Her object is to excite and to manifest the emotions of the heart and of
the soul; and in that view the approximative directions of the composer are
appropriate for her and true to nature, than metronomic exactitude.129
He knew that suggestive words were more vital than metronomic rules due to the
inherent, desirable subjectivity displayed in self-referential tempos and rhetorical
performance practices:130
128 Kullak, 31.
129
Marx, General Music Instruction, 33.
130
Ironically, Beethoven and Maelzel first promoted the metronome, and more importantly the
metronomic scale, in order to replace traditional Italian tempo words, which Beethoven believed
no longer related to the true emotional character of his music. Yet, Beethoven recognized that
other time and affect words could never be done away with, since they still signified the
interpretive, qualitative “spirit” transcending quantified indications.
Writing to Ignaz Franz, Elder von Mosel in 1817, Beethoven explained: “To take one
example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which really signifies merry, and how very far
removed we often are from the idea of that tempo. So much so that the piece itself means the very
opposite of the indication…But the words describing the character of the composition are a
different matter. We cannot give these up. Indeed the tempo is more like the body, but these
88
Consequently the vague but less restrictive indications by means of general terms
appear to be more congenial than a rigorous subdivision into minutes and seconds
by the metronome. The musical executant, or the director of a grand performance,
must indeed endeavor to conceive and represent as faithfully and earnestly as
possible the spirit of the composition; hence, it is incumbent on him also to pay
the greatest attention to the time indicated by the composer.131
All aspects of musical temporality, as Marx reiterated, rested with the skilled performer,
who was the final temporal agent:
But all ultimately depends upon his [the musical executant’s or director’s] own
animus, and the degree in which the work identifies itself with his feelings; for
from his own inspired conception alone can it be rendered with animation and
effect; while, if performed according to mere abstract and mechanical rules, it
remains inanimate and unanimating.132
By 1827, C. M. v. Weber similarly considered the complete failure of metronomes and
metronomic indications to relate the complexity heard in human-derived musical time:
Such indications can be found only in the feelings of the performer, or of the
director; if they exist not in one of the two, the metronome is unable to supply the
want; all that this can do is, mechanically to prevent any gross mistakes. As to an
attempt to denote all the delicate shades of feeling, and the consequent
modifications necessary to give full effect to a performance, I have found every
endeavor fruitless, and have desisted from the task as hopeless.133
As accounts attest well through nineteenth century, skilled musicians neither completely
trusted nor desired temporal machines—the timekeepers of science, industry, and
travel—as musical references, since the sensory qualities of rhythm, pulse, and
proportion—the “wavy outline” of musical time—consistently trumped the “flat
certainly refer to the spirit of the composition.” See Ludwig van Beethoven, Letters, Collected,
translated and edited by Emily Anderson, Volume II (London: Macmillan; New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1961), 727, letter 845.
131 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Universal School of Music, translated from the Fifth Edition of the
Original German by A. H. Wehrhan (London: Robert Cocks and Co., 1853), 85.
132
Ibid.
133
C. M. von Weber, 220.
89
stiffness” of clockwork. Affirmations of these human-temporal qualities even appeared in
middle-class America, in magazines such as Church’s Musical Visitor, in which amateurs
were reminded: “It should be borne in mind that the real use of the metronome, of any or
all descriptions, is to indicate the speed of the movement. A few swings of the tape or
pendulum are quite sufficient for this purpose. No good musician will need or use [the
metronome] for ‘keeping time.’”134
Marx listed a myriad of reasons why the machine was practically useless for all
skilled musicians’ sensibilities, citing Beethoven as the paradigmatic, nineteenth-century
musical “artist”:
However valuable the instrument [metronome] may be to the composer, for a safe
placing of the tempo desired by him, an absolute determination of the tempo is
not in accordance with the spirit of art. The tempo is determined not only by the
thought out of which a work of art has sprung, and by the manifold contents
thereof, but also by the temporary mood of the performer; the amount of vibrating
material (whether an orchestra is abundant or limited in numbers), the breadth of
the room in which the tone waves are to be developed, require consideration. This
probably explains (at least in part) the unanimous declaration of Czerny, Madame
von Ertmann, and others [that] Beethoven…played his compositions differently
every time.”135
It seems that this practice of unfettered rhythmic interpretation—beyond notation, beyond
mathematically precise readings, beyond metronomes—was afforded to all creative
musicians throughout Western history. Beethoven himself was quoted as expressing the
variability of tempo words in relation to musical movement. For instance, the term
Andantino is “sometimes…very nearly an Allegro; on the other hand, it is often to be
134 [Article 1, no title], Church’s Musical Visitor, January 1882, 102; http://www.proquest.com/
(accessed March 13, 2007).
135
Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, 68.
90
played Adagio.”136
Metronomic indications, according to Ignaz Moscheles—an important
“metronomiser” of Beethoven’s published music—were never to be employed as
objective dictators for the living interpretation of Beethoven’s compositions. In his 1841
edition of Schindler’s The Life of Beethoven, Moscheles assumed:
The musical world knows that marking time by a metronome is but a slight guide
for performers and conductors. Its object is to show the general time of a
movement, particularly at its commencement; but it is not to be followed strictly
throughout; for no piece, except a march or a dance, would have any real life and
expression, or light and shade, if the Solo performer, or the orchestra under its
conductor, were strictly to adhere to one and the same tempo, without regard to
the many marks which command its variations…The player or conductor, who
enters into the time and spirit of the piece must feel when and where he has to
introduce the necessary changes: and these are often of so delicate a nature, that
the marks of the metronome would become superabundant, not to say
impossible.137
As these comments uncover, mechanical regulations were never intended to predominate
over musical time well into the nineteenth century. In the previous century, philosopher
and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the son of an esteemed Swiss watchmaker—
likewise understood that the art of rhythm was not a mechanical activity; that musical
proportion was still tempered by human sensation and volition, not by clockwork
measurements. Citing nearly identical arguments as nineteenth-century theorists,
Rousseau stated in Europe’s largest compendium of knowledge to-date, under the
heading “Chronometer”:
136 Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven's letters: a critical edition, with explanatory notes by Dr.
A. C. Kalischer, translated by J. S. Shedlock, Volume 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1909), 281.
137Anton Schindler, The Life of Beethoven: Including His Correspondence with His Friends,
Numerous Characteristic Traits, and Remarks on His Musical Works, edited by Ignaz Moscheles,
Volume II (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 111fn.
91
The connoisseurs in music…object…to all chronometers in general, that there is
not perhaps in an air two measures that are exactly of the same duration: there are
two things which necessarily contribute to relax or to augment the measure; one
is, the taste and harmony in the pieces of several parts, and the other, the taste and
surmise of harmony in the Solo. A musician, who is master of his art, has not
played four measures of an air before he seized its character, and gives himself up
to it: it is the pleasure of the harmony that alone directs him. Here he endeavors
after strong accords, and there he passes them slightly over; that is to say, he sings
or plays more or less slow from one measure to another.138
In Rousseau’s’ description, no trace of speculative philosophy is evident; he speaks of an
audible, subjective reality, in which the meaning of musical time rested on the variable
expressions of rhythm and pulse. Musical time was about subjective taste, and taste was
gained through personal education and experience alone. Consequently, Rousseau
criticized the purpose of any temporal machine. While he specifically cited Loulié’s
short-lived simple pendulum design from the late seventeenth century, Rousseau’s late
eighteenth-century comments applied to all mechanical measurers for music, which
would become increasingly precise over future decades:
Whatever instrument may be invented to regulate the duration of measure, it will
be impossible, tho' it should be of the most easy execution, that it should ever take
place in practice. The musicians, a confident set of people, and making, like many
others, their own taste the rule of what is right, will never adopt it. They will
neglect the chronometer, and will be only guided by the true character and the
true movement of the airs. Therefore the only good chronometer that it is possible
to have, is an expert musician, who has a fine taste; who has well considered the
music he is to execute, and knows how to beat the time. Machine for machine, it
is best to keep to this.139
Rousseau agreed with many philosopher-musicians before and after his age: the
rhetorical movements and pulses shaping musical time originated solely within the
138 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Chronometer,” translated in Appendix to Grassineau’s Musical
dictionary, selected from the Dictionnaire de musique of J. J. Rousseau (London: J. Robson
1769), 10. In part, Rousseau argues on behalf of Diderot.
139 Rousseau, trans. Grassineau,10-11.
92
abilities of the skilled timeist. Yet, as twentieth-century culture attests, Rousseau’s
assertion did not hold forever; eventually Maelzel’s metronome would be on the pianos
of nearly every amateur, middle-class musician across the world. The metronome would
form a part of the daily practice routines of conservatory and professional performers in
Western orchestral traditions. Scholarly and critical writings would eventually place as
their point of reference the ability of musicians to perform under metronomic
“precisions” that were absolutely “intended by the (long-deceased) composer.” Through
nineteenth-century developments in music education and performance—as following
chapters show—Rousseau’s proclamation overturned completely: by the twentieth
century, many “classically trained” and “historically informed” musicians adopted
metronomes and their beats-per-minute indications, unfailingly and unquestioningly, as
the absolute dictators of time, tempo, pulse, and rhythm. As our contemporary musical
culture’s now overwhelming familiarity with metronomes attests, tempo-machines did
not keep to themselves.
The Pulse and the Pendulum in Nineteenth-Century Traditions
As Rousseau’s critiques allude to, a limited “chronométre tradition”—for which
twentieth-century performance-practice scholars such as Borrell, Harding, Sachs, and
Schwant consider the origins of a modern “clockwork metronome tradition”—followed
Loulié’s pendulum design through published writings by French Academy of Science
members Joseph Sauveur and Comte d’Onzembray, and only one contemporaneous
French music publication, Michel L’Affilard’s (1656-1708) fifth edition of Principes
93
très-faciles (1705).140
Yet, if Loulié’s pendulum was a useful and desirable tool, one
corresponding to the widespread metronomic tradition of the twentieth century, then
historical musicology has yet to explain why no other Ballard music publication spanning
the eighteenth century offers markings or a comprehensive description for this machine.
As discussed in his acoustics treatise Système general des intervalles des sons
(1701), Sauveur’s “improvement” of the chronométre—which replaced Loulié’s non-
standardized pendulum ruler with a scale for “astronomical inches” most familiar to clock
builders and Academy members—followed the trends of seventeenth-century pendulum
scientists, most notably Galileo Galilei and Christiaan Huygens. As such, Sauveur’s
revised time-scale for the six-foot tempo-pendulum design was more speculative than
practical, especially since Joseph Sauveur himself, as sources thorough the nineteenth-
century relate, “was deaf, he had a false voice, and no appreciation of music,”141
and “he
had no musical voice nor ear [and] was obliged to borrow other people’s voice and
ears.”142
Nevertheless, even Sauveur, with his limited practical or sensory knowledge of
musical tone and time, recognized that the chronométre—when marked with precise
astronomical inches—was still not a clockwork astronomical regulator, but a more limited
140 Many of the vocal compositions found in L’Affilard’s fifth edition of Principes très-faciles
(1705) were revised versions of his previous edition (1701), which contained no tempo-pendulum
indications. (L’Affilard’s fourth edition appeared five years after Loulié published the
chronométre design.) L’Affilard’s works are airs de cour representative of the time. As skilled
French musicians may have recognized—and as Loulié’s own indications suggest—these airs do
not seem in particular need of pendulum numbers, since they were neither foreign nor unusual in
style, meter, or sentiment.
141 John Henry Pepper, Cycolpaedic Science Simplified (London: Frederick Warne and Co.,
1869), 514.
142
Charles Hutton, A philosophical and mathematical dictionary, volume II (London: Printed for
the author, 1815), 357.
94
mechanical reflection of the living tactus in which “each vibration [of the pendulum] is
equal to the movement of the hand.”143
In the nineteenth century, Gottfried Weber recalls that a host of obscure tempo-
tools, including the chronométre, preceded the Maelzel metronome. None gained any
lasting success with either composers or performers, as Weber states, “various machines
have been invented and proposed since the seventeenth century, under the names of
Measure-measurers, Measure-clocks, Musical Time-measurers, Chronometers,
Rhythmometers, Metrometers, Measure-indicators, Tempo-indicators, and the like, which
were intended to strike quicker or slower, just according as they were regulated to this or
that particular number; and hence, in compliance with this plan, musical composers,
instead of employing the technical terms Allegro, Andante, and the like, were now, with
reference to these striking machines, hereafter merely to place the following signs at the
commencement of their piece of music.”144
Gottfried Weber’s recognition—that eighteenth-century “proto-metronomes,”
including Loulié’s chronométre, had heretofore failed in theory and practice—seems to
be justified given similar comments by Tomlinson, Quantz, and Rousseau over the course
of the early-modern age. English composer Thomas Wright, when promoting his own
variety of tempo-machine, also commented as late as 1795, “the elaborate Chronométres
of Monsieur Loulié, and Monsieur Sauveur, with the Metrometre of later invention, have
143 See Joseph Sauveur, Principes D'Acoustic et de Musique ou Systeme General des Intervalles
des sons (Paris, 1701). For an additional discussion see Robert Eugene Maxham, “The
contributions of Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716) to acoustics,” Vol. I (Ph.D. diss., Eastman School
of Music, 1976), 28-29.
144 G. Weber, General music teacher, 74.
95
failed of success.” 145
The apparent failure of eighteenth-century tempo machines—not
only of Loulié’s chronométre but of later more scientific and precise “improvements”—
in becoming necessary or desirable aids to musical practice and pedagogy, is further
suggested by the clear absence of numerical-mechanical tempo data in the majority of
early-modern music publications throughout Europe. It seems that many skilled
musicians neither seriously considered nor utilized tempo-machines well through the
eighteenth century because of an inability for external, artificial swings to reflect living
references and musical practices—and not the inability of pendulums to exactly mimic
modern-day metronomes.
As this study explores, the incorporation of any technology into common usage is
never an instantaneous process; the acceptance of machines into society takes time, and
this is especially true for the clockwork metronome. The move towards mechanical
tempo reference was gradual, and evidence strongly suggests that before the clockwork
metronome became an accepted standard for music education, the homemade simple-
pendulum “metronome,” fitted with Maelzel’s beats-per-minute scale, seemed to be a
more convenient and inexpensive solution for early-nineteenth-century educators and
theirs students. For those amateurs still learning the sensory fundamentals of becoming a
good timeist, Maelzel’s tempo ruler did offer the most standardized method to-date for
describing the initial pace of uncommon, difficult, and new music. But many considered
the clockwork machine that dictated those values to be overly precise, expensive, and
potentially damaging to musical sensibilities. Thus, while Mersenne, Quantz, Rousseau,
145 See Thomas Wright, A Concerto for Harpsichord. Reprinted in R. E. M. Harding, Origins of
Musical Time and Expression (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), Plate 17.
96
and the early Encyclopædia Britannica denied the practicality of the pendulum and
chronométre, some nineteenth-century theorists and pedagogues reconsidered the role of
older technology in practice, claiming that Maelzel’s new beats-per-minute scale was best
measured, not by Maelzel’s new and expensive metronome, but by a far less complicated
swinging pendulum—a basic machine first discounted by Mersenne in the 1630s and
later championed by Loulié and Sauveur at the end of the seventeenth century.
According to many nineteenth-century instructors, the simple pendulum had many
advantages over the clockwork metronome, as Weber explains: “such metronomical signs
are not only useless to all those who do not possess [Maelzel’s] machines, but also even
to those who have them, except in cases where the machine can be placed close by.
[Surmounting this problem] can in fact be done by using, instead of Maelzel's machine,
as can be done with entire satisfaction, merely a simple thread pendulum, i. e. any small
weight as e. g. a lead ball of any size that may be preferred, suspended by a thread; an
instrument, which every one can manufacture for himself in two minutes' time.”146
The
self-referential tempo was once the most simple, desirable, and common standard for
gauging musical time. And for a culture that still placed greater emphasis on subjective
interpretation in performance than mechanical objectivity, Weber claimed the self-built
simple pendulum was far more desirable than an exceedingly precise metronome. In the
eighteenth century, the pulse-sense prevailed over tempo-pendulum technology, yet in the
nineteenth century, the swinging pendulum prevailed over clockwork complexity. Weber
nevertheless related a musical and educational culture still largely unconcerned with
146 G. Weber, 75.
97
mechanical-temporal precisions, as he encouraged students to construct a simple tempo-
pendulum:
This operation is the more easy, inasmuch as such a proceeding with the
pendulum requires throughout no particular exactness and care, farther than only
perhaps that one do not allow the pendulum to make too large or wide vibrations,
because in the case the ball imperceptibly retards its motion. On the other hand, it
is not at all necessary to measure the inches with very particular exactness; for
even a very considerable difference of length, as e. g. the difference between 15
and 16, amounts, musically considered, to a mere nothing; and even that between
15 and 17 or 18 is scarcely perceptible.147
Weber explains that mechanical “exactness” was unnecessary in relation to the known,
fluctuating temporality of music performances. While Maelzel’s standardized beats-per-
minute scale was helpful, Weber considered that the usefulness, accessibility, and
convenience of his own methods made Maelzel’s complicated machine practically
defunct:
We see from all this, with what perfect convenience a mere simple thread
pendulum can supply the place of a metronome; and that it would not therefore be
amiss, if the composer should write the corresponding lengths of pendulum
alongside his designation of lime according to the degrees of the metronome, as
e.g.
Andante, Mälzel metron. q = 60 (Pend. 38 Rhen. inch);
for, such a designation of time would be immediately practicable to every one, as
well by means of a simple thread pendulum, as by means of a metronome, and
might thus be understood by thousands of readers, players, or music directors, to
whom a designation of time written merely according to metronomical degrees is
unintelligible, for the want of an opportunity to consult the oracle of a metronome
or of a reduction table. One might, moreover, for the accommodation of those
who may not be acquainted with the inch used, or who may not have it
immediately at command, cause an inch scale to be printed in connection with this
designation of the time. Then it would be entirely immaterial, whether one should
use the Rhenish or the Parisian inch, the English inch, the French metre [mètres],
or whatever else, as a measure; for, a piece of music thus marked, carries with
147 Ibid., 76.
98
itself, wherever it goes, its measure of time together with the measure of the inch
employed in designating the time.148
Perhaps unwittingly, Weber offered a pedagogical tempo-aid first propounded by
Mersenne in the early seventeenth century; first promoted by Loulié in the late
seventeenth century; discounted by Quantz, Rousseau, and the Encyclopædia Britannica
in the late eighteenth century; and only reconsidered in 1813. Between the lifetimes of
Mersenne and Weber—and despite Maelzel’s new and obscure invention—very little had
progressed in the technology of musical-time telling.
Marx confirmed that the simple pendulum was the most appropriate tool for an
average student who wished to find initial tempos in nineteenth-century music. Although
Marx rejected any metronome as the indicator of musical expressivity, he recognized that
the silent pendulum, as an initial pulse reference, was not to be utilized as a constant
mechanical regulator. Ease of use outweighed the precision of external tempo-tools, as
Marx relates: “A more simple contrivance, which is cheaper and less liable to get out of
order than the wheelwork of Maelzel, is the String Pendulum, recommended by Gottfried
Weber, consisting merely of a string divided into certain proportions, by means of knots,
&c. and to one end of which a small leaden weight is attached.”149
Marx’s contemporary,
the French pedagogue and musical conservative François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871),
148 Ibid.
149
Marx, The universal school of music, 83. In a footnote to the page, Marx’s translator solicits
readers to purchase the now-“superior” clockwork metronomes produced and sold by the
publisher of this very edition, attesting to the strong commercial link between metronome sales
and music publications: “The translator takes great pleasure in directing the attention of
musicians and amateurs to the Metronomes (with or without bell) sold by Messrs. Cocks & Co.
He has inspected and tried a great number of them, and can testify to their elegance, superior
workmanship, and preciseness of action. (Vide also Hamilton's Treatise on the Metronome,
published by the same firm.)”
99
while one of the most prominent champions of Maelzel’s clockwork metronome in the
early nineteenth century, too realized that “chronometers of the [simple pendulum]
kind…have the double advantage of being simple in their construction, and of trifling
expense.”150
Many pedagogues over the nineteenth century attested that the simple
pendulum—as a reference to the living, musical pulse—was no clockwork metronome. It
did not click or move perpetually, and because it was a visual aid, the pendulum swing
was only a brief reference that could not be adhered to while performing music—thus
leaving the process of musical time safely in the hands of the timeist. The simple
pendulum assisted amateurs in feeling the weighted pulse, not in regulating each internal
beat in every bar, in perpetuam. As a host of educators instructed, the pendulum was not
the a priori indicator of time—it visually suggested the sensory pulse, the self-referential
standard known before the pendulum or metronome ever existed. Such simple-pendulum
“metronomes” took on many forms over the century, and John W. Tufts claimed to invent
one popular design, the “pocket metronome,” by the 1860s. Intended specifically to assist
young amateurs, the pocket metronome—a bob with a retractable tape-measurer—closely
followed the concept of Weber’s chronometer. Tuft’s The Cecilian series of study and
song (1892) reports:
150 François-Joseph Fétis, Music explained to the world: or, How to understand music and enjoy
its performance, translated for the Boston Academy of Music (Boston: Benjamin Perkins, 1842),
37. An important proponent of the French conservatory system, Fétis seems to be unique in
stating his preference—in the third decade of the nineteenth century—for the “clicking”
Maelzel’s metronome above various simple-pendulum designs, which contrastingly “have the
inconvenience of not making sensible to the ear the tick or stroke of time.”
100
Some thirty years ago the author devised a pendulum for singers and players, to
enable them to gain regularity and certainty in the different kinds of mensural
accent. Having proved its efficacy in doing this work in vocal and instrumental
practice, it was introduced in a series of exercises prepared for public schools.
This pocket metronome, now so generally used, has proved to be of great value;
in fact, in no other way can a true feeling for accurate time be so easily gained.151
Yet even the novice students were reminded well through the nineteenth century that
tempo machines did not portray musical reality. The pocket metronome could aid in
pointing the way towards the “mensural accent,” but the “true feeling for accurate time”
ultimately rested with the musician once the pendulum ceased. Pendulum swings and
metronome clicks did not define the many ineffable rhythmical nuances created by the
musical artist, which went beyond the composer’s initial tempo indication. John Taylor,
in The student's text-book of the science of music, recounted as late as 1876 how the
Maelzel metronome—a machine far more automatic than the simple pendulum—failed to
reference the true nature of musical time:
Although invaluable in cases of doubt as an undeviating standard, in the last
resort, of arbitration, and highly useful in the earlier stages of musical practice as
a means of engrafting a just and necessary sense of rhythmical duration or time
(considered from a mechanical point of view), still, as useless in determining the
numerous undefinable fluctuations and irregular rhythmical deviations
inseparable from the only true expression of a composition— that, viz., springing
from an appreciation of its character and scope, and having its origin in an ever-
prompting feeling—the introduction of the metronome has failed to abrogate the
employment of the older and (since more suggestive) truer method of indicating
musical face or rate of movement—the approximate method, viz., involved in the
use of certain verbal directions.152
Precise metronomic clicks or pendulum swings did not correspond in practice with the
pulse-sense, even for nineteenth-century amateur musicians. And throughout the
151 John Wheeler Tufts, The Cecilian series of study and song, Book VI (New York: Silver,
Burdett & Company, 1892): viii.
152
John Taylor, The student's text-book of the science of music (London: George Philip and Son,
1876), 132.
101
nineteenth century, most skilled musicians educated in pre-metronomic traditions
acknowledged that these long-standing verbal approximations—however “imprecise”
when compared to standardized mechanical measurements—provided a “truer method”
for actualizing the subjectivities of musical time than precision clockwork could ever
offer.
Summarizing the Past, Pre-Metronomic Musical “Times”
These theorists and pedagogues—from Descartes to Christiani and beyond—all speak of
a time more nuanced, more variable, and ultimately more vital than any pendulum swings
or mechanical clicks could impart; nuances within diverse and respective repertoires that
included rhythmical emphases, anticipations, elongations, pauses, and delays; the hand
separation of soprano and bass voices; the “aspiration” and “suspension” of tones; the
free arpeggiation of notated chords; not to forget notes inégale; along with the fluctuation
of pulse-sense as each contrasting phrase, section, lyric, ornament, or harmony suggested.
These living qualities of musical time, while only implied through notation, were
eminently clear to knowledgeable performers, theorists, and pedagogues prior to the
twentieth century—and yet they remain qualities that defy simplified measurements,
reductive schemas, and mechanical certainties.
Reflecting upon the aesthetics of pre-industrialized culture, it seems entirely
logical for these theorists to assert that a rhythmic science could never exist: If thought
was variable; if speech was variable; if physical movement was variable; then so too was
the time of musical performance. In this cultural history of rhythm, basic questions
seldom posited by modern musicologists, theorists, pedagogues, or musicians themselves
must be pursued: How could performers conceive musical time in terms of a clockwork
102
metronome when clockwork metronomes did not exist, or if they were not utilized to any
rigorous degree? Since, prior to the Mechanical Age, no scientific clock meaningfully
regulated a poem or play, how could a metronome truly dictate the time of a symphony or
sonata? Marx similarly questioned any non-experiential, reductive theorems of musical
time and rhythm. He seemingly upheld three centuries of performance-practice traditions,
reasoning:
If we consider the matter impartially and candidly, we shall acknowledge that,
continuous uniformity of any motion is quite as unnatural in music as in every
other department of human activity. And on this account: that the disposition and
excitement in us can never remain at any fixed point… the excitement and energy
of the executant, moreover, is either heightened in the progress of the
performance, or his fire and power are diminished. Can it be supposed for a
moment practical or psychologically possible, that, in all these phases, the
[musical] measure should remain stagnant and uniform?153
Prior to the twentieth century, performers and theorists readily understood that musical
proportion existed—in various repertoires from respective genres, composers, and
national styles—through the very palpable sensations of pulse and movement, with all of
the variations, subjectivities, and ambiguities these qualities suggested. Past beliefs in
musical temporality rested not on scientific ideals and certainties, but on human
perceptions gained from active experience. As Mattheson commented in Der
vollkommene Capellmeister: “The true mouvement of a musical work…is beyond words.
It is the ultimate perfection of music, accessible only through eminent experience and
talent.”154
The sensory foundations of musical meter—described as internal weight,
swing, arsis and thesis, the energy of beginning, the quiet dwelling upon the note, the
153 Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture, 261.
154
Quoted from Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953), 321.
103
invisible accent—all of these were only realized through the gestural, physical process of
musical performance itself.
Thus, for those concerned with performance realities, musical time was not a
precise science; musical time was an immediate and visceral form of human expression.
It was with these temporal values, restated by diverse and disparate theorists over the
ages—from Descartes to Rameau; Rousseau to Hauptmann—that Adolph Bernhard Marx
summarized the vitality of pre-twentieth-century musical time through this long-
recognized truth:
Rhythm is the expression of the will and pleasure of him who formed it; and we
recognize in it either the determined purpose of the artist, or his sensible delight in
a well-arranged and pleasing or significant succession of tonal quantities. Rhythm
in both forms is indispensible to music… Nor has music has ever been without
rhythm. Neither in the Gregorian cantus planus, nor during the period of mensural
music, neither in the nomos of the Greeks, nor in our modern recitative, nor in the
Ragneys [Ragas] of the Hindoo, has this element of life ever been wanting.155
For three centuries, the conclusion remained: The musician and the musician alone was
the measure of musical time. Yet Marx’s ontological definition of rhythm may strike
many moderns as flippant, imprecise, and ineffectual; since the twentieth century, Marx’s
“rhythm” seems to be the last definition that many twentieth-century scholars or
musicians would ever consider citing as fact.
“Time” is a cultural and communal belief, and so the “times” eventually change.
Modern performers, theorists, and scholars decidedly live within a different musical-time
culture than the one recounted by Marx. World-renowned conductors pride themselves on
authentically informed interpretations, based on exacting, “original” metronome marks—
155 Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture, 33.
104
alongside a rigid adherence to such marks—for music by Beethoven, Berlioz, and
Wagner, although these very composer-performers considered playing to clockwork
references both an impossibility and abomination. Some professional “early-music”
ensembles perform the music of Vivaldi and Bach with such blindingly rapid and
constant metronomic speeds—and with such negligible senses of pulse, weight, or
rhetoric—that slavish practicing to an unwavering metronomic reference seems the only
technique that could have made such interpretations possible. In order to win a rarified
orchestra seat, conservatory instrumentalists—fulfilling both judges’ and their own
teachers’ expectations—mimic exacting gradations of metronomic time, showing how
“precisely” and “accurately” these applicants consistently maintain “tempo” indications
from music spanning from Beethoven to Mahler—even though Beethoven’s colleagues
and Mahler’s own piano-roll recordings strongly confirm that metronomic “precision”
had nothing to do with orchestral performance practices.
Professional teachers and performers likewise ask, “what is the tempo?” of pre-
twentieth century music by first asking, “how fast or slow is the metronome click?”—not,
“where does the invisible pulse-accent lie in relation to the harmony, meter, rhythmical
gestures, and rhetorical sentiments of any given composition?” Many singers believe that
mathematically gauged note-values on the page must prevail over the words, harmonies,
and characters conveyed in vocal repertoire spanning from sixteenth-century madrigals to
nineteenth-century oratorios. Since the 1930s, historical musicologists have cared more
about the “precise” interpretation of historical pendulum swings—so they might
“accurately” translate them to modern, metronomic beats-per-minute—while all but
neglecting the historical knowledge that subjective pulse-senses once guided the
105
fundamental qualities of measured musical time. Quantz’s meager suggestions to
amateurs are treated as scientific proof of precise metronomic tempos, although Quantz
knew nothing of Maelzel’s future metronome and very little of Loulié’s obscure 1696
Chronométre. In his monumental book Rhythm and Tempo (1953), musicologist Curt
Sachs, while he often seemed skeptical of the metronome as continuous performance
aid,156
could not separate modern, beat-per-minute mechanics from his entire history of
musical time, stating, “ours is a mechanically counting notation,”157
that “the quarter note
[is] our motor unit,”158
while conversely claiming, “the [human] tactus was wholly
unconcerned with the actual rhythm, with grouping or accent…the tactus, does not, and
cannot, reflect the rhythm of a piece.”159
Few pre-metronomic composers have been spared this metronome methodology
in modern music publications, articles, and treatises. In 1984, modern-music specialist
Robert Craft, upon reviewing Rebecca Harris-Warrick’s translation of Saint-Lambert’s
Principles of the Harpsichord (1702), stated, “Saint Lambert’s unit of [tempo]
measurement must set a record for vagueness: ‘the step of a man of average height who
156 Sachs, 21.
157
Ibid., 168.
158
Ibid., 173. A similar statement appears on page 201.
159
Ibid., 242-3. In keeping with a twentieth-century tradition, Sachs often divorced musical time
from the living sensation of pulse heard in measured music. He believed of performance practices
existing centuries before objective, metronomic regulation and measurement that “the strength of
good beats…varied considerably according to the nature of a piece. But performers and listeners
were hardly aware of these minute shades and had no reason for mentioning them.” See Sachs,
256-7.
106
walks one and a quarter leagues in an hour.’”160
Considering other historical instructions,
Saint Lambert’s self-referential tempo was perhaps the most quantitative and
reproducible for its time; it was, nevertheless, “vague” against the modern metronome,
the modern, mechanical treatment of tempo, and Craft’s modern performance practices.
In 2008, New York Times reviewer Bernhard Holland, detesting pianist Lang Lang’s
gestural performance style, suggested that “conservatories…hire time-and-motion
experts, professionals who could point out that the flailing arm, the bulging eye and the
balletic upper torso are extraneous work in a business best devoted to doing the most with
the least.”161
Holland espoused mechanical-industrial performance training—a clockwork
“time”-study—for “a business” of music making geared towards producing the printed
page with greater technical-rhythmical efficiency. Unbeknownst to this reviewer, and as
this study comprehensively documents, such mechanical-efficiency experiments in time
had been redefining modern music education and performance practices for over a
century.
In subsequent chapters, it will be shown that mechanical efficiency—only
espoused in pedagogy since the turn of the twentieth century—is often incompatible with
willful, creative, or nuanced musical performance. As Bernard Holland and Robert Craft
implied, the modern, temporal worldview often values reproducible efficiencies and
precisions above individual expressions; by extension, this industrial-scientific
160 Robert Craft, “Saint Lambert,” reprinted in Small Craft Advisories (New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1989), 147.
161
Bernhard Holland, “When Histrionics Undermine the Music and the Pianist,” New York Times,
February 6, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/arts/music/06look.html.
107
worldview values metronomic time above the sensory and rhetorical qualities of
historical musical time. If time-tellers do impose hegemony over human thoughts and
actions, a “chronarchy” through continual mechanical reference, then the twentieth
century has indeed witnessed the results of this mechanical hegemony, manifested in a
metronomic performance practice based on ever-greater rhythmical precisions,
exactitudes, and consistencies.
Even Ludwig van Beethoven alluded to such a mechanical hegemony in the
potential employment of metronomes. During another partnership with Maelzel, this time
to promote the metronome as a standard for German musical education, Beethoven
acknowledged that the new device could be seen as an imposition upon current creative
and pedagogical practices. In 1817, when considering how to “bring the Metronome into
the so necessary general use,” Beethoven confided in von Mosel: “I have no doubt they
will call out that I am a tyrant.”162
Nearly half a century later, in 1863, Samuel Butler
prophesized that the hegemonic rise of machines—a “tyranny” only suggested by
Beethoven and Maelzel’s vision of selling a clockwork metronome to “every village
schoolmaster”—would continue to change the qualities of human life for future
generations. Highlighting the growing use of clocks and portable watches during his
century, Butler concluded a Darwinian machine-evolution was indeed occurring
throughout an increasingly industrialized civilization:
162 Beethoven, ed. Kalisher, II: 69. Beethoven’s justification for this potential mechanical
imposition: It “would be better than to accuse us of feudalism.”
108
Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we
are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as
slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives
to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time,
but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over
the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for
a moment question.163
It will be shown how the growing production, distribution, and use of the clockwork
machines directly corresponded to the ever-changing temporal beliefs in performance
practices. Butler’s prophecy seemed to culminate in twentieth-century performance
culture, in which mechanical precision in musical time is not only commonplace—it is
nearly unquestioned. In 1911, Edward Dickinson recalled the kernel of a more lasting and
profound hegemony to follow, when he succinctly stated: “Metronome marks are more
exact [indicators of tempo], but they are far from being an infallible reliance. At the most
they indicate the general movement of a composition, not the alterations that must
constantly occur. They often serve as fetters to players or conductors that submit to
them.”164
Yet what happens when the fetters of musical time become the standards of
authenticity? What performance practices result when the hegemony of metronomic
regulation, which critics recognized for centuries, becomes largely prescribed in
pedagogy and performance? What happens when “submission” to mechanical,
metronomic regulations—for the sake of modern performance-precision—becomes the
desirable aesthetic? The result, according to Theodore Adorno, was that individualistic,
temporal qualities were very much lost by the mid-twentieth century:
163 Originally from Samuel Butler, “Darwin Among the Machines,” Christ Church Press, June
13, 1863. Reprinted in Samuel Butler, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement, With Other Early
Essays, edited by R. A. Streatfeild (London: A. C. Fifield, 1914), 184-185.
164
Dickinson, 118.
109
Today there is no music showing any trace of the power of the historical hour that
has remained totally unaffected by the decline of experience—by the substitution,
for “life,” of a process of economic adjustment dictated by concentrated economic
forces of domination. The dying out of subjective time in music seems totally
unavoidable in the midst of a humanity which has made itself into a thing—into
an object of its own organization.165
The following chapters document how this change first came about—how machines and
mechanical rhythm first became definitive references for once subjective acts—how the
hegemony, the “tyranny,” of metronomic time became commonplace. It is shown how,
over the course of a century, the willful fluctuations and intrinsic variability of musical
time came to be heard by many as thievery, unwarranted creativity, or error in relation to
objective mechanical rules; in which any excursion from the written page became
considered whimsical individuality in contrast to absolute composer intention. In brief,
this study charts the ascendance of a new rhythmical ontology, in which the internal
became externalized; the subjective became objectified. Throughout this intellectual and
cultural history, one finds the nuanced feelings for musical time receding in favor of the
precise reproduction offered by mechanical rhythm; faithfulness to composer-intention
becoming misconstrued as faithfulness to metronomic regulation; the rhythmical sense
subsuming to clockwork.
This profound and lasting paradigm shift, in which musical time transformed from
a subjective process to an objective regulation, is one nearly unacknowledged today. A
modern performance culture of efficiency, reproduction, precision, and positivism
prevails, valuing a clockwork species of musical “time” above the sound and sense of
musical pulsation. Yet again, Shakespeare prefigured this diametric opposition between
165 From Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (1948), reprinted in Daniel Albright, ed.
Modernism and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77.
110
innate musical perception and mechanical objectivity—alongside the results of
clockwork domination—when a distressed Richard II inquired:
Music do I hear?
Ha, ha! keep time. How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder'd string;
But, for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb'ring clock:
My thoughts are minutes…
Richard II’s personal-temporal crisis foreshadows a reality for twentieth-century
performance culture. His once-internal sense of time became externalized, regularized,
and mechanized—redundant clockwork time now controlled him, as his own living
movements lost their innate meaning and proportion; the monarch’s “times”—witnessed
in the intrinsic and the extrinsic—had submitted to the clock. The situation of many
modern musicians closely resembles Richard II’s conceptual predicament. Many
contemporary performers can attest to educational and rehearsal regimens in which their
subjective sensations and perceptions for rhythmical proportion, meter, and movement
are first and foremost measured and justified through precise, mathematical fractions of
objective time—no longer by silent, simple pendulum swings, but by unrelenting clicks
of metronomes. For professional music scholars and educators as well, “rhythm,”
“tempo,” and exacting metronomic reference are often conflated.
As this study uncovers, the very meanings and cultural values underlying
“rhythm” have palpably changed since the twentieth century due to a heretofore-
unacknowledged paradigm shift: a metronomic turn in which musical time has audibly
111
and visibly mechanized. Today, a host of performers, theorists, pedagogues, and
musicologists readily profess an allegiance to modern temporal machines and precision-
oriented measurements, seemingly unaware that the historical and cultural contexts of
time, meter, and rhythm—espoused for over three centuries—have audibly and
conceptually faded in importance. In the present age, “good rhythm” is often an implicit
term for “precise metronomic regulation.” The subsequent chapters expose how, over the
course of the modern Industrial Age, musical time transformed into technological time—
as living rhythmical proportions and thoughts truly became clockwork minutes.
112
CHAPTER II: MAELZEL’S MACHINES: A RECEPTION HISTORY OF
MAELZEL, HIS MECHANICAL CULTURE, AND THE METRONOME
Johann Nepomuk Maelzel moved to North America in 1825, not to manufacture or
promote the clockwork metronome as he had in Europe, but to continue his career as an
exhibitor of self-moving machines, or automata. Maelzel produced his unique automata
shows in cities across America including Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore,
and New York.1 As nineteenth-century accounts attest, Maelzel’s most significant
contribution to the nineteenth century was not the simple invention of the metronome, but
the broad introduction of a new and unusual mechanical culture to a rapidly
industrializing civilization. His legacy is far more profound than one small machine
alone; for the nineteenth-century, Maelzel first exposed the promise, possibilities, and
pitfalls of the mechanized world in which we now reside. The deeper meaning behind
Maelzel’s most influential and lasting machine becomes evident when his mechanical
culture is viewed within nineteenth-century contexts, through recollections of his shows
and creations, and most significantly, in critiques of the metronome.
Before his death at sea in 1838, Maelzel offered a growing nation the visions of
mechanical wonder, mystery, and ingenuity. In the mechanical exhibitions of Maelzel,
spectators witnessed the intriguing, uncanny, and occasionally frightening; They viewed
clockwork automata behaving like people, performing activities once reserved for
humans alone, but acting with altogether inhuman qualities. A special pejorative was
1 Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 186.
113
given to these qualities, automatical,2 which the widely popular Webster’s Dictionary of
1828 defined as, “1. Belonging to an automaton; having the power of moving itself;
mechanical / 2. Not voluntary; not depending on the will.” Western society consistently
considered all automata, and Maelzel’s machines especially, as soulless, thoughtless
entities, which lacked any sense of living motivation, volition, or spirit; self-moving
clockwork devices were invariably artificial in appearances and actions. The Webster’s
Dictionary of 1828 defines this quality:
ARTIFICIAL, a.
1. Made or contrived by art, or by human skill and labor, in opposition to
natural; as artificial heat or light; an artificial magnet.
2. Feigned, fictitious; not genuine or natural; as artificial tears.
3. Contrived with skill or art.
4. Cultivated; not indigenous; not being of spontaneous growth; as
artificial grasses.
Well through the nineteenth century, many in Western civilization perceived automata as
similar to mechanical time-tellers. As Derham’s and Sully’s important eighteenth-century
horology treatises on “artificial” clock-making remind us, mechanical devices made of
repetitive gear-work were a priori detached from natural time and motion.3 Clocks told
an artificial time unlike the time of the stars, the moon, the sun, or the tides. Just as early-
modern clocks told artificial as opposed to natural time, clockwork facsimiles of people
behaved with artificial as opposed to natural movements. Society clearly acknowledged
that the artificiality of clocks and other automata were the binary opposites of humanity,
2 The arcane but historically appropriate adjective “automatical” is employed throughout this
chapter, replacing the modern equivalent “automatic,” which has lost its pejorative meaning over
the twentieth century.
3 W. Derham, The artificial clock-maker. A treatise of watch and clock-work, shewing to the
meanest capacities the art of calculating numbers to all sorts of movement (London: printed for
James Knapton, 1714); and Henri Sully, Règle artificielle du tems (Paris: Gregoire Dupuis, 1717).
114
and that the behaviors of these devices were antithetical to innate, internal,4 and natural
action. The 1836 Popular Encyclopedia unambiguously defined “automaton” as “a self-
moving machine, without life.”5 Thus, for Maelzel’s audiences, the puppetry of
automata-display exposed some very distinctive qualities that set artificial machines apart
from humanity.
Self-moving, mechanical artificiality was still uncommon for Maelzel’s America.
The 1828 edition Webster’s Dictionary did not even define the terms “minute”6 and
“second”7 with any acknowledgement to clock time. Indeed, Maelzel’s public found
precision-based mechanical time to be uncustomary and unnecessary in daily life. Single-
hand civic and church clocks were still regulated by the local time of the sundial each
4 “INTERNAL, a. [L. internus.] Inward; interior; being within any limit or surface; not external.
We speak of the internal parts of a body, of a bone, of the earth, &c. Internal excellence is
opposed to external. The internal peace of man, is peace of mind or conscience. The internal
evidence of the divine origin of the Scriptures, is the evidence which arises from the excellence of
its precepts and their adaptation to the condition of man, or from other peculiarities. 1. Pertaining
to the heart…2. Intrinsic; real; as the internal rectitude of actions…”Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster's (accessed September
20, 2007).
5 Thomas Thomson, Daniel Keyte Sandford, and Allan Cunningham, The Popular Encyclopedia,
Volume 1 (Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1836), 355.
6 “MINUTE, a. [L. minutus.] 1. Very small, little or slender; of very small bulk or size; small in
consequence; as a minute grain of sand; a minute filament. The blood circulates through very
minute vessels. Minute divisions of a subject often perplex the understanding. Minute details are
tedious. 2. Attending to small things; critical; as minute observation.” Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster's (accessed September
20, 2007).
7 “SECOND, a. [L. secundus; L. sequor, to follow. See Seek.] 1. That immediately follows the
first; the next following the first in order of place or time; the ordinal of two. Take the second
book from the shelf. Enter the second house. And he slept and dreamed the second time. Gen. 41.
2. Next in value, power, excellence, dignity or rank; inferior. The silks of China are second to
none. Lord Chatham was second to none in eloquence. Dr. Johnson was second to none in
intellectual powers, but second to many in research and erudition.” Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/ ?resource=Webster's (accessed
September 20, 2007).
115
day. While the specialized fields of astronomy, cartography, and navigation did require
precision clocks that could faithfully measure and synchronize small durations of time,
scientific time telling carried little practical meaning or purpose for early nineteenth
century urban and agrarian communities. Until 1849, pocket-watches were primarily
imported into America as high-end luxuries,8 and even then, these were not ubiquitous
technologies like the wristwatches of today.9 Only after the mid-nineteenth century,
North American urban society began relying more heavily on synchronized clocks based
solely on artificial time. With the rapid growth of railroads, precise measurements of
five-minute intervals or smaller units of time became essential to safe and efficient
transportation. Accomplishing this task was not as simple as looking at the town clock.
Employing the latest technologies, astronomical observatories across the nation often
supplied the most precise, scientific standards of time for railroad companies. A
continental-wide system of mechanical timekeeping was not merely useful in the pursuit
of high-speed continental travel; it was a question of life and death.10
Nevertheless,
standardized time zones, initially conceived to organize the complex schedules of the
railroad industry, were not established as a national system in the United States until
8 See Carlene Stephens, On Time (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2002), 51; and David S. Landes,
Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world, Second Edition (Cambridge:
Harvard U. Press, 2000), 302, 307.
9 A telling and ironic anecdote from 1850 verifies: “When P. S. Bartlett boasted that his company
was making seven watches a day, his friend laughed, ‘Why, where could you sell seven watches a
day?’” From Harry C. Brearley, Time Telling Through the Ages (New York: Doubleday, Page &
Co., 1919), figure caption, between 176-177.
10
The rise of standardized time in North America is well documented in Ian R. Bartky, Selling
the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000).
116
1883.11
Local, sundial time (that is, natural and variable time) was still the overriding
temporal reference for the American public during much of the nineteenth century.
Before the world was organized through time zones and precise train schedules,
and before pocket watches became the standard gentlemen’s accessory for urban life,
Maelzel was a seminal figure in the emerging culture of the machine. As nineteenth-
century readings expose, his self-moving inventions—indeed, all nineteenth-century
clockwork machines—had cultural meanings that transcended the scientific values of
unfailing consistency, exact replication, and precision measurement. Through his
exhibitions, audiences witnessed two opposing value systems in these automata, in which
the living traits of subjectivity, creativity, and sensation emerged as antitheses to the
artificially contrived action and appearance of clockwork motion. As many musicians,
pedagogues, and critics attested, Maelzel’s metronome directly related to his other
clockwork creations; nineteenth-century society perceived the metronome to be just
another of Maelzel’s inventions, just another product of his mechanical culture. For more
than a century, many attested that the metronome was a tool that audibly created musical
automata.
Criticisms of the metronome were nothing exceptional in the nineteenth century,
and they even appear from the earliest proponents of the device. Indeed, Ludwig van
Beethoven became one of the first protesters of Maelzel’s automatical creation. In an
often-overlooked statement regarding Maelzel’s tempo-clock, Beethoven wrote the
publisher Bernhard Schotts Söhne in 1826:
11 Landes, 304.
117
This is to inform you that the quartet was delivered to Frank a week ago…The
metronome markings (the deuce take everything mechanical) will follow—
follow—follow—12
Beethoven mocked the incessant, unwavering, and monotonous metronome, which he
largely rejected by the end of his life. According to Schindler, Marx, and others
throughout the nineteenth century, Beethoven “finally declared, ‘No metronome at all!
Those who have a right feeling do not need it, and those who have not, will not be helped
by it.’”13
Schindler later commented that the metronome could never rule over
Beethoven’s notions of musical time; a proper metronome mark, at best, “leads the
intelligent musician by the right path into the spirit of the music.”14
According to
Schindler, the living, subjective realities of performance coupled with numerous
publication errors often thwarted Beethoven’s initial—and perhaps indefinite—
metronomic indications.15
Indeed it seems that the composer often found the machine a
12 Ludwig van Beethoven, Letters, collected, translated and edited with an introduction,
appendixes, notes and indexes by Emily Anderson, Volume III (London: Macmillan; New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1961), 1295, Letter 1498.
13
Adolf Bernhard Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, translated
by Fannie Louise Gwinner (Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1895), 68. Beethoven’s quote,
stemming from Schindler’s biography, was often repeated in sources throughout the nineteenth
century, including Franz Kullak, Beethoven’s Piano-Playing, translated by Theodore Baker (New
York: G. Schirmer, 1901), 22.
Anton Schindler, The Life of Beethoven: Including His Correspondence with His Friends,
Numerous Characteristic Traits, and Remarks on His Musical Works, edited by Ignaz Moscheles,
Volume II (London: Henry Colburn, 1841), 106 fn.
15
Schindler claimed “[during the winter of 1825-26] in my presence [Beethoven] ascertained that
the metronomic signs in the printed scores [of the symphonies] were faulty, in fixing the tempi
too quick; and, indeed, he declared that many of those metronomic signs were not authorized by
him.” See Schindler, 104-5; 116.
The possibility exists, however, that Beethoven changed his mind about metronome
indications once he recognized the poor results in practice. Schindler also recalled that Beethoven
occasionally marked the same music with different metronomic indications. See Schindler, 116-
117.
118
total nuisance if one cites the numerous ex post facto metronomic “calculations”
Beethoven was asked to make at the behest of publishers, who often invented their own
markings. Their editorial license in printing metronomic tempos lasted throughout the
century, a practice which Schindler chided for causing “a Babel of confusion as to the
right feeling” in Beethoven’s music less than two decades after the composer’s passing.16
Evidence suggests that Beethoven often considered Maelzel’s metronome to be a
meager reflection of his own living pulse; the mechanical movement of the metronome
was a lifeless representation of his own heartbeat. “The metronome tempos will soon
follow,” Beethoven wrote to Bernhard Schotts Söhne on March 1825, “my own is ill and
has to recover its even steady pulse at the watch-maker’s.”17
Some communications make
Wagner had a similar experience and admitted in Über das Dirigiren: “In my earlier
operas I gave detailed directions as to the tempi, and indicated them (as I thought) accurately, by
means of the Metronome…In my later works I omitted the metronome and merely described the
main tempi in general terms, paying, however, particular attention to the various modifications of
tempo.” (Emphasis mine.) See Richard Wagner, On Conducting (Über das Dirigiren), translated
by Edward Dannreuther (London: William Reeves, 1897), 20-21.
In a letter dated August 16, 1850, Wagner reiterated to Franz Liszt that metronome
numbers did not supplant the prior, sensory understandings of musical time as actualized by
skilled performers—subjectivities not under the purview of composers’ intentions. In response to
Liszt’s request for additional metronomic references in certain passages of Lohengrin, Wagner
stated: “You ask me also for a few metronomical indications of the tempo. I consider this quite
unnecessary, because I rely in all things on your artistic sympathy so thoroughly as to know that
you need only be in a good humour with my work to find out the right thing everywhere; for the
right thing consists in this only: that the effect corresponds with the intention.”
Nevertheless, Wagner provided Liszt eight musical incipits with metronomic markings,
adding necessary verbal descriptions to achieve greater emotional and rhetorical nuance than ex
post facto numbers afforded. See Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, Correspondence of Wagner
and Liszt, translated by Francis Hueffer, Vol. I (London: H. Grevel and Co., 1897), 83-85.
16 Schindler, 104-106; 111.
17 Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven's letters, a critical edition with explanatory notes by Dr. A.
C. Kalischer, translated with preface by J. S. Shedlock, Volume 2 (London: J. M. Dent; New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1909), 419.
119
clear that Beethoven, late in life, found “metronoming” his own music to be a tedious,
complicated, and taxing process—entirely divorced from his compositional or
performance practices—when he wrote on May 20, 1826, “the metronome marks you
will receive in a week by post. It proceeds slowly, as my health requires care”18
and “as
soon as health permits me, you will also receive the metronome marks for the Mass” on
February 22, 1827.19
For Beethoven, perhaps the most prominent initial supporter of the
machine, metronomic indications never seemed to be intuitive, efficient, or easily
communicable measurements, even though he expressed their necessity in order for
musicians to better “follow the ideas of [his] unfettered genius.”20
As Schindler relates,
Beethoven eventually found the “metronoming [of his music] a mere ‘business’ matter,
and this view of the labor tended to increase his distaste for it.”21
Schindler concluded that the newly appearing metronome22
and its numbers were
directly antithetical to Beethoven’s deeper musical intentions: “Let Beethoven’s piano-
forte works be played according to the new metronomic directions, and it will soon be
perceived that no more opportunity is left for feeling and expression that the most rapid
18 See Beethoven, ed. Kalischer, 424.
19
Ibid., 465.
20
Ibid., 458. From a December 1826 letter to Bernhard Schotts Söhne in which Beethoven again
related the ex post facto process of metronoming his music: “The metronome marks will shortly
follow; do wait for them.”
21 Schindler, 116.
22 Beethoven attests to the relative obscurity of the machine within his lifetime when he wrote to
his nephew from Baden on September 14, 1824, “you could bring the metronome with you, it
can’t be got here.” See Beethoven, ed. Kalischer, 332.
This last phrase has occasionally been translated, “nothing can be done with it,”
suggesting that Beethoven had a metronome at home, but it was in disrepair. See for instance,
Beethoven's letters, 1790-1826, from the collection of L. Nohl. Also his letters to the archduke
Rudolph, translated by Lady Wallace, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866), 168.
120
fingering affords; and that this rule extends even to the execution of the Adagio.”23
What
Schindler and Beethoven perhaps found most deplorable in the metronome, being a
monotonous, invariable, and faulty machine, was its supreme artificiality when compared
to the complexity of human thought and expression. As this reception history of
clockwork machines demonstrates, Beethoven was only one in a long line of significant
critics who often rejected Maelzel’s artificial automata as soulless, self-moving objects
detached from the fundamental qualities of human spirit, intellect, and emotion.24
The World of Automata before Maelzel
Before Maelzel’s lifetime, sources attest that automata and mechanical time-tellers were
considered two sides of the same technology, since they both required clockwork to
function. For centuries, the most opulent public time-tellers featured ephemeral automata,
animated figures that adorned clocks for sheer visual delight and amusement. Yet the
term “automaton” had a twofold meaning; it could describe either these artificial
clockwork representations, or the clock itself. In a typical eighteenth-century definition,
any self-moving machine was an automaton, and “according to this description, clocks,
23 Schindler, 114.
24 Franz Liszt, writing the publishers Breitkopf und Härtel in 1863, reiterated Beethoven’s anti-
metronomic aesthetic. Recognizing that publishers’ commercial interests often stipulated the
incorporation of metronome numbers, Liszt recommended, “of the best of copyists it may be said
‘Better none,’ to use Beethoven’s words in pronouncing his verdict upon Maelzel’s metronome”
when publishing his piano scores of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Nevertheless, Liszt, like many
nineteenth-century composers, often gave publishers full reign over the inclusion, and even
interpretation, of metronome indications. See Franz Liszt, Letters of Franz Liszt, collected and
edited by La Mara, translated by Constance Bache, Volume II (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1894), 75.
121
watches, and all machines of that kind, are automata.”25
Horology texts often used the
word “automaton” as a synonym for a clock, as exemplified in the title of John Ward’s
1714 watch-making treatise, A Practical Method To Discover the Longitude at Sea By a
New Contrived Automaton.26
Both time-tellers and representational automata were
species of clockwork. Thus, Western spectators often considered automata in the shape of
animals or humans not only to be similar to clocks, but also to be clocks personified.
Prior to the twentieth century, a host of sources described these clockwork
personifications in very specific contexts. Since automata were only mechanical
facsimiles—mere clockwork representations of man or beast—numerous writers defined
automata to be anti-human. René Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method (1637),
already noted the vast superiority and complexity of human actions over the artificial
limitations of automatical machines.27
In early nineteenth-century literature, too, the term
“automaton” consistently implied a figure with insufficient human qualities, an insult for
a person with lifeless characteristics or faulty intelligence. William Winstanley (fl. 1793–
1806), in his play The Hypocrite Unmask'd, considered an automaton to be a man
25 An historical miscellany of the curiosities and rarities in nature and art. Comprising new and
entertaining descriptions of the most surprising volcanos, caverns, cataracts, whirlpools, ... in
every part of the habitable world, vol. III (London: [1794-1800]), 281. Eighteenth Century
Collections Online. Gale.
http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&contentSet=ECCOArticles&type=multipage&tabI
D=T001&prodId=ECCO&docId=CW101876105&source=gale&userGroupName=cwru_main&v
ersion=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE.
26
John Ward, A Practical Method To Discover the Longitude at Sea By a New Contrived
Automaton (London: James Woodward, 1714); See also John Imison, The school of arts; or, an
introduction to useful knowledge, being a compilation of real experiments and improvements, in
several pleasing branches of science… (London: printed for the author, and sold by J. Murray,
[1785?]), 215.
27
René Descartes, Discourse on the method of rightly conducting the reason, and seeking the
Truth in the Sciences, translated from the French (Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1850), 97.
122
unmoved by nature or beauty, a hollow and expressionless figure.28
In his work A
Comedy, Entitled The Sprightly Widow (1803), American playwright John Minshull
confirmed the idea of the soulless, unfeeling machine:
But my good landlord—here—here—is her catalogue of
curiosities—If they don't move your risible faculties you are
an automaton. Ha! ha! ha! 29
The play Deaf And Dumb, Or The Abbe De L'Epee by Thomas Holcroft, (1745–1809)
described an automaton as a living imbecile, as one character chides, “you act remorse,
and feign this pity for / a thing—who, say the best, was but an idiot, an automaton.”30
Moreover, in his play Knave; or Not? (1798), Holcroft envisioned an automaton as a
figure lacking in will, manipulated through some form of external control, a living
puppet. As any viewer of a Maelzel exhibition could attest, a machine was always the
slave of its inventor. Holcroft’s character, in contrast, exclaims his humanity:
Peace! I will be no man's automaton:
I will hear no pleadings. I am the lord of my own
actions, and will be self-moved.31
28 “Well, Sir, as your interest seems to depend / much on his liberation, I will order his release; /
but pray Sir, what can have induced you / to place so much dependence on this piece of
automaton / buffoonery, or to expect any benefit from / his acting? He appears to me to possess
no one / single qualification for the stage.” See William Winstanley, The Hypocrite Unmask'd,
Act III (New-York: Geo. F. Hopkins, 1801). American Drama Full-Text Database.
http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu (accessed September 20, 2007).
29
John Minshull, A Comedy, Entitled the Sprightly Widow, Act III (New-York: Printed for the
Author, 1803.) American Drama Full-Text Database. http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu (accessed
September 20, 2007).
30
See Thomas Holcroft, Deaf and Dumb, or the Abbe de l'Epee, Act III (London, New
York: Samuel French, Samuel French & Son, 1801.) English Prose Drama Full-Text Database.
http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu (accessed September 20, 2007).
31
See Thomas Holcroft , Knave; or Not?, Act V (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson
[etc.], 1798). English Prose Drama Full-Text Database. http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu (accessed
September 20, 2007).
123
For many eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century audiences, the clockwork facsimiles
of chirping birds, babbling children, concertizing musicians, and chess playing men,
allied these lifeless and soulless things with the craft of magic. Henri Decremps (1746-
1826), in his 1785 treatise The conjurer unmasked; or, la magie blanche dévoilée: being
a clear and full explanation of all the surprizing performances, described Mr. van Estin’s
Wunderkammer, which included a marvelous automatical organ that replicated a full
orchestra with “more precision in measure than you usually hear in instrumental
performances executed by common musicians.”32
The automatical-magical world
Decremps’ described was a direct precursor to the mechanical Wunderkammer Maelzel
established in early-nineteenth-century Vienna. Estin’s cabinet of curiosities also housed
a bird-machine that would imitate any tune it heard. During Decremps’ tour, a mysterious
mechanical chess player also made an appearance.33
After portraying the performances of
these automata in full, Decremps betrayed the secrets behind many of the more
spectacular illusions.
But even before Maelzel toured the continent with his machines, eventually to
arrive in a young nation, Americans also allied automata with illusion and magic. An
1805 treatise printed in Boston, Witchcraft, or the Art of Fortune-Telling Unveiled,
devoted an chapter to a “Reluminating Automaton” along with a metaphysical epistolary
of Kempelen’s chess player, the famed device Maelzel purchased in Vienna and
32 Henri Decremps, The conjurer unmasked; or, la magie blanche dévoilée: being a clear and full
explanation of all the surprizing performances exhibited ... (London: Printed for C. Stalker,
1785), 69.
33
Decremps, 97.
124
exhibited in America two decades later.34
Automaton shows in American urban centers
were not uncommon prior to Maelzel’s 1825 arrival. As early as 1795, advertisements
appeared in Philadelphia touting “two artificial men, who are of the ordinary size of man,
perform feats of dexterity that surpass nature itself.”35
(Automata descriptions, as other
sources verify, regularly employed incredulous claims.) Broadsheets for a 1796 tavern
show in Providence printed the image of a “Chinese Automaton Figure” dancing on a
rope, triangle in hand, accompanied on one side by an ensemble of living musicians and
on the other by a barrel organ, an increasingly common mechanical instrument.36
While
Maelzel was not the first automata showman in America, he was the most successful, a
situation undoubtedly due to Maelzel’s three most significant talents: his
entrepreneurialism, ambition, and self-promotional skill. Through this powerful
combination of personal traits, Maelzel secured himself a reputation as mechanical
mastermind that lasted throughout the nineteenth century.
Skilled clock-makers and specialized court mechanics in the eighteenth century,
including the Hapsburgs’ own Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804), gave rise to the
technology and display-culture of automata. Aside from their roles as utilitarian
engineers, these notable inventors fashioned reputations for themselves as mechanical
wizards and automata showmen. Besides Kempelen, clockwork mechanics including
34 William Frederick Pinchbeck, Witchcraft, or the Art of Fortune-Telling Unveiled (Boston:
Author, 1805), 42-46.
35
“A New entertainment, by Messrs. L'Égalité....” (Philadelphia: s.n., 1795), Early American
Imprints, 1st series, no. 29161 (filmed).
36
“Exhibitions, comic and experimental. At Mr. John Thurber's tavern, west side of the bridge.
This evening, for the first time, a Chinese automaton figure will perform several feats on the
rope...” (Providence: Printed by Bennett Wheeler, 1796), Early American Imprints, 1st series, no.
30298 (filmed).
125
Jacques Vaucanson (1709-1782) and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz (1752-1791) devised
seemingly magical and miraculous automata displays that became significant curiosities
for privileged European audiences. Maelzel directly modeled his career on these
celebrated figures, surpassing his predecessors’ fame over the course of his adult life. By
visiting major cities in Europe and later North America, he introduced spectacular
displays of mechanical ingenuity to curious and astounded audiences on a global scale.
By the end of his picaresque life, Maelzel became the most renowned and influential
automata-showman of the nineteenth century.
Maelzel’s Mechanical Reputation
While Maelzel is known almost exclusively today as the inventor of the metronome, most
nineteenth-century sources attest that his fame and wealth were based on automata
exhibitions and sales, not his metronome enterprise.37
Late nineteenth-century music
scholar Henry Edward Krehbiel noted that Maelzel “as [he had] in Europe…depended for
a livelihood on exhibitions of his mechanical contrivances.”38
Moreover, Maelzel’s
notoriety was not due to his inventiveness as much as his entrepreneurialism and
showmanship. Indeed, numerous writers contest Maelzel’s actual mechanical skill, and
serious doubts still remain as to whether he invented any machines at all. Historian
Alexander Buchner has suggested that his brother Leonard Maelzel might have devised
37 Metzner, 183, 185, 186.
38
Henry Edward Krehbiel, Music and Manners in the Classical Period: Essays, Second Edition
(New York: Scribner & sons, 1898), 233. For a contemporaneous account of Maelzel’s
entrepreneurialism and wealth, see Karl Berhard, Travels through North America, During the
Years 1825 and 1826, Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea &Carey, 1828), 197-8. Bernhard, “Duke
of Saxe-Weimer Eisenach,” failed to mention the metronome in his memoir of Maelzel.
126
many of the early automata that Johann exhibited throughout Europe.39
And just as
Johann co-opted Winkel’s metronome, Maelzel merely assumed, copied, or bought many
of the renowned automata that became allied with his name. Maelzel’s most perplexing
automaton, the chess player known as the “Turk,” was purchased from Hapsburg
engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen, after the older inventor found the android too taxing
to display.40
By 1810, the Kaufman family of automata inventors had constructed a
similar if not identical android trumpeter.41
The Panharmonicon, Maelzel’s massive
mechanical orchestra, was only a more ostentatious and overwhelming barrel organ that
Leonard possibly built in 1804, a machine C. G. Hamilton likened to “a mammoth music
box.”42
Undoubtedly, American general-interest periodicals helped to establish Maelzel’s
fame as ingenious inventor during his lifetime. An 1827 North American article on the
history of Kempelen’s automaton chess player detailed the latest handler’s
accomplishments:
39 Alexander Buchner, Mechanical Musical Instruments (London: Batchworth Press [n.d.]), 79.
40
See Metzner, 183. Unlike Buchner, Metzner does not mention Leonard as an important
influence in Johann’s career.
41
See Buchner, 80, plates 49-52. Buchner states that the Kaufmann family took their automaton
trumpeter on tour between 1810-1812. Maelzel exhibited his trumpeter in Vienna by 1909
through 1813.
42 See Clarence G. Hamilton, How to Use the Metronome Correctly (Philadelphia: Theodore
Presser Co., 1916), 5.
127
Mr. Maelzel has been for many years distinguished for his great mechanical skill.
The Panharmonicon, which formerly exhibited here, was made by him [unlike the
chess player]; he is likewise the inventor of the Metronome, an instrument by
which the time of music is accurately measured; it is not unknown here, and is
extensively used in Europe. He has also invented an apparatus which is attached
to a Piano Forte, by which any piece of music which is played on it, is at the same
time correctly written out. His speaking figures are of his own make and far excel
the attempts of Von Kempelen [the inventor of the chess player], although the
labours of the latter, were eminently successful.43
Placing Maelzel in the grand tradition of mechanical showmen, the writer clearly makes a
distinction between the automata that Maelzel truly invented and those he co-opted. Yet,
the reviewer seemed uninformed about the metronome itself, or its origins as a creation
of Dutch clockmaker Dietrich Winkel.44
The writer confides that the metronome was
little used in North America, but reports on “its extensive use on the continent.”
According to this early biography, the metronome was Maelzel’s least recognized
machine.
By the end of Maelzel’s life, his reputation as mechanical wizard grew seemingly
to mythical proportions. In February 1837, The Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge considered all of his clockwork creations. In this literary cabinet of Maelzel’s
curiosities, the metronome accounted for one small portion of his ingenuity. The article
noted:
43 “Automaton Chess Player,” North American. Or, Weekly Journal of Politics, Science and
Literature, May 19, 1827, 1.
44
The history of Maelzel’s reported thievery of Winkel’s metronome is out of scope for the
present survey, but it is well represented in many nineteenth-century music references and
Beethoven biographies.
128
Some of the most beautiful and splendid of automatic machines are the creations
of his genius… Of his inventions the following may be enumerated: viz.—The
automaton speaking figures, which articulate certain English and French words, in
the hands of any person; the panharmonicon-a magnificent instrument, composer
of all the pieces, rich, various and powerful as the are, of an entire military band;
the animated diorama of the cathedral at Rheims—a large and most superb
representation of the kind; the automaton trumpeter, of the size of a man; and
whose clarion notes cannot be equaled by those of any living performer—the time
from the nature of the mechanism, being absolutely perfect; the equestrian
automata, and the automatous slack rope dancers, which go through all the
difficult feats and surprising evolutions, both on ‘horse and foot’ of the circus and
amphitheaters, and with an agility, ease and gracefulness, so true to nature, as
scarcely to be credited by those who have not witnessed them; the melodium,
whose very name attests how exquisitely it is attuned to ‘sweet sounds;’ the
automaton charlatan, never exhibited, we believe, in America; the metronome, or
musical time-keeper, patented in Europe; and ‘last not least,’ that unique and most
masterly combination of music, mechanism and design, the grand and appalling
panoramic spectacle of the conflagration of Moscow.45
In this sprawling inventory, one can see Maelzel’s automatical culture in earnest: the
reader beholds the vision of the natural actions of man and beast reproduced in
clockwork. Speaking children, blazing trumpets, trotting horses, balancing acrobats, and
even burning cities, all contrived in mechanical facsimiles. As the reports describe,
Maelzel’s creations represented animals, people, and places of natural and civilized
world, reduced to artificial splendor.
When detailing these wonders, contemporaneous writers considered the
metronome to be a negligible contribution to Maelzel’s oeuvre. The device was eclipsed
in a list populated by Maelzel’s more wondrous mechanical entertainments. A brief
pedigree of the metronome—“patented in Europe”—again belied its unfamiliarity in
North America in 1837. The American public remained relatively unfamiliar with the
tempo-machine during his life for one significant reason: Maelzel never established a
45 “John Maelzel,” The American magazine of useful and entertaining knowledge, Feb. 1, 1837,
196-7.
129
metronome factory in the United States as he had in France or England. Even after
Maelzel’s lifetime, sources attested to the continued scarcity of the device on the new
continent. An 1840 article in The Musical Magazine suggested, “the Metronome is a very
desirable thing, but it is at the same time rare in this country and very expensive.”46
As
late as 1874, while the American watch industry was in the midst of a boom,47
a Scientific
American reader inquired why no manufacturers of the metronome existed in America.48
Evidence of North American metronome companies only appear at the end of the
nineteenth century, when in 1897, an advertisement in the Musical Visitor announced the
John Church Company as the new national competitor within a market of expensive,
foreign-made metronomes.49
While American sources began to express greater familiarity with the metronome
by the middle of the century, Maelzel’s reputation was not defined by any single
automatical invention. For instance, a survey of various automata makers appeared in an
1852 article “Wonderful Toys” from The North American Miscellany and Dollar
46 “Substitute for Maelzel’s Metronome,” The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical
Science, Literature and...Feb. 29, 1840, 67.
47
Landes, 344-5.
48
Scientific American, Feb. 21, 1874, 123. The suggestion was made to use Weber’s simple
pendulum as substitute for the clockwork metronome.
49
See Music Trades, “Metronomes,” The Musical Visitor 26 (Dec. 1, 1897): 335. “The John
Church Company lay claim to the distinction of being the first manufacturers of metronomes to
guarantee the little musical accessory as absolutely correct and perfect. The foreign-made
metronome seems doomed as the Church Company is making vast quantities of them, and at a
price below what the importer must pay for the foreign article without the guarantee. An
absolutely correct metronome is a necessity to every musician, but a poor one is about as useful
as wire strings on the bass drum.”
Despite this advertisement, enterprising American inventors continued to patent
alternative clockwork and electric metronomes during the late nineteenth century. Also, simple
pendulums called “metronomes” were widely disseminated through music periodicals and
publishers.
130
Magazine, which praised Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter as being more skilled than any
living trumpeter of the age. The Panharmonicon, as this source suggests, was proof that
“a full orchestra of clock-work musicians is quite possible.”50
After mid-century, Maelzel
and his automatical machines were often discussed as precursors to a new, mechanically
inspired civilization. An Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The Human Wheel, its Spokes
and Felloes” from 1863 recalled Maelzel exclusively for his speaking automata. The
writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, who alluded to Maelzel’s works throughout the century,
championed the growing mechanical culture in America. Holmes imagined a future
where automata could imitate all aspects of humanity, including the ability to speak. “To
make a machine that articulates is not so easy,” Holmes said, “but we remember
Maelzel's wooden children.” In Maelzel’s automata, Holmes found the first successful
attempts to mimic life in mechanical form.51
Ironically, nearing the end of his own life in
50 See “Wonderful Toys,” The North American Miscellany and Dollar Magazine, Feb. 1, 1852,
103: “Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome, opened an exhibition in Vienna, in 1809, in which
an automaton Trumpeter as large as life, performed with surprising accuracy and power [after
being wound-up by its inventor…accompanied by a full band of living musicians…In the Journal
des Modes, whence this account is derived, it is declared that the tones produced by Maelzel’s
automaton were even fuller and richer than those got out of a trumpet by human lungs and lips;
because man’s breath imparts to the inside of the instrument a moisture which deteriorates the
quality of the tone.”
51
See Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May 1863. Gutenberg eBook #13026,
http://www.gutenberg.org (accessed September 20, 2007): “Talking seems the hardest to
comprehend [of all human action]. Yet it has been clearly explained and successfully imitated by
artificial contrivances…To whisper is to articulate without bleating, or vocalizing; to coo as
babies do is to bleat or vocalize without articulating. Machines are easily made that bleat not
unlike human beings…To make a machine that articulates is not so easy; but we remember
Maelzel's wooden children, which said, ‘Pa-pa’ and ‘Ma-ma’; and more elaborate and successful
speaking machines have, we believe, been since constructed.” Many reprints of this article
appeared through the end of the century.
In his Reminiscences, Benjamin Perley Poore describes Maelzel’s speaking dolls as
“small figures, when their hands were shaken, ejaculated the words, ‘Papa!’ and ‘Mamma!’ in a
life-like manner.” Gutenberg eBook #20290, http://www.gutenberg.org (accessed September 20,
2007).
131
the 1890s, Holmes felt himself automatically imitating Maelzel’s decrepit, creaking, and
long-since departed chess player.52
A revised, posthumous image of Maelzel appeared in an 1855 article entitled
“Automata,” published in Ladies’ Wreath, a Magazine devoted to Literature, Industry
and Religion. The writer Annie Parker also espoused a new nineteenth-century
mechanical world. Unlike Holmes, she considered Maelzel’s most unassuming
clockwork invention, the metronome, to be of primary importance. Explaining why the
metronome surpassed Maelzel’s other machines in this emerging technological culture,
she drew the link between utilitarian devices of the nineteenth century and their
wondrous artificial precursors, stating that “Machinery and the mechanic arts in our day,
have been brought to such a wonderful degree of perfection that we are apt to overlook
the small beginnings from which this perfection sprung [sic.]. Among the causes which
have led to it, the making of automata is not the least important. In this utilitarian age, an
invention that does not serve some immediate purpose of beauty or use, is pretty sure to
be overlooked or forgotten.”53
According to Parker, Maelzel helped to found the modern,
52 Expressing a significant theme that recurs throughout this study, Holmes compared unthinking,
habitual behaviors to the actions of Maelzel’s automata, stating, “Every stage of existence has its
special trials and its special consolations. Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these
we manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles rheumatic, to speak
metaphorically,--that is to say, when every act of self-determination costs an effort and a pang.
We become more and more automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should
come to be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel's chess player,—or what that seemed to
be.” See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Over the Teacups (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1891): 38.
53
See Annie Parker, “Automata,” Ladies’ Wreath, a Magazine devoted to Literature Industry and
Religion, Oct. 5, 1855, 360-362. She continues, “Early in the present century, Leonard [sic.]
Maelzel astonished the Parisians by the exhibition of his celebrated Panharmonicon [...] Maelzel
is not known merely as the inventor of this curious instrument. Had he given the world no more
useful proofs of his genius, he might well be forgotten. But he did great service to musical
science by the invention of the metronome. It is for this he is remembered and classed with the
most ingenious mechanicians of the century.”
132
mechanical age. She argued that while his other trivial automata fell into obscurity, the
metronome survived for the utilitarian good of the new mechanically oriented society.
After describing the defunct Panharmonicon and its repertoire, she asserts that Maelzel
will be “remembered and classed with the most ingenious mechanicians of the century.”54
It is highly probable that Parker referenced the book Illustrious Mechanics of
Europe and America by the Frenchman Edward Foucaud. Maelzel’s biography from
Illustrious Mechanics, which appeared in an 1847 English edition, seems entirely
paraphrased by Parker. In Foucaud’s grandiose estimation, the inventor was destined for
the immortal annals of science due to his only “useful invention.” Yet Foucaud fully
acknowledged Maelzel’s renowned entertainment career, stating,
Such are Maelzel’s claims to the great reputation his name has obtained. But, to
speak the truth, if he had made nothing but automata, however ingenious and
curious the mystery of their construction, he would be now almost
forgotten…This species of curious ingenuity is not alone sufficient to immortalize
a man. But on the other hand, however simple a mechanism may be, if it is useful
to mankind, it is sure to perpetuate the inventor’s name, unless it originated in a
barbarous age…Maelzel will remain immortal through his metronome; even if
musical science should ever be entirely overturned by one of those revolutions
which sometimes take place in the regions influenced by the human mind, his
name will always maintain a place in the annals of general science.55
Parker seems ignorant of the true internal mechanisms comprising the Panharmonicon
and also confuses the Maelzel brothers. Leonard, too, was an automaton builder, but did not
travel as extensively as Johann. Alexander Buchner states, “The brothers are therefore very often
confused even in specialist works on the subject. It is in fact difficult to say exactly where the
work of one ends and the other begins.” See Buchner, 79.
54
Parker, 362.
55
Edward Foucaud, The Book of Illustrious Mechanics of Europe and America. Translated from
the French by John Frost (New York: Appelton & Co, 1847), 184-5. From Foucaud, Les artisans
illustres (Paris: Béthune et Plon, 1841). With more research, it may be argued that this French
biography was intended to stimulate sales of metronomes, which were primarily manufactured in
Paris during the time of this account.
133
For some twentieth-century scholars of technology, the emerging value placed upon
useful inventions signaled the death of automata creation and display.56
As machines
became mundane parts of everyday life, the novelty once evoked in their public
exhibition waned. Clockwork automata, once mysterious spectacles, ceased to fire the
imagination in a world of fast trains, readily attainable pocket watches, household
musical-clocks, and powerful factory machines. Yet for some, Maelzel made this new,
mechanically aided civilization possible.
Despite Foucaud’s and Parker’s assertions, Maelzel continued to be recognized as
a mechanical showman and master illusionist throughout the nineteenth century. Circus
impresario P. T. Barnum recounted the encouragement he received from Maelzel, a
shrewd businessman who was for the young, impressionable Barnum, “the great father of
caterers for public amusement.”57
Likewise, Alexander Wheelock Thayer recalled
Maelzel in The Life of Beethoven:
The mechanician was not only a man of unquestionable inventive genius, but he
also understood the public; knew as by instinct how to excite and gratify curiosity
without disappointing expectation, and had the tact and skill so to arrange his
exhibitions as to dismiss his visitors grateful for an amusement for which they had
paid. He was personally both respected and popular.58
56 Paul Metzner charts the decline of automata culture later in history. He explains the early
twentieth century attitude that “Engineers have been less interested in how well a machine
imitates a human being than in how well it performs a certain function that human beings have
been accustomed to performing…People expect an electrically powered machine to accomplish
something, and admire it on the basis of what it accomplishes. They do not admire it any more if
in accomplishing its task it also looks or acts like a human being.” See Metzner, 210. The above
quotes suggest that this attitude towards mechanical utility began much earlier in the course of
both French and American modernity, during a self-dubbed “utilitarian age.”
57
See P. T. Barnum, The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Second edition (London: Ward and
Lock, 1855), 58. Recounted in Metzner, 186.
58
Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The life of Ludwig van Beethoven, edited, revised and amended
from the original English manuscript and the German editions of Hermann Deiters and Hugo
Riemann, concluded, and all the documents newly translated, by Henry Edward Krehbiel, Vol. 2
(New York: The Beethoven Association [1921]), 252. Lending credence to Thayer’s assessment,
134
In contrast, John Delafield, in his study Mysticism and its Results; Being an Inquiry into
the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy, invoked Maelzel’s name with the history of public
deception. In Delafield’s memory, Maelzel remained an illusionist, a trickster for profit—
a figure that betrayed the intentions of a true mechanical scientist. Nowhere was the
“utilitarian good” of Maelzel’s metronome praised in Delafield’s 1857 commentary:
We arrive then at nearly the culminating point of Egyptian priestcraft, the days of
“wise men,” “sorcerers,” and “magicians.” Such men ever have, and we presume
ever will employ secrecy as the chief element of their clever jugglery…Maelzel's
automata, or Vaucanson's duck, will attract the world, when Bacon's, or Newton's,
or Laplace's works may remain in dust on the book-shelves. Human nature is
always the same, and thus it was in the days of Moses and Pharaoh. The wise
men, sorcerers, and magicians, held undisputed sway, not only over the
superstitions of the people, but over their educated monarchs and princes.59
Delafield perhaps recounted Maelzel’s exhibitions of the famed chess-playing Turk. Like
Kempelen before him, Maelzel hid breathing, thinking human being within a mechanical
frame, passing off a living player for an artificial masterwork. For almost a century, the
chess player represented an automatical illusion par excellence, recounted in diverse
sources including chess histories, fictions, a laudatory poem,60
journal articles (the most
Maelzel’s British contemporary Francis Joseph Grund recollected: “Mr. Maelzel, who exhibited
these wonders, was a very agreeable man, who, with a good-natured German smile always
reserved the first benches for the children, and regularly pampered them with sugar-plums. There
was, besides, mechanical ingenuity in the performance; and a problem to solve, which is always
interesting to Americans.” See Francis Joseph Grund, The Americans in their Moral, Social, and
Political Relations (Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1837), 78.
59
John Delafield, Mysticism and its Results; Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of
Secrecy (Saint Louis: Edwards & Bushnell, 1857), Gutenberg eBook #22314,
http://www.gutenberg.org (accessed September 20, 2007.)
60
See Hanna F. Gould, “To the Automaton Chess Player,” in Landmark Anthologies: Specimens
of American poetry (Boston: S. G. Goodrich & Co, [1829]). American Poetry Full-Text Database.
http://ebooks.ohiolink.edu (accessed September 20, 2007).
135
famous of which was penned by a young Edgar Allen Poe),61
and even a memoir of
Napoleon.62
Historians, journalists, and critics remembered Maelzel throughout the century for
his many machines and methods; not only for wonderful automata and useful
metronomes, but also for his illusory performances and grand public deceptions. In his
memoirs, William Wirt, who served as Attorney General of the United States from 1817
to 1829, depicted Maelzel as both a complete shyster and a natural born orator, someone
who could convince the public of anything. Like Delafield, Wirt has no comment on
Maelzel’s scientific contributions to the future of society. Wirt infers, however, that
Maelzel would have made an exceptional politician, reflecting that
Everybody talks sense now-a-days. But how many are there who can talk
successful folly and gain the reputation of wisdom by it? That is a species of
mental legerdemain which puts a man on a level with the far-famed Maelzel, the
exhibitor of the Androides, compared with whom the Chief-Justice [John
Marshall] himself is but an everyday sort of man.63
61 Edgar Allen Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” Southern Literary Messenger II (1836): 318-326.
Many scholars consider Poe’s article to be his nascent attempt to establish the detective-story
genre.
62
Constant, Premier Valet de Chambre, Recollections of the Private Life of Napoleon, Vol. II,
trans. by Walter Clark. (Akron: Saalfield Publishing Co., 1907), 1895. “The Emperor made two
or three moves, and intentionally made a wrong one. The automaton bowed, took the piece, and
put it in its proper place. His Majesty cheated a second time; the automaton bowed again, and
took the piece. ‘That is right,’ said the Emperor; and when he cheated a third time, the automaton,
passing his hand over the chess-board, spoiled the game.” Also noted in Thayer, ed. Krehbiel, The
Life of Beethoven, Vol. II, 232.
63
John P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Volume II (Philadelphia: Lea and
Blanchard, 1850), 201.
Addressing Congress on October 11, 1837, Virginia representative John Robertson
compared an entire body of the U. S. legislative to Maelzel’s machines. Using the prevailing
automatical metaphors, Robertson railed, “Those who desert their own principles, and act in
opposition to their own judgments, are slaves, mere puppets, moved by the will of another.
Maelzel could construct a House of Representatives as fit to exercise the functions of
legislators—yes, sir, speaker, orators, and all.” See Register of Debates in Congress, volume XIV
(Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1837), col 1441.
136
As nineteenth-century documents attest, Maelzel’s image was nothing if not protean. The
1884 and 1911 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica unapologetically labeled Maelzel
an “imposter” for his sordid history with Winkel’s metronome.64
The Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians in 1889 posited that “Maelzel was evidently a sharp, shrewd,
clever man of business, with a strong propensity to use the ideas of others for his own
benefit,”65
while C. G. Hamilton, as late as 1916, likewise ascertained that Maelzel
“possessed a remarkable combination of inventive genius, business ability, and readiness
to appropriate unscrupulously to his own use the products of others’ brains.”66
Maelzel’s
obituary appearing in the Athenaeum perhaps treated him most harshly, concluding of his
life:
As a man, Maelzel seems to have been quarrelsome, extravagant, and
unscrupulous. He can only be ranked amongst those empirics whose cleverness
almost amounts to genius. Had he possessed a larger amount of culture and of
conscience, he might have done service to high Art.67
Regardless of Maelzel’s many posthumous visages, his death in 1838 signaled the true
downfall of automata-display. Maelzel’s self-fashioned career was singular in nineteenth-
century culture, and while other mechanical-showmen flourished for a time, no exhibitor
64 See The Encyclopedia Britannica. A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature,
Ninth Edition, American Reprint, (Philadelphia: J.M. Stoddart Co., Limited, 1884), XVI, 207. It
reads, “When the imposter revisited Amsterdam, the inventor [Winkel] instituted proceedings
against him for his piracy…” This article is reprinted verbatim at least through the 1911 edition of
the encyclopedia.
65
“Maelzel,” A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by George Grove, D.C.L, Volume II
(London: Macmillan and co., 1880-9), 194-5.
66
See Hamilton, 5.
67
Reprinted in John Timbs, A Year-book of Facts in Science and Art (London: David Bogue,
1856), 94. The 1855 obituary is mostly likely confusing Leonard Maelzel with Johann, who died
in 1838.
137
resonated in the public’s imagination like Maelzel. Barnum and other entertainers would
employ some of his methods, but Maelzel’s brand of performance-spectacle was never
again repeated. As few heirs to his career followed, Maelzel’s personal collection of
machines were sold, dispersed, neglected, or destroyed. Without a master, a venue, or an
accompanying orchestra, his famed automaton trumpeter no longer sounded. A fire that
gutted Philadelphia’s Chinese Museum in 1854 relegated the mysterious chess player to
the status of legend.68
Decimated in WWII, Maelzel’s gargantuan Panharmonicon—
always too cumbersome for traveling exhibitions—survived in another guise; his
mechanical orchestra was the precursor to the ubiquitous and utilitarian orchestrion,
which found a welcome place by the latter part of the nineteenth century in taverns,
department stores, amusement parks, and luxurious homes alike. While Maelzel’s
complex and non-duplicable clockwork inventions fell into obscurity, the metronome
continued to garner acceptance in the nineteenth century as a tool for children’s music
education. Ironically, Maelzel’s smallest, least spectacular, and least profitable automaton
in his lifetime became his most influential after his death, and today many recognize him
for this device exclusively.
While twentieth-century performers and researchers seemed to forget Maelzel and
his mechanical culture, sources in his own century attested to his unique influence:
Maelzel represented a culture of artificiality based on mechanical promotion and
exhibition, and many musicians and intellectuals from this industrializing civilization
recognized the common qualities that underlie all of Maelzel’s machines. Many in this
past Western culture—those who prized human volition, variability, and expression
above mechanical imitation, replication, and precision—perceived the clockwork
68 Metzner, 188.
138
metronome similarly to all self-moving automata. They understood that Maelzel’s most
lasting machine also lacked the innate, volatile qualities of action and intellect that
comprised the very essence of humanity.
Maelzel’s Automaton Trumpeter and Panharmonicon
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, automata were invariably portrayed as
thoughtless, passionless figures. Not surprisingly then, nineteenth-century cultural critics
employed Maelzel’s famed automaton trumpeter in similar conceits. The performance
and history of the machine is well documented. In 1813, it débuted as soloist in high-
profile benefit concerts that included Beethoven, Hummel, Sphor, and other Viennese
musical greats. This hybrid man-machine concert, which included Beethoven’s “Battle
Symphony” (a work originally intended for Maelzel’s Panharmonicon), was so profitable
that Maelzel and the trumpeter traveled across Europe, replicating the performance-
spectacle with other live orchestras.
During the trumpeter’s premiere performances in London, listeners recognized
both Maelzel’s mechanical ingenuity alongside the machine’s musical failings.
According to the Times review printed in September 1818, the trumpeter did not have the
nuanced musical sense customarily heard in a human performance. With knowledge of
Maelzel’s reputation as “inventor of the metronome,” the British reviewer proclaimed of
Maelzel’s “automaton figure:”
Nothing can exceed the accuracy and neatness of the execution, or the steadiness
of the tone: in the rapidity with which the same note may be repeated in
succession, and in some passages of a similar nature, it surpasses the powers of
any living trumpeter; it fails only in expression, and in the swell of the note, a
defect which is common to all music produced by mechanism.69
69 The Times, Sept. 23, 1818, 2.
139
The fact that the automaton was expressionless is immaterial to this reviewer, since
musical clocks and barrel organs regularly exposed the failings of machine-music to the
whole of English society. It was common knowledge that mechanical music was always
defective when compared to a human performance; any automaton, however spectacular,
“fails only in expression.” Among its deficiencies, the trumpeter could not dynamically
shape notes or phrases, which the English called “swell,” a practice that living performers
intuited without notated indications, at least since the time of Caccini.
The automaton’s repertoire, which comprised a finite selection of marches and
fanfares, did not require any interpretive or emotional complexity. The trumpeter played
strict military music with mechanical precision, steadiness, power, and speed. Not
surprisingly, it excelled in automatical qualities only. The trumpeter was, nevertheless, an
uncanny spectacle, and Maelzel’s London audience enthusiastically requested an encore.
What was astonishing to the reporter was that “After the ceremony of winding up [by
Maelzel], he [the automaton] complied with the wishes of the company present, and
repeated his elaborate performances without moving a muscle.”70
As Maelzel’s trumpeter crossed the Atlantic, so did its reputation as a musically
deficient mechanism. Accounts spanning the century attested that the once-amazing
automaton gradually lost its luster. With only the artificiality of Maelzel’s machine in
mind, the lawyer, diarist, and amateur musician George Templeton Strong (1820-1875)
expressed his distain for a human performer on December 30, 1842:
70 Ibid.
140
As to Mr. Charles Braham, his voice is good and he manages it well, but
Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter has full as much expression. He looks as if he
were some great piece of clockwork wound up before the commencement of the
concert, and made to work itself into the room and emit musical sounds and then
stalk out again at intervals.71
For Strong, Maelzel’s automaton was the emblem for all that was unmusical. In a
germane comparison, Strong perceived that any lifeless human performer behaved and
sounded merely as “some great piece of clockwork,” a quality that bore a close
relationship to Maelzel’s musical timekeeper. The term later critics in the century would
use for this artificial quality was “metronomic.”72
The trumpeter was only one of Maelzel’s machines that analogized lifeless music
making in the nineteenth century. Like the automaton trumpet player, the
Panharmonicon was often praised as an automaton, but criticized as being insufficient
when compared to living musicians. While Maelzel’s trumpeter was an artificial
facsimile of one military musician, the Panharmonicon was the mechanical facsimile of
an entire military orchestra, replete with woodwind, brass, and percussion sections.
Thayer faithfully described the mechanics of the Panharmonicon as it originally appeared
71 Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music, Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988),
161.
Writer Edward Walter Hamilton, in his “monograph” Mr. Gladstone, commented upon
his subject’s skill as an orator, which bares striking similarity with Strong’s comment of Braham.
Hamilton described, “The pace at which he spoke was an even one. He could have spoken to a
metronome, though he had one pace for the House of Commons and another pace for the
platform. There was never a pause for want of an expression.” See Edward Walter Hamilton, Mr.
Gladstone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 4.
72
Other cultural critics analogized the automaton trumpeter as a pejorative throughout the
century. As late as 1862, a reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly criticized James Fenimore Cooper’s
narrative style, commenting, “[George] Washington, as shown to us in ‘The Spy,’ is a formal
piece of mechanism, as destitute of vital character as Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter.” See The
Atlantic Monthly 9 (January, 1862), Gutenberg eBook #13924, http://www.gutenberg.org
(accessed September 20, 2007).
141
in the Viennese Wunderkammer of Maelzel.73
Long after the Maelzel’s European
displays, however, an American Panharmonicon show received a scathing critique in the
Western Recorder from 1825. The reporter first mocks an advertisement describing the
mechanism:
“This wonderful instrument is exhibited every evening at Knickerbocker Hall,
Albany. It performs by means of certain mechanical arrangements upon 206
musical instruments. Of these there are thirteen different kinds,” &c. So says the
Albany Daily Advertiser. How supremely ridiculous are all such pretentions!!—
Let the first novelty wear off, and it will be seen by every one, that the whole is a
mere burlesque on the very name of musical execution. Every man who wishes
well to music, ought to be indignant against such pretentions.74
This critic contended that the Panharmonicon, while novel, was in no sense musical.
Another overly enthusiastic description of the Panharmonicon appeared in Maelzel’s
obituary notice in the Gazette Musicale. The French article described that the machine
was exceptional for its “expressive play,” “extreme agility,” and “graceful manner.”
Writing for The Musical Magazine in 1839, a highly skeptical American reviewer
reported that the obituary reflected “whimsical specimens of French credulity, and are not
solitary indications of the degree of confidence that is to be placed in the matter-of-fact
statements of that paper.”75
The American reviewer distrusted both the specific
description of the Panharmonicon and the entire journal for personifying ad ridiculum
such an obviously artificial object, one that imitated a military band no less. If the
73 Thayer, ed. Krehbiel, II, 251. “The Panharmonicon combined the common instruments then
employed in military bands, with a powerful bellows—the whole thing being enclosed in a case.
The motive power was automatic and the keys were touched by pins fixed in a revolving cylinder,
as in the common hand-organ or music-box.”
74
“Panharmonicon,” Western Recorder, Aug. 23, 1825, 136.
75
“THE VIOLIN. Hogarth's Musical History,” The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical
Science, Literature... Aug. 17, 1839, 270.
142
writer’s opinion in the Western Recorder held true, the Panharmonicon was a “mere
burlesque on the very name of musical execution,” and although promotional material
would claim otherwise, the automaton was a machine bereft of any natural grace or
expression.
Audiences of the time could perceive that all of Maelzel’s machines, however
remarkable, were imposters of the thing itself; no automaton could replicate the living
qualities of human musicians. The difference was obvious for one New York Review
writer in 1838. Describing the ineffable artistry and subtle touch required to play the
piano, he exclaimed, “Compared with this, how dead, how destitute of interest is
mechanical music, even the wondrous melodium of Maelzel!”76
The Metronome as an Extension of Automatical Values
Like all automata, the metronome was a product of clockwork. Thus we find an early
nineteenth-century description of metronomic motion that seems to evoke the artificiality
of Maelzel’s other machines. The British periodical The Albion from 1829 printed a
sardonic review of a questionable, amateur house-concert where the “elderly ladies, in
particular, were enthusiastic…Their heads and fans had often, during the performance,
covibrated, like Maelzel’s Metronomes, with the rhythm of the livelier passages, which
seemed to call forth the remembrance of livelier days.”77
The writer portrayed the usually
placid and possibly oblivious spectators behaving very strangely for 1829 standards,
moving as if they were automatical machines. Such a depiction was unique, if not
76 [Book Review] “Gardiner’s Music of Nature,” The New York Review V (July, 1838): 46.
77
“Musical Outlines,” The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, May 9, 1829, 384.
143
obscure, as this writer clearly wished to amuse with witty analogies based on the latest,
fashionable technologies. Extending his mechanical metaphors, the reporter then
compared the two misguided recitalists to compensating balance-springs in the new
Breguet pocket watch.78
More practical comments regarding metronomic motion appeared in the following
decade in English-language sources. In these early critiques, we find that the metronome
was a tool that informed students not only with a tempo reference, but also with an
undesirable standard of automatical behavior. While interest in the clockwork metronome
was growing, some educators found that the machine caused unforeseen problems when
used constantly in practice. In The Zodiac, a Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Science,
Literature, and the Art from 1835, an anonymous writer suggested that reliance on the
machine created mental and physical issues for the inexperienced student, stating that “an
occasional recourse to a metronome will be a very great help to you, if you have one
within your reach; but the too frequent use of it will make you feel ill at ease when you
have to play without it.”79
Early in the nineteenth century, this writer acknowledged a
psychological crutch imposed by a new, and still unfamiliar, clockwork reference. His
comment was not an isolated critique of the machine—it was a standard assessment,
expressed throughout the century, of the noticeable drawbacks in educating with the
metronome.
78 Ibid., “Like a peculiar watch of Breguet’s invention, in which two distinct balances force each
other into simultaneous vibration so did these sisterly pair…”
79
“Musical Instruction,” The Zodiac, a Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Science, Literature, and
the Art...Dec. 1835, 86.
144
Perhaps the most prominent early critic of the machine was none other than
Beethoven’s contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). And while
Hummel’s 1828 pedagogical publication Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung
zum Piano-forte Spiel presented the clockwork metronome very early on to students—
through Maelzel’s own promotional language—the composer-performer Hummel
strongly warned musical students against the artificial rhythm imbued by the metronome.
As late as 1861, periodicals such as Dwight’s Journal of Music and the Saturday Evening
Post translated Hummel’s important caveats against the machine:
If one could play a piece through correctly, attending to the beating of a
metronome, which is scarcely possible, if he possesses any nervous sensibility,
the performance must necessarily bear a cold, hard and inexpressive character.80
Others continued to hear detrimental musical effects in using the metronome as the
century progressed. And as the device became more familiar, experienced musicians’
criticisms became more urgent.
In the early history of the device, teachers considered the new metronome to be a
useful aid in the growing field of middle-class musical pedagogy. Nevertheless, music
periodicals and reviews consistently sounded warnings against overusing the machine in
instruction. For many witnessing its influence firsthand, the metronome replaced the
internal sense of musical time with the externalized, artificial time of clockwork. Perhaps
the earliest and most comprehensive English description of the invention from a general-
interest publication appears in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany from
October, 1817. In “An Explanation of the Notation Employed in the Scale of Maelzel’s
Metronome,” the writer defines the techniques required translate Maelzel’s beats-per-
80 Quoted in “Musical Customs and Practices,” Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 28, 1861, 4; APS
Online.
145
minute scale and describes the use of the machine to performers, students, and amateurs.
Most importantly, he explains the proper and improper place of the clockwork
metronome in living musical performance.81
The writer, known only as
“Philharmonicus,” verbally dissects the unfamiliar technology:
The Maelzel’s metronome we have seen is itself a species of pendulum, which is
made to vibrate different times by means of a sliding weight upon a portion of the
rod continued upwards beyond the point of suspension, and furnished with a
graduated scale upon which is marked the number of beats it makes, when the
upper edge of the weight is adjusted, so as to be opposite to it. It is furnished with
an escapement, and its motion is continued by a weight hung over a pully. The
scale extends from 50 to 160. This instrument answers its purpose in some
respects, but it is not without inconveniences. It is somewhat complex, and may
be put out of order. It is not portable, but requires to be fixed against a wall, and at
a considerable height.82
Also the constant loud ticking which it makes at every
beat, though perhaps esteemed an advantage by some, who cannot measure equal
portions of time in their mind, is disagreeable to those who have a real feeling for
music, and will render those who use it constantly, too mechanically uniform in
their performance, as it will not permit that judicious acceleration and retardation
81 The article also instructs on how to build a string pendulum, which the writer strongly suggests
is a more appropriate and convenient machine for initial tempo reference.
82
It becomes clear from this description that the writer speaks of a “metronome” resembling a
wall clock and not Maelzel’s more compact invention. The machine as described may therefore
be the earlier and more cumbersome design by Maelzel, otherwise a modified clock with
Maelzel’s scale. Despite the differences in appearance, the described machine functioned, and
more importantly sounded, with the same basic qualities as found in Maelzel’s more familiar
metronome.
The 1815 British patent announcement for Maelzel’s first metronome design is almost
comically ambiguous and suggests that the invention was not yet fully conceived or perfected:
“John Malzl, of Poland-street, Middlesex, Machinist; for an instrument or instruments, machine
or machines, for the improvement of musical performance, which he denominates a Metronome,
or musical time-keeper. Dated December 5, 1815.” See The Repertory of Arts, Manufacturers,
and Agriculture, Vol. XXVIII, Second Series (London: J. Wyatt, 1816), 127-8.
Probably due to the early obscurity of the invention in England, this patent description
appears verbatim in an 1816 review of music-publications by Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven’s
collaborator and confidant in London. Ries’ music, published by Clementi & Co., was some of
the first to include the unfamiliar metronome indications—along with the supposedly dreaded
Italian affect words that metronome numbers were intended to replace. See Sylvanus Urban,
“Review of New Musical Publications,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, Mar. 1816, 251.
146
of the time according to the genius of the passage, in which a great deal of the
expression evinced by a performer of taste consists.83
As many other commentators on Maelzel’s machine suggested, the invention was a boon
to the unmusical student, those amateurs who had no innate sense of rhythm and were
hopeless in finding a musical pulse without external, mechanical assistance.
Nevertheless, “Philharmonicus” offers valuable insights into the performance practices of
his—along with Beethoven’s and Hummel’s— cultural age. Musical time, as he
explained, was essentially an internal phenomenon that the performer had sole authority
over. The writer contended—as so many other perceptive musicians over the century
would similarly explain—that the regular ticking of the automatical clock was the very
antithesis of human expression and musical taste. Mechanical “uniformity” negated the
sensory “judgment” of the performer, who was expected to vary the time over the course
of a composition as the quality of each phrase dictated. For those “who have a real
feeling of music”—as Philharmonicus was one of the first to acknowledge—the
metronome clicked out a time that most creative performers found highly “disagreeable”
with their very human sense of time, rhythm, and expression.
Nearly two decades later, the Musical Magazine reported in 1836, “the
importance of this little instrument in regulating the time of a movement is beginning to
be appreciated,” but provided the following caveat:
Our enterprising teachers should not be slow in availing themselves of such a help
as found in the Metronome. We would not recommend its constant use, lest the
style of the singers should become too evidently labored and mechanical, but
occasionally introduced it will be of great service.84
83 Philharmonicus, “An Explanation of the Notation Employed in the Scale of Maelzel’s
Metronome,” The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany I (October, 1817): 223-4.
84
“The Metronome,” The Musical Magazine, Apr. 1836, 304. http://www.proquest.com/
(accessed April 13, 2007).
147
The metronome, according to early critics, actually created a mechanical performance
practice when consistently referenced. Writers heard the qualities of mindless labor and
artificiality in the metronome, which seemed unlike the traditional perceptions of musical
movement. An 1840 article entitled “Substitute for the Maelzel’s Metronome” from the
Musical Magazine expressed a similar sentiment. The critic reminded students and
teachers that clockwork technology was an unnecessary musical-time reference, since the
simple pendulum was both appropriate and sufficient for finding starting tempos by
Maelzel’s beat-per-minute scale. As the writer recognized, the silent, swinging pendulum
defined musical time much differently than a perpetual, clockwork device. The simple
pendulum was not automatical. He concluded with an essential reminder:
We would make here one remark in regard to the proper use of Maelzel’s
Metronome. It is originally not designed as an instrument by which to keep the
time, but only as one to indicate it, and to use [it] in the former way, except in
exercises, for the mere purpose of learning to keep time, would take away the
spirit of the pupil’s performance, making it a mechanical affair, and him, if he
succeeds in conforming to it, a slave of time.85
As we will see throughout this study, critics continued to intuit a form of tyranny in the
self-moving, artificial time of the metronome. Much like the automaton was a mindless
slave due to its clockwork invariability, the student became a mindless slave under the
clockwork sound of the metronome. These criticisms appeared well into the twentieth
century: the metronome made once free-willed musicians into machines.86
85
“Substitute for Maelzel’s Metronome,” The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical
Science, Literature...Feb. 29, 1840, 67. http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed April 13, 2009).
86
By 1854, Adolph Bernhard Marx had found technique-based instructional methods offered to
the rising wave of amateur, middle-class musicians typically created mechanical performers. Due
to the pressures demanded by this new culture of consumer-amateurism, the typical, lack-luster
music teacher perhaps unwittingly became the trainer of mindless young musicians. Marx
148
For many who understood the physical and variable nature of musical time, the
metronome created a new and unwelcome performance practice, one based in artificial
and automatical behavior. Publishers and editors were no small part of the problem; the
publishing industry continued to encourage metronomic performance practices by adding
metronome numbers and promoting metronome use in new editions. This editorial trend,
which Schindler called “professional metronoming,” was especially prevalent for
Beethoven’s publications. Schindler scorned, “to here these Sonatas [Beethoven’s Op.
27] according to the metronomic signs affixed to them leads one to wish that all piano-
forte metronomers were put under the ban,” and suggested that these editors were
“perverters of all truth in expression [whose re-interpretation] threatens soon to bring all
genuine music under the domination of the superficial—if, indeed, it has not already
submitted to that authority.”87
As editor of Schindler’s text, Moscheles admitted that he himself was included in
the “metronomising” of Beethoven’s music yet attested to the worth of his metronomic
translations, stating “I have not merely listened to my own musical feeling, but been
guided by my recollections of what I gathered from Beethoven’s own playing.”88
It seems
described the dangerous results of what was effectively a cultural-social crisis in mass musical
education, during an age in which the clockwork metronome gradually found new, non-“artistic”
adherents. Marx explained: “the immediate consequence of this has been, as might be expected,
that the musical profession, like every other lucrative business, has attracted a host of
competitors, every one of whom again exerts himself in recruiting and sending out fresh legions
of amateurs…Every hour of the day, if possible, is occupied in giving lessons; and, in the few
spare moments, the over-taxed powers of body and mind are still further exhausted, in the
practice of all the new and fashionable things which every day brings forth. Art is made
mechanical, and as a mechanism transmitted to the people; not through the fault of the harassed
teacher, but in consequence of his false position.” See Adolph Bernhard Marx, The Music of the
Nineteenth Century and Its Culture (London: Robert Cocks, and Co., 1854), 74.
87 See Schindler, ed. Moscheles, 108-109.
88
Ibid., 106fn.
149
that early-nineteenth-century metronome markings, whether from an editor or composer,
were largely grounded by subjective, ex post facto assessments and not objective
absolutes. In Schindler’s Life of Beethoven, Moscheles too recognized the subjective,
non-mechanical nature of musical time, and he could not comprehend the biographer’s
complete disdain for editorial metronome markings. While he was indeed a
“metronomising” editor, Moscheles believed that “the musical world knows, that marking
time by a metronome is but a slight guide for performers and conductors.”89
Moscheles’ understanding—that metronomic guidance was of slight and limited
importance—was not a universal truth for musicians in his age, or for ages to follow.
Many contemporaneous critics found that these metronomic values were becoming a new
reality in performance. In 1846, the Harbinger reviewer, similar to Schindler, suggested
that mechanical time was actively defiling the human qualities of musical expressivity:
To bang through an overture like a machine is not the thing; no machine has
whims and inflections, and therefore, it only makes cast-iron music…a mere
beater of time is worth nothing, but to embarrass all parties and to kill the music,
and Maelzel’s metronome were quite as good a thing and less expensive.90
As many suggested, the activities of the industrialized world—which functioned in
lockstep with automatical machines—had no place on the concert stage.91
Musicians with
89 Ibid., 111fn. Moscheles too recognized that performance practices, perhaps under the influence
of more metronomic, technical practice routines, created more mechanical interpretations. As a
Beethoven editor, he thus reasoned: “In some of [Beethoven’s] quick movements I have
purposely refrained from giving way to that rapidity of piano-forte execution, so largely
developed at the present time.” See Schindler, ed. Moscheles, 106-107fn.
90
“Musical Review,” Harbinger, Devoted to Social and Political Progress, Mar. 7, 1846, 204.
91
Susan Bogert Warner, in her 1852 novel Queechy, analogized the metronome as the antithesis
to natural music-making, writing “the canary might as well study Maelzel's Metronome…The
nature of the one must change or the two must remain the world wide apart.” For Warner, too,
innate musicality was “the world wide apart” from clockwork technology. See Susan Warner (aka
Elizabeth Wetherell), Queechy, Gutenberg eBook #8874, http://www.gutenberg.org (accessed
September 20, 2007).
150
“cast-iron,” invariable, hard, and inexpressive qualities were considered just as useful as
Maelzel’s tempo-clock. As we recall, the contemporaneous critics of Maelzel’s other
automata concurred, “no machine has whims and inflections.” Thus, while George
Templeton Strong considered Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter a lifeless clockwork
performer, critics of the clockwork metronome, as early as “Philharmonicus” in 1817,
heard living musicians exhibiting the very same automatical qualities when Maelzel’s
machine guided their actions.
As amateur and professional musicians increasingly used the metronome to
reference tempo, critics began to discuss a performer’s ability to transcend metronomic
time and thus express something “anti-artificial.” Conductors, in particular, were
criticized throughout the nineteenth century when behaving like metronomes. The Times
pejoratively dubbed even Moscheles “a metronomic director” in 1841.92
Recognizing the
musical insufficiency of metronomic directing, others argued that a mechanical conductor
invariably created a mechanical orchestra; and that a music ensemble, under this slavery
of metronomic time, sonically transformed into a living Panharmonicon. In 1847, the
Harbinger magazine critic described how mechanical qualities were eroding the natural,
human nuances once heard in good orchestra performances. He maintained that the
emerging metronomic time-sense was entirely misguided and unlike anything that
composers, including Beethoven, could ever have intended. The reviewer scolds:
92
“Schindler’s life of Beethoven, edited by Moscheles,” The Times, April 10, 1841, 6.
151
Let no orchestra attempt to play very fast, which is obliged to be merely
mechanical in its playing; in which there is not a pervading feeling of the
composition which dictates to every instrument, by a simultaneous instinct, when
to retard a little, and when to accelerate. No strict time-keeping by Maelzel’s
metronome can possibly produce a piece of music as it existed in the composer’s
mind, or fail to sacrifice its life and glow and meaning; and consequently that
swift rail-road speed, which does not yield to all the varying impulsations of a
controlling feeling, will express as little as a rapid locomotive with a long train of
dirt cars after it.93
The times were actually changing, and critics considered Maelzel’s metronome
instrumental in dictating a new paradigm of musical time through mechanical motion.
Even in literature, the radical, detrimental shift towards metronomic action was
expressed. In Menella Bute Smedley’s story Edith Kinnaird (c1845), one character
recites a well-worn poem with uncommon, anti-human performance practices: “Mr.
Dalton volunteered to read aloud Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall,’ which he delivered with a
pompous trepidation very fatal to the flow of the meter, to say nothing of the sentiment.
You might have kept time to his declamation with a metronome.”94
As both music
criticisms and fictional anecdotes suggest, the traditional practice of metric emphasis and
the “simultaneous instinct” of creative rhythm—which combined the qualities of accent,
movement, phrasing, dynamics, and expression—receded under the strict guidance of
mechanical time. The metronome, in opposition to the lived experience of musical and
spoken rhythm, enforced an expressionless value system that some listeners equated to
factory machinery and mass, industrial transportation––those utilitarian offspring of
Maelzel’s soulless automata. Yet experienced musicians could still intuit a distinction
between traditional music making and the “mere” artificiality of metronomic time. In
93 “Musical Review,” Harbinger, Devoted to Social and Political Progress, Feb. 27, 1847, 185.
94
Menella Bute Smedley, “The Maiden Aunt—No. V,” Sharpe’s London Magazine, Dec. 4,
1847, 92.
152
1856, one such performer in the Philharmonic Society of New York praised a fine
conductor of pre-metronomic traditions, U. C. Hill, who “taught us the art of shades and
effects in music, and has rendered the metronome and all mechanical music hateful to us
for ever.”95
The Embrace of Maelzel’s Automatical Values in Industry
As cultural critics, music educators, and performers heard the sounds of trains and factory
machinery in Maelzel’s machines, it may come as no surprise that significant nineteenth-
century politicians and labor theorists found the artificiality of Maelzel’s automata to be
positive, influential symbols for the industrializing world. One notable example of
Maelzel’s cultural influence appears in a speech by Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
from 1836. Possibly recollecting Maelzel’s Boston exhibitions, Webster described the
importance of machines in America’s new industrial society:
It is thus that the successful application of science to art increases the productive
power and agency of the human race…These automata in the factories and the
workshops are as much our fellow laborers, as if they were automata wrought by
some Maelzel into the form of men, and made capable of walking, moving, and
working, of felling the forest or cultivating the fields.96
While music critics heard the sound of monotonous labor and factory machines in the
metronome, Webster found that factory machines and human labor imitated Maelzel’s
automata. The politician envisioned a nation where automata and men work with the
95 “Music,” The Albion, a Journal of News, Politics, and Literature, Mar. 8, 1856, 115.
96
Daniel Webster, "Technical Progress and Prosperity," The Writings and Speeches of Daniel
Webster Hitherto Uncollected I (Boston, 1903), 63–78; in Annals of American History.
http://america.eb.com/america/ (accessed August 3, 2007).
153
same movements and purposes.97
Webster was not concerned that factory machines did
not appear like Maelzel’s fabrications. The utility of automatical machines, despite
appearances, made them equal in value to living workers. Perhaps unwittingly, Webster
explained that machines and men, when used for the same industrial purposes, were
virtually indistinguishable from one another, and from Maelzel’s actual clockwork
creations.
The writings of other early nineteenth-century labor theorists strongly suggest that
Maelzel’s mechanical culture inspired the very notion that automatic machines could be
invented and employed in the new factories of England and France. One of the first
proponents of a Maelzelian factory system was Andrew Ure, in his 1835 text The
Philosophy of Manufactures: or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and Commercial
Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain. Yet Ure recognized that automata—
Maelzel’s inventions specifically—presently failed to provide any lasting purposes for
society beyond fleeting entertainment and diversion:
The chess-player of M. Maelzel, now under exhibition at Paris, and
formerly shown in this country, has been often described. It imitates very
remarkably a living being, endowed with all the resources of intelligence, for
executing the combinations of profound study.
Raisin’s automaton harpsichord was found to contain an infant performer.
Self-acting inventions like the preceding, however admirable as exercises
of mechanical science, do nothing towards the supply of the physical necessities
97 Daniel Webster was not the first significant United States politician to describe an aspect of
American society using the term “automaton.” In a letter dated July 12, 1816, Thomas Jefferson
wrote to Samuel Kercheval, “And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load
us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion
and servitude…A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that
second, for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of
misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering.” It may be significant that at the
time of this speech, Maelzel was exhibiting automata in London. From Thomas Jefferson,
Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, volume IV (London:
Colburn and Bentley, 1829), 293–300.
154
of society. Man stands in daily want of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter; and is
bound to devote the powers of body and mind, of nature and art, in the first place
to provide for himself and his dependents a sufficiency of these necessaries, with
which there can be no comfort, nor leisure for the cultivation of the taste and
intellect. To the production of food and domestic accommodation, not many
automatic inventions have been applied, or seem to be extensively applicable;
though, for modifying them to the purposes of luxury, many curious contrivances
have been made.98
Ure, similar to Daniel Webster, re-envisioned the ideal factory system to be one where
automatons and men labored together with the same actions. Ure’s modern factory, with
its human factory laborers, represented a mechanical collective that would rival even
Maelzel’s Panharmonicon:
But I conceive that this title [“factory”], involves the idea of a vast automaton,
composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted
concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to
a self-regulating moving force.99
Ure acknowledged, however, that these new labor concepts, based on repeating,
mechanical actions of men, women, and children would take time to implement, since
even factory workers in the early nineteenth century were not keen on behaving like
synchronized clockwork. He explains the real problems with the automatically structured
factory: “The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention of
a proper self-acting mechanism for drawing out and twisting cotton into a continuous
thread, as in the distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one co-
operating body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and
98 Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures: or An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral, and
Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain (London: Charles Knight, 1835),
11. It seems that Ure did not realize Maelzel’s chess player, like Raisin’s harpsichord, also
contained a person within the pseudo-automaton. Ure did acknowledge, however, the truly
“productive” textile machines of famed eighteenth-century automaton creator Vaucanson. See
Ure, 12-13.
99
Ibid., 13-14.
155
above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to
identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.”100
For Ure,
the greatest problem in establishing the new industrial factory was in making men
metronomic.
Later nineteenth-century social critics often suggested that the mindless, slaving
automata that Webster and Ure once analogized were truly embodied in the new and
expanding industrial workforce. Human laborers took on the qualities of automata both in
action and appearance through repetitive, redundant, and soulless work. Likewise
suggesting Maelzel’s machine culture, George Fitzhugh explained how Ure’s speculative
theories became reality in an 1854 essay "The Failure of Free Society" stating, “division
makes labor ten times more efficient, but, by confining each workman to some simple,
monotonous employment, it makes him a mere automaton and an easy prey to the
capitalist.”101
Andrew C. Cameron also echoed this sentiment during an 1867 union
conference, maintaining, “The man who merely performs the monotonous functions of a
mere automaton, as thousands of our factory employees do from year to year, must
eventually descend both in the intellectual and social scale.”102
These social critics found
that men, women, and children—who lost the sense of their own interpretive will through
mindless repetitive actions—became mechanical. Cultural critics continued to express
similar perceptions regarding musicians when they applied the metronome to once
100 Ibid., 15.
101
George Fitzhugh " The Failure of Free Society," Annals of American History.
http://america.eb.com/america/ (accessed August 3, 2007).
102
Andrew C. Cameron, “The Problems and Prospects of Labor,” Annals of American History.
http://america.eb.com/america/ (accessed August 3, 2007).
156
creative performance practices. As Cameron, Fitzhugh, and many critics of the
metronome suggested, a “man who merely performs monotonous functions” devolves
into “a mere automaton.”
Automatical behavior, once only dreamed of by Ure, became a positive value in
modern factory organization by the end of the century. In his “scientifically managed”
factory system, the industrial-labor mastermind Frederick Winslow Taylor recognized
that he trained human beings to act artificially. Through incessant drilling of workers’
actions, which were constantly gauged by the precise, artificial time of the stopwatch
down to fractions of a second, Taylor increased the productivity and efficiency of factory
laborers to unprecedented levels. Yet, Taylor found a common criticism with his
scientific training method:
Now, when through all of this teaching and this minute instruction the work is
apparently made so smooth and easy for the workman, the first impression is that
this all tends to make him a mere automaton, a wooden man. As the workmen
frequently say when they first come under this system, “Why, I am not allowed to
think or move without some one interfering or doing it for me!” The same
criticism and objection, however, can be raised against all other modern
subdivision of labor.103
In the industrial world, men seemed to be moving ever closer to the behaviors of
Maelzel’s automata. Acting in strict artificial time while performing mindless automatical
actions, humans started mimicking those inventions that many writers earlier in the
century considered insufficient when compared to humanity. But, while the factory was
embracing automatical culture for its efficiency, precision, and ease of production, the
world of music performance and education continued to voice protest regarding
Maelzel’s automatical metronome. In the metronome, critics continued to hear the very
103 Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management (Reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press,
1972), 125.
157
same mindless, monotonous qualities of time and motion that Ure’s and later Taylor’s
modern factory system valued so highly.
Musical Artificiality Actualized in the Metronome
The 1884 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica acknowledged that the metronome, over the
course of the nineteenth century, became the primary external-reference tool for music
instruction in Europe.104
The metronome article, however, was no endorsement of the
device. Instead, the Britannica entry described the insufficiency of Maelzel’s automatical
creations in a world of living music performance. Concurring with pedagogues over the
century, the critical Encyclopedia Britannica writer argued that a simple pendulum, a tool
unrelated to the artificial time of clockwork, was vastly more appropriate in defining
musical tempos. He then railed upon the unoriginality and inconvenience of Maelzel’s
overly artificial creation, concluding:
Maelzel’s scale was needlessly and arbitrarily complicated, proceeding by twos
from 40 to 60, by threes from 60 to 70, by fours from 72 to 120, by sixes from
120 to 144, and by eights from 144 to 208. Dr. Crotch constructed a time-
measurer, and Henry Smart (the violinist, and father of the composer of the same
name) made another in 1821, both before that received as Maelzel’s was known in
England. In 1882 James Mitchell, a Scotsman, made an ingenious amplification of
the Maelzel clock-work, reducing to mechanical demonstration what formerly
rested wholly on the feeling of the performer. Although “Maelzel’s metronome”
has universal acceptance, the silent metronome and still more Weber’s graduated
ribbon are greatly to be preferred, for the clock-work of the other is liable to be
out of order, and needs a nicety of regulation which is almost impossible; for
instance when Sir George Smart had to mark the traditional times of the several
pieces of the Dettingen Te Deum,105
he tested them by twelve metronomes, no
104 General-interest periodicals continued to describe the metronome solely as a pedagogical tool,
not a professional practice aid. In 1905, an article entitled “The Romance of Automata” by Henry
Ridgely Evans states, “ Maelzel was the inventor of the Metronome (1815), a piece of mechanism
known to all instructors of music.” Emphasis added. See The Open Court, Mar. 1, 1905, 131.
105
Significantly, Smart knew the “traditional times” of Handel’s work without the aid of the
metronome.
158
two of which beat together. The value of the machine is exaggerated, for no living
performer could execute a piece in unvaried time throughout, and no student
could practice under the tyranny of its beat; and conductors of music, nay,
composers themselves, will give the same piece slightly slower or quicker on
different occasions, according to the circumstances of performance.106
For this writer and many others in the nineteenth century, artificial clockwork placed an
external imposition on human action. The metronome, like Taylor’s stopwatch, imposed
a form of tyranny over the movements and thoughts of people. We recall that Beethoven
himself acknowledged the tyrannical nature of the device, even while endorsing its use to
fellow composers.107
The Encyclopedia Britannica entry confirmed that a free and
variable quality of musical time was the common practice. Recognizing that all good
performances necessitated subjective judgment, the critic realized that metronomic time
merely squashed creative freedom; its clockwork clicks effaced the natural subjectivity
inherent in musical time and expression. Thus the entry exposed a significant concept
underlying the use of the machine in the nineteenth century: The metronome did not
sufficiently explain or document how music moves. The device merely projected an
automatical constriction, a tyranny, upon the subjective movements and expressions of
living musicians.
By the late nineteenth century, metronomic time was an increasingly audible
quality in professional performances, and its seemingly hegemonic influence was heard
even in the most renowned musicians and ensembles. As critics continued to relate,
performers seemingly devolved into automata when guided by the time of Maelzel’s
106 The Encyclopedia Britannica, Ninth Edition, Vol. XVI (American Reprint, Philadelphia: J.M.
Stoddart Co., Limited, 1884), 207. This article is reprinted verbatim at least through the 1911
edition of the encyclopedia.
107
Beethoven, Letters, ed. Anderson, II, 727.
159
metronome. For instance, a New York Times reviewer in 1894 described a concert where
“the dynamic gradations were attempted, though nearly all were made with abrupt
rudeness, but there were hardly any nuances of tempo at all. Mr. Damrosch beat off the
measures like a metronome, and the orchestra, following his lead, played like an
assembly of artisans.”108
This reviewer heard the qualities of repetitive, unthinking labor
in metronomic musical-time; the musicians sounded as if they were Taylor’s modern
factory workers—and by mechanical association, Maelzel’s historical automata.
The composer Camille Saint-Saëns expressed an opposite aesthetical point of
view in 1891, complementing a conductor, A. Vianesi, who “[possessed] the precious
quality of not conducting like a metronome, [giving] to my music the suppleness which is
essential to an artistic orchestra.”109
For both Saint-Saëns and the New York Times
reviewer, the metronome promoted the values of an artisan, in binary opposition to an
artist.110
The 1913 Webster’s Dictionary verifies the pejorative term and compares the
two opposing concepts, “where idea of mechanical conformity to rule…attaches to the
term artisan, [while] the ideas of refinement and of peculiar skill…belong to the term
108“The Symphony Society,” The New York Times, Jan. 4, 1894, 2.
109
Camille Saint-Saëns, “Letter 4—No Title,” Century Illustrated Magazine, Nov. 1891, 156.
110
In the nineteenth century, experienced musicians, pedagogues, and critics often invoked the
binary association between “artist and artisan” when describing their performance culture. By
1854, Adolph Bernhard Marx had considered the musical artist to contain a high capacity for
intuition, sensory perception, individualism, and creativity, while the mere performing artisan
could only reproduce lifeless products.
Describing the necessary values of musical education in The Music of the Nineteenth
Century and Its Culture, Marx, a vocal critic of metronomic interpretation, states: “I must once
more premise that all activity in art must be ‘artistic’ in its operation; that is to say, that it must
spring from individual will, reflection, and sympathy throughout all its manifestations. All
theorizing of every kind—that is to say, all teaching that does not appeal to intuitive perception of
the subject and active participation in it—is void, dead, and can only mislead.” See Marx, 265.
160
artist.”111
Thus, for many, the clockwork metronome was a tool that developed musical
workers, not creative musicians.112
Another New York Times reviewer, summarizing Krehbiel’s publication Listening
to Music, maintained in 1897 that for an orchestra leader “to beat time might be the work
of the metronome, and so the orchestra would be brought down to the level of a
mechanism, to be set going with a crank.”113
The clockwork consistency of Maelzel’s
metronome resulted in an ensemble that again evoked two more of Maelzel’s machines:
the trumpeter and the Panharmonicon, those inexpressive and artificial military
musicians. One writer in 1905 perceived a similar mechanical aesthetic in an ensemble
directed by the notable American conductor, Theodore Thomas, admitting that he,
111 See Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 86.
112
Venerable piano pedagogue Adolph Friedrich Christiani, in The Principles of Expression in
Pianoforte Playing (1884), offered perhaps the most detailed description of the qualities that
distinguish performing musical “artists” from common musicians. By scoring performers on the
presence or absence of four innate abilities—“Talent, Emotion, Intelligence, and Technique”—
Christiani printed a fifteen-point hierarchy of musicality and artistic development. Christiani
clearly consider those with “Talent” to be the highest order of musicians, even if they lacked
other innate qualities. Someone with all four innate qualities was considered to be an “Executive
artist, of highest order.” Someone only lacking in technique was a “non-executive artist; probably
first-class teacher.” Fourth in the list was the performer lacking in “Emotion,” who was listed
merely as an “Executant musician; probably scholarly and critical, but dry.” Seventh in the
artistic hierarchy of music performance was, “A virtuoso, without being either an artist or a
musician” and who lacked the capacities for both “Emotion” and “Intelligence.”
The lowest three musical types on Christiani’s hierarchical scale of artistry are telling:
One who lacks both “Talent” and “Emotion” is a “Scholarly executant, but cold;” Lower still is a
“Musical theorist,” someone who only contains “Intelligence” and nothing more. Finally, and
most significantly for the present study, stands the performer who only has “Technique,” whom
Christiani summarily discounts as a “Virtuoso of the music-box kind.”
See Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 16.
113 “Listening to Music,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1897, RB2.
161
seemed to me simply a kind of human metronome, beating time. I learned the
contrary on one occasion, when I was permitted to witness one of his private
rehearsals. At a certain point in the symphony, which the orchestra was playing in
perfect time and in perfect tune, but with a mechanical effect of crescendo and
diminuendo…he suddenly rapped on the music stand before him…with hand and
foot acting together he imitated the movement of an organ-grinder…The orchestra
repeated the passage with the spirit and fire, before lacking, infused into it. It was
a trifling incident, but a significant one.114
As we recall, nineteenth-century spectators consistently found artificial machines, both
their actions and appearances, to be wanting. The reviewer described a human
metronome as “simple,” in the same way an automaton was considered “mere.” Yet,
despite the insufficiency of metronomic time, comments continued to acknowledge the
rise of mechanical performance practices. A London reviewer for the Times, again in
1897, remarked on the unusual tempo-sense displayed in a performance of Berlioz’s
transcription of “Weber’s ‘Invitation’ [which] ended the programme; it was taken with a
strange absence of rhythmic elasticity, with almost metronomic regularity.”115
Berlioz
himself, by 1841, had realized that any music adhering to Maelzel’s metronome would
exhibit all the qualities of a “strange,” lifeless corpse:
I do not mean to say…that it is necessary to imitate the mathematical regularity of
the metronome; all music so performed would become of freezing stiffness, and I
even doubt whether it would be possible to observe so flat a uniformity during a
certain number of bars.
Much like the strangeness elicited by the visage of Maelzel’s chess player, automatical
time and motion appeared unnatural, dead, or altogether inhuman for nineteenth-century
composers and music critics alike. But this flat, uniform, and freezing-stiff performance
114 “Three Impressions of Theodore Thomas,” Outlook, Feb. 4, 1905, 316-17.
115
“The Lamoureux Concerts,” The Times, Mar. 29, 1897, 13.
116
Hector Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary
Cowden Clarke (London: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1856), 246.
162
practice was clearly on the rise by the end of the century. Again from 1897, another New
York Times critic heard an odd performance of Brahms’ Symphony no. 1, where in the
first movement, “There was no rubato at all, and much of the significance of the beautiful
phrasing was quite lost because Mr. Damrosch drove his orchestra ahead with the angular
rigidity of a metronome.”117
As Saint-Saëns’ compliment suggested, some notable conductors continued to
lead an orchestra unencumbered by artificial metronomic time. Yet, during the first
decade of the twentieth century, some critics found that such nuanced conducting became
a rarity. In 1907 one reporter for the International Year Book extolled the new conductor
of the Boston Symphony Orchestra: “Dr. Karl Muck, of Berlin, won the affection of all
admirers of orchestral music. He towers far above his predecessor, and the famous
orchestra, free from the dead weight of a mechanical metronome beat, played with all its
old-time sweep and passion to which audiences were accustomed under the batons of
Nikisch and Paur.”118
Indeed, in a telling assertion of twentieth-century performance
culture, the traditional, non-metronomic perception of musical movement was becoming
distinguished for being “old-time.”
The emergent epistemology of automatical-musical time not only altered
orchestra performances, but also solo recitals and choral concerts. Commenting on a
piano performance by Bernard Stavenhagen (1862-1914), a Times critic recounted in
1891 that “the metronomic accuracy of rhythm which now distinguishes Herr
Stavenhagen’s playing is very ill suited to the variations which form the opening
117 “The Symphony Society,” The New York Times, Jan. 23, 1898, 16.
118
Frank Moore Colby, editor, The International Year Book, A Compendium of the World’s
Progress for the Year 1907 (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1908), 523.
163
movement”119
of a particular Beethoven sonata. Reviewing the 1905 Bristol Musical
Festival, another Times review noted that the choral director often “insists on a
metronomic regularity that can hardly have been intended. Surely the fine choral
recitatives…were not meant to be taken quite so inflexibly as they were taken today.”120
Even through the twentieth century, it seems, recitatives were still performed with a non-
metronomic time sense, employing the traditional knowledge of poetic meter and spoken
declamation, expressing the music in the “reciting style.”121
Critics of the metronomic time were especially resentful when the machine was
applied to the publications and performances of Beethoven. Georg Henschel (1850-
1934), the famed conductor and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was perhaps
the most outspoken detractor of the metronomic interpretations of Beethoven’s
symphonies. As editor of Sir George Grove’s published letters, Henschel described two
qualities in conflict: Maelzel’s automatical metronome and Beethoven’s musical spirit.
The tension between them was especially problematic in Beethoven’s grandiose Ninth
Symphony:
These marks had been sent by Beethoven—eight days before his death—to the
Philharmonic Society of London in his great anxiety to lessen the difficulties of
studying and performing his gigantic work. Interesting therefore as they may be to
the biographer, the historian, the student—to the public, I thought, it could be
nothing but distracting to state that the Adagio, for instance, of the Ninth
Symphony is supposed to be played at sixty beats, while the Andante alternating
with it should be played at sixty-three beats in the minute. Who could, I reasoned,
even supposing he had, by the help of the metronome, begun the Adagio at
exactly sixty beats—who could warrant that in the Andante he would not beat
more or less than exactly three beats per minute more? Surely not Beethoven
119 “Herr Stavenhagen’s Recital,” The Times, Nov. 25, 1891, 3.
120
“Bristol Musical Festival,” The Times, Oct. 12, 1905, 4.
121
See Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 1198, for a common-usage concurrence.
164
himself: for, godlike as are the revelations of his soul, it was human blood that ran
through the veins of his body.122
While critics and skilled musicians such as Henschel found the metronome an insufficient
tempo guide for publication, many also heard the machine actively affecting the once-
expressive interpretations of Beethoven’s monumental orchestral works. Ironically
perhaps, a 1911 performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 8—apocryphally inspired by
Maelzel’s clockwork metronome—was for one New York correspondent to the London
Times exceedingly mechanical as, “Not enough was made, for instance, of the delicious
ebb and flow of impulse in the whimsical ‘metronome’ movement. It was too
metronomic (and incidentally rather too fast throughout.)”123
Thus, many still believed in
the subjectivity of musical time, in which temporal nuance, variability, and expressive
movement were essential qualities to living performances. For this critic, even in
Beethoven’s supposed musical imitation of a metronome, a nuanced, human sense of
musical movement should prevail above the incessant, lifeless monotony of metronomic
time.
The Rejection of the Metronome in Music Education and Performance
Early in the nineteenth century, Maelzel’s metronome was initially championed in
pedagogical circles as a simple reference tool, but in the last decades of the century,
many skilled instructors considered its continual employment harmful to the goals of
music performance. By the 1880s, the metronome was no longer a novelty in some
122 Reprinted in C. A. B., “George Grove’s Analyses of Beethoven,” The Musical World, Nov. 3,
1888, 850.
123
“Music. Concerts from New York,” The Times, Nov. 25, 1911, 12.
165
countries, and more musicians perceived that the machine was causing serious detriment
to subjective musical time. An 1897 Musical Visitor article by American composer,
pianist, educator, and theorist Edward Baxter Perry attested that individual choice and
experience must continue to define musical time, as it had for centuries. “Nine tenths of
the details and all of the finesse of interpretation,” he asserted, “must always be left to the
taste and intelligence of the individual player.”124
His sentiments echoed the beliefs of
Rousseau, Loulié, Couperin, and even Beethoven himself, who affirmed that skilled
performers imbue an ephemeral “spirit” into a performance, despite the visual limitations
of music notation. Using Chopin’s “Berceuse” as an example, Perry argued that
interpretive practices must oppose the influence of metronomic thinking. While equal,
rigid, and repetitive rhythms appeared in Chopin’s publication, Perry explained that
living practices inform musical time, since “no variation is even hinted at in the score, yet
surely no one but a wooden pianist, with a metronome for a heart, would think of playing
them exactly alike.”125
Perry heard wooden pianists trained by Maelzel’s metronome just as Frederick
Taylor witnessed wooden laborers trained with the stopwatch. Both accounts alluded to
the inhuman appearance, repetitive movements, and unthinking actions of people
subjugated by the constrictions of artificial time. For Perry, the metronome virtually
replaced a musician’s heart—the once standard reference for musical time—with
unfeeling clockwork. As critics even before Perry argued: the metronomic musician was
an automaton. In his 1902 Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works, Perry considered that
124 Edward Baxter Perry, “Rubato Playing,” The Musical Visitor, Aug. 1897, 202.
125
Ibid.
166
“such a person, no matter how highly organized, or perfectly trained otherwise, is no
better than a machine. He does not live, he simply runs.”126
Perry reaffirmed in his 1910
pedagogical treatise Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces, where no discussion of the
metronome ever appears, that an innate, poetically derived understanding of musical time
“makes all the distinction between mere machine playing and artistic delivery.”127
As the century turned, some of the world’s most respected musicians argued that
metronomic time was immanently impinging upon the subjective nature of musicality.
The world-renowned pianist Josef Hofmann (1876-1957)—perhaps the first professional
instrumentalist to make a solo recording—warned that repetition, redundancy, and
mechanical consistency was to be seriously avoided in both performance and
instruction.128
As late as 1905, Hofmann brazenly proclaimed:
Never Play with a Metronome: You may use a metronome for a little passage,
as a test of your ability to play in strict time. When you see the result, positive or
negative, stop the machine at once. For according to the metronome a really
musical rhythm is unrhythmical—and on the other hand, the keeping of absolutely
strict time is thoroughly unmusical and deadlike.129
Musical rhythm continued to be a living quality for Hofmann, a musician of pre-
mechanical performance traditions. Indeed, he believed that the individual’s rhythmic
126 Edward Baxter Perry, Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works (Philadelphia: Theo. Presser Co.,
1902), 106.
127
Edward Baxter Perry, Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces (Philadelphia: Theo. Presser Co.,
1910), 181.
128
Hofmann argues: “Systemization is the death of spontaneousness and spontaneousness is the
very soul of art. If you play every day at the same time the same sequence of the same studies and
the same pieces you may acquire a certain degree of skill, perhaps, but the spontaneity of your
rendition will surely be lost. Art belongs to the realm of emotional manifestations, and it stands to
reason that a systematic exploiting of our emotional nature must blunt it.” Indirectly, he argues
against Taylorism and the procedures of Scientific Management.
129
Joseph Hofmann, “Playing the Piano Successfully,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, Mar. 1905, 9.
167
sense could not translate into mechanical beats, movements, or measures.130
Hofmann’s
epistemology recalls the teachings of piano pedagogue Adolph Friedrich Christiani
(1836-1885) who warned, “the fact should never be lost sight of, that absolute strictness,
machine-like perfection in time-keeping, is not artistic.”131
As late as 1913, the Webster's
Revised Unabridged Dictionary recalls the common-usage of Christiani’s and Hofmann’s
expressive quality:
Rhythm, n. [F. rhythme, rythme, L. rhythmus, fr. GR. measured motion, measure,
proportion, fr. to flow. See Stream.] 1. In the widest sense, a dividing into short
portions by a regular succession of motions, impulses, sounds, accents, etc.,
producing an agreeable effect, as in music, poetry, the dance, or the like. 2. (Mus.)
Movement in musical time, with periodical recurrence of accent; the measured
beat or pulse which marks the character and expression of the music; symmetry of
movement and accent. Moore (Encyc. ) 3. A division of lines into short portions
by a regular succession of arses and theses, or percussions and remissions of
voice on words or syllables. 4. The harmonious flow of vocal sounds.132
Christiani’s 1885 treatise, The principles of expression in pianoforte playing, verified that
an interpretive, implied rhythmical hierarchy of meter, one directly akin to poetry, existed
in musical performance despite the visual limitations of music notation. These innate
rhythmic practices,
130 In 1901, Hofmann explained his anti-metronomic aesthetic in the same journal: “As to
rhythmics of performance: I must…remark that in performers of strongly pronounced
individuality such a thing as absolute rhythmics does not exist. By absolute rhythmics I mean the
correct time valuation of each individual note. For if the performer were to render everything
according to the time value of each individual note his performance would be exceedingly dull.”
See Hofmann, “Playing the Piano Correctly,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1, 1901, 18.
131 Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The principles of expression in pianoforte playing (Philadelphia:
T. Presser, [1885]), 260.
132
See Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 1238-9.
168
should pervade a musical composition, as the beating of the pulse pervades
whatsoever has life, because they give a swinging, undulating, human element to
a movement, which would be stiff and machine-like, lacking in pulsation and life,
without them.
This is why a music-box and a barrel-organ, though mechanically correct,
are so tiresome and monotonous.133
In 1917, composer Constantin von Sternberg (1852-1924), a staunch critic of both
modernism and modern mechanical time, was one of the last nineteenth-century-trained
musicians to reassert Christiani’s and Hofmann’s belief that the “invisible accent” of
musical meter was natural, innate, and intrinsic to meaningful interpretation. He stated
that “without it every distinction between the living musician and the mechanical self-
playing machine practically vanishes.”134
Consistent with centuries-old meanings of time and motion, nineteenth-century
musicians considered musical rhythm to be physically derived. Musical time continued to
be associated with gesture, movement, dance, and speech; it was a variable quality
containing “harmonious” and “agreeable” affects, proportionally “regular” in human
pulse and spoken meter, not mechanically precise in clockwork. In 1888, The Musical
World cited Henschel and others in their assertions that musical, dramatic, and poetic
rhythm was founded upon a completely different epistemology—an individualistic,
interpretive practice—distinctly opposed to the redundant sound of a clicking automaton,
“The metronome,” says Nottebohm, “has nothing to do with feeling. The
conception of the spirit of a tone-piece, the nuances in its motion, deviations from
the absolute and normal measure founded upon the rhythmical structure of the
piece, cannot be made dependent on a soulless clockwork, still less can they be
determined by such. The metronome is nothing but a help toward securing a time
which the composer had in mind”—a very weak one (Mr. Henschel adds) for
133 Christiani, 48-49.
134
Constantin von Sternberg, Ethics and Esthetics of Piano-Playing (New York: G. Schirmer,
1917), 50.
169
those who cannot approximately find it through the character of the themes of a
musical work, the interpretation of which can as little be measured by the degrees
of a metronome as can the delivery by a reader or an actor of a poem, a
monologue in rhythmical verse.135
As analyzed in Chapter I, the subjective expression of musical time was a non-notated
performance practice essential to living music making, consistently likened to the time of
speech than to clockwork. The French baroque concept of mouvement and the twentieth-
century term “swing” in many senses equated to the nineteenth-century value of rhythm.
Thus, well through the nineteenth century, musical time was directly opposed to
artificiality; for those who could perceive difference, musical rhythm as actualized by
skilled and experienced performing “artists” was a non-automatical quality.
A 1912 article entitled “The Theory of Practicing,” published in The Youth’s
Companion, reaffirmed the distinctly human values of musical movement to the student
pianist:
To mention the ways in which you ought not to practice, it may be said first that
you should never allow yourself to be a mere machine. To become a human
metronome, or a mechanical device clicking out notes, it to build a wall across the
path of progress; to set a limit of proficiency beyond which you cannot pass. The
musician like the elocutionist, lessens his chances of success by the habit of
“parroting.”136
In 1910, an anonymous writer in the London Times succinctly explained the true utility of
the metronome, describing its defects in relationship to internalized understandings of
musical time. He summarized many of the reservations expressed in the past century
regarding automatical values when applied to creative performance:
135 C. A. B., “George Grove’s Analyses of Beethoven,” The Musical World, Nov. 3, 1888, 850.
136
“The Theory of Practicing,” The Youth's Companion, Feb. 1, 1912, 66.
170
On the whole the dictum may be allowed to stand, with the insistently necessary
proviso that there are many different kinds of irregularity—and also many
different kinds of emotion. Or we might confine ourselves to a negative definition
and use the term “non-metronomic rhythm.” The Metronome is a useful aid for
unmusical children (though even then, unless it is set so as to synchronize with
the shortest notes played, all kinds of things may, and frequently do, happen
between its beats); but otherwise it is a pure snare and delusion.137
Like Joseph Hofmann and Edward Baxter Perry, this writer warned against the constant
use of any clockwork mechanism, which imparted an artificial hegemony over the
performer’s natural sense of musical time:
But it is necessary to try playing to a metronome and to feel its extraordinarily
hampering effect, in order to realize how non-metronomic (even if only slightly
so) good performances ordinarily are; and as soon as the metronomic yoke is
broken, however microscopically and momentarily, we have something which,
whether it be good or bad, is [known today as] tempo rubato.138
“Rubato” remained an insufficient term for what seemed to be a standard quality of
musical time. All human action, many argued, was in a type of rubato when compared to
an artificial clock reference. Louis Charles Elson explained, in his treatise Mistakes and
Disputed Points in Music and Music Teaching (1910), of “Tempo Rubato: This irregular
or, more properly, elastic tempo has many disputed points associated with it. Its very
name, ‘Rubato,’ is an error, since the time is not ‘stolen’ or even transferred from note to
137 “Rhythm and tempo rubato,” The Times, April 16, 1910, 13. The word delusion carries more
weight and meaning than commonly understood today. The critic’s wording is highly germane.
See the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, 387: “Delusion n. [L. delusio, fr. deludere. See Delude.] 1.
The act of deluding; deception; a misleading of the mind. Pope. 2. The state of being deluded or
misled. 3. That which is falsely or delusively believed or propagated; false belief; error in
belief…Syn. -- Delusion, Illusion. These words both imply some deception practiced upon the
mind. Delusion is deception from want of knowledge; illusion is deception from morbid
imagination. An illusion is a false show, a mere cheat on the fancy or senses. It is, in other words,
some idea or image presented to the bodily or mental vision which does not exist in reality. A
delusion is a false judgment, usually affecting the real concerns of life. Or, in other words, it is an
erroneous view of something which exists indeed, but has by no means the qualities or attributes
ascribed to it.”
138
“Rhythm and tempo rubato,” The Times, April 16, 1910, 13.
171
note.”139
Elson continued to describe this common performance practice with an
historical anecdote:
Tempo Rubato, therefore, means elasticity and not distortion. It is the very life-
blood of some modern [Romantic] music, as Chopin showed sometimes when
Mme. Dudevant caused him to play when he was not in the mood. He would then
perform one of his compositions in strict and exact time, and the guests would
soon perceive that he had given the body without the soul.140
Johannes Brahms expressed an equal resentment of the metronome and an identical
recognition that the phenomenon known by some as “rubato” was, in fact, the standard
practice of expressive or “soulful” performance. “The so-called ‘elastic’ tempo is
moreover not a new invention,” Brahms remarked, “‘Con discrezioné should be added to
that as to many other things.”141
In a letter to the eminent conductor, singer, and
composer Georg Henschel, Brahms continued to describe the use and value of the
metronome for his compositions:
Your question strikes me as rather indefinite,—whether the metronome marks
before the different movements of my Requiem should be strictly adhered to?
Why, just as well as those to be found before other music. I am of the opinion that
metronome marks go for nothing. As far as I know, all composers have as yet
retracted their metronome marks in later years. Those figures which can be found
before some of my compositions—good friends have talked them into me; for I
139 Louis C. Elson, Mistakes and Disputed Points in Music and Music Teaching (Philadelphia:
Theodore Presser Co., 1910), 95.
140
Ibid, 96.
141 A letter from Brahms to Henschel reprinted in Carl Van Vechten, In the Garret (New York:
Alfred A Knopf, 1920), 218.
Paderewski commented similarly to Brahms, that music performances throughout history
contained a temporal quality that many could describe as being in “Tempo Rubato.” He stated: “It
is older than the Romantic school, it is older than Mozart, it is older than Bach. Girolamo
Frescobaldi, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, made ample use of it.” See Elson, 96-97.
Reprinted from Henry T. Fink, Success in Music and How It’s Won (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1909).
172
myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go very
well together.142
Clarence Grant Hamilton, an Associate Professor of Music at Wellesley College, in his
1910 treatise Piano Teaching, Its Principles and Problems, concurred with Christiani and
Brahms regarding the utility of the metronome in education and performance—and that
the phenomenon of rubato was part and parcel of the customary, “elastic” quality of good
musicianship. Furthermore, Hamilton’s instructions echoed Hummel’s words from over
80 years prior:
The pupil must be taught, however, that rhythmic verve is a more important factor
in determining this spirit, and that, therefore, a vital performance does not
necessitate the pushing of the speed to the metronome requirements. Disregard the
metronome marks in teaching, therefore, except as a general indication, and let
the rare of performance be kept rigidly within the pupil’s abilities.
It has been suggested that the metronome should be used only sparingly in
the performance of actual compositions (page 72). The reason for such restriction
is that the metronome produces an inflexible tempo, and that even in the most
formally rhythmic compositions some allowance should be made for variation in
this respect. The grace and artistry of personal performance is dependent upon the
subordination of all elements to the sense of expression, and it is this flexibility of
treatment which distinguishes the work of a pianist from that of a machine.143
Concurring with Brahms, Henschel, and a host of “artistic” musicians of past decades, the
anonymous writer of the 1910 Times article also found that the metronome merely
dictated an automatical mode of time while imposing an oppressive “yoke” upon creative
freedom—hampering both the composer’s and performer’s figurative “blood.” The
metronome was not intended for the interpretation of Brahms’ Requiem, Beethoven’s
142 C. A. B., “George Grove’s Analyses of Beethoven,” The Musical World, Nov. 3, 1888, 850.
Also Vechten, 218. Vechten claims that Brahms wrote this letter to Henschel. The Musical World
states that Brahms wrote about his metronome indications “at the request of a well-known
London conductor.”
Clarence Grant Hamilton, Piano Teaching, Its Principles and Problems (Boston: Oliver Ditson
Company, 1910), 85. Of rubato, Hamilton states: “The slight variation caused by the rubato
accent (page 78) is our first instance of tempo modification.”
173
symphonies, or the meaningful performance of any composer’s music for that matter. “In
the proper and subtle sense of the words,” the Times writer explained, “free rhythm
applies to all music alike. It is not a morbid abnormality; it is the natural outcome of the
artistic temperament.”144
The article continues:
Many perhaps fail to grasp this [quality of tempo flexibility and rhythmic
variability in performance], simply through conceiving rubato only as something
uncommon and extreme; they do not see that the particular kinds of very palpably
flexible rhythm to which they would restrict the term are nothing but the natural
and inevitable extensions of a principle applicable, in a greater or lesser degree, to
the performance of 99 out of a hundred compositions of almost any age or style—
so long, that is to say, as the performer is a human being and not a barrel-organ.145
Conclusions in Automatical Culture
Living musicians were not automata, yet when guided by the metronome, musicians
sounded automatical. During Maelzel’s lifetime, to be mechanical meant to be “skilled in
making machines.” By 1913, a new and ominous usage of the term appeared in the
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, citing “Mechanical…3. Done as if by machine;
uninfluenced by will or emotion; proceeding automatically, or by habit, without special
intention or reflection; as mechanical singing; mechanical verses; mechanical service.”
As many argued, the metronome created mechanically sounding music, thus it
correspondingly changed an essentially human quality of musical time. As suggested by
the 1913 Webster’s dictionary, a musician under the influence of Maelzel’s metronome
was a “machine…3. A person who acts mechanically or at will of another.”146
A century
earlier, Maelzel’s audiences would have recognized such a figure as a mere automaton.
144 “Rhythm and tempo rubato,” The Times, April 16, 1910, 13.
145
Ibid.
146
See Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 897, 906.
174
From the outset, the metronome seemed to be an efficient tool for music
instruction. But over the decades, many heard metronomic time as totally inhuman and
lifeless when compared to traditional and internalized perceptions of musical movement.
When amateur or professional musicians required an external tempo reference, sources
over the century suggested the swing of the simple pendulum, which was silent, finite,
and exclusively visual. The pendulum did not keep musical time with clockwork
consistency. Due to its non-automatical swing, the pendulum was used—and could only
be used—as an initial tempo reference, a supplement for the very human pulse of musical
time. In 1889, a New York Times reviewer remarked, “no one who understands the design
and nature of the metronome marks expects a slavish, mechanical adherence to them, but
they are inserted for the purpose of giving a general indication of the rate of
movement.”147
Likewise, in Ethics and Esthetics of Piano-Playing, a treatise dedicated to
Joseph Hofmann, Constantin von Sternberg remarked in 1917, “it may be said that the
metronome is not intended to regulate the playing of a whole piece, but to give only a
general idea of its average speed. Granted!”148
Sternberg expressed a long-held
understanding of the metronome: The machine was a referential aid for traditional,
variable musical time; it did not define musical time in mechanical absolutes. More
significantly, he maintained that the metronome always failed to reflect the living
qualities of musical time, for compositions past and present. He continued:
147 “Amusements,” New York Times, Mar. 28, 1889, 4.
148
Sternberg, 81. British music critic Ernest Walker echoed Sternberg in 1930: “The rigidity of
the metronome we of course discount; the indication whatever it is, is understood to be both
approximate and fluctuating. Except for contrasts or other special effects, no performance worth
anything, of any music, remains mathematically level, either in time or tone, for more than a very
limited period. This we all take for granted.” See Ernest Walker, “Some Questions of Tempo,”
The Monthly Musical News (December, 1930). Reprinted in Ernest Walker, Free Thought and the
Musician (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 134-5.
175
We also have recalled to our minds that such terms as Adagio, Allegro, etc., are
not designations of speed but, primarily, of mood. Then, the metronome has been
“found out” as an artistic impossibility, and has been relegated to its proper
station as a sort of orthophonic adjunct to purely mechanical exercises.149
As Sternberg suggested, modern teachers of his age considered the metronome highly
useful for new pedagogies, grounded in repetitive exercises that drilled a student’s basic
technique. Yet, as a crude teaching tool, the metronome did not dictate a composer’s true
intentions, nor could it document a skilled performer’s nuanced interpretations.
Musicians trained in traditional temporal practices, like Henschel, Perry, Hofmann, and
Sternberg, never equated the pedagogical usefulness of the metronome with the historic
epistemologies of musical time. The efficiency of the machine in teaching fundamental
physical skills to amateurs did not relate to musical tempo and rhythm in performance.
As many over a century argued, the metronome only imparted an artificial and “slavish”
constriction, a “yoke” upon musical interpretation, one against the very nature of current
and past musical performance traditions. Skilled musicians explained that the objective,
externalized clockwork-click was irreconcilable with the subjective, internalized sense of
movement, meter, or pulse. Sternberg continued his assessment of the device:
A metronome should be in every teacher's studio, to be judiciously employed in
the rudimentary mechanical work; but as soon as his pupil touches a composition
away with it! For tempo is an individual matter; it must be felt, or it will not
convince.150
149
Sternberg, 44.
150
Ibid., 82. Sternberg acknowledged the binary opposition between internal, subjective musical
time and external clockwork: “What matters it whether a person who plays a piece without
understanding does it in the right or wrong tempo? I, personally, would ten times rather listen to a
wrong tempo with a conviction back of it, however erroneous it might be, than to a right tempo
dictated by a machine or, for that matter, by any influence extraneous to the player's mind.”
176
As a host of comments in this reception history verify, a human uninfluenced by
subjective reason, spirit, or sensation became the incarnation of a Maelzel automaton—
the very definition of a mindless, heartless machine. Nineteenth-century critics,
performers, and pedagogues consistently found anyone habitually behaving with
automatical qualities was mere or insufficient in intellectual, physical, and expressive
capacity. In his Life of Beethoven, Schindler clearly recognized a crisis in performance
practices, a distinct change brought about by mechanical motion. “It must be borne in
mind that Beethoven’s instrumental music has undergone a metamorphosis,” Schindler
admitted, “it is necessary first to acquaint the reader that this metamorphosis relates
wholly and solely to metronomising, or the regulation of time by means of the
metronome.”151
As these many criticisms describe, Maelzel’s metronome made possible a
new aesthetic, an utterly insufficient and mechanical performance style for music
compositions never inspired by the beat-per-minute regulation of the machine’s click.
Maelzel’s career, taken in its entirety, was dedicated to one vision: the replication
of subjective human actions in the repetitive motion of clockwork. Nevertheless, for
nearly a century, the reception and recollection of Maelzel’s machines exposed them to
be mere mechanical copies of more complicated, living creations. Continual
acknowledgments described Maelzel’s trumpeter as a mere automatical soloist; the
Panharmonicon as a mere automatical orchestra; and the cold, unfeeling chess player as
an eerily human thinker (since, underneath the deceptive artificial façade, he was human).
As sources attest, the nineteenth century witnessed Maelzel’s clockwork copies not only
for their ingenuity and potential utility, but also for their overwhelming insufficiency
when compared to the complexity of human nature itself.
151 Schindler, ed. Moscheles, 97.
177
Recognizing that automatical machines influenced and altered living rhythm and
musical time, a few perceptive musicians knew that Maelzel’s mechanical culture directly
extended to the metronome—that automata and tempo-clocks shared an identical origin,
both in design and application. Constantin von Sternberg intuited that Maelzel’s
renowned automata-career corresponded precisely to the mechanic’s posthumously
successful metronome, and in 1917 he offered a damning assessment of the tempo-
machine in a brief critical biography of Maelzel:
How any musician could ever play with a metronome, passes my humble
understanding. It is not only an inartistic, but a downright antiartistic instrument.
In order to prove this and to explain the vogue it has had in spite of it, we must
regard the inventor a little closer and consider the time in which the misfortune of
his invention happened. Maelzel was the son, not of a musician, but of an organ-
builder. His father delighted in contriving all sorts of queer “stops” which, of
course, no organist wanted or even accepted. These queer stops accumulated in
his shop until it was a regular museum of such musical eccentricities. His son
inherited this trait. He “learned” music, but never played in public or composed
anything. He did not even teach music, but only “gave lessons.” How much his
pupils could have learned from him we can infer from the fact that he spent all his
leisure time upon things that go against the very grain of every one who loves
music. He constructed all kinds of mechanical instruments, such as an automaton
trumpeter, a mechanical orchestra, a “panharmonium,” I believe also a
mechanical chess-player and the metronome!152
Despite Foucaud’s assertion in Illustrious Mechanics, Maelzel’s reputation as automata-
exhibitor would not be forgotten. For Sternberg and others spanning a century, the
metronome reflected the very same qualities witnessed in all of Maelzel’s self-moving
machines. The metronome was yet another Maelzel automaton, one that aided in the
actualization of automatical behavior.
Maelzel’s legacy is far more profound than his only remaining “useful” invention,
the metronome, might suggest. Maelzel influenced such varied and diverse figures as
152 Sternberg, 79-80. Sternberg continues: “From all this it is easily seen that the impulse leading
to the invention did not come from an artistic temperament.”
178
Beethoven, Napoleon, Poe, Daniel Webster, P. T. Barnum, and Oliver Wendell Holmes
for one significant reason: Maelzel’s career, in its totality, was dedicated to the promotion
and exhibition of mechanical facsimile. Yet these important figures, along with many
other creative minds in the nineteenth century, found something deeper in his life’s work.
As insufficient copies of humanity, Maelzel’s devices represented for many the antitheses
of creativity, individuality, volition, and expression. Simply stated, Maelzel’s creations
represented the mechanization of life. In Maelzel’s values, thinkers such as Holmes,
Parker, Webster, Ure, and Taylor witnessed the possibilities of a mechanized future,
especially in industry and labor, where men could indeed act automatically through
methodically efficient and redundant training. Yet nineteenth-century performance
culture was not as enthusiastic regarding Maelzel’s machines, or the mechanization of
artistic creation. The sounds of automata were both mindless and monotonous, two
artificial values that did not serve the goals of musical expression or creation. For artistic
endeavors, automatical culture was nothing to be prized.
Yet, automatical music training expanded in the nineteenth century, as the
metronome defined a new clockwork paradigm of musical time that effaced the living
qualities of rhythm for amateur music students, and eventually professionals, across the
world. Through a slavish belief in mechanical time, living performers and ensembles
actually transformed into musical machines, as they mimicked metronomes, barrel
organs, wooden androids, and orchestrions. Indeed, the Encyclopedia Britannica found
that the clockwork metronome “reduced to mere mechanics what formerly rested wholly
on the performer’s feeling.”153
The metronome recast musicians—their nuanced
153 Speaking to the Royal Musical Association on December 8, 1891, Edgar F. Jacques
concluded similarly, that the adherence to metronome indications was in no small part responsible
179
rhythmical actions and perceptions—into a shallow clockwork imitation. Subjectivity,
variability, and metric pulsation were lost and forgotten—“metamorphosed”—in the
heartless click of a tempo-clock. The metronome, therefore, was the very embodiment of
Maelzel’s mechanical culture: the metronome mechanized music making.
Perhaps musicians and scholars trained in twentieth-century traditions would have
no trouble concurring with nineteenth-century critics who heard lifelessness in Maelzel’s
clockwork trumpeter and Panharmonicon. Maelzel’s mechanical contrivances with their
redundant barrel-organ tunes could never have sounded with any semblance of human
spirit or expression. And yet today, countless performers, pedagogues, and researchers
continue to reference Maelzel’s other automaton, the metronome, exclusively for the time
of pre-twentieth-century music, while many even consider metronomic rhythm to define
the absolute movement and pulse of music performance itself. In every music
conservatory, studio, and concert hall, his mechanical creation continues to resonate in
some fashion. The next chapters document how Western society came to inherit and
embrace metronomic values after all, for the “far-famed” Maelzel did, over time,
successfully bequeath two lasting legacies of his automata-display culture to our modern
world: First, that the illusion of human expression and intelligence can be imparted into
mere, mindless automata; and second, that the delusion of artificial time can be slavishly
imposed upon expressive, thinking musicians through mere, automatical metronomes.
for the reduction of a performer’s individual expression, invention, and creativity in the concert
hall by the last decade of the century. Jacques notes: “I need only ask you to remember how the
progress [of music publication] has all along been in the direction of definiteness…how, finally,
marks of expression were added and words used to indicate speed, these being supplemented later
by metronome-marks. We have, indeed, so clipped the wings of the executant that we no longer
expect extemporized cadenzas, either in an opera or in a concerto.” See Edgar F. Jacques, “The
Composer’s Intention,” in Proceedings of the Musical Association, 18th Sess. (1891 - 1892): 42.
180
CHAPTER III: THE SCIENTIFIC METRONOME
Chronography, the Clockwork Metronome, and the Personal Equation:
An Introduction
During Maelzel’s lifetime, the professional specialization that required the most
meticulous adherence to precise mechanical timekeeping, down to fractions of a second,
was not music composition, improvisation, teaching, or performance, but astronomical
observation. While skilled musicians judged musical time through a combination of
physical intuition, sensory perception, and living experience, professional astronomers
observed the sky with near inhuman precisions, gauging the movements of stars and other
heavenly phenomena through second-by-second reference. In the high-technology
observatory of the early nineteenth-century, astronomers made the most finite
observations and assessments of stellar transits, which they viewed through a high-
powered telescope and referenced by an ultra-accurate sidereal clock. Stoddard’s
Encyclopedia Americana (1884) explained the specialized astronomer’s complex series
of assessments and reactions—constituting his performance in precision, mechanical
time—typical for any stellar observation in the first half of the nineteenth century:
The usual plan for noting the time of any celestial phenomenon was for the
observer to listen to the beats of his sidereal clock; to keep count of the minutes,
and estimate the space passed over by the object during the interval between the
beats; to mentally divide this space into tenths, and record in his note-book the
minutes, seconds, and tenths, meanwhile counting the clock-beats that not one be
lost. All this must be repeated at the bisection of the object with each of the
several wires (spider-lines) in the held of view of his telescope, sometimes as
many as ten or more being employed. Even by this wearisome method skilled
observers, after years of practice, have been able to record the time of transits to
within one-tenth of a second, though it was more frequently to one-fifth of a
second.”1
1 J. M. Stoddart, Stoddart’s Encyclopedia Americana, Volume II (New York: J. M Stoddart,
1884), 88.
181
With these exact scientific measurements, astronomers were, in essence, the time tellers
for the whole of modern civilization, mapping the heavens by hours, days, months, and
years and translating this data into time standards necessary for calendars, navigational
charts, and other systems of time-reckoning. Over the century, astronomical observatories
provided the ultimate reference for the time of cities, nations, and industries.
By the end of the eighteenth century, astronomical clocks were so ingeniously
constructed and meticulously maintained that significant errors seldom occurred in the
machines themselves. Although observatory clocks still needed careful calibration,
ultimately referenced through astronomers’ observations, the mechanisms were so regular
and precise that they typically did not lose more than a tenth of a second per day.2
Astronomers, however, were far more variable, and their non-mechanical perceptions of
stellar events, transits, and eclipses varied greatly depending upon the time, place, and
person; despite the infinitesimal accuracy required of their observations, astronomers
readings—their personal interpretations of natural phenomena—seldom corresponded
exactly to one another when measured against precision clock-time.
Astronomers dubbed the complex human process of perception and reaction when
recording an astronomical observation the “eye and ear method.” For scientific purposes,
in which objective certainties mattered above personal interpretations, nineteenth-century
astronomers began realizing this highly subjective method, hinging on an individual’s
variable senses of sight and sound, was insufficient for the vital requirements of their
science. More than 1/5 of a second difference between astronomers’ measurements of the
2 See G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ii. Whitrow’s
chart of time-telling precision is based on the research of F. A. B. Ward.
182
same stellar events displayed great personal errors, mistakes that could ultimately transfer
to official star charts, time tables, almanacs, civic clocks, and other essential time-
references. Thus, the eye and ear method created an important problem in science to be
solved: If heavenly bodies moved at an objective rate across the telescope, and the
sidereal clock was an objective, infallible temporal reference, then only the astronomer
was at fault in the scientific method of astronomical observation. In nineteenth-century
astronomy, the human observer, not the clockwork machine, represented the overriding
problem in performance practices.
British Royal Astronomer Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811) first expressed the
“problem” of an astronomer’s personal perception in 1796 at the Greenwich Observatory.
Maskelyne’s assistant David Kinnebrook recorded times of transits up to eight-tenths of a
second different than Maskelyne. The differences between their measurements continued
to appear, and Kinnebrook failed to close the supposed margin of error. Maskelyne could
not abide such blatant mistakes from his assistant. (It seems that Maskelyne did not
consider himself as a source of error.) So in 1796 Kinnebrook was fired.
This story came to the attention of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846),
German astronomer who founded the Königsberg observatory in 1813. The variables
exposed by the eye and ear method greatly concerned Bessel, who wished to quantify and
define the errors of human observation when compared to precise, mechanical time. By
1819, while Maelzel continued promoting a series of high-profile automata shows
featuring “Kempelen’s celebrated Automaton Chess Player, and Maelzel’s Automaton
183
Trumpeter” in London at the admission price of “2s. 6d.,” 3 Bessel had begun
methodically recording human differences in fractions of mechanical seconds in order to
find astronomers’ individual errors, their differences in perceiving the same objective
events. Bessel, and all professional astronomers and experimental psychologists after
him, dubbed the human variation in time and action the personal equation—the errors
intrinsic (i.e. natural) to subjective human perception and reaction which were exposed
through methodical, mechanical testing.
Experimental psychologist Edward Wheeler Scripture colorfully retold this vital
discovery to the modern sciences in his text Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895):
Finally, after more experience, astronomers in general reached the conclusion that
everybody disagreed with everybody else. Moreover, men who disagreed in one
way at one time would be likely to disagree differently at another time; so that a
man did not even agree with himself. As this was evidently not the fault of the
star, the conclusion was finally reached that each person had a peculiar error of
his own. This was called by the queer name, “personal equation.”4
3 See the advertisements, “Kempelen’s Celebrated Automaton Chess-Player,” Times Jan. 7, 1819,
1, col. A; and “Maelzel’s Exhibition,” Times, Feb. 24, 1819, 1, col. A. By June 1819, Maelzel
promoted “The ORCHESTRION, and a MOVING PANORAMA of the CONFLAGRATION OF
MOSCOW...The Orchestrion will perform, solely by mechanism, several grand Compositions by
Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Cherubini, &c. daily, at 2, 3, and 4 o’clock.” See Times, June 3,
1819, 1, col A.
On April 16, 1819, Beethoven sent a letter to Ferdinand Ries, also in London, explaining
the tempi to the movements of Op. 106 with Maelzel’s metronome scale. Beethoven, Letters, II,
ed. Anderson, Letter 940, 806. There is a distinct possibility, therefore, that on his trips as famed
automata showman, Maelzel distributed (perhaps free of charge) new metronomes to Beethoven’s
collaborators and publishers. But the details of this history are not in the scope of the present
study.
One year prior, in 1818, Maelzel’s metronome appears in a list of French inventions
which also includes his Panharmonicon and another unnamed “instrument.” See J. R. Armonville,
Le guide des artistes or Répertoire des arts et manufanctures (Paris: Chaingnieau, 1818), 260,
261.
4 E. W. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (Meadville: The Chautauqua-Century Press, 1895),
40.
184
With the initial hope of defining and reducing these personal-equation errors in
astronomy, Bessel discovered that no true objectivity was possible in an observer’s
perception of time and movement when gauged by the clock. Psychologist and historian
Edwin Boring recounted Bessel’s important contribution to the modern, nineteenth-
century sciences, stating, “Thus Bessel may be said to have discovered not only the
personal equation, but also its variability. He found a gross error, and he showed that one
could not reliably ‘calibrate the observer’ in order to correct for it.”5 Bessel could not
simply fix the errors of the personal equation even when he documented them. He found
with scientific certainty that astronomers did not, and could not, consistently conform to
clockwork precisions delineated by fractions of a second.
Since humans could not perform up to the goals of nineteenth-century astronomy,
which now required the observer to perceive and react far beyond normal tolerances of
either the mind or body, astronomers sought to solve the personal equation through
clockwork machines themselves. By the 1850s, while a middle-class musical culture
became more familiar with Maelzel’s metronome as a novel, and potentially useful
pedagogical tool for children and amateurs, a new metronomic machine for professional
astronomers—the observatory chronograph—had actively improved the science of
astronomy in the nineteenth century. The chronograph recorded and regulated the exact
time of the observer’s perception of a stellar transit; through the sound of metronomic
time, the chronograph ultimately corrected for the astronomer’s “problem,” his personal
equation during a performance.
5 Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century
Company, 1929), 137.
185
Engineers of The United States Coast Survey invented the observatory
chronograph in 1850, and the new process of high-precision chronographic recording was
initially dubbed “The American Method.”6 The Royal Observatory at Greenwich,
consistently at the forefront of precise time-telling practices, installed an American-style
chronograph in 1854, in what astronomers and science historians recognize as a major
development in time reckoning for Western civilization.7 The text Stargazing Past and
Present (1878) published an early image of the machine, which consisted of a pendulum-
clock dictating seconds-—a very large, ultra-accurate clicking metronome—with a
barrel-drum recording device.8 The chronograph recorded two events in time for any
astronomical reading: a temporal standard and a variable. One needle traced the
objective, mechanical second (and in later models, fractions of the second) defined by the
pendulum-clock through an unwavering pattern drawn on paper. The other needle printed
the interpretation of the observation: the astronomer’s reading of the heavenly transit,
referenced through the sound of ticking seconds, which he marked by a key-stroke,
electrically connected to the chronograph. Thus, an analysis of the readout showed the
6 E. C. Sanford, “Personal Equation,” The American Journal of Psychology 2 (November, 1889):
19-20. Also recounted in Boring, 139.
7 David S. Landes, in his highly important and influential study of time-telling Revolution in Time
(1983, reprint 2000), devotes little discussion to the nineteenth-century astronomical chronograph
and its impact. He opts instead to document the chronograph complication of nineteenth-century
pocket watches, the “stop-watch” feature used to time precise durations. Yet Landes failed to
realize that the handheld “chronograph (or sometimes chronoscope), whose primary function is
to measure elapsed time” of pulse-rates or horse races served a significantly different purpose
than the observatory chronograph, which acted as a second-by-second regulator and recorder of
action. The pocket-watch chronograph, which only became publicly available beginning in the
1860s, and the wristwatch chronograph of today are referential measurers of exact duration only
and do not structure or document the performer’s actions in precise, constant intervals of time.
See Landes, 3, 457 n35.
8 J. Norman Lockyer, Stargazing Past and Present (London: Macmillan and Co., 1878), 261.
186
human’s interpretation, his errors due to the personal equation and when they occurred, to
within fractions of the invariable mechanical second.9 With a visible record of the
astronomer’s observation-performance in precision, repetitive time, the inconsistencies of
any individual’s perception and reaction could be accounted for and corrected by the
chronograph. The eye and ear method, along errors of personal equation, could now be
seen, controlled, and reduced with precise metronomic rhythm for the most precise
scientific observations. Thus astronomers’ performances in the Greenwich Observatory—
well before musicians’ performances in the concert hall and the music parlor—
necessitated constant, unwavering reference and strict regulation through metronomic
time.
9 Boring, 139-140.
187
Fig 3.1. The Greenwich Chronograph. The right portion of the schematic depicts the pendulum clock
beating seconds, which was electrically recorded by the drum-barrel on the left. From Stoddart’s
Encyclopedia Americana (1884), 261.
188
Stoddart’s Encyclopedia Americana (1884) recounted the boon of the
chronometer to astronomical observatories across the world, since the mechanical “time-
recorder” replaced the “eye and ear method, as it is called, which required the observer’s
powers of attention to be distracted beyond what they are able to bear.”10
The
encyclopedia continues:
The chronographic [method], which has almost entirely superseded the old “eye-
and-ear method,” relieves the observer of all anxiety regarding the time, the
clock-beats, and the making of the record in his note-book, and enables him to
give his undivided attention to the observation of the transits, which, under the
other method with its attendant difficulties, he was, to a certain extent, prevented
from doing.11
More than relieving the observer of any anxiety when thinking and acting with near
impossible mechanical precisions, the chronograph succeeded, according to Boring, in
making entirely negligible the effects of human perception itself. Indeed, observatories
employed the machine to “do away with the observer” in professional astronomy.12
Boring reports, “In the first two years of the use of the chronograph [1854-6], the
Greenwich observatory discovered that the instrument reduced the personal equation to
less than one tenth of a second, the goal of precision that the astronomers had originally
been seeking.”13
Through metronomic regulation, the chronograph reduced imprecise,
personal variations of time and perception to clockwork certainty. In nineteenth-century
astronomy first, metronomic time superseded and even subjugated personal
10 Stoddart, 88.
11
Ibid.
12
Boring, 133.
13
Ibid., 140.
189
interpretations in sight and sound for objective, scientific aims. In 1889 the American
Journal of Psychology praised the introduction of the chronograph to the new nineteenth-
century sciences of physiology and experimental psychology, in laboratories where the
objective sound of clockwork ticked away, marking precision time for humans in a host
of scientific studies using a technique intended “to do away with the observer himself.”14
While astronomy first exploited the potential for constant metronomic regulation
in the astronomical observatory, the scientific applications of metronomic time—the vital
element of the chronographic method—expanded well into the twentieth century in ways
completely unrelated to the subjective, creative practices of skilled musicians from pre-
metronomic traditions. As evidence in the fields of both science and music pedagogy
strongly suggest, the metronome’s home in the second half of the nineteenth century—
more than on the skilled performer’s piano or the composer’s desk—was in newly
established university laboratories across the world. Indeed, the new nineteenth-century
scientists, those directly influenced by the chronographic method of astronomers,
embraced the metronome well before professional performers found the tempo clock of
any meaningful value as a regulator or reference for musical time and rhythm. Despite
Maelzel’s expressed intentions for the device, the clockwork metronome thrived within
an unlikely community, one separated from music pedagogy, composition, and
publication, as it became a regulatory machine intended for precision-oriented scientific
research and experimentation. Using the metronome as a modern laboratory apparatus,
scientists—not composers or experienced performers—first valued Maelzel’s machine as
a precision-oriented timekeeper and chronographic regulator. Employed by scientists for
14 Sanford, 24.
190
precise temporal measurement, reference, and regulation in controlled settings, Maelzel’s
metronome became the scientific metronome: a chronographic apparatus dictating and
defining objective, invariable, and inhuman time for the quantification, reduction, and
even retraining of the various individual traits that comprise the personal equation.
In the second half of the nineteenth-century, scientific experiments in both Europe
and North America used the increasingly accessible metronome in the same fashion as
the large “seconds-clock” of the 1854 Greenwich chronograph. It is this scientific
metronome, applied for scientific ends, which provides us with the understanding of the
metronome as it became used in the last years of the nineteenth century, when both
scientists and pedagogues recorded and regulated a host of human activities through
metronomic rhythm—a modern trend that affected music instruction and performance
practices most conspicuously. Indeed, by the turn of the century, the scientific
metronome and the observatory chronograph were indistinguishable; fueled by efficient
scientific pedagogies, the metronome represented the infallible mechanical-temporal
reference for an industrializing culture, one that devalued and reduced the personal
equation in a variety of human performances.
The Clockwork Metronome Emerges in the Nineteenth-Century Sciences
Chronography, in the mid-nineteenth century, was a unique technical process to
professional astronomy, with the most exacting practices of mechanical time
measurement in relation to human action. Prior to the founding of experimental
psychology in 1875, the measurements of physical and mental action in constant
metronomic time seemed excessively precise for most professional activities.
Nevertheless, other nineteenth-century scientists readily considered Maelzel’s metronome
191
a vital asset in regulating and recording a host of studies, and it seems that both
professional and amateur scientists embraced the metronome to a far greater extent—with
far less contention—than skilled musicians in the nineteenth century, many of whom
suggested that the simple pendulum was a vastly more appropriate mechanical pulse
reference. While creative musicians valued subjective interpretation in anti-metronomic
time throughout the century, many scientists realized the clockwork metronome provided
an objective, regular rhythm for their methodical and repetitive experiments.
Isolated evidence of the scientific applications of the metronome appear as early
as the 1830s, as some physiologists began rehabilitating patients for a variety of physical
and mental ailments by regulating their human movements to clockwork. One early
example is seen in the methods of renowned French doctor Armand Trousseau, who, in
the search to cure chorea, had his patients perform gymnastic exercises alternately to the
swing of a simple pendulum, a cuckoo clock, or click of the metronome.15
In 1858 the
specialist publication Half-Yearly Abstracts of the Medical Sciences makes clear,
however, that Trousseau’s most mechanized treatment was highly experimental, even
while chronography, at the time of this publication, was beginning to successfully efface
the errors of astronomers’ performances:
15 Armande Trousseau, Lectures on clinical medicine, translated by P. V. Bazire, Volume I
(London: Robert Hardwicke, 1867), 413-414, 428.
192
M. Trousseau has found a very useful substance in the employment of a
metronome, the number of the oscillations of which can be regulated, each being
indicated by a clicking sound. If one of these be placed before the patient, the
sight16
and sound of the oscillations become of great utility in assisting him in
regulating the movements of the whole or a part of the body. It is, however, only
an adjuratory means, and is more useful in the case of tic, the patient being
directed to produce his tic voluntarily at the same time the click of the instrument
is heard. He becomes fatigued by this voluntary effort, and the tic is speedily
modified, though rarely cured.17
After Trousseau’s experiments, other doctors prescribed automatical actions for their
ailing patients. Perhaps inspired by the famed exhibitor of automata, physiologist M.
Colombat designed a clockwork machine that the American Journal of Dental Science
(1844) reported, “acts somewhat like Maelzel’s metronome, but is constructed on another
principle, and will go for several days without being wound up.” Colombat applied this
metronome-like device, the muthonome, in the chronographic treatment of stammering,
where the patients “give utterance at first to 60 or 80 in a minute, which number he
gradually increases to 160 or 180 in the same space of time.” 18
The machine, as this
source makes clear, was not Maelzel’s metronome and could run for an extended time
that no musician would consider an appropriate reference for expressive, meaningful
performance.
16 This comment verifies that Maelzel’s metronome was also a visual reference of pulse. The
swaying pendulum of the metronome had rhythmic significance beyond the machine’s audible
click.
17
W. H. Ranking and C. B. Radcliffe, editors, Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences
XXVII (Jan.-June, 1858): 73. It seems that the metronome click, not the visual pendulum swing,
influenced the patient’s reactions. As Chapter V exposes, psychologists through the first half of
the twentieth century found that the monotonous metronome click had a definitive effect on
subjects’ mental and physical reactions.
18
American Society of Dental Surgeons, “French Medical Societies,” American Journal of
Dental Science IV (Dec., 1843): 127.
193
Besides these seemingly unusual treatments, evidence strongly suggests that
British physiologists were the first to consistently and successfully employ Maelzel’s
metronome in the nineteenth-century sciences, most often for regulating nerve impulses
and breathing rates of animal subjects. British physiologist Benjamin W. Richardson, the
“Senior Physician to the Royal Infirmary for Diseases of the Chest,”19
had claimed to be
operating on animals with aid of an electrified metronome of his own design by 1853, the
same year that astronomers installed the chronograph at Greenwich. Richardson recalled
ten years later that his modified metronome apparatus (which again offered far greater
regulation than was possible in a wind-up metronome), “made its balance strike against a
spring on either side in perfect time and order. I connected two rods with this to which
the poles of a battery might be attached; when the battery was in action, and its poles
connected with the metronome, I set the instrument so that twenty, thirty, forty, or any
number of shocks, could be given per minute.”20
In the mid nineteenth century, the general sciences still found an electrical-current
metronome overly precise and unnecessary. The high-technology methods and
apparatuses of astronomers and physiologists did not serve scientists’ and engineers’
needs for measuring brief time periods during simple observations and experiments. As
the electrified clockwork metronome became desirable in the physiology laboratory,
Edward Charles Pickering, the Thayer Professor of Physics in the Massachusetts Institute
19 Benjamin W. Richardson, “Researches on the Treatment of Suspended Animation,” The British
and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review XXXI (January-April, 1863): 478.
20
Richardson, 495.
194
of Technology, advised in his Elements of Physical Manipulation (1873) the use of a
“Metronome Pendulum”21
for basic scientific research, suggesting:
Short intervals of time may be roughly measured by a pendulum, made by tying a
stone to a string, or better, by a tape-measure drawn out to a fixed mark…By
graduating the tape properly, we may readily construct a very serviceable
metronome…Where the greatest accuracy is required, as in astronomical
observations, a chronograph is used.22
Similar to Weber’s musical pendulum, Pickering’s “metronome” was merely a simple
pendulum with a graded measuring scale. As confirmed by many nineteenth-century
musical sources, the simple pendulum was a non-regulative tool—a finite visual
reference, not a ticking clock intended to artificially dictate and control action in
perpetuity. The metronome-pendulum displayed a different precision—a different
epistemology of rhythm viewed as a seamless movement—a silent, swinging pulse, far
less automatical or sonically intrusive than the chronograph. Significantly, Pickering
reminds the reader that nineteenth-century astronomy alone required the chronographic
method: the most objective, constant clockwork regulation for the most precise scientific
measurements. Thus it seems that well through the mid-nineteenth century both skilled
musicians and the typical home scientist did not need such high levels of mechanical
regulation in their endeavors; instead, they valued the simple pendulum as a brief
reference of time, not a regulator of action.
At the time of Pickering’s publication, non-specialists in science found the
clockwork metronome difficult to obtain, particularly in America where the metronome
21 Edward C. Pickering, Elements of Physical Manipulation (New York: Hurd and Houghton,
1873), x.
22
Pickering, 16-17.
195
was an imported and expensive luxury compared with the simple pendulum. An 1874
Scientific American article suggested that the home scientist could easily construct a
metronome by “taking a cheap clock movement, and substituting for the pendulum a wire
with a sliding weight. Mark the wire with a file at the different points of graduation.”23
While failing to describe the specific purposes of the machine in relation to musical
education or performance, the periodical suggests that a clockwork metronome could be
made by anyone.
Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century the metronome became a
more available and reliable apparatus, and a variety of scientists and engineers
increasingly employed the clockwork metronome for technical processes in ways entirely
unrelated to musical pedagogy, composition, or performance. In the 1880s even the U. S.
government acquired a Maelzel metronome for scientific purposes. A report of the
“Psychological and Anthropological Apparatus Now Accessible to Students in
Washington D.C., in the Office of the Surgeon General” listed a metronome with the “Set
of Instruments and Materials for Water Measurement” intended for educational training
and research.24
23 Scientific American XXX (Feb. 21, 1874): 123.
It seems that as early as 1816, the mechanically inclined British amateurs had been
constructing basic seconds-beating metronomes out of clocks for their practice. A music
aficionado Samuel Tozer recalled in Mechanics’ Magazine (Jan. 11, 1834) that, “The resident
inhabitants who played on that occasion, had had a rehearsal previous to our arrival, and they so
regulated the pendulum of a common wooden clock as to keep time for them, equal to the best
metronomes which are made by thee noted maker in John’s-street, Tottenham-court-
road…Previous to the Oakhampton occurrence, I was told of a country sawyer, at Crediton, that
he instructed his son on the violin by means of a wooden clock, such as in London is now to be
had for 5s.” See Samuel Tozer, “Cheap Metronomes or Time-Beaters,” Mechanics’ Magazine
XX no. 544 (Jan. 11, 1834): 255.
24
Joseph Jastrow; H. K. Wolfe; W. L. Hervey; Nicholas Murray Butler; William James; George
Trumbull Ladd; James McKeen Cattell; W. L. Bryan; E. C. Sanford; J. Mark Baldwin,
196
Some technologically minded photographers, too, found Maelzel’s machine
useful when timing exposures in the darkroom.25
Yet British photographer James Cadett
stressed in 1880 that bell metronomes currently sold on the British market were
noticeably less accurate than other timekeeping technologies. Similar to the Scientific
American writer of six years prior, Cadett suggested an alternative, a homemade
“metronome” constructed from the workings of a cheap clock:
I have both used the metronome, and seen it used by others, with great success;
but it is very necessary to see that the metronome beats truly by comparing it first
with a clock. I prefer to let it beat two or three times to the second, and let the bell
indicate the seconds. I do not think that the metronome is reliable when beating
only once to the second. Another method, which is far cheaper and more correct,
is one adopted by a friend of mine. He took one of the cheap Swiss clocks which
may be bought for two shillings or less, and lengthened its pendulum with a piece
of wire till it beat dead seconds. Anything more effective or simple I have not
seen. It was done for timing ordinary exposures in the studio.26
While skilled artist-musicians discounted the metronome for its artificial precision—as
the antithesis to human creativity—technical aficionados such as Cadett criticized the
metronome for the opposite reasons: the standard commercially available metronome was
not mechanically precise enough for use as a constant temporal regulator. British Royal
“Psychology in American Colleges and Universities,” The American Journal of Psychology 3
(Apr., 1890): 280-1.
25
The relationship between the metronomic time, chronography, and photography—the technique
of chronophotography—is not in the scope of this survey. See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time
and Space, 1880-1918 (Second Edition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003) for an
introduction to the history of precise, time-lapsed images in modern culture.
26
James Cadett, “ On the Establishment of a Standard Measurement of Sensitiveness, no II,” The
British Journal of Photography XXVII (Oct. 15, 1880): 496.
In the same edition, another writer suggests that a simple pendulum called a
“metronome” could be used to make an instant camera shutter, stating, “If any of my readers have
in their possession a common metronome for timing music, let them replace the lead ball at the
bottom by Mr. Beechey's apparatus, taking care that it has the same weight as the lead ball. In this
manner he will have in his possession an instantaneous shutter, with which he can regulate the
exposure from a second to a fraction of a second.” Ibid., 526.
197
Engineer Allan Cunningham also recognized that Maelzel’s machine was neither the
most reliable nor most accurate timekeeper available for conducting precision-oriented
measurements. In 1881 he ranked timekeeping machines in relation to their accuracy and
sufficiency:
5°. Timekeeper. A half-second's chronometer is best. Next to this (and nearly as
good) a loud ticking clock (not ticking too quick for the car to follow) with
second's hand. Next a similar clock without second's hand, or else a metronome.
Next a stop-watch.
Next probably (but much inferior) a simple seconds or half-second's
pendulum. And last of all a common watch or clock provided with a second's
hand. [The pendulum may be improvised with a bullet and string: its proper
length must be found by comparison with a good watch or clock through at least a
minute].27
In both Cadett’s and Cunningham’s assessments we see how different professions with
different requirements placed different values on identical machines. For this civic
engineer, the least precise timekeeper was the simple pendulum, while the clockwork
metronome was a vastly better reference for hydraulic experiments (albeit not the best
machine available). Conversely, professional musicians of the time considered Maelzel’s
metronome overly precise, automatical, and artificial in relation to variable, human
performance practices. For many music pedagogues the simple pendulum remained the
most appropriate external time reference because it fundamentally referenced subjective
and physical phenomena, not artificial clockwork. Indeed, influential piano pedagogue
Adolph Friedrich Christiani, confirmed the scientific epistemology of time that grounded
Maelzel’s automatical machine:
27 Allan Cunningham, Roorkee Hydraulic Experiments ([n.p.]: Thomason College Press, 1881),
350.
198
In principle, the metronome is, mathematically and astronomically, as correct as
any good clock is supposed to be.
The unit being always a minute.
A minute being the 60th part of an hour.
An hour, the 24th part of a day.
A day, the 365th part of a year.
And a year, the time it takes the earth to go around the sun.28
Writing in 1885, Christiani agreed with many scientists and engineers of the decade,
recognizing that the typical clockwork metronome was quite imprecise when compared
to household time-tellers. “In practice, however, a metronome is seldom as correct as a
good clock,” Christiani reiterated. He attested, however, that such chronographic
applications of the metronome had no place in music education and performance, and
commented—in contradistinction to mechanical engineers—“but that [level of accuracy]
is not necessary.”29
In the last years of the nineteenth-century, attitudes regarding the importance of
chronographic precision began to change, even in the field of music education.
Technically minded teachers, like chronographic scientists before them, began to view
the simple pendulum as insufficient when compared to automatical, clockwork
references. The values of scientific measurement and musical pedagogy, diametrically
opposed at least through the 1880s, would eventually merge with metronomic precision
by the turn of the century.
28 Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1885), 262. N.B. He makes no mention of seconds, since the second
continued to be an unusually precise temporal measurement outside of astronomical observatories
and experimental laboratories.
29
Ibid.
199
Over a decade after Maelzel’s death, clockwork and then electrically modified
metronomes became necessary apparatuses for the field of physiology, a medical science
that technology historians recognize as spawning a “laboratory revolution” in the mid-
century through the incorporation of novel automatic machines.30
In the 1860s, after
Richardson’s seminal experiments with his electrical-current metronome, physiology
departments across Great Britain and North America seemed to rapidly employ the
clockwork metronome during exploratory surgeries, most often on the muscle and nerve-
tissue of frogs.31
British researchers timed the effects of a poisoned frog by the click of
the metronome, as reported in 1867 by the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology.32
In
1876, Johns Hopkins University lists a “metronome, with electrical attachment, giving
contacts from 6 to 200 times in a minute” under a report of “the More Important
Physiological Apparatus in the Biological Laboratory.”33
The same year in Great Britain,
Physiologist James Dewar reported eye experiments where he timed a light source by a
30 Sven Dierig, “Engines for Experiment: Laboratory Revolution and Industrial Labor in the
Nineteenth-Century City,” Osiris 18 (2003): 118. Dierig’s article, while it details the
incorporation of chronographs in German physiology laboratories, makes no mention of the wide-
scale incorporation of electro-magnetic metronomes through the last decades of the nineteenth
century.
31
“Report on Physiology,” British and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review LXV (Jan., 1864):
233.
32
Thomas R. Fraser, “On the Physiological Action of the Calabar Bean,” Journal of Anatomy and
Physiology I (Nov., 1886): 329.
33
Johns Hopkins University, “List of the More Important Physiological Apparatus in the
Biological Laboratory,” in Report of the President (Baltimore: William K. Boyle & Son, 1876):
62. These Hopkins experiments were reported in H. Newell Martin, “Respiration of the Frog,”
The Journal of Physiology 1 (London: Macmillan and Co, 1878-9): 159.
200
metronome.34
By 1878 American doctors had timed frogs’ pulse rates during exploratory
operations to the metronome’s beats-per-minute.35
A Syllabus of a course of lectures on
physiology by John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, Professor at University College, London,
included a standard clockwork metronome as the timer for muscle-tissue experiments on
these animals.36
Also in 1878, Johns Hopkins University reported on frog experiments
where “the time in this case, as in all the others, was taken for each tracing separately by
an ordinary magneto-electric chronograph worked by a metronome.”37
Physiology sources also make clear that by 1875 the metronome’s artificial
rhythm had provided the best external regulator of breathing for unconscious animals.
Prior to the 1870s, however, some of the first attempts at artificial respiration in Germany
timed with a clockwork metronome proved to be less successful, since, as science
historian Sven Dierig relates, “no human assistant could retain the [metronomic] rhythm
of respiration throughout a long experiment.”38
But physiologists across Europe and
North America soon solved the problems of human action as part of a metronomic
(artificial) breathing apparatus. Isaac Ott, in the Philadelphia Medical Times (1875),
described an artificial respirator that was powered “at regular intervals, by an electro-
34 James Dewar, “On the Physiological Action of Light,” in Royal Institution of Great Britain,
Proceedings VIII (1875-1878): 147-8.
35
See, for instance, “A Contribution to Our Knowledge of Phytolacca Decandra, and of Grindelia
Rocusta,” in Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal, J. G. Westmoreland, ed. (Atlanta: H. H.
Dickson, 1878): 478-9.
36
John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, Syllabus of a course of lectures on physiology, Second Edition
(London: K. Lewis, 1879), 133.
37
H. Newell Martin, “Respiration of the Frog,” in Studies from the Biological Laboratory I
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1877-1878): 159.
38
Dierig, 127.
201
magnet and metronome.”39
He recounted his physiological procedures at the University
of Pennsylvania in The Action of Medicines (1875): “By regulating the rapidity of the
metronome,” Ott reports, “the current of air passing into the chest of the animal can be
broken as often as is desired, the breaks being according to the normal respirations of the
animal operated on. This apparatus worked exceedingly rhythmically, and run for about
two hours.”40
Ott suggested that when electric current was not available, a standard
metronome should dictate the time for the technician, who would regularly pump air into
the unconscious animal during a surgical operation.41
Joseph Ketchum’s 1885 patent
filing for an “Apparatus for Producing Artificial Respiration,” offered a similar
suggestion: “A metronome may be used for a [human] patient to breath by and the
attendant to work by, so as to secure synchronous operations, if desirable.”42
39 J. Ott, “Original Communications. Physiological Action of Gelsemia,” Philadelphia Medical
Times, Jul. 31, 1875, 689. American Periodical Series Online,
<http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=726640772&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3338&RQT=309&
VName=HNP>
40
Isaac Ott, The Action of Medicines (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1878), 26-7.
41
Ott, The Action of Medicines, 27.
42
Joseph Ketchum, “Apparatus for Producing Artificial Respiration,” U. S. Patent #320,070
(Filed Apr. 1, 1885; Patented June 16, 1885): 3.
202
Figs. 3.2 and 3.3. Mercury contact metronomes for experimental physiological surgeries. Left, from J.
M’Gregor-Robertson, The Elements of Physiological Physics (1884), 71. Right, from John Gray
McKendrick, A Text Book of Physiology (1888), 377.
While the metronome was a boon to physiology as an electro-mechanical
(chronographic) stimulant for muscles and lungs, we should note that Ott’s
“rhythmically” accurate apparatus was not “rhythmical” to the skilled music performer:
the scientific metronome, to the nineteenth-century musical artist, was a mere, unthinking
machine with no living “rhythm” whatsoever. This scientific “rhythm” was of a
decidedly different, metronomic species. Yet, such mechanical “rhythm” would be
explained and actualized in laboratories throughout the nineteenth century. This
experimental rhythm, exclusively defined and dictated by the metronome, eventually
became the fundamental rhythm of modern education as well.
In The Elements of Physiological Physics: An Outline of the Elementary Facts
(1884), J. M’Gregor-Robertson of the University of Glasgow documented the now-
standard apparatus used by physiologists across the world in muscle and nerve
experiments. He explains, “By an adaptation of the instrument used in music for beating
203
time, the metronome, this can be done, and the rate of speed at which the shocks follow
one another can also be regulated by it to a large extent.”43
Likewise, John Gray
McKendrick’s A Text Book of Physiology (1888) describes and prints the image of a
“metronome, arranged for making and breaking an electrical current” as “the apparatus
employed in study of muscle” through a series of shocks.44
A Dictionary of Medical
Science (1895) briefly defines the metronome as an “instrument provided with clock-
work for measuring time in music; also employed to test hearing power.”45
Maelzel’s Metronome as Laboratory Chronograph
While physiologists first revised Maelzel’s metronome through electromagnets and
mercury contacts for the consistent regulation of shocks and pneumatic pumps, by the last
three decades of the nineteenth century the metronome had become the timekeeping
element of the new laboratory chronograph, the precision time regulator and recorder
once reserved for the astronomical observatory. The Standard Electrical Dictionary
(1897) confirms:
Metronome, Registering. A clockwork time-marking instrument arranged to
close, at any desired interval, the electric circuit of a chronograph.46
43 J. M’Gregor-Robertson, The Elements of Physiological Physics: An Outline of the Elementary
Facts (London: Cassell & Company, 1884), 71-72.
44
John Gray McKendrick, A Text Book of Physiology (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons,
1888), 377.
45
Robley Duglison, A Dictionary of Medical Science, Twenty-first edition (Philadelphia: Lea
Brothers & Co., 1895), 697. Duglison’s earlier editions of the Medical Lexicon from 1846
through 1874 do not include a definition of the metronome.
46
T. O’Conor Sloane, Standard Electrical Dictionary, Second Edition (New York: Normal W.
Henley & Co., 1897), 610.
204
By the end of the century the metronome had also emerged as the standard time-element
for chronographic tests and experimental research in science classes across the world.
Winfred S. Hall’s Laboratory Guide in Physiology (1897) instructs the student or
professor on how to construct a simple chronograph using a contact metronome47
and
lists under “instruments for special use and for demonstrations” a scientific metronome
that can be purchased for 12 dollars.48
The 1899 British catalogue of Physiological
Instruments from the Cambridge Instrument Company listed three types of metronomes
under “time markers,” the most expensive of which has mercury contacts for running an
electrical current.49
The 1902 Technologisches Wörterbuch, a multilingual German
industrial-scientific dictionary, defined “Metronom” as a timekeeper used in the field of
physics.50
A 1907 German encyclopedia for pharmacists and apothecaries included the
definition of the clockwork metronome as well.51
Indeed, the metronome, applied as a
chronographic regulator in science, was not isolated to one nation or for one scientific
purpose. Even the University of Calcutta required a metronome for scientific lectures, as
47 Winfred S. Hall, A Laboratory Guide in Physiology (Chicago: Chicago Medical Book Co.,
1897), 319.
48
Ibid., 329.
49
Physiological instruments manufactured by the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company
(Cambridge: Printed at the University Press, 1899), 26.
50
Egbert von Hoyer, Franz Kreuter, Technologisches Wörterbuch, Deutsch-englisch-französisch:
Gewerbe & Industrie (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergman, 1902), 486.
51
Joseph Moeller and Hermann Thoms, Real-Enzyklopädie der Gesamten Pharmazie, Volume
VIII ([Leipsig]: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1907): 668.
205
reported in 1908.52
By the end of the nineteenth century, the metronome had increasingly
provided an objective rhythm for a host of scientific studies on time and action.
Given its scientific foundations in chronography, the clockwork metronome
continued to guide astronomers’ observations well through the nineteenth century,
especially during field research using the “eye-and-ear” method. Royal Astronomical
Society members recorded the January 22, 1898 solar eclipse in India with a Maelzel
metronome.53
Arthur G. Robbins reported on the total solar eclipse in Washington,
Georgia on May 28, 1900, as he “started simultaneously two stop-watches on the tick of
the chronometer, put on a pair of dark glasses, started the metronome and placed one of
the watches beside it on a box.”54
When another Royal Astronomical Society member
registered the total solar eclipse in Sumatra on May 17 and 18, 1901, the metronome
dictated the time within a portable astronomical chronometer. The Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society reported on the procedure at the Sumatran recording station where
“Seven men from the ‘Pigmy’ [a military gunboat] also assisted; two counting seconds
with the aid of a metronome.”55
52 University of Calcutta, Calendar (Calcutta: Thacker, Sprink & Co., 1908), 327.
53
John Tebbutt, “Equatorial Comparison of Uranus…,” Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society LVIII (Nov., 1897-Nov., 1898): 21-25.
54
Arthur G. Robbins, “The Eclipse Expedition of the MIT to Washington, Georgia,” Technology
Quarterly and Proceedings of the Society of Arts XIII (Sept., 1900): 172.
55
H. F. Newall, “Total Solar Eclipse of 1901 May 17-18,” Monthly Notices of the Royal
Astronomical Society LXII (Nov., 1901-Nov., 1902): 214-216; and W. F. Dyson, “Total Eclipse
of the Sun, 1901 May 18,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society LXII (Nov., 1901-
Nov., 1902): 240.
206
Figure 3.4. MIT chronograph for observing the May 28, 1900 solar eclipse. The clockwork metronome
appears at the bottom left of the astronomical apparatus. From George L. Hosmer, “The Eclipse Expedition
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Washington: Part II. Report of Observations,” Technology
Quarterly and Proceedings of the Society of Arts XIII (Sept., 1900): 165.
As its accuracy improved in the twentieth century, and as more manufacturers of
the machine appeared, the metronome became a necessary apparatus in the
comprehensive professional and educational laboratory. By the 1920s the metronome was
a readily accessible and affordable instrument for the home scientist as well. Ironically
perhaps, scientific sources seldom associated the machine with music, sound, or the
science of acoustics. The article “Starting the Small Physics Laboratory” (1923)
published in the Peabody Journal of Education lists the metronome in an inventory, not
under the “sound” category with resonator tubes, whistles, and tuning forks, but under the
207
general heading “Mechanics of Solids” alongside other automatic machines such as a
rotator and a stop watch.56
From this brief survey into the scientific metronome, it becomes clear that the
uses of the machine diverged widely from Beethoven’s—and most nineteenth-century
composers’—original applications. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, scientists
found a new life for Maelzel’s automaton as part of the chronographic apparatus, and
thus the metronome rapidly disseminated throughout the fields of physiology, physics,
and astronomy well into the twentieth century. Yet, during most of the nineteenth
century, the scientific metronome had little to do with the creative will of composers or
the performance practices of experienced musicians. Indeed, skilled performers rejected
the machine for the very same reasons that scientists accepted it: the metronome offered
incessant rhythm and artificial regulation in time, far from the volatile qualities of human
perception, creativity, or expression. A benefit to scientific research and experimentation,
the metronome dictated automatical “rhythm” alone. For scientists, the objective
temporal reference was a vital aid to their novel empirical methods; yet, for many
experienced performers and composers, such artificial clockwork control represented
creative death itself.
Beyond the field of professional astronomy, the nineteenth-century science of
experimental psychology most actively relied on metronomic time for the research of
human action measured by the modern chronographic method. Laboratory psychologists
applied the machine quite differently from nineteenth-century physical scientists,
engineers, photographers, and even physiologists. Beyond classroom experiments in
56 Hanor A. Webb, “Starting the Small Physics Laboratory,” Peabody Journal of Education 1
(Sept., 1923): 90, 92.
208
gravity, tests on hydraulic systems, darkroom exposures, or administering electric shocks
to dead frogs, the scientific metronome actively regulated the personal equation of
thought and action on living, conscious people. Experimental psychologists used
Maelzel’s machine not merely as an objective reference for objective phenomena; they
applied the metronome in a host of newly devised chronographic training-experiments.
For experimental psychologists the clockwork metronome was the sole rhythmic
reference against which they judged and regulated the “observer’s” (i.e. the laboratory
subject’s) every physical action and innate perception.
In the new nineteenth-century science of experimental psychology Maelzel’s
metronome became the “seconds-clock” of two chronographic machines in particular, the
kymograph and the ergograph. These recording and regulating apparatuses had become
essential tools in numerous university-funded laboratories across the world by the
1880s.57
The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901) succinctly defines the
close relationship between the original astronomical chronograph, Maelzel’s clockwork
machine, and the modern apparatuses of experimental psychology:
The chronograph used in psychological experiment is some form of revolving
cylinder, such as the kymograph or polygraph…The time is measured by a
tuning-fork, metronome, or seconds pendulum, and recorded by means of
tambours or an electric circuit.58
The following three chapters of this study continue to explore how experimental
psychologists, like astronomers before them, researched the personal equation of
perception and action under the invariable control of metronomic time. As these scientists
57 Boring, 139.
58
James Mark Baldwin, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Volume 1 (New York:
Macmillan and Co., 1901), 614.
209
dictated and defined the complexities of the human experience within the rigid
framework of the chronographic method, their mechanical-scientific epistemology had
created a new standard of time and action for an industrialized culture by the twentieth
century. In this modern science, a paradigm shift occurred in the conceptualization of
musical rhythm—from a variable, subjectively sensed quality, to an objective truth,
exclusively heard through precise clockwork. Before composers or performers considered
the metronome to be the absolute reference of their creativity or expression, modern
experimental psychologists replaced the complex personal equation of musicality, in
theory, pedagogy, and practice, with monotonous clockwork clicks.
The Scientific Metronome in Experimental Psychology
Influenced by both the precision-oriented culture of professional astronomy, where
observers gauged perceptions of sight and sound upon the chronograph, and by
physiology, which utilized electro-magnetic metronomes to regulate experimental
surgeries, Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832-1920) founded the modern science of experimental
psychology at the University of Leipzig around 1875.59
With his new psychological
laboratory, which included a host of automatic machines, Wundt, his colleagues, and
students researched and reduced the personal equation of their subjects to second-by-
second clockwork precisions.60
59 O. L. Zangwill, “Wundt,” The Oxford Companion to the Mind Online. Boring dates the
founding of the Leipzig laboratory later in the decade.
60
Besides the astronomy and physiology, the industrializing landscape of Germany, Leipzig in
particular, may have influenced Wundt to incorporate and rely on new, automatic laboratory
machines. See Sven Dierig, “Engines for Experiment: Laboratory Revolution and Industrial
Labor in the Nineteenth-Century City,” Osiris 18 (2003): 116-134.
210
Psychologist Carl Emil Seashore, perhaps the most prominent scientist working
on the problems of the musical-personal equation during the first half of the twentieth
century, recognized the traditions of his field. In Elementary Experiments in Psychology
(1908), he summarized the chain of influences that led modern psychology to research
and regulate human mental processes through precision, mechanical time:
Historically, interest in the reaction-measurement has passed through several
phases. It began over a hundred years ago in the study of the personal equation of
astronomers. Then the physiologists became interested in the measurement of the
speed of the nerve-impulse by this method. This roused the psychologists to the
measurement of the time of mental processes. At the present time the interest of
the psychologists centers upon its use as an aid in the analysis and synthesis of
action.61
In History of Experimental Psychology, psychologist and historian Edwin Boring also
acknowledged the origins of this uniquely modern science, along with its chronographic
methods, stating, “It is for this reason that experimental psychology can be said to have
grown in part out of astronomy: astronomy furnished it with a problem, some facts, a
method, and some apparatus.”62
The “problem” of experimental psychology was identical to Bessel’s problem first
recognized in the astronomical observatory: the personal equation, the individual’s errors
of perception when compared to an objective and precise clockwork reference. Where
astronomers improved the accuracy of observations through chronography, Wundt
proclaimed that his new science would extend the chronographic method to solve the
many other problems of human individuality:
61 Carl E. Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1908), 218.
62
Boring, 142.
211
Psychology has to investigate that which we call internal experience, —i.e. our
own sensation and feeling, our thought and volition, —in contradistinction to the
objects of external experience, which form the subject matter of natural science.
Man himself, not as he appears from without, but as he is in his own immediate
experience, is the real problem of psychology.63
Thus Wundt—who originally trained and researched as a physiologist—sought to answer
these self-perceived problems of the human mind and body with a host of newly devised
experiments, using the apparatuses of physiology and the chronographic methods of
astronomy. Wundt believed the quantification of human subjectivity in precise,
mechanical time was well within the reach of his new science, stating by 1888 that,
When we learn how long it takes to perceive, to will, to remember, &c., are in
themselves of the same interest to the psychologist, as the distances of the stars to
the astronomer, or atomic weights to the chemist…these times are of further and
great use…in analyzing complex mental phenomena, and in studying the nature of
attention, volition, &c.64
According to Wundt, the human mind, even the individual’s will, functioned within
completely knowable laws and thus could be measured through precise clockwork
machines and methods. Unlike the metaphysical or “rational” psychologists of his day,
such as William James, Wundt—a strict empiricist—believed all things related to purely
quantifiable objects, that the fundamental “nature of volition,” expression,
communication, and intelligence could be registered completely through his new
laboratory procedures and machines, which ultimately could be reduced to definitive,
reproducible mathematical formulas and numerical data. Wundt explained the scientific
values beyond his objectivist brand of psychology:
63 Wilhelm Max Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, translated from the Second
German Edition by J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.,
1907), 1.
64
James McKeen Cattell, “The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic,” Mind 13 (Jan., 1888): 45.
212
Experiment is accompanied by measurement, step by step. Weight and measure
are the great instruments of experimental research, and are always employed in
the search for exact laws. With experiment, weight and measure enter into the
science: for they give it a definite character. Measurement reveals the constants of
nature, the laws that regulate phenomena. The results of all measurement are
expressed in number. Numbers are not the object of measure; but they are the
indispensable means of arriving at its true object, for only numbers can reveal
law.65
It becomes clear from the inception of his Leipzig laboratory that Wundt’s experimental
psychology sought to completely objectify the seemingly ineffable processes of the
human mind. In studying mental phenomena through clockwork machines, Wundt’s
science was perhaps a response to physiologists’ strictly empirical research on bodily
phenomena, their mechanical measurements of blood circulation, musculature reactions,
and nerve responses. E. B. Titchener, Wundt’s early doctoral student at Leipzig and
highly influential North American psychology professor, argued that Wundt’s new
science was the next step in physiology, since experimental psychologists now had the
ability—using the very same apparatuses familiar in physiology—to chart the human
mind with a chronographic precision never before attempted.66
Titchener explained in A
Beginners Psychology (1916):
65 Théodule Ribot, German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James
Mark Baldwin (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1886), 192.
66
American physiologists had worked with living human subjects in metronomic time at least by
1875. For example, weight lifting experiments at Washington University relied on metronomic
regulation in which “the beginning and close of this interval of work is marked by the sharp click
of a metronome, the time whose beat is t.” See F. E. Nipher, “On the Mechanical Work done by a
Muscle before Exhaustion,” American Journal of Science and Arts 9 (Feb., 1875): 142. APS
Online. Such studies continued throughout the twentieth century for industrial training purposes.
213
Now it is possible to measure all these organic changes; to record the rate and
height of the pulse, for instance…physiology puts the necessary instruments at
our disposal. The observer may therefore be harnessed to some such system of
recording apparatus, and may be subjected to some pleasant or unpleasant
stimulus; he reports what he feels, and the experimenter is able to compare the
report with the record from the instrument.67
“The instrument” of time measurement that Titchener, Seashore, Boring, and Wundt all
allude to in their chronographic methods included the scientific metronome. In the
experimental-psychology laboratory, the metronome functioned alongside the
chronograph as the objective reference for researching the human mind and body. Thus
metronomic time aided in both recording and reducing human actions and feelings—all
“organic changes”—to scientific certainties. But the metronome served another purpose
in the experimental laboratory; the artificial rhythm of Maelzel’s machine occasionally
furnished as the “unpleasant stimulus” or distraction when testing mental and physical
reactions of laboratory subjects. As psychologists soon learned, the incessant sound of the
metronome clearly influenced more than just a subject’s immediate laboratory
performance; the sound of the clockwork metronome altered the mind and body over
time.
As an essential scientific apparatus, the metronome had a variety of applications
when researching and recording mental processes in the modern psychology laboratory.
Often psychology experiments employed a standard clockwork metronome, especially for
short tests on a subject’s near-term perceptions. Like physiologists earlier in the century,
however, experimental psychologists occasionally revised Maelzel’s metronome with
electrical contacts and battery power, so the machine could tick indefinitely for more
67 Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1916), 82-3.
214
controlled and consistent experiments—to better resemble an observatory chronograph.
Wundt first developed an electric metronome for his Leipzig laboratory, which was
depicted in his Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. Clearly inspired by
physiologists’ alterations of the standard Maelzel machine, Wundt details his new
laboratory metronome for “Range of Consciousness” experiments:
Affixed to the pendulum of the metronome is a small iron plate, projecting on
either side. This is arranged between two electro-magnets, e1 and e2 in such a way
that the pendulum can be arrested or set swinging at any moment by the closing or
opening of a current passing through them from the battery k1. The current is
made by simply closing the key s with the left hand. In order to mark off for
perception the separate series of metronome-beats, we make use of a small
electric bell, g, supplied by a second current, k2. This current is made for a
moment, and then broken again by an instantaneous pressure upon the button of
the telegraph key t.68
Other psychologists altered the standard metronome in various ways for different
experiments. Wundt’s former student Titchener recommended that psychologists tamper
with the typical clockwork metronome to reduce the very distractive and prominent click,
which could negatively influence the subject’s reactions. He explains:
PRELIMINARIES. — The customary tick of the metronome, as it stands upon
table or piano, may be described as a noisy clang or a metallic clack. To deaden
the sound, i.e., to eliminate the clang elements, E [the experimenter] must remove
the floor of the clock-chamber (it comes away when a button is turned), and set
the instrument upon a layer of thick — felt. The tick then becomes a mere click or
crack.
The table on which the metronome stands must be placed in such a
relation to O [the observer, the subject] that there is no echo or reverberation from
the walls of the room. The ticks are to form a series of sharply separated dead
sounds.69
68 Wundt, Lectures On Human and Animal Psychology, 261.
69
Edward Bradford Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice,
Volume 1 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901), 175.
215
Fig. 3.5. Wilhelm Wundt’s electro-magnetic metronome apparatus for “range of consciousness”
experiments. Reprinted from his published Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 261.
As the scientific applications of the metronome expanded, psychologists
increasingly abstracted the machine from its original purposes as an initial reference for
musical pulse; in their hands Maelzel’s metronome became an artificial sound-emitter
exclusively. Meanwhile, its pendulum swing became entirely devalued in scientific
experimentation. It seems that “sharply dead sounds” alone were a more appropriate
rhythmical reference for standardized experiments on the mind. Silent visual rhythm
played a minor role in the typical psychological investigation; because the simple
pendulum was non-automatical, it rarely if ever guided the scientific studies of attention,
fatigue, or consciousness. Indeed, Titchener, in one metronome-attention experiment,
216
placed the metronome behind his subjects so they could perceive the unremitting sound
stimulus while being uninfluenced by the sight of the pendulum swing.70
The scientific metronome traveled widely and rapidly from Wundt’s laboratory as
the methods of experimental psychology expanded across Europe and America. A
University of Wisconsin inventory from 1890 lists a “Verdin rotating drum, Marey
tambour, Deprez signal, three metronomes” for testing the subject’s reaction time and
nervous system.71
Titchener, a primary proponent of Wundt’s science in North America,
recommended numerous types of metronomes when conducting experiments on
“Auditory perceptions, Memory, etc.” In 1900 he published metronome makers and
prices in an extensive list of scientific paraphernalia necessary for university
researchers.72
Likewise, an 1899 American Journal of Psychology laboratory checklist
includes the metronome in experiments of “Attention […] (b) range of attention
(counting of metronome beats and execution of several simultaneous acts).” Oddly
perhaps, this inventory did not list the metronome in experiments quantifying “Memory:
(a) visual memory of geometrical design, (b) memory of sentences, (c) musical
memory.”73
The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901), however, defined the
metronome as a chief “apparatus for the study of rhythm and auditory span of
70 Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 177.
71
Jastrow, et al., The American Journal of Psychology 3 (Apr., 1890): 275-6.
72
Edward Bradford Titchener, “The Equipment of a Psychological Laboratory,” The American
Journal of Psychology 11 (Jan., 1900): 256. He lists: “56. 2 simple metronomes. Petzold…each
Mk. 7.50 / 57. Simple metronome. Willyoung…3.75 / 58. Metronome with mercury contacts.
Kronecher. Petzold…Mk. 36.00 / 59. Interrupter-clock, cased. Baltzar. Zimmermann…Mk.
170.00.”
73
Stella Emily Sharp, “Individual Psychology: A Study in Psychological Method,” The American
Journal of Psychology 10 (Apr., 1899): 345.
217
consciousness.”74
As scientific sources attest, Maelzel’s metronome, when used with
chronographic methods, had little in common with most nineteenth-century composers’,
performers’, or musical pedagogues’ intentions for the machine, or their traditional
epistemologies of rhythm.
By the 1890s, metronomic time had regulated and recorded a host of human
activities in the psychological laboratory. Besides judging time intervals in attention and
memory experiments, the metronome set the determining pace in subjects of “memory
image,”75
the regularity of memory recollection,76
as well as reaction time.77
Among
many studies, Wundt analyzed a subject’s special sense in relation to metronomic time.78
Titchener codified one such experiment, which tested a subject’s visual reactions when
exposed to various light stimuli, invariably regulated by the metronome.79
As scientific texts and inventories confirm, the metronome was particularly
essential in memory, recollection, and response studies, some of them first devised in the
mid-1880s by psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909). Using metronomic
regulation, Ebbinghaus’ experimental procedure required a subject to invariably repeat a
74 Baldwin, 611-614.
75
Arthur H. Daniels, “The Memory and After-Image and Attentions,” The American Journal of
Psychology 6 (Jan., 1895): 563. He summarized the work in Wundt’s laboratory on rhythm
perception with the metronome.
76
W. G. Smith, “The Relation of Attention to Memory,” Mind 4 (Jan., 1895): 62.
77
Edgar James Swift, “Disturbance of the Attention during Simple Mental Processes,” The
American Journal of Psychology 5 (Oct., 1892): 5.
78
See A. E. Segsworth, “On the Difference Sensibility for the Valuation of Space Distances with
the Help of Arm Movements,” The American Journal of Psychology 6 (Jun., 1894): 369-407.
79
Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 27.
218
pattern of words or nonsense syllables, one after the other, testing the capacity for both
mental retention and quick, automatical reaction. An 1896 The American Journal of
Psychology article summarized Ebbinghaus’ original process:
[His self-experiments] were chiefly upon the memory span and the effects of
repetition. His method of learning the syllables was to read aloud in a monotonous
voice series of nonsense syllables of various lengths, regulating the rapidity of
reading by the strokes of a metronome, until the series could be just reproduced
without error.80
The recitation of nonsense syllables in metronomic time continued to be a standard
memory experiment well through the early twentieth century. In the text Experimental
Psychology, Titchener printed a figure of the metronome used in such experiments, an
“apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables.”81
Another prominent former
student of Wundt, Ernst Meumann, in The Psychology of Learning, further summarized
Ebbinghaus’ methods from 1885, explaining that “he controlled the rapidity of reading
and reciting by speaking in a tempo of ‘150 beats to the minute,’ having previously
practiced this tempo with a metronome or a watch. He memorized rhythmically, grouping
the syllables by threes and by fours and pronouncing the first, fourth, seventh, etc.—or
the first, fifth, ninth, etc., with a moderate accentuation.”82
80 Theodate L. Smith, “On Muscular Memory,” The American Journal of Psychology 7 (July,
1896): 456.
81
Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1916), 381.
82
Ernst Meumann, The Psychology of Learning, translated by John Wallace Baird (New York: D.
Appleton and Co., 1913), 162-3.
219
Fig. 3.6. The “Apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables.” As depicted, the battery-
powered Maelzel metronome regulated the rate of this psychological performance-experiment to test
memory, recollection, and response time. Reprinted in Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology, 381.
Meumann’s comments again expose the scientific notion of “rhythmically”
infused action, qualities Meumann actively promoted through his own experiments,
which are analyzed in the following chapter. The unique “rhythm” of Wundt’s,
Ebbinghaus’ and Meumann’s experiments, keeping with a host of psychological studies
founded on chronography, was by very definition metronomic—a value antithetical to the
internal and subjective senses of pulse, proportion, and movement practiced by skilled
musicians. Chronographic scientists continually espoused a “rhythm” that reflected a
fundamental value shift in comparison to skilled musicians and educators of the past;
within psychologists’ laboratories thrived a reductive “rhythm” exclusively defined
through the sound of redundant, repetitive clockwork.
In 1927, The American Journal of Psychology reported on more precise methods
of the Ebbinghaus experiment, now a mainstay of psychology research:
220
All presentation was aural. [The experimenter] read the series to the beats of a
metronome set at eighty per minute. Thus the interval between the beats was 3/4
of a sec., and the series most rapidly read were presented at this rate. Series more
slowly read were presented one to every second beat, one to every third beat, and
so on. Whatever the rate, the signal 'Now' was given two beats before the
beginning of each presentation and two beats after the end of each presentation
which was to be followed by another.83
Even for those unfamiliar with Ebbinghaus’ research methodologies, it becomes clear
that these memory studies were not simple, empirical observations of an individual’s
common mental abilities, but a more profound mental-physical training within the
confines of precise clockwork “rhythm;” similar to so many other psychological
experiments of the age, Ebbinghaus’ experiments were, to some extent unintentionally,
training sessions in mechanized reaction and response. Musical “artists” of the nineteenth
century would have recognized these experiments at face value—as a peculiar
performance practice in becoming automatical, in slavishly imitating Maelzel’s
automaton.
Ebbinghaus, and experimental psychologists before him, recognized that human
subjects could only perform with consistent metronomic rates and rigidities through
methodical, repetitive training. The results of numerous metronomic experiments on
physical and mental recollection show that for laboratory subjects (as well as experienced
musicians) these artificial performances were clearly not the normal course of living
action: to recollect and repeat in metronomic time took repetitive drilling, through a
recognizable process of habituation. French psychologist Théodule Ribot (1839-1916), in
his survey of the new science of experimental psychology, German Psychology To-day:
The Empirical School, reported that the subjects of Wundt’s laboratory usually failed to
83 Eleanor A. McC. Gamble, “A Study of Three Variables in Memorizing,” The American
Journal of Psychology 39 (Dec., 1927): 224-5.
221
reproduce precise metronomic rhythm stipulated under chronographic guidelines. This
fact was most notable during the attention-consciousness experiments administered by
Vierordt:
To study the duration of these small intervals, Vierordt causes the subject to
attend for some time to the beating of the metronome; then he [the subject] is to
reproduce the beats as fast as he heard them. Now, the repeated intervals are too
short when the real intervals are long, and too long when the intervals are short.
The individual variations on both sides of the exact point are large.84
The scientific metronome, when applied with chronographic values and goals, provided a
new and artificial reference for newly devised human performances, which
correspondingly reduced the individual subject to the status of an automaton.
Psychologists consistently noticed problematic “individual variations” during
metronomic experimentation, yet over time, they also recognized that these personal
variations receded with incessant, mechanized training—just as it had for astronomers
using the chronograph. Ebbinghaus well understood that over time his methods effaced
the personal equation—the intrinsic variability of human action—to mere automatism,
concluding of his results, “There are great individual differences; but, in general, it is
only after a good deal of practice that the observer becomes the sheer mechanical
associator.”85
Experienced musicians of the century, acknowledging the inhuman
influence of the metronome upon human musicality, came to the very same conclusion as
experimental psychologists: “the observer may be trained.” 86
84 Théodule Ribot, German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James
Mark Baldwin (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1886), 273.
85
Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology, 382.
86
Ibid.
222
While it is not in the scope of this brief survey of the scientific metronome to
chart every use of the clockwork machine in the nineteenth-century psychology
laboratory—for its purposes are seemingly endless—the following chapters continue to
explore the numerous scientific applications of the device, as modern experimental
psychologists redefined the values of thought and action with an increasingly precise and
automatical “rhythm.” Chapter IV documents metronomic experiments on attention span
and musical performance; Chapter V exposes the effects of the metronome in behavioral
training; and Chapter VI explores metronomic tests of physical tolerances and child
normalcy as they relate to contemporaneous trends in music pedagogy. In their many
metronomic laboratory experiments—each founded on the chronographic methods of
astronomy—mechanical rhythm redefined the fundamentals of individual perception and
performance in time both for experimenters and their subjects. Indeed, the new paradigm
of rhythm first espoused by Wundt transferred to every act of humanity in his Leipzig
laboratory. Thus we find that in researching, documenting, and training physical and
mental phenomena with the sound of the clockwork metronome, Wundt and following
psychologists mistranslated musical time as being equitable or synonymous with
metronomic rhythm especially during sound-perception experiments; their mistranslation
of creative, subjective rhythm as an objective, automatical quality constituted a dramatic
value shift that served a reductive research methodology with lasting repercussions. By
the turn of the century this paradigm of laboratory “rhythm,” utilized first by
experimental psychologists, fueled the trend for more “scientific” pedagogies espoused in
the last years of the nineteenth-century, which now prescribed precision-based
metronomic time for a host of trainable performances.
223
CHAPTER IV: METRONOMIC RHYTHM, THE CHRONOGRAPHIC BIAS,
AND THE SCIENTIFIC REDEFINITION OF MUSICIANS
AND MUSICAL ACTION
“Rhythm” and “time,” as this study continues to explore, are value systems that vary
according to people, places, and purposes. Well through the nineteenth century, the
automatical “rhythm” of the metronome was not the sensory, subjective rhythm of living
musicians. But as the metronome became an important chronographic tool for
physiologists and experimental psychologists, the objective “rhythm” of the scientific
laboratory rapidly emerged. This new rhythm had profound and lasting effects on musical
performance practices by the end of the century. Through scientific methods and
machines of the late nineteenth century, the time of clockwork and the time of music
converged ever closer.
As numerous recent histories of technology have shown, scientists and their
methods act as catalysts in the development of the most precise machines valued for the
most precise measurements. In fields such as surgery, chemistry, computing, and
especially time telling, scientists first require specialized equipment that helps to cut
smaller, view closer, count faster—or measure increasingly minute, equal fractions of
time. Thus, scientific values of “time,” when defined by artificial time tellers, are
traditionally the most precise for any given point in Western history. These temporal
values are as “precise” as the historical, communal, and cultural contexts stipulate. For
instance, in our present age, particle physicists use some of the most exacting time-telling
instruments, housed within sub-atomic super-colliders, currently in existence. Yet, these
precision tools have very specific and limited purposes. And they certainly have a
negligible place in most people’s daily time-telling epistemologies, since one does not
224
need to measure the workday or quarter notes in picoseconds. For the nineteenth century,
the clockwork metronome was a similarly specialized time reference. When embraced by
the new experimental psychologists, it was an apparatus rigorously applied with similar
scientific intentions and values—providing the most objective, constant, and precise
temporal measurements then available to Western civilization. For the nineteenth century,
the clockwork metronome was a state-of-the-art regulator of scientific time and rhythm.
With their many psychological studies in precision-based rhythm, the new
scientists applied automatical machines to the study of human action in ways once
considered antithetical to humanity. This chapter explores the intimate link between their
scientific research, precision-oriented apparatuses, and the redefinitions of rhythmical
action in “time.” Through experimental psychologists’ chronographic studies, the once-
experiential qualities of creative “artistic” rhythm heard in the sensory accent, rhetorical
gesture, and other subjective techniques, became precisely mechanized through
speculative scientific theory. Originating in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory, this new
scientific culture redefined an individual’s rhythmical perceptions and actions with
mechanical precisions never before realized or desired by skilled performers.
Scientists altered the very meanings of “good rhythm” for living musicians
through the constant reference to metronomic apparatuses. For psychologists trained in
Wundt’s methodologies, the creative, interpretive time of musical rhythm ceased to hold
value; in their hands, the scientific metronome ruled over the once-subjective rhythms,
pulses, movements of musical time. In contrast to knowledgeable musical pedagogues
who espoused sensory and willful performance practices, Wundt’s school viewed the
human “observer”—both inside and eventually outside the laboratory—as a passive,
225
reactive subject against precise, mechanical regulation. Consequently, by the 1890s,
musical performances in the psychological laboratory had transformed into
chronographic tests, as experimental psychologists maintained that exacting mechanical
time and metronomic rhythm provided the complete understanding of correct human
impulses and actions. Distanced from the temporal beliefs of Marx, Christiani, or Weber,
experimental psychologists’ modern rhythm studies indisputably turned musical time into
an automatical quality; in laboratories before on the concert stage, these scientists
reconceived musical rhythm within the absolute standard of metronomic sound. These
many experimental psychologists prefigured and first prescribed the precise mechanical
rhythm that most modern musicians practice, modern pedagogues teach, and modern
audiences hear today.
The Birth of Scientific “Rhythm”
Wilhelm Wundt practically invented the modern meaning and scientific application of
“rhythm” during his psychological investigations into the mental phenomena of attention
and consciousness. Perhaps inspired by notable physiologist Karl Vierordt—who
incorporated the metronome into human experiments by the 1860s—Wundt believed that
in testing a subject’s exposure to repetitive mechanical sounds, one discovered how long
the mind could hold a string of ideas, which pointed to a range of consciousness. The
metronome, and in following years more precise metronomic apparatuses, facilitated
these laboratory studies that spanned well into the twentieth century. As prominent
former student of Wundt, Titchener recognized that his teacher was “the first to propound
226
a psychological theory of rhythm”1 based on these attention and consciousness
experiments. Here, in the mechanical laboratory of the first experimental psychologist,
the experience of musical time flipped to value automatons and automatical time.
Through Wundt’s new experiments, human motion was no longer the reference of
rhythm; instead, rhythm became a scientific rule regulated exclusively by objective,
mechanical means. Charles Samuel Myers described psychologists’ typical “Time and
Rhythm” studies in A Text-book of Experimental Psychology (1909), and he succinctly
defined this radically new temporal quality found in laboratory procedures, in which
“The simplest material for rhythm consists of a series of identical, regularly repeated, and
equally accented stimuli.” 2
The source of Wundt’s tradition of laboratory rhythm—without any ambiguities
or nuances—was the sound emitted from the scientific metronome. In 1901, Titchener
defined the essential, external “materials” employed over the past decade for
psychological experiments on the subject’s sense of “rhythm”:
1 Edward Bradford Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice,
Volume I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901), 355.
2 Charles Samuel Myers, A Text-book of Experimental Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green
& Co., 1909), 314-315.
By the end of the previous century, Myers had applied these typical metronomic
“rhythm” experiments to the indigenous populations of Murray Island to test the innate
“rhythmic” abilities of non-European peoples. Myers reports: “Twelve Islanders were tested for
their sense of rhythm; this was found to be remarkably accurate for 120 beats of the metronome
to the minute, and somewhat less so for 60 beats. Most of the subjects had a tendency to vary in
the direction of increasing the rate of the taps.” See C. S. Myers, et al. “Anthropological Reviews
and Miscellanea,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29
(1899): 222.
Myers’ ethnographic research prefigures ethnomusicologists’ studies in following
decades that also relied upon the metronome to quantify rhythmic performances.
227
The instruments which give the rhythm stimuli, the variously modified sound
series, must have a high degree of mechanical accuracy, and are correspondingly
expensive. The most useful appliance for investigation is, probably, Meumann’s
‘time-sense’ apparatus, consisting of Baltzar kymograph, time-disc, set of
contacts, and sound-hammers…The metronome recommends itself, for the initial
experiment, both by its cheapness and by its wide range of rate3…The metronome
is, in general, a very reliable instrument. Nevertheless, these rates should be
tested, on principle, by counting the beats with a stop-watch.4
Using his electrified metronome as the exclusive rhythmic stimulus, Wundt and his
students tested their subjects’ perception to the monotonous succession of mechanical
sounds at various rates of speed.5 Upon eliciting subjects’ reactions to the redundant
mechanical stimulus, these scientists found that the mind often attempted to order
incessant and equal metronomic ticks into groups, usually in patterns of two or three.
American psychologist William James (1842-1910) summarized the phenomenon:
Our spontaneous tendency is to break up any monotonously given series of
sounds into some sort of rhythm. We involuntarily accentuate every second, or
third, or fourth beat, or we break the series in still more intricate ways. Whenever
we thus grasp the impressions in rhythmic form, we can identify a longer string of
them without confusion.6
More than this phenomenon elicited by metronomic sound, when one sound in the
mechanical series was more prominent, accented by a bell for instance, the mind grouped
the softer clicks in relation to the loudest, even though every sound remained
automatically consistent. Thaddeus Bolton defined this mental phenomenon in the
3 Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 338.
4 Ibid., 339.
5 See, for another example, Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology (Leipzig: Wilhelm
Engelmann, 1902), 230-236.
6 Sherover, 373. Reprint from William James, “The Perception of Time,” Chap XV, The
Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890).
228
American Journal of Psychology (1894), reiterating the scientific definition of rhythm
that was exclusively dictated through externalized, mechanized “impressions:”
We come now to the consideration of the nature of the rhythmical group. The
general principle is this: In a series of auditory impressions, any regularly
recurrent impression which is different from the rest, subordinates the other
impressions to it in such a way that that fall together in groups. If the recurrent
difference is one of intensity, the strongest impression comes first in the group
and the weaker ones after. If the recurrent difference is one of duration,7 the
longest impression comes last. These rules of course hold good only within the
limits spoken of above. When the impressions are uniform in length and intensity,
the mind enforces a grouping by giving fictitious values to the impressions,
generally with respect to intensity, but sometimes with respect to duration.8
This ability to mentally group incessant, automatical sounds became a trusted measure of
attention span in the laboratory; the longer that subjects were exposed to metronomic
rhythm, their ability to “fictitiously” group sounds into a discernable pattern diminished.
Wundt found that this phenomenon of mental grouping eventually ceased after forty
metronome clicks. Bolton recounted this initial discovery at Leipzig University:
In the work undertaken by Dietze in Wundt’s laboratory upon the Umfang of
consciousness, this rhythmical grouping of the sounds of the metronome was
observed and employed to determine the length of the mental span. The grouping
was accomplished [mentally from the subjects] by intensifying voluntarily certain
sounds and subordinating others to it. By grouping the sounds first by eight and
then the groups of eight by five, it was possible to grasp forty sounds…Wundt
refers this grouping to the ripening of the concept on the wave of apperception.9
Experimental psychologists considered the mental process of grouping redundant
artificial sounds into patterns standard knowledge, and they repeated and revised Wundt’s
initial metronome experiments well into the twentieth century. James Burt Miner in
7 Bolton makes clear on page 233 of his article that this lengthening is mechanically precise: “the
longer impression twice the length of the shorter.”
8 Thaddeus L. Bolton, “Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 6 (Jan., 1894): 232-3.
9 Ibid., 205.
229
Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms (1903) described a variant of the attention
experiment, in which the subject, as was the custom, passively perceived a rhythmic
grouping out of metronomic sound:
The subject was told to relax all his muscles as much as possible and then listen to
the metronome, with eyes closed. After he had listened awhile to the beats I asked
him if the sounds seemed to vary in any regular way. He generally at once noticed
the grouping. Having made sure that the subject perceived a subjective rhythm I
then watched for involuntary movements.10
“Subjective rhythm” as described by Miner and first practiced in Wundt’s experiments
was no longer related to any internal pulse, physical movement, or interpretive volition
whatsoever; the new psychologists’ “subjective rhythm” was indeed antithetical to the
type of rhythm espoused and experienced by skilled musical performers and pedagogues
throughout the nineteenth century. The species of rhythm that psychologists elicited in
the laboratory instead required the subject to “passively” listen to artificial, external
“impressions,” and then imagine an ordered pattern out of mechanical monotony. Herbert
Woodrow confirms in A Quantitative Study of Rhythm (1909) that, in experimental
psychologists’ attention research, all rhythmical phenomena (along with the definition
“rhythm”) reduced to chronographic explanation:
The following description of the method used in this research may be found rather
difficult to follow by those who are unaccustomed to the terminology of
rhythm…It should be remembered that in all the rhythms here dealt with every
second or every third [automatical] sound is either louder or longer than the
others. Also that rhythm is characterized by an apprehension of the sounds in
groups and that when there is no grouping [in the mind] there is no rhythm.11
10 James Burt Miner, “Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,” (PhD Diss., Columbia University,
1903), 23-4.
11
Herbert Woodrow, A Quantitative Study of Rhythm, The Effect of Variations in Intensity, Rate,
and Duration (New York: The Science Press, 1909), 17. Woodrow introduces the scientific
theory of rhythm in Chapter I, exposing psychologists’ view that all creative human movement in
time is reducible to mechanical action and chronographic explanation:
230
Woodrow certified the temporal truth defined by his scientific field: “Every one is agreed
today that the essential thing in the perception of rhythm is the experiencing of groups. It
is this experience of groups which distinguishes rhythm in the psychological sense of the
word from rhythm in the sense of the earth about its axis.”12
In keeping with his
discipline, Woodrow did not distinguish sensory musical rhythm from the purely
psychological “groupings” elicited through mechanical sound stimuli. He did, however,
recognize a wholly different “rhythm” in the rotation of the globe. For these scientists,
rhythm—as perceived by human-subjects—was a mentally “experienced” phenomenon
exclusively, called forth in the laboratory through objective, chronographic apparatuses.
Hearing the New, Best Source for “Rhythm”
Psychology texts document that the sound of the clockwork click, not the sight of the
pendulum swing, defined this new scientific species of rhythm. Titchener’s experiments
often effaced the visual element of rhythm entirely, as the psychologist placed the
subject’s back to the machine, so the only perceptible sense of rhythm was the succession
of artificial clicks emitted from an altered, muffled metronome. Using clockwork sound
as the paramount reference for rhythm, Titchener documented the procedure to elicit
“To produce an impression of rhythm, it is necessary to have a series of stimuli. These
stimuli may be sounds, as in the case of poetry and music, muscular contractions, as in
dancing and beating time, or lights and electrical shocks, as in some laboratory
experiments. The stimuli which give the impression of rhythm, whatever their nature,
may vary in intensity, in duration, and in quality, and may be separated by intervals of
varying length. A fundamental task of the experimental investigation of rhythm is to
investigate the part played by each of these factors. Only after each of them has been
studied separately, may we study the effect when two or more of them are simultaneously
involved, and when more complicated factors are introduced, as in melody and
harmony.” See Woodrow, 5.
12
Ibid., 53.
231
“sensations” from the passive subject, who heard six different degrees of metronomic
speed, at 42, 48, 66, 92, 152, 200 beats per minute, respectively.13
The passive subject
had little recourse but to absorb the metronomic stimulus and then describe his sensory
and cognitive reaction to the various rates of artificial “rhythm.” How little this had in
common with musical creativity, interpretation, gesture, or rhetoric might be
overwhelmingly evident to musicians such as Wagner, Brahms, or Hofmann—or
countless other composer-performers who rejected mindless, metronomic thought and
action. Nevertheless, Wundt’s school continued to reduce the complexities of human
rhythm and sensation to reproducible methods and efficient metronomic explanations.
Occasionally, these attention experiments became tests in perceiving the
relationship between the specific sounds emitted from the metronome-apparatus itself. In
Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (1901), Titchener
documents another training process where hearing the synchronicity between the
metronomic bell and click became the subject’s true challenge:
EXPERIMENT (5). Seventh Law. — Materials: bell metronome.
(a) Set the metronome pendulum for a fairly rapid beat, e.g., 144 or 152 strokes in
the 1 min., and the bell for sounding at every sixth stroke.
After the experiment ends, the scientific researcher poses the following questions to the
observer:
13 Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 176. “EXPERIMENT (1). — … After the ready signal, E
starts the metronome at one of the two quickest rates (.39 or .30 sec. intervals), and lets it run for
45 sec. O is to give himself up, quite passively, to the impression of the sound series, and is to
describe what he hears. / The experiment should be repeated three times with each of the rates.
There must be a pause of at least 5 min. between series and series. The introspective record
should be made as full as possible. / EXPERIMENT (2). — The experiment is performed with
all six rates, taken in irregular order, and each twice repeated. / EXPERIMENT (3). —
Experiment (2) is repeated, but under slightly different conditions.”
232
What time-relation does the ring bear to its corresponding stroke? Do the two fall
together? Or does the ring come before or after the stroke? (b) Set the bell for
sounding at every second stroke. How are the ring and its stroke heard? Is it
possible by shift of attention to shift the apparent time-relation of the two
simultaneous impressions?14
Besides scrutinizing the subject’s ear for mechanical sound-stimuli, these experiments
expose the practical problems in attending to the rhythm of Maelzel metronomes in
general, since the visual tempo of the pendulum oscillation and the click of the clockwork
did not necessarily correspond. Some nineteenth-century music references also indicated
that the metronome click actually sounded in-between the course of the pendulum swing,
and not at the end of the swing, where the visual pulse lay. Furthermore, this discrepancy
between the visual and audible rhythms varied depending upon the speed: the faster the
rate, the closer the click seemed to relate to the pendulum swing.
An even more challenging aspect in referencing a typical bell metronome was that
the bell marking the metric pulse did not often sound simultaneously with the continuous
click marking the internal beats. This lack of synchronization within the metronome
itself, between the visual and audible tempos, created considerable confusion for those
who found a silent, simple pendulum a more faithful reflection of musical pulse and
physical movement. As late as 1908, psychologist Carl Emil Seashore noted in
Elementary Experiments in Psychology that due to this temporal discrepancy between the
metronome ring and click and “according to the direction of the attention, [the subject]
can make the one or the other appear to come first. One can make either the bell-stroke or
14 Ibid., 115.
233
the click of the metronome arise first, although in a good instrument they really sound at
the same instant.”15
The typical inconsistencies found in “over the counter” metronomes seemed so
prevalent that Titchener felt it necessary to instruct experimental psychologists on the
proper way to shop for a scientifically acceptable machine:
The Instructor should, therefore, select the instrument himself from the music-
dealer’s stock, and not order at haphazard. There is a great difference between one
metronome and another, despite the sameness of make. An instrument whose
clacks sound approximately equal on the music-counter (and such an one should
be found among the first half dozen tried) will give still more nearly equal ticks in
the laboratory, when resonance is ruled out.16
Nineteenth-century performers and pedagogues found the referential pendulum swing
appropriate and acceptable when teaching novices in the subjective pulse-sense of
musical time. But, in order to study “rhythm” in psychologists’ laboratories, one needed
to hear the continual, “nearly equal ticks” and rings emitted from the best clockwork
metronomes available.
Training to Think and Act in Scientific Rhythm
Once the scientifically acceptable (the most chronographically precise and consistent)
metronome was procured, Titchener confirmed that these “rhythm” experiments required
a subject to accept a completely passive physical and mental attitude when
“experiencing” the laboratory phenomenon of “rhythm.” (Neither Wundt nor Titchener
devised attention tests to measure the subject’s interpretive rhythm while actively
15 Carl E. Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1908), 168.
16
Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 339. Titchener even commented that he “has not been
able to find a bell-metronome which answers the purpose” of some of his basic rhythmic-sense
experiments.
234
performing works of music, poetry, dance, or drama.) In a Beginner’s Psychology,
Titchener explained, however, that these attention experiments in mechanical sound often
required the subject to do more than merely relax:
If you listen to a metronome beating, say, 15 in the minute, you will be able with
practice to hold six successive strokes in the focus of attention, but not more; if
you try to group the seventh stroke with the preceding six you become confused;
the series breaks, and cannot be welded together again. As the speed of the
metronome is increased, the beats fall of themselves into groups of twos and
threes; and you can still grasp and hold six of these rhythmical impressions. When
the speed has reached some 200 in the minute, the rhythmical grouping becomes
more complicated; as many as eight single beats may be bound together in a
rhythmical unit; and the attention is adequate, again after practice, to five of these
complex groups.17
More than just documenting the subject’s ability to mentally group metronomic clicks
into patterns, psychologists actively instructed their laboratory subjects to comprehend
various rhythmic groupings within the mechanical stimuli. Regardless of the individual’s
initial perceptions—or whether they perceived groupings or not—experimental
psychologists trained subjects to ascertain a sonic order within the continuous barrage of
clicks. Titchener described a learning process similar to Ebbinghaus’ memory
experiments, in which metronomic rhythm influenced and altered subjects’ very actions
and perceptions with repetitive practice over time. Thus, psychologists’ attention research
often reflected a more profound attention training, as subjects learned to interpret and
perform under artificial temporal guidance, not only for the mind but the body as well.
Underlying this training process was scientists’ belief that rhythmic perception originated
through the objective metronomic click alone. Throughout his career, Titchener
17 Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1916), 103-4. Emphasis added.
235
continued to document the methods and machines essential to these attention-training
experiments:
Set a metronome beating, with an interval of about a quarter of a second between
stroke and stroke. Try to throw the beats into all the different possible rhythms,
trochaic, iambic, etc. You will find it quite easy to change from rhythm to rhythm,
especially if you use movement to assist you,— moving foot or hand when the
beats come which you wish to emphasize. Then see how complex a foot or
measure you can construct in the various rhythms.18
The individual’s mental ability for “rhythm” merely rested on his response and reaction
to automatical sound. In stark contrast to past practices of musical performers and
pedagogues, Titchener even referenced once-traditional rhythmic epistemologies solely
through the unwavering click of the metronome. The subjective tactus and flow of music
and poetry now subsumed to clockwork. In the attention experiments of psychologists,
values of time and rhythm radically turned to favor Maelzel’s invention; as a
chronographic time source, the automaton became the very foundation of human rhythm,
thought, and movement.19
More than being disinterested empirical experiments, these “rhythm” studies
defined additional personal-equation problems that needed solving through unerring
mechanical reference: what could the mind comprehend—and for how long—when it is
exposed to exacting and unwavering metronomic time. Psychologists’ attention-span
18 Edward Bradford Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1902), 184.
19
Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, 184. Titchener applied the findings of attention span
studies, not only to the rhythms of poetry and music, but to the compositional forms of poetry and
music as well. Through the research of metronomic “rhythm,” he justifies the creation of artistic
works in which, “The result, we may note, agrees very well with the canons of musical and poetic
composition. The musical phrase never contains more than six measures, and the poetical line or
verse never contains more than six feet; a seven-measured phrase or a seven-footed line falls to
pieces, ceases to be unitary. The rhythmical wholes of a higher order, the period in music and the
stanza or strophe in poetry, never contain more than five phrases or verses; as a rule, neither
contains more than four.”
236
experiments directly complemented their research on labor fatigue. In physical-motion
studies, they tested the duration that a subject could maintain a constant rate of weight
lifting (often by an index finger); in mental-attention experiments, they tested the
duration that a subject could maintain a constant series of rhythmic groupings. Each type
of training-study challenged natural human tolerances; scientists regulated laboratory
subjects’ performances through repetitive and invariable metronomic clicks, eventually
finding the mechanical instant when humans faltered.
Training to Feel in Scientific Rhythm
Not only for action and attention experiments, psychologists used the metronome to call
forth Wundt’s theoretical range of human emotions, in which “We can distinguish six
types or classes of these sense-feelings: the agreeable and disagreeable, the exiting and
subduing, and the straining and relaxing.”20
While Wundt’s “tridimensional theory of
feeling” aroused some contention in the field, many experimental psychologists trained
under his scientific theory based human sensation on these wholly limited, dualistic
measures.21
With their dramatic value shift favoring chronography over human action,
some psychologists found that the metronome stimulated this myopic emotional range
within passive laboratory subjects. Certainly a strong influence on Wundt’s
“tridimensional theory of feeling,” Vierordt performed the earliest research on human
20 Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology, 81.
21
For a discussion and critique see Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 250-257.
237
time perception and sensation with the sound of the metronome.22
In 1890 William James
reported:
Vierordt listened to series of strokes performed by a metronome at rates varying
from 40 to 200 a minute and found that they very naturally fell into seven
categories from ‘very slow’ to ‘very fast.’ Each category of feeling included the
intervals following each other within a certain range of speed, and no others. This
is a qualitative, not a quantitative judgment—an aesthetic judgment, in fact. The
middle category, of speed that was neutral or, as he calls it, ‘adequate,’ contained
intervals that were grouped about 0.62 second, and Vierordt says that this made
what one might almost call an agreeable time.23
With the scientific knowledge that constant metronomic sound exposed human emotions
in the laboratory, Titchener even justified musical aesthetics through Wundt’s scientific-
mechanical bases of feeling:
The straining and relaxing feelings are dependent upon the temporal course and
succession of sensations; the interminable pedal-point in Eb with which Wagner
begins the Ring sets up a feeling of tension which is relaxed when the Bb is
added, only to grow again, and again relax when new tones are introduced; and if
you follow the strokes of a slow-beating metronome you get a similar alternation
of the two sense-feelings.24
With a machine now informing aesthetic judgments for these experimental scientists,
Titchener considered the sensation of strain and relaxation elicited by Wagner’s
harmonies equal to the click of the metronome. In the mechanical laboratory of
experimental psychology, metronomic rhythm indeed seemed to be the sole reference for
all sonic and sensory phenomena, to the extent that even Wagner’s sense of tonality could
be explained through an objective, metronomic equivalent.
22 See Karl Vierordt, Der Zeitsinn nach versuchen (Tübingen: H. Laupp’schen Buchhandlung,
1868).
23
James, 618-619.
24
Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology, 82.
238
For Wundt himself, it clearly seems that living rhythms lost their subjectivity,
variability, and individuality—both in theory and practice. Neither rhythm, time, nor
emotions were innate, active, or experiential phenomena—instead, “rhythm” represented
the wholly passive subject’s reactions and impulses to metronomic exposure. The
laboratory subject’s armchair reactions to external and automatical sound “impressions”
logically translated to the perception of subjective time, as Wundt states in Outlines of
Psychology:
When the feelings produced by rhythmical impressions become somewhat more
intense, as is usually the case, especially when the rhythm is connected with
sensational contents that arouse the feelings greatly, the feelings of rhythm
become in fact emotions. Rhythms are for this reason the important means both in
music and poetry of portraying emotions and arousing them in the auditor.25
Skilled individuals’ nuanced and variable performances of poetry, dance, or music held
no value in Wundt’s concept of emotional response; since rhythm was purely external
and metronomic—a sound to perceive and react to—the experiential rhythm witnessed in
creative human activity did not factor into his “rhythms” of poetry or music. The
“auditor” of artistic rhythm, as tested in Wundt’s laboratory, was merely a passive subject
exposed to externalized and constant “impressions.” Redefining the audible qualities of
rhythm, Wundt devalued the lived experience of the creative artist, opting instead for the
regulated, objectified time used during chronographic experimentation.
While he often neglected to specify that the metronome afforded a primary source
of rhythm, Wundt further defined the mind’s exposure to rhythm as an absolute
psychological process of feeling, a reactionary phenomenon seemingly divorced from the
seminal acts of artistic creation; rhythm was ultimately an objective quality that
25 Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 187.
239
constantly influenced the passive spectator. Rhythm, as a scientific rule, was an external,
objective imposition upon the subjective mind. Thus, metronomic “impressions”
remained a prominent notion throughout Wundt’s theory of rhythm, and in his widely
published Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, he explains:
The feeling of rhythm, which is the single psychological motive in dancing, and
ranks with harmony and disharmony as a psychological motive in musical
composition, contains the elements both of expectation and satisfaction. The
regular repetition in rhythmical sense-excitation makes us expect every
succeeding stimulation, and the expectation is immediately followed by
satisfaction. Rhythm therefore never involves strain, or if it does, it is simply bad
rhythm.26
Redefining artistic rhythm through the limited binaries of good and bad, relaxation and
strain, pleasing and displeasing, as dictated by his psychological spectrum of emotions—
called forth in his laboratory through the binary “tick-tock” of the metronome—Wundt
continues:
In pleasant rhythms satisfaction follows expectation as quickly as possible. Every
impression arouses the expectation of another, and at the same time satisfies the
expectation aroused by its predecessor, whose temporal relations it reproduces.
Rhythm, that is, is an emotion compounded of the emotions of expectation and
satisfaction. A broken rhythm is emotionally identical with disappointment.27
It will forever remain a mystery whether Beethoven or Berlioz would subscribe to
Wundt’s definition of musical rhythm, but given the evidence from the first two chapters,
it seems unlikely that any nineteenth-century composer would explain rhythm using
Wundt’s epistemology. In Beethoven’s lifetime, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
often criticized the composer’s unique rhetorical penchant for unexpected rhythmic
26 Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, translated from the Second
German Edition by J. E. Creighton & E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co.,
1907), 376-7.
27
Ibid., 377.
240
motives and uncustomary time signatures as being highly “bizarre” or difficult, and only
disappointing to the extent that Beethoven’s music tried the amateur performer’s limited
abilities and interests.28
Indeed, Moritz Hauptmann, the professional Leipzig singer,
composer, and influential theorist, expressly stated in a letter dated October 28, 1848 that
the fashion of modern composers, which perhaps still included Beethoven, to break from
traditional symmetric forms of metrical phrasing actually caused many listeners clear
feelings of contentment, “satisfaction—nay, in many instances pleasure out of” such
unexpected rhythmic inventions.29
Gottfried Weber, in contrast, associated unexpected
syncopations in music—strong-beat juxtapositions against the regularly perceived
metrical pulse—with the visceral feelings of “shock” and “revulsion,” but not of
disappointment.30
Yet nowhere in Wundt’s scientific aesthetics do composers’ creative
styles—or, for that matter, skilled performance artists’ interpretations—alluded to by
28 For instance, AmZ published the following review of Beethoven’s Opus 12 keyboard sonatas in
June, 1799:“It is undeniable that Mr. van Beethoven goes his own way. But what a bizarre,
laborious way! Studied, studied, and perpetually studied, and no nature, no song. Indeed, to put it
precisely, there is only a mass of learning here, without good method. There is obstinacy for
which we feel little interest, a striving for rare modulations, a repugnance against customary
associations, a piling on of difficulty upon difficulty so that one loses all patience and
enjoyment.”
Reprinted in Wayne M. Senner, ed., The Critical Reception of Beethoven’s Compositions
by His German Contemporaries, Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 145,
Letter 65.
29
Moritz Hauptmann, The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, edited by Alfred Schöne and Ferdinand
Hiller, translated by A.D. Coleridge, Volume II (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., and Richard
Bentley and Son, 1892), 66. The classicist Hauptmann also criticized these new compositional
trends, chiding modern composers’ for their break from the “traditional” metrical symmetry of
classical musical phrasing. He stated, “We live surrounded by a crust of prose, which it is hard to
break through…Modern works are conspicuous for want of rhythmical perfection.”
30 Weber contended that the “Syncope, like rhythmical inversion, produces a species of shock or
revulsion in our feelings, from the circumstance that the stress of voice falls upon the light
portion of the measure involved in the syncopated form, whereas no stress occurs on the heavy
portion.” See Gottfried Weber, General Music Teacher: Adapted to Self-instruction, Both for
Teachers and Learners; Embracing Also an Extensive Dictionary of Musical Terms, trans. by
James Franklin Warner (Boston: J. H. Wilkins & R. B. Carter, 1841), 118.
241
Weber, Hauptmann, Marx, Christiani,31
and many others, appear as primary evidence of
rhythmic thought, sensation, or action. Again, Wundt conveniently and necessarily
omitted human artists’ expressive intentions, their creative authority and agency—their
personal equations—from his absolute, laboratory-inspired laws of scientific rhythm.
The New Science of Musical Time
Once Wundt and his school redefined human rhythm, thought, action and emotion
through limited perceptions and reactions to automatical sound, the father of
experimental psychology seamlessly redefined musical time through the clockwork
metronome. The infallible regulator in his laboratory now became the temporal constant
of musical interpretation and performance.32
Through Wundt’s attention studies, the
31 We must recall Adolph Friedrich Christiani’s strikingly antithetical, anti-scientific
understanding of artistic rhythm from 1885. In explaining the difference between positive (strong,
heavy) and negative (weak, light) grammatical accents, Christiani asserts:
“In fact, any kind of diversion — is generally a welcome change, a relief. Harmony, after
discord, is a new pleasure; sunshine, after rain, gives fresh enjoyment. And so with
rhythm.
A break in the rhythmic form gives more real animation to a movement and
stronger evidence of artistic spirit, than strict observance of uniformity, or of positive
rules, could possibly do.
Contrast, not uniformity, is a condition in every work of art. The petty artist, the
mere scholar, will keep within the boundary of traditional rules; the great artist, the
creator, the genius will go beyond them.”
See Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1885), 69.
32
According to contemporaneous French psychologist Théodule Ribot, Wundt justified his
mechanical-mathematical values of once-creative rhythm, in part, through the theories of ancient
Greek geometry, which sought to define “perfect” proportions of the body, the heavens, and
harmonic relationships. Wundt’s chronographic science, however, extended these theoretical
concepts of proportionality to the actualization of rhythms using precision machines entirely
unknown to the ancients. In the years following Wundt’s founding of the Leipzig laboratory,
Ribot recognized this somewhat anachronistic justification “suffices to indicate Wundt’s
conception of aesthetics. In the order of auditory sensation, he studies similarly the three factors,
rhythm, melody, and harmony; and deduces their mathematical conditions.” Wundt assumed that
the perfect theoretical proportions of musical intervals relate to the human perceptions and
242
metronome became the laboratory chronograph of all musical thought and action. In
Outlines of Psychology, Wundt exposes this foundational value shift where the
traditional, subjective time of musical performance quietly transformed into the objective,
mechanical rhythm of psychological experimentation:
When the [metronomic] rate passes the upper limit of about one every 0.12 sec.,
the formation of distinctly defined temporal ideas is impossible because the
attention can not follow the impressions any longer. The most favorable rate is a
succession of [metronomic] strokes, one every 0.2 — 0.3 sec. With this rate and
with the simplest rhythm of 2/8 time which generally arises of itself when the
perception is uninfluenced by any special objective conditions, as a rule, 8 double
or 16 single [metronomic] impressions can be just grasped together. The best
rhythm for the perception in one group of the greatest possible number of single
impressions is the 4/4-measure with the strong accent on the first stroke and the
medium accent on the fifth. In this case a maximum of five feet or forty single
impressions, can be grasped at once. If these figures are compared with those
obtained when the scope of attention was measured, putting simple and compound
temporal impressions equal to the corresponding spacial impressions, we find that
the scope of consciousness is about four times as great as that of attention.33
For Wundt and his school, the redundant metronomic rhythm of his attention experiments
precisely equated to musical meter. In a radical epistemological shift that served his
chronographic method, Wundt conflated precise clock time and the constant stimulus of
metronomic “impressions” with his reinterpretation of a now objectified, mechanized
musical meter and measure. In Wundt’s mind, the metronome was no meager initial pulse
reference—it was a chronographic regulator for all musical perceptions and
performances.
actualizations of musical rhythm, as Ribot summarized, “The important point is the method; it is
briefly this. We make a physiological and physical analysis of sensations which produce an
aesthetic effect, fix this analysis with numbers, and thus derive a law.” See Théodule Ribot,
German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James Mark Baldwin (New
York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1886), 229.
In the twentieth century, Jaques-Dalcroze would offer similar justifications for modern
rhythmic action, as a neo-classical ideal of motion applied through his scientific pedagogy of
Eurhythmics.
33 Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 236.
243
Wundt’s chronographic concept of musical meter directly transferred to a new,
mechanical interpretation of music notation, in which each metronome click precisely
defined the movement of the invariable eighth note—for each and every time signature
commonly seen in print. Music meter became part and parcel of the attention experiment;
out of the repetitive stream of clicking eighth notes, variations of volume-intensity alone
created the phenomenon of mental groupings. Wundt thus redefined a new law of musical
pulse, a once sensory epistemology that Riemann previously considered the “agogic
accent.” Through chronography, Wundt literally mechanized musical time and notation:
If we denote the metronome-strokes by quavers, and the bell-signal by an accent
placed above them, an experiment consisting of two successive series may be
represented in this way:— 34
Wundt continued to represent his modern chronographic values through conventional
music notation, further transferring the active techniques of speech and music
performances to the limited perception of metronomic rhythm in his mechanical
laboratory:
If we give ourselves quietly up to the apprehension of the [metronomic]
impressions, we observe that the separate strokes are not all alike, even though
they are really and objectively perfectly equal. We alternately accentuate and slur
them, just as we do in marking time in speech, by a voluntary and regularly
alternating intensity of accentuation. If we denote the accented impressions by
points placed above them, we have the two series of our former figure as they
usually occur in reality [in the mind]:— 35
34 Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 262.
35
Ibid., 263.
244
A certain degree of complexity may result simply from the effort to hold as many
impressions as possible together in consciousness. You may quite easily obtain
the following system, e.g., in which the different degrees of accentuation are
again denoted by points, the strongest by three, the next by two, and the weakest
by one,— 36
In Wundt’s attention-study examples, music notation was reduced to invariable
metronomic precision. Wundt mistranslated the redundant succession of metronomic
clicks—expressed in automatical eighth notes with the occasional artificial bell-accent—
directly into traditional, physically actualized musical and poetic meters:
If we look at the metrical forms employed in music and poetry, we find again that
the limit of three degrees of accent is never exceeded. The absolute amount of
accentuation may, of course, be very different in different cases. But in immediate
perception these different degrees are always arranged in three principal classes,
which alone are of any real importance in metrical division as a basis of
classification for rhythmical forms…a time like the 6/4 is one of the most
complex of the rhythms employed in music. Its scheme is the following:—
It contains, you see, only twelve simple impressions.
37
In Wundt’s novel metronome experiments, new musical values emerged; the perception
of metronomic impressions in the laboratory became the reductive “time” of living
musical performance.
Once Wundt assumed an eighth-note metronomic regularity for all time signatures,
regardless of affect, melodic, harmonic or formal structure, without reference to physical
36 Ibid., 264.
37
Ibid., 265.
245
or rhetorical gesture, he notated a new precision-oriented quality for musical time, a
lifeless automatical underpinning of note values in which the subjective sense and
sensation of human pulse and movement, traditionally gleaned from the musical meter,
conceptually died.
Scientific Interpretations of Musical Performances and Performers
Wundt’s fallacy in transferring the rhythm of attention-span studies to musical time can
be explained thusly: usually, in any given composition in the Western music tradition,
more than 40 distinct rhythmic “impressions” exist, and co-exist in various parts—and
yet sources throughout history readily recognize the existence of musical rhythm (albeit
of a non-metronomic variety). No evidence over the course of history confirms a wide-
scale problem of mental perception, in which experienced musicians, dancers, or poets
consistently failed to mentally “grasp” a succession of complex rhythms—involving, for
instance, hocket, counterpoint, diminution, syncopation, tempo rubato or imbroglio—
during performances.
Wundt explained this problem away by reducing the idea of musical meter to a
single voice in a constant succession of metronomic eight notes, commenting: “As a
matter of fact, however, music and poetry never push their use of this aid in the formation
of easily comprehended ideational series to the extreme limit of conscious grouping.
Each member in a rhythmical series must be referred to its predecessors, and for this to
be done with pleasure and without effort, it is necessary that the grasp of consciousness
be not too heavily taxed.” In other words, musical time—that is, Wundt’s revision of
246
musical time as an equal and repeating series of metronomic “impressions”—was never
rhythmically complex enough to burden musicians’ minds.38
The reason that rhythmically varied and complex compositions existed and could
be performed without the benefit of Wundt’s chronographic procedures may seem
obvious: the physical, experiential qualities of musical time had little to do with passive
exposure to metronomic clicks. The rhythmic groupings elicited from automatical,
artificial machines in Wundt’s laboratory had little to do with the lived practices of
creative performers and their physical actualization of musical and poetic meter outside
of laboratory confines. As we continue to find, musical rhythm as practiced (and
explained) by skilled performers was not accurately accounted for in Wundt’s
methodology, which instead entrusted the metronome to reduce and redefine values of
rhythm once solely founded on sensory human experience.
Wundt was not the only scientist attempting to create theoretical connections
between musical and poetic rhythm, intangible mental perceptions, and objective
mechanical motion. While skilled nineteenth-century musicians knew how to play
together “in time” without the constant regulation or reference to the metronome, some
scientists realized that this process was due to more complex understandings of rhythm—
which pendulums, metronomes, and chronographs failed to account for—consisting of
internalized anticipations and perceptions of pulse, spoken rhetoric, and physical
movement. Ribot’s 1886 English edition of German Psychology To-day offered one
scientist’s conjecture on why metronomic time in Wundt’s laboratory had little to due
with musical time in living performance:
38 Ibid., 265.
247
“It is certain,” says Wolf, “that at the moment of the passage, the observer does
not hear the stroke of the pendulum, but an internal stroke which his thought
substitutes for it, just as the musician does not wait for the stroke of the director's
baton, but catches himself the rhythmic advance of the measure.”39
It is striking that this early experimental psychologist compares the laboratory subject’s
tests by a metronome to the professional musician’s performance by the conductor’s
baton—a significantly different temporal reference. Wolf likened the director’s baton to
the accuracy and precision of the clockwork metronome, implying that the musician’s
performance on stage was identical to the subject’s chronographic test in the laboratory.
The reality, however, was even more complex and nuanced than many psychologists
including Wolf recognized, since knowledgeable musicians of the century, as Chapters I
and II demonstrated, valued conductors who displayed more than mere metronomic
technique, directors who could influence a body of instrumentalists to act as one nuanced,
expressive soloist.
William James, a philosophic-scientist distinctly separated from Wundt’s
empirical school but certainly informed by it, realized that perceptions of time, as a
general phenomenon, represented more complex qualities than could be accounted for
through artificial laboratory machines and methods. Indeed, James instinctually
understood that the mechanical constructs and measurements of time—which the
industrializing civilization increasingly relied upon—bore little relation to living action,
either to bodily movements or mental perceptions (not to mention music performances).
James echoed centuries-old understandings: time perception was a subjective
phenomenon, an individual sense. And like the other subjective senses, such as touch,
sight, and smell, the mind did not quantify relationships, variations, or proportions with
39 Ribot, 253.
248
mechanical exactitudes or mathematical expressions. In the Principles of Psychology
(1890), James voiced this temporal epistemology still prevalent in pre-twentieth century
society:
The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and
days40
—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition,
after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the
field of space are beyond the range of most men’s practical interests
altogether…To realize an hour, we must count ‘now!—now!—now!—now!—’
indefinitely. Each ‘now’ is the feeling of a separate bit of time, and the exact sum
of the bits never makes a very clear impression on our mind.41
Even through the 1880s, intellectuals such as James still considered precise, instant-by-
instant mechanical rhythm an abstraction to the experiential, sensory flow of time and its
movement. Precise artificial time—the chronographic reference in Wundt’s laboratory—
did not equate to a living reality. James described the concept known to metaphysical
philosophers as the “specious present:” the experiential perception of time that includes
the subjective sense of an intangible moment, a fleeting instant, contextualized by the
expectation of the future and the recollection of the past.42
Thus, in 1890, while Wundt
continued drilling subjects to perceive and react within the monotonous rhythm dictated
by the metronome, James contended that this precise laboratory procedure “never makes
a very clear impression on our mind” when applied to daily life and the experiential
40 N.B. James does not mention seconds, since the mechanical second was still an overly precise
construct to be a living perception at the time of his writing.
41
From William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Compnay,
1890), 611. Reproduced in Charles M. Sherover, ed., The Human Experience of Time, the
Development of its Philosophic Meaning, (Reprint, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2001), 372-3.
42
For a further explanation of the “specious present,” see James, 609-613. James illustrates, “In
short, the practically cognized present is no knife edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth
of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.”
249
feeling of time flow. He writes this comment, of course, before the clockwork metronome
became the universal temporal standard in the American middle-class musical household
or public-school classroom.
Other scientists in the 1880s, those unaffected by the high-technology
chronographic laboratory of experimental psychology, realized that the metronome could
not absolutely define the living realities of musical time or clarify the vagaries of music
notation. Reporting in The English Mechanic and World of Science (1884), William John
Grey, an analytical chemist and frequent contributor to the periodical,43
made a novel
musical experiment, quantifying with a metronome various music tempos in print in the
hopes of ascertaining scientific certainties regarding performance practices. (Whether
Grey used a simple pendulum or a clockwork metronome is uncertain.) “It occurred to
me some years ago,” he writes, “to endeavor to make a table of the metronome
equivalents to the various expressions used in music for indicating the rate of speed; but
on examining into the subject I found considerable disagreement, and abandoned the
attempt.”44
Years later, he realized the errors of his scientifically oriented methodology,
stating, “The results are not very concordant, and seem to indicate that the words are used
somewhat at random, and perhaps may be regarded as referring to style, rather than
time.”45
He inadvertently discovered, as musicians of the century already acknowledged,
that affect words, which required personal interpretation for each composition, were
43 See The English Mechanic and World of Science 53 (April 24, 1891): 188; and (May 8, 1891):
233.
44
William Grey, “Time,” The English Mechanic and World of Science 39 (May 9, 1884): 218.
45
Ibid.
250
incommensurate with simplified, referential metronome numbers.46
Grey’s scientific
assertion:
On the whole, the conclusion we must come to is that the word indications of time
are not very reliable for translations into the beats of the metronome, and they
would seem unnecessary when the time is given by that instrument, except for the
benefit of those who have got one.47
By 1891, Grey’s summation had resonated with the readership of The English Mechanic
and World of Science, where some voiced considerable disagreement regarding the
proper use of the metronome in music. For these advocates of scientific methods, the
problem was how to apply the objective reference of mechanical time to subjective
reality of musical performance. Indeed, the very definitions of time, movement, and
rhythm seemed at odds in their discourse. According to one respondent, “Time is the
speed at which any music is played, and is governed by the expressions Andante, Largo,
&c., and by the metronome mark where given. The rhythm is the swing of the music, and
The “Metronome” entry in the first edition Grove Dictionary (1880) is highly critical as well of the of beats-per-minute translation of affect words, which began appearing on the more recently designed metronomes. The reference argued that the two epistemologies—mechanical indications and expressive words—are incommensurate with one another: “Some Metronomes are marked with the words Andante, Allegretto, Allegro, etc., in addition to the numbers. This is a new, and utterly useless contrivance: for it is evident, that, if q =100 be held to indicate Moderato, h =100 will stand for Allegro, and e=100 for Largo. The word Moderato, therefore, without the Minum, Crotchet, or Quaver, to qualify it, means nothing at all; and it is absurd to encumber the scale with it, or with any other technical terms whatever.” See George Grove, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), 320.
47 The English Mechanic and World of Science 39 (May 9, 1884): 218.
Grey’s assessment bares close similarity to Gottfried Weber’s comment on the
impracticality of the clockwork metronome during Maelzel’s lifetime. Weber felt, “It is to be
regretted that the presuppositions in this case are so numerous, and particularly that such
metronomical signs are not only useless to all those who do not possesses these machines, but
also even to those who have them, except in cases where the machine can be placed close by.”
See Gottfried Weber, Godfrey Weber's General Music Teacher: Adapted to Self-instruction, Both
for Teachers and Learners; Embracing Also an Extensive Dictionary of Musical Terms,
translated by James Franklin Warner (Boston: J. H. Wilkins & R.B. Carter, 1841), 75.
251
corresponds with the meter in poetry.”48
H. Brocklehurst concluded, similarly to skilled
musicians of the century, that the metronome was an initial pulse reference, not a
regulator, and he urged English Mechanic readers not to neglect the essential factor that
defines musical time:
The speed at which hymn tunes are played is governed by the taste and experience
of the organist, and is one of the safest guides in judging the capability and
discrimination of the performer.49
A later commentator to the periodical—and probably a trained musician—writing under
the pseudonym “Organon,” confirmed and elaborated upon Brocklehurst’s traditional
nineteenth-century aesthetic:
It is the rhythm that has to be studied, the mere “time” [tempo] may be anything
you please, though, as a rule, it is only courteous to adopt that indicated by the
composer. In the Hymns A[nglican] and M[ethodist] the “time” is rarely
indicated, and the organist is left to suit his taste: but do, please, understand that if
you wish to play “music” you must attend to the accent—the ictus metricus, so to
speak. The bars are simply used as guides. A real musician could play without
bars at all.50
Regardless of the comments of contemporaneous musicians, engineers, and scientists in
other fields, Wundt’s empirical school of experimental psychology continued to
misapprehend this intrinsic variability of artistic rhythm in favor of what can be
recognized as the chronographic bias: their overriding belief that, in measuring the
“incessant now” of automatical time and action, scientists efficiently solved the
“problems” of human variability for “operations” and “observations” as diverse as
manual labor, memory recollection, and even music performance.
48 The English Mechanic and World of Science 53 (May 8, 1891): 232.
49
Ibid.
Ibid., 253.
252
Conceiving Musical Chronography and the Chronographic Musician
The chronographic method, as early as it appeared in the astronomical observatory,
represented a dualistic belief system that assumed the following: the chronograph was the
constant, absolute reference and regulator, while the human observer was the variable to
be strictly regarded against that mechanical standard. First in the astronomical
observatory and then in Wundt’s laboratory, the human performer was held accountable
to the exacting mechanical time and rhythm given by the chronographic apparatus. In this
light, the observer (i.e. the subject) was an imperfect machine, replete with errors in
reaction and response to the chronograph; his individual temporal perceptions and
subsequent physical actions exposed his fallible personal equation. Starting with Wundt’s
new science, the musician was considered under these same guidelines—as a mere, faulty
performer when referenced against mechanical time. It was the psychologist’s duty to
uncover these performer errors, and indeed, even correct for the musician’s personal
equation. Given their complete reliance on laboratory apparatus and trust in time-telling
technologies, these new psychologists had little interest in proving the ephemeral,
nuanced, and variable qualities of musical time, which defied the reductive methods of
their science and transcended the repetitive rhythms of their laboratory equipment.
In 1895, Wundt’s former student Edward Wheeler Scripture (1864-1945)—in
stark contrast to William James’ past comments on the abstractions of mechanical time—
exposed this modern conceptual bias towards a time controlled by automatical machines,
one that invariably defined individual creativity and expression in the industrialized
world:
253
Time, the great independent variable, is the only force over which we can gain no
control. Man can annihilate space and fight power with power, but—tick, tick,
tick—the little watch counts off the seconds, not one of which can be hindered
from coming or be recalled when past.51
Scripture was one of Wundt’s most successful students, and he later became director of
Yale’s department of experimental psychology. Throughout his professional career,
Scripture maintained a keen interest in solving the “problems” of efficient rhythmic
action under the seemingly uncontrollable “tick, tick, tick” of chronographic reference.
While Scripture heard live orchestra performances displaying slightly more complex
temporal qualities than those dictated by laboratory methods and metronomes, he also
likened the conductor’s baton to a monotonous chronograph, one in which the orchestra
musician strove precisely to conform to, all while factoring in the personal equation—the
human errors of actualizing the mathematically correct time of musical performance. In
his 1895 article “Some Principles of Mental Education,” Scripture explains, “A player in
an orchestra or a band must not be ahead or behind the others. He must not be irregular.
He must, however, have a constant error in being just as far behind [the] baton of the
leader as the others are.”52
Poetic meter, expressive contrasts, rhetorical gestures—or
even the comments of skilled musicians regarding their own experiences—were not
factors in Scripture’s assessments of “regular” musical performance and subsequent
musician “error” represented by their non-metronomic musicality.
Unchecked by chronography, an individual’s experiential knowledge reeked of
the variable, personal equation. Wundt and his school, in order to first define and then
51 E. W. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (Meadville: The Chautauqua-Century Press, 1895),
61.
52
E. W. Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” The School Review 3 (Nov., 1895):
542.
254
solve these chronographic problems of musical performance, consistently devalued the
fundamental humanity of the individual musician. In his Outlines of Psychology, Wundt
scientifically diminished the education of the performing instrumentalist:
This “enigma of the instincts” ceases to be an enigma when we come to look upon
instincts, as we have done above, as special forms of impulsive action, and
consider them as analogous to the simple impulsive acts of men and animals, for
which we have a psychological explanation…Such reduction can be easily
observed in the case of man, as, for example, in the habituation to complex
movements in learning to play the piano.53
Wundt unapologetically reduced musicians to the psychologist’s scientific and
technological ideal: the human as mere machine, an automaton with blind instincts and
habitual impulses, lacking in forethought or reflection. In one of his published lectures,
Wundt further described lay musicians (perhaps with musical abilities similar to his
own), who functioned like typical subjects in his laboratory:
The novice at the piano must strain his attention upon every note, in order to find
the appropriate key; the practised player translates the printed page mechanically
into the proper movements. Any movement that has become altogether habitual is
made instinctively. An impulse of will is, of course, necessary at the outset; but its
effect extends to a whole series of actions, and each particular one takes place
without effort and without knowledge: the series once started is continued to its
end with the same unconscious certainty and purposiveness as the reflex.54
53 Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 314.
54
Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. 394-5. Wundt’s belief in the mechanized
musician perhaps originates from his physiological training, in which human actions were
considered the habituated outcropping of muscular reactions to nerve impulses. For instance,
William Carpenter in Principles of Mental Physiology (first published in 1874) states nearly
identically of impulsive action: “60. Thus, then, while the Human organism may be likened to a
keyed instrument, from which any music it is capable of producing can be called-forth at the will
of the performer, who may compare a Bee or any other Insect to a barrel-organ, which plays with
the greatest exactness a certain number of tunes that are set upon it, but can do nothing else.” See
William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, Fourth edition (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1883), 61. Also see 217, 218 for more theories on the automatic musician. James
reprints parts of Carpenter’s discussion in The Principles of Psychology, 117.
255
In describing learned and habitual activities, Wundt exemplified mediocre, amateur
musicians—students that may have been more familiar to him than performing musical
“artists,” such as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, or Brahms. To Wundt, the “practiced”
musician was distinguished from a “novice” by being perfectly automatical. He
considered a trained musician’s skill to manifest in blind, will-less, and mechanical
actions—unconscious reflexes made apparent only to the experimental psychologist.
Wundt’s disparaging attitude towards all musicians resonated throughout his
scientific discipline, well into the twentieth century. Ernst Meumann, one of Wundt’s
most influential students, viewed musicians—experienced performers no less—nearly
identically to his teacher’s mechanical ideal. An American Journal of Psychology (1902)
article explained Meumann’s conception of the living performer:
The high degree of accuracy with which a musician can produce a required
fraction of a standard [time] interval when it is part of a musical score must be
ascribed largely to this motor appreciation, i.e. to the facility with which a
rhythmic movement becomes automatic. In playing with both hands another
means of control is possibly furnished by the aid one hand may give to the other.
For example, when the right hand plays a complicated passage, the left supported
by its automatism can preserve the original rhythm, marking for the right hand the
essential points of each measure. Counting introduces still another motor
procedure, which becoming quickly automatic acts as a steadying influence. The
movements of the director have a similar result. The effect of all this automatism
is to unburden the attention so that it may concentrate itself upon the musical
purport of tones.55
Meumann’s non-experiential understanding of musicians and musicality confirms
Wundt’s laboratory culture, in which chronographic practices informed and influenced all
aspects of time and action. Under psychologists’ chronographic bias, the ideal musical
performer—like the ideal laboratory subject— habituated through repetitive, precise
55 Charles H. Sears, “A Contribution to the Psychology of Rhythm,” The American Journal of
Psychology 13 (Jan., 1902): 30.
256
training to passively react in small gradations of automatic time with mindless,
“unburdened attention.” These scientists wholly devalued the traditional musical
techniques perceived and actualized by skilled performers while they embraced the two,
mutually exclusive values of scientific chronography: To believe in the absolute truth of
their chronographic method, psychologists needed to believe that living individuals—
regardless of personal intention, intelligence, and expression—held intrinsic and
disdainful “errors” when compared to their chronographic apparatus.
While Wundt could not compose, improvise, or perform the music of others with
any semblance of experiential knowledge, he scientifically presumed to define the trained
pianist’s abilities, in which,
In most cases there are no acts of intelligence involved at all, but only
associations; and in any case intelligent action must have been reduced to
association before it could became mechanized. The piano-player has first of all
to form a stable association between the printed note and the movement of touch.
But this association gradually lapses from consciousness, and the interconnection
of movements becomes purely mechanical.56
Wundt considered musical ideas and actions completely quantifiable with scientific
certainty; his was a radically differing conception of music creation than any skilled
nineteenth-century performers, teachers, or composers would have recognized or
condoned. Without learning music to any high degree, Wundt was certain that the
musical “instinct” could be fully explained and reduced with new scientific methods and
mechanical apparatus. Indeed, Wundt reduced all of music history and creation to blind
ritual, naïve and simple “ceremonial games,” which are:
56 Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 398.
257
Religious ceremonies secularized for the purposes of amusement. Here belong the
dance, the march, and many children’s games, in which the essential factor in the
enjoyment is the pleasure aroused by regular rhythmical movements performed in
unison, especially when accompanied by music or singing. Music itself is nothing
but a game of this order, so highly developed that it has grown to be a form of
art.57
Perhaps also influenced by the physiological pedagogy of gymnastics, Wundt’s
drastically revised (and highly subjective) epistemology of human creativity represented
a distinct paradigm shift in which automatical machines infallibly dictated time and
rhythm for musical, and indeed all cultural performances. This epistemology is again
described through one simple concept: the chronographic bias.
Upon reading the wealth of laboratory research by experimental psychologists on
the mental phenomena of rhythm, it seems safe to assume very few of these new
scientists had any experiential knowledge in the fields of artistic performance,
composition, improvisation, speech, drama, or dance. Rather, many of them seemed to
have a markedly second-hand understanding of musical creation and living rhythm.
Often, they gained their musical knowledge exclusively through passive listening. Edwin
Boring in A History of Experimental Psychology alluded to Wundt’s disdain for the
musician and musical experience during a scientific disagreement with the psychologist
Carl Stumpf, a trained performer and founder of “tone psychology.” Wundt discounted
Stumpf’s experiments on sound perception, believing that his colleague’s musical
education actually detracted from objective, scientific research. Indeed, Wundt
considered his own lack of musical expertise to be a scientific virtue. Boring paraphrased
Wundt’s self-assessment: “He relied on laboratory results with apparatus and the
57 Wilhelm Max Wundt, Ethics: An Investigation of the Facts and Laws of the Moral Life,
translated from the Second German Edition (1892) by Titchener, Gulliver, and Washburn, Vol. 1
(London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Lim., 1902), 209-210.
258
psychophysical methods. Whatever is obtained under unprejudiced, carefully controlled
experimental conditions must be right, Wundt virtually said.”58
Perhaps Wundt failed to
realize that his sole reliance on chronographs and metronomes to solve the problems of
the human mind reflected, in itself, a prejudiced condition.
One of Wundt’s most influential students, Titchener admitted to his own musical
inexperience in endnotes to a published lecture: “I have practically no gift of musical
composition, and my skill as a performer is below zero.”59
Nonetheless, Titchener
considered himself to be skilled enough to claim judgments over musical creativity and
aesthetics. He founded his authority upon his upbringing, being raised after all in a
middle-class “musical family,” where he “was fortunate enough to hear a great deal of
the best piano music in my childhood.”60
He never claimed to perform “the best” music
in his youth; he only passively listened to other amateurs in familiar surroundings. (It
would be enticing to discover whether his “musical family” made extensive use of the
clockwork metronome.)61
Titchener reflects, “My musical endowment…consists in a
58 Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century
Company, 1929), 354-5.
59
Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought-
Processes (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), 205.
60
Ibid.
61
Invoking the increasingly popular mid-nineteenth-century “musical” family as depicted by
Titchener—along with the typical dearth of musical talent contained therein—Adolph Bernhard
Marx, the Founder of the Berlin Conservatory, was highly critical of the new trends of middle-
class music pedagogy, which specifically arose in Germany during Wundt’s youth. Marx believed
that the educational models intended to instruct the masses in the technical skills of piano-
playing—due to overriding social and economic interests—devalued an individual’s creative and
“artistic” potential through routine practice and performance.
In The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture (1854), Marx rails at the culture
in which Wundt and later Titchener formulated their sense of musical aesthetics: “Look at our
domestic music! It is scarcely necessary to ask: who is musical? but, rather, who is not? In the so-
called higher or more refined circles of society, music has long been looked upon as an
259
quick and comprehensive understanding of a composition, a sort of logical and aesthetic
Einfühlung, an immediate (or very rapid) grasp of the sense and fitness of the musical
structure.”62
Titchener never discussed the measures or qualifications by which he
deemed music compositions to be “fit” or “sensible.” Yet this comment reveals
Titchener’s highly personal aesthetics and education: he perceived music composition,
and by extension music performance, as he would the “sensibility” of a subject’s mind
and the “fitness” of his body, through a physiological-psychological examination.63
While lacking in musical expertise, experimental psychologists—given their training,
traditions, and environment—seemed to have an intimate understanding primarily of the
chronographic method: the controlled and reproducible research of human perception and
action guided by metronomic rhythm within the confines of their laboratory.64
indispensable branch of education. In every family it is cultivated, if possible, by all the members,
without particular regard to talent or inclination…we have to take into account that these lessons
and hours of practice have to be wedged in between the hours of continuous school and study;
and that this press of occupation does not even leave the necessary leisure for the full inward
apprehension of art itself; leaving out of the question the harmonic development of the entire
man…But where necessity or love of gain, and not a natural inclination and pure delight in art,
has been the moving spring, there industry and conscientiousness, being called forth, not by a
love for the thing itself, but by a feeling of duty and necessity, can at best be but of an external
nature; there may be found diligent study, but no deep interest—much practice, but all
mechanical and abstract.” See Adolph Bernhard Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and
Its Culture (London: Robert Cocks and Co., 1854), 73, 74.
62 Titchener, Lectures, 205.
63 Ibid. Titchener admits: “There is thus a fairy close analogy between my apprehension of music
and the visual schematizing of arguments which is described in the Lecture. It would be
interesting to know whether the correlation is at all general.”
64 Titchener did acknowledge that rhythms occurred in nature without reference or regulation of
the metronome. In An Outline of Psychology (1902), he reiterates many of the physical paradigms
of rhythmic action in pre-modern societies: walking, breathing, poetic meter, all in a non-
mechanical arsis and thesis. Nevertheless, he faithfully follows Wundt’s modern metronome-
methodology of rhythm, as he judges: “Sounds are, indeed, better material for the idea of rhythm
than are tactual complexes; for the limbs are fixed to the trunk, and can therefore do no more than
oscillate to and fro, pendulum fashion, giving of necessity the most rudimentary form of
rhythm,—beat’ beat, beat’ beat,—whereas a series of sounds can be divided into groups of any
260
Wundt indeed recognized that rhythm was relatable to bodily movements, but for
him the body was completely analogous to an automatic machine. Thus, living movement
in “rhythm” logically reduced to simple chronographic explanation, as Wundt states in
Outlines of Psychology, “The mechanical properties of the limbs are important
physiological bases for the rise of these ideas…we have movements in which the
voluntary energy of the muscles is operative only so far as it is required to set the limbs
oscillating in their points and to maintain this movement—rhythmical movements.”65
Through his extensive and influential publications, Wundt continued to refashion
“rhythmical” action with chronographic intentions. His interpretations of a living
individual’s “rhythmical movements” consistently employed terminology once reserved
for lifeless mechanical timekeepers:
With rhythmical movements the case is different. Their significance for the
psychological development of time ideas is due to the same principle as that
which gives them their importance as physiological organs, namely, the principle
of the isochronism of oscillations of like amplitude…Every single period of
oscillation in such a movement is made up of a continuous succession of
sensation which are repeated in the following period in exactly the same order.66
Given the psychologist’s exclusive understanding of rhythm as a perception and reaction
to external, mechanical stimulus—primarily in the repetitive, periodic rhythm of the
scientific metronome—Wundt again described the paradigmatic human, and human
musician, as a perfect automaton who projected automatical rhythms based in exactitude,
complexity. The rhythm: beat” beat beat, beat’ beat beat, beat” beat beat, beat’ beat beat, could
not be formed from tactual impressions.” As Titchener states, the “better” stimulus for “rhythm”
is founded on metronomic sound, not visual pulse or movement. He then translates these auditory
impressions, following Wundt’s epistemology, into music notation, in which the eighth-note
assumed metronomic consistency. See Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, 182-3.
65 Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 159. Wundt’s original emphasis makes the relationship
between automatical machines and the epistemology of scientific “rhythm” all the more striking.
66
Ibid., 160.
261
precision, and isochronism. Indeed, Wundt seemed to describe the perfectly moving
human as the perfectly regulated clockwork metronome.
To summarize, Wundt’s experimental science represented the origins of a radical
value shift for individual performances through the precise relationship to chronographic
reference. His laboratory experiments, especially on the research and training of rhythmic
perception, began a tradition through which later psychologists continued to
misapprehend the living practices of the musician, musicality, and musical rhythm.
Beginning in the 1890s, notable European and American psychologists, working under
Wundt’s methodologies and values, applied this new, objective “rhythm” to the scientific
study of living performers themselves. In the process these researchers further redefined
musicality through increasingly precise chronographic rules and regulations. In
laboratories across Europe and America these scientists would judge to ever-greater
extents the living rhythms of music performance under the precise mechanical guidelines
of chronography, where, not surprisingly, they always found the individual musician—
his personal equation—technically flawed.67
67 Adolf Bernhard Marx expressed starkly opposite values of musical artistry, performance, and
aesthetics in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Marx acknowledged the ultimately
complex and irreducible qualities of creative human thought and sensation in The Music of the
Nineteenth Century and Its Culture (1854). He indirectly argued against what would, by the end
of the century, become the chronographic study of the musician and living musicality:
“The human mind is furnished, by means of the senses, with a multitude of facts and
phenomena. Of these it retains and assimilates a greater or smaller number according to
its necessity and power; it distinguishes those that are dissimilar, recognizes and
compares those that are alike, or have some features in common, and draws conclusions
from all these observations. Thus it gradually expands, becomes more active, and
acquires what we call consciousness, both of itself and of the world around. It is,
however, to be observed, that no individual thing or isolated fact can, by itself, become
the object of mental contemplation; inasmuch as every thing that exists, or every fact that
takes place, is not only itself a compound of many things or facts, but also stands in close
relation with a number of other objects and phenomena. Thus, e.g. man appears to be an
individual being; and yet how many different things are to be distinguished in this being!
262
The Living Musician, the Experimental Psychologist,
and the Laboratory Chronograph
It was one matter for Wundt to idealize the perfect person as a precise clockwork
machine and the typical musician as a blind automaton. It was yet another matter when
experimental psychologists—beginning with Ernst Meumann in Europe and Thaddeus
Bolton and Edward Wheeler Scripture in North America—actively employed the
chronographic method on trained musicians, testing their subjects musical abilities
through the exactitudes offered only through precision time-keeping machines. Guided
by Wundt’s scientific values, these and other psychologists not only revised the values of
musical rhythm towards a mechanized ideal, but invented a new performance practice, a
new goal for the musician, one corresponding with Wundt’s imaginary clockwork
creatures, who moved rhythmically based on “the principle of the isochronism of
oscillations of like amplitude.”
Once experimental psychologists defined rhythm through the chronographic bias,
human volition and expressive variation diminished in the mind of the researcher,
student, and faithful believer of modern science. A brief example from the modern
pedagogue William Morris Patterson and his book The Rhythm of Prose: An
Experimental Investigation of Individual Difference in the Sense of Rhythm (1916),
exposes how, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the non-mechanical nature
of human action was seen as a flaw through the prism of chronographic study. Reiterating
His body with all its powers and organs, his mental endowments, intellectual
developments, character, inclinations and manners! And then, how manifold are his
relations to the outer world, to his family, his friends, or his enemies, to his nation, and
the different ranks and classes of people, to his times, and to a thousand minor things and
conditions! The mind cannot possibly be satisfied with the contemplation of individual
objects or acts, or even with a number of isolated things or phenomena.” See Marx, 22.
263
the ideas of experimental psychologists before him, Patterson affirms, “Rhythm is thus
regarded as first of all an experience, established, as a rule, by motor performances, of
however rudimentary a nature.”68
In justifying these scientific values of rhythm, he relied
heavily upon Margaret Keiver Smith’s study Rhythmus und Arbeit (1900), imprinted
under Wundt’s Philosophie Studien. A student of Meumann in Zurich, Smith grounded
her labor experiments on the metronome, which also informed her understanding of
artistic rhythm. In Rhythmus und Arbeit, she affirmed the now-standard scientific
aesthetic that “in the arts (namely in poetry, music, and perhaps dance) where the rhythm
is mathematically determined, is found to be of very great regularity and precision.”69
Further exposing her chronographic bias, Patterson recounts:
One interesting result of Miss Smith’s research is that the observers think they are
working to time-beats when they are not. The exactness with which their
movements and the beats of an accompanying metronome coincide varies
according to the individual difference of the subjects.70
As Patterson reported, Smith’s isolated laboratory experiments proved that subjects,
guided only by a physical sense of rhythm, did not naturally or usually move with
metronomic rhythm. Smith’s chronographic conclusion: the subjects’ movements were
not “rhythmical” —the very same quality skilled musicians would have recognized as
automatical or metronomic. A skilled musician, a good “timeist” of the nineteenth
century, could alternatively have argued that Smith’s Rhythmus und Arbeit study showed
68 William Morrison Patterson, The Rhythm of Prose, An Experimental Investigation of Individual
Difference in the Sense of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), x. Patterson
cites the definition given by experimental psychologist C. A. Ruckmick in a 1913 rhythm study.
69
Margret Keiver Smith, Rhythmus und Arbeit (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900), 165. “Bei
der Kunst aber (nämlich bei der Poesie, der Musik und auch vielleicht bei dem Tanz), wo der
Rhythmus mathematisch bestimmtwird, ist eine viel größere Regelmäßigkeit und Genauigkeit zu
finden.”
70 Reported in Patterson, 27.
264
that subjects’ own internal perception faithfully guided their time-beats—they held a
physically-derived, subjective sense of pulse and movement. Those without a metronome
as reference may have also observed that the actions of these subjects indeed contained
pronounced bodily rhythm. Yet, the subjects’ belief in their own rhythmic performance,
or the visual rhythm seen in their actions, did not factor into the scientific method at all—
scientists’ chronographic bias trumped the experiential, innate rhythm of recurring human
movement.
Psychologists’ devaluation of non-metronomic (i.e. human) rhythm can be again
witnessed in the anthropological research of Charles Myers, who tested indigenous
peoples in his modern Western values of chronographic time and action before 1899.
Myers, like Smith, considered the variable nature of human rhythm, when mechanically
unfettered, to be either faulty or non-existent. The Journal of the Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland reports:
Mr. C. S. Myers contributed some observations on Savage Music, dwelling on the
interest of savage music for the anthropologist as contrasted with that of the
musician…The characteristic feature of Murray Island music was a lack of
rhythm in the now obsolete tunes that were reproduced in the phonograph. In the
respect of the complexities of rhythm in other races, Mr. Myers said that from his
own observations on the Malays of Sarawak, there were grounds for suspecting
the futility of search after quarter-tone music, owing to irregularity of
intonation.71
Researchers including Meumann, Smith, Myers and others expressed little regard for the
cultural tradition, location, or the creative intention of their subjects, opting instead to
devalue the variable qualities of chronographically uncontrolled human performances.
Their subjects’ rhythm, in both musical and physical activities, seldom aligned with any
See C. S. Myers, et al., “Anthropological Reviews and Miscellanea,” The Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29 (1899): 223.
265
“exact” mechanical values because the “rhythm” psychologists sought could only be
known in observatories and laboratories through scientific methods and apparatuses.72
Eventually pedagogues such as Mary Hallock, Patterson, and Jaques-Dalcroze,
directly informed by the chronographic bias of experimental psychology, wholly
considered “the exactness” of an external metronomic reference to be the definitive and
correct reference of “time-beats,” and thus the absolute truth of “rhythmical”
performance. Again, living rhythm reflected a problem of imprecision, inefficiency, and
error for the psychologist and the modern pedagogue, and in Patterson’s own words, an
intrinsic, in fact troublesome, “individual difference of the subjects.”
Fueled by Wundt’s research into a subject’s mental “rhythmic groupings” of
metronome clicks, Ernst Meumann’s seminal work on the science of musical rhythm, his
University of Leipzig Ph.D. thesis Untersuchungen zur Psychologie und Aesthetik des
Rhythmus (1894), helped to convince later experimental psychologists, including
Meumann’s student Smith, that musical performance was a strict, chronographic process,
an experiment in metronomic musicality, an extension of labor-fatigue research. Charles
H. Sears, in his own rhythmic study, paid homage to Meumann’s objective study of
chronographic musicality:
72 It is intriguing to consider if the experimental research into musical time and action by
Meumann, Bolton, Scripture, Binet and Coutier prefigured and perhaps to some extent inspired
both Smith’s Rhythmus und Arbeit and Karl Bücher’s influential labor study Arbeit und
Rhythmus, Third Edition (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1902). Bücher was the economics professor at
Leipzig University, and was undoubtedly familiar with Wundt’s and Meumann’s studies on
muscular fatigue and attention span.
266
In treating rhythm from the standpoint of the player Meumann discusses the
question of how the musician is able to produce the exact fractions of time
intervals required by the notes on the written sheet. Experiments made upon
subjects skilled in piano playing to determine how accurately intervals equal to
certain fractional parts of given intervals could be produced when there were no
artificial means of assistance showed that even good musicians were liable to
considerable errors.73
In defining a new standard of musical action—in mathematical fractions of mechanically
referenced time—Meumann actually invented new problems for the “skilled musician,”
who was now charged with performing exactly to the metronome, in all notated
compositions, even when “no artificial means of assistance”—no chronographic
reference—was available in performance. Meumann continued the revolutionary
aesthetical shift in musical time by re-conceiving the very qualities of “accurate”
musicianship. Instead of considering intellectual volition, rhetorical emphasis, physical
accentuation, sensory intuition, or gestural affinity as it related to an individual’s creative
interpretation, Meumann simply and—if we heed the comments of skilled musicians
themselves—incorrectly considered a “good” performer’s inability to mimic exacting
metronomic rhythm one of “considerable error.”
Meumann found that musicians were not naturally metronomes, an observation
confirmed by many psychologists before and after him. Even Wundt admitted that his
subjects’ sense of time flow during experiments varied according to their attention span.74
The physiologist Karl von Vierordt’s seminal metronomic-action experiments from as
early as 1868—research that clearly influenced Meumann in his musical-rhythm
studies—found that a subject, when asked to reproduce the beats of a metronome after
73 Sears, 29.
74
Ribot, 273-4.
267
the metronome had been stopped, would usually recall faster clicks slower, and slower
clicks faster. Metronomic time, as Vierordt’s initial research showed, was not easily
recollected or reproduced by his human subjects. This phenomenon of perception and
performance regulated in mechanical time is still recognized today as Vierordt’s law.75
As Vierordt’s contemporary Ribot reported, “individual variations” in subjects’ physical
and mental reproduction of metronomic clicks diverged considerably “on both sides of
the exact point.”76
The non-mechanical variability of music performance was a well-known fact to
experimental psychologists in the nineteenth-century. Scientific rhythm researcher Kurt
Ebhardt employed a chronographic piano apparatus that recorded performers through
electrical-contact hammers, and noted in his 1898 musical-time dissertation Zwei
Beiträge zur Psychologie des Rhythmus und des Tempo similar non-metronomic results
to Vierordt. He recognized “that feeling enters in as the determining factor of tempo” and
that even the harmony of a piece may sway instrumentalists from the strictly metronomic
actualization music notation as defined by Wundt’s science.77
By 1899, researchers Shaw
and Wrinch had acknowledged that while “the definite relation of one, a half, a fourth,
and an eight, as in written musical compositions” exists as mathematically precise
75 See “Vierordt's law, n." A Dictionary of Psychology, Andrew M. Colman, ed. (Oxford
University Press, 2006.) Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press. (Case Western
Reserve University, Accessed, 18 August 2008),
http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t87.e8789.
76
Ribot, 273.
77
Summarized in Sears, 32. For Ebhardt’s tests, conservatory musicians performed various music
selections by Mozart and Schumann, with harmonic accompaniments and without. See Kurt
Ebhardt, Zwei Beiträge zur Psychologie des Rhythmus und des Tempo (Leipzig: Johann
Ambrosius Barth, 1898), 53, for his chronographic documentation for each performance.
Ebhardt’s explanation of feeling and chronographic variation appears on page 52.
268
rhythmic values under a chronographic reference, “the relative length of musical notes in
the production of a true musician is not in the exact ration of one to a half, a quarter, an
eight, and so on.”78
Fig. 4.1. Ebhardt’s chronographic piano-apparatus used to research subjects’ metronomic exactitude
during music performances. From Kurt Ebhardt, Zwei Beiträge zur Psychologie des Rhythmus und des
Tempo (1898), 30.
Despite the many empirical observations proving that the time of musical
performance was seldom, if ever, a priori metronomic, Meumann and the psychologists
he influenced, such as Ebhardt, Sears, Scripture, and Seashore, actively trained
musicians—for the exactitude and “correctness” stipulated by objective, chronographic
78 Quoted in Sears, 33. From M. A. Shaw and F. S Wrinch, “A contribution to the psychology of
time,” in University of Toronto Studies, Psychological Series I (Toronto: University Library,
1899): 101-153.
269
rhythm—to perform with the metronome, in methods similar to their fatigue and attention
studies. Sears documented Meumann’s seminal chronographic research of the musician:
A second test was made in relation to the observance of tempo. In this a good
piano player was required to beat a rhythm first in accompaniment to a given
standard rhythm [from the chronographic laboratory apparatus] and then alone.
The intervals between the single strokes of the beater were 0.4 and 0.3 seconds.
After the observer [the good pianist] had beaten the rhythm thirty to forty times
the standard [metronomic] rhythm was discontinued, while the subject kept on.
As soon as the standard [metronomic] rhythm ceased the beating of the subject
began to change.79
While skilled musicians of the nineteenth century and earlier perceived and performed
music with vastly differing qualities than found in the scientific metronome, experimental
psychologists, holding to their chronographic values, assumed that musicians should
perform by absolute laboratory standards. Thus, with their misapprehension that
metronomic rhythm was a priori musical time, a host of psychologists authoritatively
judged human creativity solely through the automatical rule of chronography. Some of
the most striking musical-rhythm experiments devised by scientists, influenced by
Vierordt’s, Wundt’s, and then Meumann’s scientific rhythm studies, further highlight this
dramatic and indeed revolutionary paradigm shift in both the qualities of musical time
and the values of individual creativity for modern Western culture.
79 Sears, 29.
270
Fig. 4.2. The chronographic record from a subject’s laboratory performance of various rhythmic
passages. The upper line is the metronomic temporal standard; the bottom line is the personal interpretation
of the rhythm notated below each record. From Kurt Ebhardt, Zwei Beiträge zur Psychologie des Rhythmus
und des Tempo (1898), 31.
Both in Europe and North America, the years 1894 and 1895 represent a
watershed for the publication of chronographic research on musicians and musical
rhythm. A year after Meumann’s research was published, French psychologists Binet and
Coutier, in “Recherches Graphiques sur la Musique,” reported their meticulous
laboratory experiments with pianists, in which the scientists graphically analyzed finger
strength and reaction time in relation to metronomic accuracy. They found that pianists
were not mechanically uniform in all fingers, and the longer subjects performed, their
fatigue—a common measure in other metronomic labor studies—caused further
271
irregularities in time. In 1902 Sears summarized these findings and noted the extreme,
inhuman precisions Binet and Coutier held their pianist-subjects to perform under:
A renowned musician in playing five successive notes was found to retard the
interval between any two notes 0.01 of a second. In ten successive trials it was
observed that the value of the intervals always increased as they advanced up the
scale, the average increase varying from 0.01 to 0.015 of a second.80
Moreover, Binet and Coutier recognized that a “renowned musician’s” feeling of the
musical phrase and invisible accent of the metric pulse equated to chronographic
imprecision. Again in this particular study, standard performance practices became
disassociated from rhetorical expression, physical movement, or the pulse of living
musical time. When misinterpreted through the chronographic bias of scientists, the
skilled performer’s rhythmical interpretations were but errors as defined by clockwork:
In relation to the accentuation of single notes these investigations found that a
tendency exists—“1. To separate the accented note from the preceding note, 2. To
tie or slur the accented note to the following note, 3. To increase the length of the
note accented as if this increase were equivalent to an increase in intensity, 4. To
increase, especially in rapid playing the intensity of the notes which follow the
note accented.”81
Writings from the decade assert that psychologists strove their musician-subjects to be
exclusively metronomic. Ebhardt also redefined what were standard and desirable
performance techniques for skilled musicians, attesting that the “rhythmic accent exerts a
disturbing influence on the keeping of time, that it is a source of constant error, and that
in the great majority of cases the accent causes not a shortening of the preceding but a
lengthening of the subsequent member.”82
Scientists, maintaining their chronographic
80 Sears, 30-1.
81
Ibid., 31.
82
Ibid.
272
bias, heard musicians’ physical sense of metric pulse, the traditional ictus metricus, to be
a mechanically imprecise act, and thus an ultimately flawed performance practice.
Scripture’s Principles
Strikingly similar to the studies by Binet and Coutier in France and Ebhart and Meumann
in Germany, E. W. Scripture’s rhythm experiments in America concerned the need for a
human’s efficient and regular response time, guided by the researcher’s coolly objective,
chronographic bias. In his 1895 texts Thinking Feeling, Doing and the article “Some
Principles of Mental Education,” derived from a lecture presented in 1894,83
Scripture
unreservedly believed that music directing ought to conform to chronographic
procedures, as he explains:
A convenient example is given by measurements on the time of rhythmic action. I
will take the case of the leader of an orchestra who must beat time with his baton.
It does not make much difference just how fast he beats, provided he beats
regularly.84
For Scripture, the conducting of musical time had little to do with the variable qualities of
pulse—or the ever-shifting emotional, structural, and rhetorical content of the specific
music conducted—but lay solely with the mechanical exactitude of the performance act.
Scripture added in his 1907 text The New Psychology, “every musician likewise must
learn to be regular in his [time] intervals, though he may to a certain extent choose their
average length.”85
Scripture, conforming to Wundt’s values, idealized the musician as a
mathematician of metronomic sound in time. In Thinking, Feeling, Doing, Scripture
83 Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” 533.
84
Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 263.
85
E. W. Scripture, The New Psychology (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1907), 181.
273
promoted outright his chronographic bias towards human performance by answering his
own scientific problem:
What is rhythmic action? The process in the mind of the one who is acting is in
the first place an estimate of equal intervals of time; after a few strokes at equal
intervals the person knows just when to expect the next one. In other words, it is a
case of time-memory corrected by an actual stroke each time. Knowing when to
expect the next stroke, an act of will is executed so that the final action occurs in
some definite relation to the stroke, generally at the same moment of just after it.86
Given this self-perceived scientific truth, Scripture measured the quality of musical time,
first and foremost, through metronomic rhythm, since any given performance conforms
“always within a small range [of error] before and after the click, so that it [the human
action], on an average, hits the click the record is both accurate and regular. This is the
ideal of rhythmic action.”87
Scripture conceived human movement through chronographic
observation, where a subject must “correct for” physical error to achieve a mechanically
efficient “regularity.” In his 1899 Science article “Observations of Rhythmic Action,”
Scripture again verified his mechanical epistemology of rhythmic performance, stating,
“The irregularity of an act is a good expression of its difficulty.”88
Indeed, Scripture
attested to the industrial-scientific purposes of rhythmic-action studies in The New
Psychology (1907), reiterating, “natural rhythm is the one in which [each person] can
perform the greatest number of movements with the least fatigue.”89
86 Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 263.
87
Ibid., 257-8.
88
E. W. Scripture, “Observations of Rhythmic Action,” Science 10 (Dec. 1, 1899): 809.
89
Scripture, The New Psychology, 181.
274
Fig. 4.3. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a gymnast-subject in his Yale laboratory. The study was
intended to record and regulate the personal equation of efficient rhythmic action. From E. W. Scripture,
Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895), 262.
It is clear that Scripture’s “rhythm” originated in the labor-fatigue and attention-
fatigue experiments from Wundt’s psychology laboratory. Guided by the notion that any
divergence from automatical rhythm equated to physical problems and inefficiency,
Scripture chronographically tested gymnasts’ “accuracy and regularity” during
“rhythmical exercises with dumb bells.”90
In an identical fashion, Scripture found it
logical to connect the conductor’s baton, and by extension the conductor, to the ever-
trustworthy chronograph. He documents:
90 Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 262.
275
To measure the regularity in a case of this kind I have arranged an electric contact
on the end of a baton, by which a spark record is made on a vibrating time-line
drawn on the smoked paper of a revolving drum. I will not go into the details of
the arrangement; it is sufficient to say that each beat leaves a record and that the
time between each record can be measured in hundredths or thousands of a sec. as
desired.91
Fig. 4.4. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a conductor-subject in his Yale laboratory. The
purposes of the study were identical to his physical-labor experiments intended to record and regulate the
personal equation for efficient rhythmic action. From E. W. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895),
260.
With precisions far greater than any Maelzel metronome could reference or regulate,
Scripture tested musicians’ performance under ever-greater measures of inhuman
rhythm—finding ever-greater “problems” of human “irregularity.” He intended these
91 Ibid. Scripture’s chronographic tests on conductors, it seems, were not isolated to his Yale
laboratory. T. O’Conor Sloane, Standard Electrical Dictionary, Second Edition (New York:
Normal W. Henley & Co., 1897), 586. The text describes Scripture’s original apparatus, and its
overriding scientific purpose:
“Baton, Electric. An orchestra conductor’s baton arranged so as to close an electric
circuit at each stroke of beating time. It is used in physiological experiments in
connection with a chronograph to determine accuracy of rhythmic action.”
276
experiments, as with all chronographic procedures, to record and eventual sublimate the
personal equation, those ever-present problems of human variation, within his reductive
and replicable scientific framework. Indeed, Scripture even invented a mathematical
expression for the conductor’s personal equation, his mean variation (MV) of beating
time under chronographic testing.92
Scripture explains the value of chronographically
recording the mean variation of individual conductors:
The actual average time of a beat makes no difference within such small limits, as
music played at the rate of 1 beat in 0.40 sec is not sensibly different from that
played at 1 beat in 0.39 sec. An essential qualification, however, for the success of
an orchestra leader is his regularity in estimating intervals of time, and this can be
determined by getting his mean variation.93
Under Wundt’s methodology, Scripture and other experimental psychologists—
seemingly uneducated in the fundamentals of musical creation or performance—
redefined musicians’ actions with values and precisions that only their laboratory
machines could provide, within temporal limits only they valued. (In Scripture’s case,
accuracy to within a hundredth of a mechanical second was a sufficient and acceptable
precision for human music performances.) Using more precise apparatuses, they found
even more imprecision and imperfection with living actualizations of musical-mechanical
rhythm. With the mean variation of his conductors computed, Scripture formulated who
was the most “regular” human time-beater, and asked, “which is the better man?”94
Scripture clearly considered the “better man” to be the most automatically precise one.
92 Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” 537.
93
Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 261. Italics original.
94 Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” 536.
277
Not only for conductors, children, and weight lifters, Scripture’s chronographic
methods, along with his scientific conceptions of musical time, applied to
instrumentalists as well:
Another example similar to the one just mentioned is that of a piano player who
must learn to strike the notes at regular intervals. The quarter notes should all be
about the same length; equal measures should be completed in equal times.95
Scripture’s interpretation of musical time—that all quarter notes were a priori
automatically equal—stemmed from his deeply ingrained chronographic bias, not his
comprehensive musical training. Scripture further explained that any divergence from
chronographic regularity represented a significant problem in musical performance—
regardless of meter, verbal indications, articulation, harmony, form, or melodic gesture,
(with continual variations in each quality) musical time at both the measure and quarter-
note levels ought to display constant metronomic rhythm. He went on to “suggest,
however, that even when the MV is so small that no one distinctly notices the irregularity,
yet the actual irregularity present may be great enough to injure the effect” of the
chronographically perfect musical performance. Chronographic precision in human
action and perception—both in his laboratory and on the concert stage—was of
paramount importance to the scientist, as Scripture subsumed individual musicality to the
strict laws of experimental psychology, stipulating, “A successful musician of any kind
should know not only that his instrument is in tune but also that he himself is in time.”96
Ibid., 537.
96 Scripture, Thinking Feeling Doing, 262. The sentence is misquoted in “Some Principles of
Mental Education,” 537, which reverses the words “tune” and “time,” thereby making the
analogy incomprehensible. Scripture goes on to calculate the regularity of ironworkers in a
similar chronographic fashion, verifying the industrial impetus for such scientific research in
efficient action in time.
278
Even the most rhythmically regimented of traditional instrumental
performances—the military drummer’s cadence—was not metronomic enough for
Scripture’s tests when gauging the precision of a sergeant’s “time-marking.” Scripture’s
disdain for the chronographic errors derived from the individual musician’s personal
equation—a scientific attitude first expressed by Wundt—could not be more pronounced
when he instructs:
But before we begin an experiment we must distrust everything and everybody—
even the drummer. The drummer himself may have something the matter with
him—we will attend to that later—but at any rate we must use some arrangement
for drumming which we have proved to be exact. 97
Instead of employing a trained and skilled drummer as the reference for the sergeant’s
performance of marking time, Scripture found an automatical source of rhythm vastly
more appropriate than a living one:
The drumming we shall use will be a series of clicks at exactly equal intervals. To
produce the click we use the graphic chronometer. This is essentially a stop-watch
which makes the fine pointer beat either in seconds or in fifths of a second.98
If military drummers failed to be chronographically accurate enough for his laboratory,
Scripture’s mechanical study of pianists uncovered even more egregious human errors.99
Scripture expressed great concerned with “the problem of the two simultaneous acts”
witnessed in two-handed piano playing—a clear indicator of the musician’s flawed
97 Ibid., 255-6.
98
Ibid., 256.
99
Scripture explained his chronographic tests of drumming as follows: “Suppose we put into his
hand an electric drum-stick. Every time that the stick strikes the drum a spark is made. Since the
drummer has no watch to guide him but judges his time as he pleases, we do not use any sounder
but let him beat alone. A record can be made just as before with the chronometer, and the
regularity can be measured in tenths of a second.” Ibid., 259.
Scripture provides further graphical representations of subjects’ time-marking
performances, along with their various rhythmic irregularities when compared to his unwavering
metronomic standard. See 256-8.
279
personal equation. Under the belief that all human action must display metronomic
regularity and efficiency, Scripture turned a musical keyboard into an electrified
chronograph. In Thinking Feeling Doing, he provided a photograph of his chronographic-
piano tests and described the method used to solve his entirely self-defined problem of
musical simultaneity:
We wish, now, to find out if, when we will to move the two corresponding fingers
of the two hands at the same moment, they really do move as intended or if one is
behind the other. To do this we must have two keys, two spark-coils, and two
metal points, one each side of the [chronographic] time-line…When the fingers
move, two sparks fly through the paper and two white dots are made. Do they
occur at the same moment?100
Fig. 4.5. In Scripture’s Yale laboratory, chronographically “Measuring the Simultaneity in Actions of a
Piano-player” using an electrical-contact keyboard connected to the standard recording barrel-drum. From
E. W. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895), 31.
Scripture’s answer to his own question was a resounding “no”—pianists did not use their
two hands like two synchronized laboratory metronomes:
100 Ibid., 31-32.
280
Thus the will to move both hands at the same time results in moving the two at
different times. A careful investigation shows that sometimes the right precedes,
sometimes the left, in irregular order…The difference may seem small. But, for
example, the ear is very sharp and there are people in the world who, intending to
strike the keys of a piano simultaneously, generally hit one slightly behind the
other with a difference sufficient to be heard.101
Under the chronographic bias, Scripture assumed much about the skilled piano player,
and again, redefined the values of musical time within his own laboratory training and
tradition. His ear seems attuned, not to the expressive and non-notated techniques used by
the most experienced piano players, which included hand separation, chord arpeggiation,
and finger pedaling—all of which are intrinsically non-metronomic musical gestures—
but to the time and rhythm most customarily heard in barrel organs and other musical
automata.
Fig. 4.6. Scripture’s chronographic record of a pianist’s performance of a mere two notes (represented by
the two dots). The read-out shows the performer’s mechanical imprecision and lack of precise metronomic
simultaneity in two-handed playing by 0.005 sec. as referenced by the laboratory apparatus. From E. W.
Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895), 32.
Precision, regularity, and simultaneity were the new values stipulated by
Scripture’s and other psychologists’ chronographic experiments in music making. All
divergence from the mechanical time apparatus constituted human error. He printed an
example of his chronographic readout, showing two notes performed by the pianist that
101 Ibid., 32.
281
diverged from mechanical simultaneity by .005 seconds. Indeed, Scripture considered a
pianist’s non-synchronous practice of hand separation such a problem that he expressed
these “errors” through a three-bar passage of printed music; ironically, he exemplified the
personal equation of performance through a more “realistic” music transcription that
directly corresponded to the expressive beliefs of nineteenth-century musicians, such as
Christiani, who advocated for the positive qualities of non-metronomic musicality.
Fig. 4.7. Scripture’s interpretation of an anti-scientific, non-metronomic performance practice. Justified by
the chronographic method, Scripture transcribes a hypothetical performer’s lack of mechanical
simultaneity, exposing “irregularity” in rhythmic action during a typical music performance. From E. W.
Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (1895), 32.
In his brief musical except, Scripture essentially verified what many skilled
musicians of the nineteenth century had been claiming all along—music notation
insufficiently signified the more complex musical practices and more nuanced rhythms
that can only be gleaned through living performances. But where skilled musicians
claimed individual expressivity and artistic meaning in living performances, Scripture
heard irregularity, imprecision, and mechanical error.
Since these rhythmic complexities were incommensurate with the objective
chronographic method, Scripture suggested that the pianist’s problems of metronomic
imprecision represented a clear “danger of over-looking small differences” which must
282
be dealt with by the music teacher, who—without the benefit of scientific machines—
may be unequipped to train-out such egregious imprecision:
The error of simultaneity in piano-playing might readily be great enough to
produce a disagreeable impression on a large part of the audience and yet be so
small as to have escaped the teacher’s correction.102
Scripture assumed that music instructors—and more importantly “passive auditors”—
must hold the same chronographic biases as experimental psychologists. To facilitate
such musical-temporal perfection, Scripture’s paradigmatic pedagogue should, in a
perfect world, also have access to a chronographic apparatus:
Although such means of testing simultaneity would be desirable for every piano-
player, it is of course, impracticable to provide smoked drums, spark-coils, etc.
for general use. We must wait till some ingenious mechanic invents a hand
arrangement to place directly on the piano keys.103
Most significantly, while the perfect chronographic piano had yet to be installed and
wired into every practice room, Scripture well recognized the apparatus currently
transforming average students into his brand of “successful player”—the performer with
the lowest levels of mean variation in musical time, the most simultaneous hands, and the
most automatical rhythm. It was the machine indispensable to experimental psychologists
and their own laboratories:
By practice with the metronome successful players are able to reduce their MV till
it does not disturb the playing. It is not known just how far this may be carried, as
no one has ever taken the trouble to make accurate measurements.104
Ibid., 33.
103 Ibid., 33.
104
Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” 537.
283
As Scripture relates, while the pervasive problems of chronographic imprecision
continued to plague musical performances, for now at least, Maelzel’s metronome would
succeed in solving many of the errors intrinsic to the player’s personal equation.
Bolton’s Rhythm
In 1894, the very same year Meumann’s influential thesis on rhythm was published in
Leipzig,105
and one year before Binet, Courtier, and Scripture’s publications on musical
chronography, Thaddeus L. Bolton’s American Journal of Psychology article “Rhythm”
offered the most extensive scientific discussion to date on the phenomena underlying the
rhythms of speech, music, and the body. Bolton, a Fellow at Clark University and student
of G. Stanley Hall—the founder of the first experimental-psychology laboratory in North
America106
—sought to “reduce rhythm to a more fundamental activity of mind.”107
In
keeping with Wundt’s methodologies, Bolton’s experimental process seemed to entirely
devalue the fundamental, variable rhythmic activities of the body.
Deeply familiar with physiologists’ nerve and circulation research,108
along with
psychologists’ research on fatigue and attention,109
Bolton offered the most truncated and
mythological history of music, dance, and poetic rhythm, culminating in the invention of
105 See E. Meumann, “Untersuchungen zur psychologie und aesthetik des rhythmus,” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Leipzig, 1894).
106
Scripture, The New Psychology, vii.
107
Bolton, 146. Bolton (on page 149) considers the rhythms of walking and speech to be
voluntary, and thus “the most important and are the true types of rhythmical activity.” Pulse and
respiration are “involuntary,” and thus not bonafide rhythmic sources. Jaques-Dalcroze repeated
this concept, nearly verbatim, in Rhythm, Music, and Education, 171. Reprint from “Music, Joy,
and the School,” (1915).
108
Ibid., 150-2.
109
Ibid., 151, 155.
284
“melody, though it was not disassociated from the meaning of the words. With the
discovery of the musical instrument came the discovery that a melody might be sustained
by simple tone intensities.” Skipping the history of percussion instruments entirely,
Bolton found that “although music finds its essential basis in rhythm, its distinctive
feature is the melody combined with harmony.” Concerning the main purpose of his
study, Bolton recognized, “the most important and fundamental unifying principles
underlying music is the time, without which there can be no music.” It quickly emerges,
however, that despite his broad yet specious history of rhythm, Bolton interpreted
musical time exclusively through his very modern laboratory chronograph:
Musical tones must be exactly timed, if one is to get the conception of a melody
from a series of tones. When they are exactly timed they may be farther unified by
regular changes of intensity [volume] which group the sounds into measure. The
most common measures that occur in music are 2-4, 3-4, 4-4, and 6-8 time. In
what might be termed the natural system of accents, the first note in each measure
receives a strong accent. This is really the only accent in 2-4 time. In 3-4 time the
second note also receives an accent, but it is weaker than the first. In 4-4 time
there are four grades of intensity. The first note is the strongest, the third next, the
second is weaker still, and the fourth is the weakest of all. In 6-8 time the third,
fifth and sixth are of about equal intensity, and weak. The first is strongest, the
fourth is next, and the second weaker though stronger than the third. An equal
amount of time is given to each measure—that is, the strong accent occurs at
regular intervals—but the distribution of this among the notes in a measure may
be greatly varied; the separate notes, however, always bearing constant and
simple relations to one another. The smallest fraction that may express the
relations of these notes is 1-64, and this appears only in instrumental music.110
Clearly influenced by Wundt’s initial mistranslation of musical meter from attention
experiments, Bolton defined a natural musical accent as a performer’s objective
manipulation of volume intensity along with his maintenance of mathematical-
metronomic precision at each measure. Indeed, every note in any given meter, according
to Bolton, was objectively distinguished only in degrees of volume, nothing else—a
110 Ibid., 166-7.
285
highly automatical interpretation of musical performance, one directly opposed to
Christiani’s, Weber’s, and Marx’s multifaceted understanding of musical accent and
pulse. Bolton still acknowledges, at least, Christiani’s “grammatical accent,” otherwise
known as the “invisible accent” or ictus metricus: the non-notated emphasis of musical
meter considered by previous skilled performers and pedagogues to be common-practice
musicality. Yet Bolton, as with other psychologists, thought metronomic rhythm was the
a priori standard of musical time; there could be no other rhythmical epistemology when
defined by the chronographic method. Stating his chronographic bias outright, Bolton
proclaims these new values for performance culture: “Perfect time is the result of the
application of scientific methods to music.”111
For these experimental scientists with their
laboratory procedures, perfect metronomic time was the only time that mattered, or
indeed existed.
For his experiments, Bolton believed that the rhythmic stimulus should be
unrelated to any sound heard in the outside world; the “rhythmic” source must sound as
redundant and mechanically regular as possible, with no changes in pitch, duration, or
volume. Bolton explains, “the importance of an absolutely uniform series of sounds
cannot be too strongly insisted upon. A difference in sounds which would ordinarily
remain unnoticed [outside of the laboratory] is sufficient to suggest a rhythm…In the
present experiment the greatest precaution was used against any variation in the sounds
that would suggest or impose a grouping.”112
His perfect rhythmic apparatus was as
sonically sterile and devoid of human or natural sound as possible. Under these
111 Ibid., 169.
112
Ibid., 206.
286
requirements, Bolton found that even Wundt marred the first rhythm-perception
experiments because the clockwork metronome implied too much of a living rhythm,
even when used as a constant artificial regulator. By 1894, Bolton had considered
Maelzel’s metronome (with Wundt’s electro-magnetic modifications) an imperfect,
unscientific machine:
The difficulty was with Wundt’s apparatus. The two sounds heard during a
complete swing of the pendulum of the metronome are not of the same intensity
or quality, and hence the impossibility of [the subject] restraining the [mental]
grouping by two113
…The Sound of the metronome which Dietze employed is full
and rich and has great carrying power [within the subject’s attention span.] Any
experiments upon the carrying power of the mind must take into consideration the
character of the sound.114
Experimental psychologists, beholden to new technologies for more precise and
reproducible measurements, continued to reference musical rhythm through new
machines emitting new artificial sounds devoid of any associations to living rhythm.
Thus, when researchers and pedagogues infused “rhythm” with the scientific values of
precision, synchronicity, and redundancy, metronomic machines redefined—and
continued to redefine—traditional human activities with increasingly automatical
qualities. To facilitate perfect “rhythm” in the laboratory, Bolton invented a special
battery-driven chronographic device, far more mechanically precise, constant, and
artificially monotonous in sound than a clockwork metronome. He explains the new
laboratory tool:
113 Ibid., 205-6.
114
Ibid., 207.
287
The rate was determined by counting the clicks in the telephone by a stop-watch.
Rates between one click in two seconds and ten in one second were possible. As
the rate was a very important factor, it will be given in all cases in the
presentation of results…The telephone was placed in a different room from the
chronograph, where there was as little disturbance from other noises as possible,
especially from any noises that were in the least suggestive [for the subjects] of a
rhythm.115
For Bolton’s experiments, telephony now regulated and referenced once creative
perception because “the click of the telephone is about as simple and instantaneous a
sound as it is possible to produce.”116
“When the experiment first began,” Bolton documents, “the apparatus was set so
that about three or four clicks to the second were heard in the telephone.” Bolton
recorded his subject’s reaction to the sharp automatical sounds, which were wholly
unfamiliar, even in comparison to the metronome. The subjects, significantly, associated
this new electro-telephonic click to more familiar non-musical phenomena, and “the
sounds suggested most generally and immediately the clock. Other suggestions were:
slowly dripping water, galloping horse, pile-driver, etc.”117
Using this artificial sound
source, Bolton tested his subjects’ sense of rhythm and then carefully correlated his
findings to their respective levels of musical ability.
In discussion with his subjects, Bolton found that rhythmic imagery was an
importance reference for some musicians’ sense of pulse and meter. “Subject 1” and
“Subject 6” both with “Some musical talent and training,” and “Subject 12” with
“considerable musical talent and great interest in music” often related the external
115 Ibid., 184.
116
Ibid., 207. In another rhythm experiment, Bolton employed a rotating disk with a tuning fork
to produce an automatical series of pitches. See 228-9.
117
Ibid., 184.
288
clicking sound to the musical time-reference they seemed most knowledgeable with: the
swing of the simple pendulum, a temporal aid that continued to be used in musical
education during this time.118
More than just mentally grouping the artificial sounds into
order, these musical subjects visualized a finite, silent reference of moving pulse.
Furthermore, Bolton admitted, “Almost every subject either visualized the pendulum or
spoke of the pendulum-swing movement sometime during the experiments…In my own
case and in some others there was a tendency to sway the body with the [imagined]
pendulum…It was quite visible at times.”119
They visualized and moved to a far less
precise, regulatory, or modern rhythmical reference—one Titchener considered less
effective and more “rudimentary” that pure metronomic sound.120
To make sense of the
sonic monotony, Bolton and his subjects called forth a silent image of tempo first
suggested by the scientist Galileo in the late sixteenth century as reflection of living pulse
and movement. Bolton did not stress this rediscovery: that a visual-physical epistemology
of rhythm existed prior to clockwork machines. Rather, he strictly relied on the most
artificial sound apparatus heretofore employed in modern science—a far more
progressive rhythmic machine with far greater consistency than offered by such
antiquated, seemingly anti-scientific perceptions of human pulse.
118 Ibid., 186, 190-1, 214.
119
Ibid., 186 n2. He goes on to contend that his subjects visualized a clock pendulum alone, not a
simple pendulum or a clockwork metronome: “When the rates were slow, the subject visualized
the clock pendulum and made one [telephone] tick come near the completion of each [imagined]
half swing. The clicks were then grouped by twos and were called the clock tick.” Nevertheless,
the visualization of a moving rhythm, distinct from sound clicks, provides insight to a past
epistemology of musical rhythm, as Bolton continues to mention, “by this pendulum-swing
movement groups of two, three, four, six or eight were frequently grouped into 2-groups. The
first group, then, in the 2-group was accented or more emphatic than the other, and a distinct
pause seemed to follow the second group.”
120
See Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, 182-3.
289
After his meticulous chronographic testing, Bolton averaged the results—the
mathematical de-emphasis of individual variations—down to the thousands of a second.
Then, he verified Wundt’s procedures, scientifically redefining the qualities of rhythm
with ever-increasing precision:
This general principle may be stated: The conception of a rhythm demands a
perfectly regular sequence of impressions within the limits of about 1.0 sec. and
0.1 sec. A member of the [automatical] sequence may contain one or more simple
impressions. If there are a number of impressions, they may stand in any order of
arrangement, or even in a state of confusion, but each member of the sequence
must be exactly the same in the arrangement of its elements.121
Using this absolute definition, Bolton naturally transferred the rhythm of poetry to meet
his laboratory standards, commenting, “The application of this principle to poetry
demands that the accents in a line shall recur at regular intervals; it requires also that the
successive feet in a line shall be of precisely the same character.”122
If the poetic rhythm
became a chronographic value in Bolton’s study, so too did musical time, since the
notated composition represented a precise object to be performed under strict metronomic
consideration:
In a musical rhythm, however, the measures may vary with certain restrictions in
the arrangements of their [notational] elements. But it is just this variation which
constitutes the melody to a certain extent. The rhythm is varied for purposes of
melody, but it is, nevertheless, a disturbance to the [absolute metronomic]
rhythmical flow in so far that it changes the measure. The melody is a new and
higher unifying agency, which corresponds in a way to the use of rhymes in
poetry. The temporal sequence of the accents is always preserved.123
Bolton’s application of the chronographic method offers more striking examples of
scientists’ miscomprehension of traditional musical rhythm and meter, not to mention the
121 Bolton, 237.
122
Ibid., 237.
123
Ibid., 238.
290
creative intentions of musicians themselves. Perhaps unbeknownst to those working
within Wundt’s methodologies, their experiments did not scientifically or irrefutably
prove how skilled performers or composers experienced musical time. These new
psychologists merely recorded the mental phenomena of “rhythmic grouping” when
subjects were faced with artificial, redundant sounds in confined laboratory settings.
Then these scientists applied those mental phenomena to their self-defined laws of
musical creation and performance. Revising rhythm strictly through objective laboratory
procedures—in opposition a performer’s self-actualization of physical pulse and
movement—Bolton even misconstrued musicians’ loudly expressed disdain of
automatical time, commenting, “although there is a feeling among musicians that rhythm
is distasteful, it is more apparent than real. It is the regular monotonous recurrence of the
same rhythm without sufficient variations that is displeasing and not the [metronomic]
rhythmic flow itself.”124
Bolton failed to realize that more meaningful definitions of
rhythm existed for skilled musicians, who often voiced their distaste for the redundant,
inhuman “rhythmic flow” heard in the clockwork metronome alone.
Sears’ Contribution
As reported in “A Contribution to the Psychology of Rhythm” (1902), the experiments of
Charles H. Sears yet again proved, to the most extensive degree to date, that musicians
did not conform to chronographic precisions. In the process, Sears takes the
chronographic bias towards human musicality to its most precise limits as well. The work
of Meumann, Ebhardt, Binet, and Courtier all greatly influenced Sears, who, at the time
of his publication, was (like Bolton nearly a decade before him) working at Clark
124 Ibid., 167. Emphasis added.
291
University under the tutelage of Stanley Hall, the dean of American experimental
psychologists and founder of the American Journal of Psychology. Sears’ laboratory
research on “rhythm” again exposes the dilemma of scientific methods and technologies
when applied to fundamentally subjective acts: the more precise the chronographic
experiments, the more readily apparent are the “problems” of the musician’s personal
equation. From the very first paragraph of his American Journal of Psychology report,
Sears states his chronographic bias—prescribing how the absolute mathematical-
mechanical laws of musical performance should be actualized by all “competent
players:”
When the musician begins his studies certain statements are made to him with
regard to the relative values of notes. He is told that a half note should be given
half the time of a whole note, a quarter note half the time of a half note, an eight
note half as much time as a quarter, and so on, and that a dot placed after a note
adds one-half to its length. It is implied that all notes of the same kind should
receive equal amounts of time unless a change in tempo is indicated, that a triplet
should divide into three equal parts the time usually given to two like notes, that,
except for purposes of expression, all measures are of the same length, etc.125
Sears seems to misunderstand the deeper qualities of musical time from the outset of his
research, for with proper musical experience (something Sears may have lacked), the
performing “artist”—in contrast to the novice—did not interpret written notes with
redundant, invariable durations or mathematical-mechanical proportions, since a host of
non-notated, gestural, rhetorical, and expressive techniques informed the time of music.
Skilled musical performance transcended the limited, chronographic interpretation of
musical notation. Nevertheless, as Sears considered musicians to be passive subjects in a
laboratory process of music making, expression and personal interpretation were
exceptions to the rule of perfect performances. Sears, like preceding scientific researchers
125 Sears, 28.
292
of rhythmic action, realized that to facilitate such mathematical, chronographic
performance practices, musicians required continual mechanical reference and regulation:
Toward fulfilling these requirements he strives with the metronome as an
assistant. How far the trained musician accomplishes what the notes set before
him indicate and what he sets out to do is an interesting question not only to the
psychologist, but also to the musician.126
Sears continued the psychologist’s task of redefining the problems of the modern
musician in time: how to reduce personal musical actions to the precisions of the
metronome, how to make music performance more like a chronographic experiment. In
posing these problems, Sears makes clear that many scientists increasingly believed their
reductive research methods directly transferred to the complex and nuanced performances
of “trained musicians.” Sears’ sheer ignorance of the multi-faceted qualities of living
musicality can be witnessed in his summary of past rhythmic experiments. Indeed, he
even believed that musicians’ emphasis of the metrical bar, the traditional “invisible
accent,” constituted both a performance mistake and a physiological abnormality:
Irregularity of [rhythmical] movements in playing results from peculiarities due
largely to the structure of the hand. Much of this irregularity may be overcome by
practice. Irregularity is the most marked in rapid playing which leads to the
expectation that in the production of a piece of music those measures that contain
many notes will possess greater variations than those containing only two or
three…For simple intervals without accent the greatest exactness of execution is
between 0.4-0.7 seconds. Accent, increasing the irregularity of the time relations
in the group, is the source of constant error. Usually the accented member is
lengthened.127
This new, clinical “regular rhythm” of scientific musicianship—a conceptual paradigm
shift influenced by chronographic research—one devoid of expressivity, physical and
rhetorical gesture, or a sense of pulse, becomes readily applied when Sears references
126 Ibid., 28.
127
Ibid., 33.
293
“the time intervals in selections played by a music box” prior to his experiments on
musical time; for this experimental psychologist, the tones of an automaton now defined
the performance goals for the living musician-subject. And while Sears witnessed even
the barrel organ to contain mean variations (chronographic imperfection) in the
performance of both measures and notes, the automaton’s interpretation of accented beats
was far less variable or imprecise. Sears summarized that his preliminary music-box
research “does give some indication of the extent of variation in the length of measures
and notes that will ordinarily pass unobserved, and furnishes, as a very ‘mechanical’
means of producing music, an interesting basis of comparison with the performers whose
playing is next to be considered,”128
in a procedure that held human musicians up to the
unfailing standards of automatical, chronographic rhythm.
For these experiments, Sears’ musician-subjects, “all practiced musicians” (of
which his wife was one) played an organ, not a piano, electrically connected to the
chronograph so that changes of “intensity” would not factor into the interpretation of
meter or phrasing, or complicate the chronographic records. Sears chose five hymns to be
performed; yet he stipulated that the subjects play the melody alone for three of them. For
the two hymns in which the performers played all four voices, Sears again recorded only
the melody. He failed to explain why he ignored or discarded the performances of fully
voiced hymns.129
Concerned with mechanical precision in the top voice alone, Sears not
only reduced complex musical rhythm to metronomic rates but also reduced harmonic
music to simple monophony for the sake of scientific experimentation. Perhaps
128 Ibid., 34-5.
129
Ibid., 35-8.
294
chronographically recording all voices uncovered too many rhythmic complexities or
nuances (such as arpeggiation and hand separation) to be dealt with through his
laboratory method;130
perhaps, too, Sears found it impossible to document music as it was
truly heard given his limited apparatus. Thus, musical time merely reflected what Sears’
technology could afford the scientist; the chronographic record of the soprano voice from
five hymns helped Sears justify the laws of rhythm for every “correct” musical
performance throughout history.
Tables 4.1 (above) and 4.2 (below). Two of Sears’ many reductive charts that quantified the
average chronographic rate of his musician-subjects’ hymn performances, devaluing human
variation and rhythmic nuance. From Charles H. Sears, “A Contribution to the Psychology of
Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 13 (Jan., 1902): 53, 43.
130 Ibid., 53. He admits that, while temporal imprecision abounded in the performance of the lone
soprano voice, “it will be found that irregularities are on the whole somewhat greater when all
parts are played.”
295
From the outset of his research, Sears recognized the individual problems in his
performer-subjects and their failure to conform to chronographic precisions. Even in a
single voice from these hymns, the subjects’ notes were not mathematically exact when
compared to the machine. Furthermore, Sears admits finding that “the time occupied in
playing the whole hymn or selection is of course a slightly variable one. It not only varies
for different subjects in playing the same selection, but also for the same subject in
playing the same selection at different times.”131
Sears found another troubling
performance practice not accounted for in the hymn notation—musicians would either
“overlap” (finger pedal) or put “intervals” (silent pauses) between notes, both standard
techniques that Sears seemed unprepared for, explaining that “very rarely did one tone
begin at the instant that the preceding one had come to an end, but that one tone usually
began before the preceding one had ceased.”132
In all instances, Sears counted pauses and
finger pedaling (an extension of legato articulation) as human error, and in keeping with
his reductive methods Sears states, “in the final reckoning up of the lengths of the notes it
is necessary to take these overlaps and intervals into account, and this has been done
throughout on the assumption that each note was intended by the player to last until the
following note was struck no longer.”133
Sears interpreted his subjects’ musical intentions
131 Ibid., 38.
132
Ibid.
133
Ibid. With a self-contradictory concern for musical quality, Sears later suggests that these
overlaps are “probably done in the interest of smoothness. It is nearly impossible to make the end
of the one tone and the beginning of the next exactly synchronous; and, if it were, the effect
would very likely be less flowing than with the overlaps. Intervals on the other hand would give a
staccato effect not desirable without special reason. The overlaps are by no means uniform.” See
Sears, 49. In a further reduction of individual musicality, Sears finds the average overlap time,
down to thousandths of a second, during specific passages of each hymn. See also Table XI,
“Showing number and average length of overlaps in fractions of a second,” 49.
296
based upon his own chronographic bias; he assumed that every note these musicians’
played should mimic the binary “on-off” ticks of a metronome. Sears simply discounted
all perceived rhythmic abnormalities in their performances, explaining, “The overlap has
therefore been subtracted from the full time of the preceding note in every case in which
it appeared and the interval added when it occurred.”134
To prove musicians’ imprecision
in chronographic time, Sears first omitted all complex musical qualities that could not be
explained through his chronographic method, qualities that transcended the “tick-tock” of
his laboratory machine. To justify psychologists’ chronographic method of above all,
Sears conveniently erased all proof of humanity from musical rhythm.
Yet humanity lingered in living music performance, as Sears documented each
player and each note played to within hundredths of a second, finding metronomic
imprecision throughout the selected hymn tunes. Sears discovered what skilled musicians
already realized. He recorded that “the measures vary not only with the general rate but
among themselves for the same subject and the same selection,” that is, the performers’
interpretations were in constant flux when compared to the rigid time of the seconds-
clock. Beginning and concluding measures were so mechanically imprecise (owing to the
individual interpretations of initial pickup and cadencial gestures) that Sears, not
surprisingly, “excluded” them from his already reductive data, which showed only the
average lengths of measures in seconds. Again, he reduced the human realities of
performance to chronographic time and numerical quantification.135
Even with his data
reduced, averaged, and tabulated down to hundredths of a second, Sears discovered no
134 Ibid.
135
Ibid., 41.
297
absolute rhythmical laws at the bar level, admitting, “There is no clearly evident order in
the variation of the measures except a retardation when nearing the end of the
selection.”136
Sears entertained the possibility, however, that the words of these familiar
hymns affected the movement of musical time—a standard epistemology that any skilled
musician could have explained to him—but he was clearly against the notion, stating,
“The evidence furnished by the tracings for such an accommodation of the music to the
words is too slight to warrant the assertion that it exists, but, nevertheless, such a relation
is not impossible.”137
Sears reports that the temporal irregularities continued at smaller denominations,
and “since the time of the measures is variable, it follows that the time of their
component parts must also vary. Such variations are found not only in the different
measures, but even in the same measure.” This scientist found conclusively that for any
given performer and any given performance (of a single line from five hymns), neither
the measures nor notes were consistent with the chronograph. Nevertheless, Sears
continued to reduce the discovered nuances and variations of musical time, neglecting to
document the temporal variations witnessed in identically notated rhythms. Instead, he
provided a chart, “Showing in hundredths of a second the average length of notes,” from
a whole note to an eighth. By averaging the note values in precise mechanical time, Sears
once again erased the actual, empirically proven variability witnessed in each of his
subjects’ actions.138
136 Ibid., 41-2.
137
Ibid., 43.
138
Ibid., 43. See Sears, Table VI. Emphasis added.
298
With the reality of individual variation mathematically erased, Sears confidently
judged the absolute laws of musical performance, in which “the quarter note is taken as
the basis of comparison,”139
suggesting that the quarter note always held an objective
metronomic value in every interpretation, regardless of meter, affect, or articulation.
Thus, for certain subjects, he found quarter note realizations “sometimes too long and
sometimes too short. All subjects make the eight notes too short, sometimes very much
too short…[subject] S, also without exception, makes the notes of higher denomination
that the quarter too large.”140
If simple relationships between eight and quarter notes showed great
imperfections, Sears found even more complex and “irregular” performance of triples and
dotted figures, rhythms that never seemed to conform to his chronographic guidelines.
Under the assumption that the quarter-note triplet must fit exactly into the metronomic
time of a half note, in a vocal hymn no less, Sears reported, “if each triplet is compared
with the unaccented note of its own measure the results are conflicting, and the chances
seem about equal that the triple will be too short or too long.”141
Musical time became an
issue of objective chance, not personal volition, as Sears also discovered that not only
were triplets imprecise when compared to the larger beat, but the notes of the triplets
themselves were irregular against the chronograph. “Turing to the individual notes of the
triplet,” Sears reflects, “there is a tendency to give more time to the second note than to
the first, and more to the third than to the second…thus while the tendency is slight to
139 Ibid.
140
Ibid., 44.
141
Ibid.
299
make the second note longer than the first, it is very strong to make the last longer than
either of the others.”142
More noticeable chronographic imprecision appeared when the musicians
performed the combined dotted eight and sixteenth note rhythm. Sears commented, “All
the subjects without exception made the whole measure very slightly longer than the ones
that precede and follow it, though with such slight differences that the relation may be
only accidental.”143
Since Sears viewed human performance to be imperfect and
accidental against the chronograph, he found, “A comparison of the component parts of
the last half of the measure with the average of the quarter notes in the first half of the
measure shows a great lack of uniformity in the duration of both the dotted eights and
their combination with the sixteenth notes. On the other hand the sixteenth notes with two
exceptions are all of too long duration.”144
The invisible accent of musical meter also posed some rhythmic problems for
Sears, who recognized, “It is evident from the foregoing that accented notes are often
longer than unaccented notes of the same denomination, but it is also evident that this
tendency is not present in all cases and with all players.” This standard practice of
emphasizing the metric pulse seemed less evident in one hymn, where Sears
misapprehended the accent to fall on the downbeat of each bar, when in actuality, the
musical pulse falls on the downbeat of every second full bar, as the phrasing and text
142 Ibid.
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid., 45.
300
dictates.145
Sears admitted, however, that the specific expressive qualities might influence
this unwieldy, non-notated practice of rhythmic emphasis for any given composition:
One may conjecture that [the metrical accent] will appear most prominently in
pieces, e.g., marches and processionals, which require a strong marking of the
rhythm, and will be more or less completely absent in pieces of a more flowing
character.146
Perhaps without realizing it, Sears “conjectured” upon what skilled musicians had
experienced, practiced, and preached for over two centuries: musical time, as actively
performed by individuals, contained fluctuations within the bar and across the bar, a
variety of non-notated accentuations, along with “overlaps” and “intervals”—qualities
more vocal than mathematical or mechanical—which imbued living music performance
with a certain mouvement, swing, “wavy outline,” or inégalité. Yet for Sears and other
experimental psychologists, the performer’s variable qualities of musical interpretation
solely represented accident, error, or even blind chance against objective certainties of
mechanical time and rhythm.
At the end of his article, Sears printed the hymns from his experiment, only
providing the complete voices for the two hymns with the most homophonic (i.e. visually
synchronized) texture. Numbers underneath each note, representing hundredths of a
second, show the time that each performer spent playing each rhythm—of the soprano
voice alone, minus the many unquantifiable, non-metronomic techniques discussed
above. Seldom did Sears’ numbers correspond to exact rhythmic proportions. Thus,
Sears, being biased towards scientific methods, mathematically calculated and judged his
four subjects’ interpretations of musical rhythm on the reductive basis of “too long” and
145 Ibid., 46, and 58 Figure.
146
Ibid., 46.
301
“too short” when compared with his infallible laboratory chronograph, which marked the
most inhuman time possible.
Fig. 4.8. A portion of Sears’ chronographic data showing the “errors” of the musical-personal equation for
the four subjects: S, B, M, and W. The numbers below the musical staff document the duration—in
hundredths of a second—that the subjects held each note of the soprano voice alone on the organ apparatus.
From Sears, “A Contribution to the Psychology of Rhythm,” AJP 13 (Jan., 1902): 57.
Musical Time Lost: Revision of Past Epistemologies through
the Chronographic Bias
Given his limited understanding of music performance, combined with a dogmatic belief
in chronography, Sears considered that all musical time throughout history must conform
to metronomic precisions. Misinterpreting an article in Music by noted Wagner scholar
Maurice Kufferath, “Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony” (1900), which describes how pulse
proportions relate to notated meter, Sears attested that the metronome logically replaced
the heartbeat as reference for every composition, justifying through a questionable and
reductionist history:
302
Bach and his school tried to establish an absolute standard of rate, taking as a
typical measure a group of four quarter notes, one to every pulse beat. To this
measure the time values of all others bore a constant ratio. But such a system as
this, if strictly carried out, would be as apt to increase as to decrease such
irregularities as are here under consideration; and modern musicians having set
aside the normal pulse beat, find their absolute standard in the metronome or in
the number of quarter notes per minute.147
Sears, perhaps correctly, believed that words and pulse no longer held sway in the
understanding of musical time, since this past epistemology was palpably absent in the
procedures of experimental psychologists. But Sears also implied that even Bach, with
only his meager pulse as reference, would be rhythmically “irregular” using such
primitive, non-chronographic techniques. For Sears, the metronome clearly offered the
modern improvement on this old practice—a more exacting tool that simply reduced the
temporal irregularities of all music performance to “the number of quarter notes per
minute,” regardless of musical meter, phrase, harmony, or form. Sears recognized,
however, that Bach lived in a different musical “time” than the modern scientist or music
student.
Sears only roughly paraphrased the more significant statement from Kufferath, a
music pedagogue and theorist who did not fully conform to Sears’ chronographic bias. In
the 1900 Music article “Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony,” Kufferath stated that past
practices of musical time were indeed rapidly waning—to the detriment of music
performance—and that new metronomic methods were lacking by comparison.
According to Kufferath the heartbeat was the sufficient, standardized, and appropriate
reference of musical time for an age long since past, for performance practices long since
forgotten, and “in abandoning as a point of comparison, and as a unit of movement, the
147 Ibid., 40-1.
303
normal beat of the pulse, we have abandoned a principle absolute, precise and universal,
which the metronome only imperfectly replaces.”148
Kufferath recognized that a value
shift had clearly taken place in culture: the metronome, once merely a supplement to the
general understanding of musical pulse and meter, had become the primary means of
dictating and defining musical rhythm in the modern age. Speaking for traditional
performance practices, Kufferath, perhaps ironically, found the automatical machine to
be “imperfect” against the living, variable heartbeat.
While the metronome may have been an imperfect replacement for those who
understood past performance practices, it seems that the new proponents of metronomic
action, those with a chronographic bias, became practically ignorant of the physical,
internal, and subjective qualities of time once valued by past performance culture.149
By
the turn of the century, scientists increasingly subsumed rhythms of the body to
clockwork until human pulse and movement contained little of the value that Kufferath,
and many other musicians throughout the nineteenth century, described as being essential
to music performance.
Wundt promoted this trend—the devaluation of an internalized sense of time
perception—in the 1890s, when he retracted his published theory that walking furnished
148 M. Kufferath, “Rhythm, Melody, and Harmony,” Music XVII (Nov., 1899-Apr., 1900): 38.
149
Recall that Marin Mersenne, in the early seventeenth century, reported that the heartbeat of a
healthy individual might offer a gauge for the time of day: “Some maintain that one can tell what
time it is by the movement of the pulse. The pulse quickens its movement from midnight on or
from six o'clock in the morning until noon.” See Marin Mersenne, Traite' de l'harmonie
universelle ou est conteu la Musique Theoretique et pratique (Paris, 1627); John Bernard Egan,
“Critical translation of the second book” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1962), 43-44.
304
a conceptual basis for rhythm.150
Likewise, Jaques-Dalcroze, in stark contrast to
Kufferath, had found the heartbeat to be “a matter of unconscious activity, independent of
the will, and therefore valueless for the purposes of execution and perception of rhythm”
by 1907.151
Jaques-Dalcroze, who seemed to be highly informed by the rhythmic studies
of experimental psychologists, eventually admitted in his 1915 article “Music, Joy, and
the School” that past epistemologies of rhythm and performance had effectively receded
from public knowledge, stating, “Rhythm is the basis of all vital, scientific, and artistic
phenomena…And yet we have long ceased to scan verses by means of bodily movement,
and rhythm has become a purely intellectual conception.”152
It cannot go unnoticed that
Jaques-Dalcroze considered that one, absolute “Rhythm” grounded both scientific and
artistic pursuits, just as it had in Wundt’s laboratory through the chronographic method.
As analyzed in Chapter VI, Jaques-Dalcroze, in order to solve the modern problems of
rhythm, applied Wundt’s psychological-chronographic values to train students in a new
automatical type of “bodily movement.”
Similarly revoking the physicality of human rhythm in favor of chronography,
Mary Hallock questioned whether musicians (in their capacity as composers primarily)
ever judged musical time in relation to something as ephemeral and imprecise as the
150 See Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 355: “Stumpf (Tonpsychologie, i., 340) remarks that
‘our sense of time and rhythm appears to have developed, for the most part, in walking,’ and
quotes Wundt (Phys. Psych., 2d ed., 1880, ii., 286) to the effect that the time-period which is
most accurately reproducible in idea is practically identical with the time required for a
movement of the leg in rapid walking. Wundt, however, gives up the fact, and the theory based
upon it, in his later editions (cf. ii., 1880, 287 f. ; ii., 1887, 354; ii., 1893, 416), though he still
regards bodily movement as the ultimate source of the rhythmical impression (ii., 1893, 91 ; cf.
84).”
151 Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, “The Initiation into Rhythm,” in Rhythm, Music, and Education,
translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 81.
152
Jaques-Dalcroze, “Music, Joy, and the School,” (1915) in Rhythm, Music, and Education, 171.
305
human pulse or poetic meter. Her works were cited, reviewed, and republished
throughout the decade in sources as varied as The Medical News (1905)153
and The
Metaphysical Magazine (1907).154
Hallock’s sparse article “Pulse and Rhythm” (1903) in
particular seems to have resonated with the public. In 1903, The American Monthly
Review of Reviews reflected on her strictly scientific, drastically revised interpretation of
musical time:
Are musical composers unconsciously guided by the beat of the pulse? This
question, long a matter of curious speculation, may some day be scientifically
answered by the aid of modern instruments and accumulated data. Many
interesting facts bearing on the problem are presented by Miss Mary Hallock in
the September number of the Popular Science Monthly. Commenting on the fact
that the scientific study of rhythm, so far as man is concerned, has been
approached almost wholly from the side of its conjunction with literature, this
writer says: “Looked at from that side, it is not strange that the testimony could
never be mathematically exact and emphatic.”155
The exacting mathematical-mechanical regulation of human activity stemmed exclusively
from scientists’ chronographic bias and apparatus. As Hallock recognized, this scientific
search for mechanically accurate rhythm—proven in the laboratory through
mathematically averaged and “accumulated data”—fundamentally conflicted with
traditional, experiential concepts of pulse and poetic rhythm. The reviewer continues to
quote Hallock, her exclusively scientific methodology of creativity, and what was
increasingly becoming modern civilization’s myopic view of human action in mechanical
time:
153 J. R. Baird, “Pulse in Verbal Rhythm,” The Medical News, July 29, 1905, 225. The
correspondent commented upon Hallock’s article in Poets Lore.
154
Mary Hallock Greenewalt, “The Correspondence of Pulse and Rhythm,” The Metaphysical
Magazine XXI (May-Dec., 1907): 378.
155
Albert Shaw, ed., “Pulse and Rhythm,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews XXVIII
(July-Dec., 1903): 487.
306
“The only data which are of sufficient accuracy to prove that the rhythmic
phenomena of pulse first impressed on our consciousness that which can
accurately be called rhythm, are to be found in the metronomic denotations of
musical compositions. It is there, and there only, that the brain has been able
systematically to externalize the rhythm most natural to it with a sense of method
and order approximating instrumental exactitude, and capable of an exact
expression and measure in number. These furnish only a trace, but a trace
sufficient when one keeps in mind the havoc that conscious intellect can always
play with things strictly natural.”156
When those with the chronographic bias interpreted the rhythm of human action, their
assessments often reduced to “too fast or too slow,” “too long or too short” against rigid
mechanical standards. In her article “The Correspondence of Pulse and Rhythm,”
Hallock’s interpretation of rhythm confirmed this modern epistemology, in which metric
pulse and rhetorical gesture ceased to be primary qualities of musical time. The
metronome alone provided the answers to the unwavering tempo of compositions and
performances; the human pulse merely reflected an imperfect chronographic regulator.
While she admitted that musical beats could not often be strictly timed to the actual
second-ticks of a clock,157
Hallock unquestioningly believed that musical time was
strictly bound to the modern, mechanical minute—not physical pulse or movement—and
that metronomic gradations within that objective minute supplied the absolute rule of
rhythm, for hymns and popular tunes composed long before the metronome ever existed:
156 Ibid.
157
“If with the eye fixed on the second-hand of a watch or a clock the long meter doxology be
sung, every one of the equally accented notes entering simultaneously with the tick of each
consecutive second, it will become at once apparent that the melody is delivered at a rhythmic
rate of sixty beats to the minute. Should one in the same breath hum ‘Yankee-doodle,’ sounding
each of its accented notes, at the same rate, it will be found that these two melodies, standing at
the extremes of the sublime and the ridiculous, the one in character slow, the other fast, the first
combining the utmost dignity and breadth, the second ludicrously vapid and thoughtless, are both
set to precisely the same length of rhythmic time by the clock.” See Hallock, “The
Correspondence of Pulse and Rhythm,” 379. Reprint from Popular Science Monthly.
307
The impression of slowness or rapidity in the music is due rather to the character
of the context and the number of notes to be played in the divisions within the
[mechanical] minute than to the actual clock time [in sixty mechanical seconds] it
takes to perform the rhythmic unit.158
Hallock, it is important to note, was a conservatory-trained pianist, teacher, and by one
Who’s Who account, a highly inventive performer.159
Her writings expose how strongly
scientific values influenced Western education, industry, and performance culture at the
turn of the century. Indeed, the epistemology of Scripture, Bolton, and Sears—originating
in Wundt’s “rhythmical” experiments—were not confined to laboratories or scientific
journals alone. By the twentieth century, their chronographic bias had invaded public
education and consequently modern society, as seen in the works of William Patterson,
Carl Emil Seashore, and most notably Jaques-Dalcroze. The scientific interpretation of
rhythm became an essential standard in the creative arts, promoted in a series of general-
interest texts and periodicals. Meanwhile past practices and epistemologies of time and
rhythm became obscured and devalued in the face of mechanical objectivity.
In another of Hallock’s articles, “Pulse in Verbal Rhythm” (1905), scientific
values clearly dominate her modern music pedagogy—following a cultural-societal trend
further explored in Chapters VI and VII. And similar to scientists such as Sears, Hallock
reconsidered a musician’s variable expression in time—a living practice that she could
not realistically deny—with absolute reference to the performance techniques of musical
automata:
158 Ibid., 379.
159
See John William Leonard, ed., Women’s Who’s Who of America, 1914-1915 (New York: The
American Commonwealth Company, 1914), 343. Sometime between 1912 and 1914, she was
“first to arrange and utilize a color lighting accompaniment shifting with every phase [phrase?] of
music in sympathy with the feeling and mood.”
308
No demonstration is needed to show that at discretion each unit of time between
these accented syllables may be made faster or slower at will. In music this
shifting of the [metronomic] tempo is the spice of interpretation. One who
inclines his attention to the pianola has told me that change in the tempo lever
alone made expression; whereas change in the intensity lever alone did not.160
At
one moment we may feel like humming a few bars of a Brahms Rhapsody at the
rate of seventy-six beats to the minute, again at eighty and again at eighty-eight in
whatever motion may best fill the mood of the moment.
These time rates are mathematically gaugeable by an instrument in
universal use among musicians called the metronome.161
When once only scientists misapprehended musical time, by the turn of the century, some
trained musicians such as Hallock were making an effort to perform under the strict
guidance of metronomic impressions. Corresponding to the rise of chronographic values
in culture, the Medical News suggested that any bodily reference to musical time
represented an exception—an almost mythical performance practice—to the now
mechanical standard of modern performance, citing that, “Miss Hallock calls attention to
160 The fact cannot go unremarked that pianolas (player-pianos)—in order to sound more
lifelike—were constructed so that the human manipulator could smoothly vary volume and tempo
at any point in the piano-roll performance, accelerating and decelerating the music at his will
without the audible reference or regulation of a metronome.
Despite pianola-performers’ ability to display an artificial sense of tempo rubato and
expressive playing, a unique treatise from 1922 entitled The Art of the Player-Piano offered a
rhythmic-training exercise directly inspired by psychologists’ now-typical attention experiments.
Sydney Grew’s “text-book for student and teacher” instructs non-musical pianola manipulators:
“The clear steady ticking of a clock helps counting. A metronome is better than a
clock, because the speed of its beats can be varied.
A clock seems to tick naturally in duple-time — tick-tack, tick-tack. But by
concentration we can make the clock present its ticks in triple-time, quadruple-time, six-
time, and even in five-time. Our metrical sense develops quickly when we train it so to
accentuate the ticking of the clock. The metronome can, by means of its adjustable bell,
be made to mark off metrical groups of two, three, four, and six.”
See Sydney Grew, The Art of the Player-Piano (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.,
1922), 32.
161
Mary Hallock, “Pulse in Verbal Rhythm,” Poet Lore 16 (1905): 80. Regardless of Hallock’s
assertions, music publications seldom, if ever, printed metronome marks for each variable,
interpretative moment described by Hallock’s performance practice.
309
the fact that from the earliest times there has been an impression abroad in many minds
that rhythm in music was somehow associated with the pulse beat of ordinary human
existence. This idea has been repudiated as visionary.”162
For a modern age in which scientific methods and chronographic biases reigned,
the idea that the pulse could somehow reference musical rhythm seemed entirely
speculative, unfathomable even. In “An Experimental Study of Musical Enjoyment”
(1912), Harry Porter Weld extensively documented his subjects’ physical reactions and
mental visualizations to a variety of music recordings, and certified:
Our negative correlation between pulse and tempo is in opposition with the views
of Riemann and of Steinitzer, both of whom assumed that the normal pulse is the
criterion by reference to which we estimate rapidity or slowness of tempo. Indeed
Hallock has carried this so far as to compute [through printed metronome
markings] the normal heart-rate of Beethoven from an analysis of his sonatas. But
we have wholly failed to find any correlation between rhythm or tempo and pulse.
In musical productions the length of the rhythmic group varies in consequence of
acceleration, retardation, rubato, pause, forced accenting of tones: the pulse does
not respond to these variations.163
In documenting the reactions of passive auditors, Weld failed to recognize not only the
differing concepts and qualities between musical tempo and rhythm, but that the “forced
accenting of tones” represented the active performer’s continual, albeit variable sense of
pulse in metered music. He (and not Riemann) mistakenly assumed that the musician’s
162 “Special Article. Byways of Medical Literature.—XVII. Pulse Beats and Musical Rhythm,”
Medical News, Sept. 26, 1903, 622. APS Online.
163
Harry Porter Weld, “An Experimental Study of Musical Enjoyment,” The American Journal of
Psychology 23 (Apr., 1912): 253. Weld did recognize, however, that the musical sense could not
be captured through mere clockwork quantification, that more complex processes of sensory
perception and physical actualization were involved which could not be defined through
traditional rhythmic-attention experiments. Weld states: “Our introspections reveal the fact that
the ‘music consciousness’ is made up of a mass of kinaesthetic and organic sensations, motor,
vocal-motor, auditory and visual imagery, numerous associations many of which are irrelevant,
affective and emotional processes, and various phenomena which have to do with intellectual
enjoyment.”
310
reference to the beating pulse should equate to a precise chronographic regulator, applied
over the course of an entire performance. Not surprisingly, Weld’s modern psychological
laboratory contained the industry-standard recording equipment: “the kymograph was so
adjusted that the drum made one complete revolution in five minutes. A time line,
marking seconds, was recorded upon the drum by means of a fourth tambour which was
actuated by a metronome; the metronome stood in an adjoining room, and every care was
taken to make our apparatus as nearly noiseless as possible.”164
Even though Weld
faithfully maintained a chronographic bias, in which the subject’s heart- or breath-rate
contained no inherent referential value during the passive exposure to metronomic sound,
he nevertheless approached one inescapable conclusion of living performance:
The human body is not equipped with a physiological metronome, by means of
which tempos are estimated in any constant fashion. The only criterion of tempo
which we employ is an indefinite 'sense of fitness' whose estimate may vary from
time to time without any concomitant variation of heart-rate, of respiration or of
other physiological process. And we estimate tempo in terms of our momentary
ability to make that motor response which seems to be most fitting for the
particular composition which constitutes our stimulus.165
With the rise of scientific values based in mechanical objectivity, historical
epistemologies of time and rhythm seemed to wane from the social consciousness; as the
above reports suggest, prior conceptions of time and action receded in favor of the
“progress” that both technology and the chronographic method offered industrialized
164 Ibid., 248.
165
Ibid., 268. He also acknowledges that pre-chronographic epistemologies of musical rhythm
indeed existed: “Musicians have themselves recognized the intimate relation between movement
and music. They have stated that their art is concerned with rest and motion,—or, as Riemann
(28; I) puts it, with rest, motion and rest. Kostlin, quoted by Gross (8; 2 If.), states that music
glides, turns, hops, leaps, jumps, dances, sways, quivers, blusters, and storms, and adds that the
auditor who adequately reproduced its movements in the physical world must become
imponderable or he would be dashed to pieces.” See Weld, 270.
311
civilization. First in laboratory, and then throughout Western society, the subjective pulse
of rhythm ceased beating; it was replaced by the standardized and lifeless metronomic
click.
After experimental psychologists redefined rhythm as an absolute law of attention
and action to passive metronomic exposure, chronographic actualization became their
prescription for modern society at large. No longer for laboratory experiments on mental
perception and physical response, performances in scientific “rhythm” became a new
goal of education and aesthetics in the twentieth century. Patterson’s text The Rhythm of
Prose, while offering perhaps the most lucid and extensive survey of the many
contemporaneous (and often conflicting) meanings of rhythm, clearly exposes that
scientific values of time and action directly transferred into the realm of twentieth-
century cultural thought. Indeed, Wundt’s laboratory experiments defined Patterson’s
artistic “rhythm,” in what this scientific pedagogue considered “The New Standard”166
ringing with metronomic regularity. Patterson ascertained, “The ultimate basis of all
rhythmic experience, however, is the same. To be clear-cut, it must rest upon a series of
definite temporal units.”167
As he and other new pedagogues attested, the twentieth-
century “rhythm” of both music and poetry was automatical above all. “When a melody
is played in strict, unvarying metronome time,” Patterson explains, “swing is at its
lowest, and the ‘psychological moment’ for an accent is merely a matter of remembering
166 Patterson, 1.
167
Ibid., xxii.
312
that two and two make four. What is usually meant by swing is really ‘elastic’ swing,
where the simple mathematical relations are complicated for purposes of expression.”168
As performances became viewed through the exactitudes of the chronograph
method, individual expression was now an objective calculation to perform outside the
regulatory rhythm of the metronome. Affirming psychologists’ reinvention of once
physical-musical rhythm, Patterson too devalued subjective interpretation and experience
in performance arts, favoring instead objective, regulated action, in which any audible
sense of pulse and movement—what Patterson alluded to as a non-notated sense of
“swing”169
—became re-envisioned as uncommon, extreme expressions of “rubato”
against chronographic rule:
Compensation figures conspicuously. Time stolen in one place, is repaid in
another. What Riemann calls ‘agogic accent’ (the deliberate addition of length to
a note, instead of stress, in order to give it prominence) and, of course, tempo
rubato (stolen time), belong to this category; so, though it does not seem to be
generally remembered, all effects due to accelerating and retarding the standard
tempo.170
Informed and influenced by experimental psychology, Patterson too considered the
performances of both poetry and music to be scientific acts, in which the passive
response to external mechanical impressions replaced the active, willful interpretation of
artistic rhythm. He continued to promote the modern values of objective time and
efficient action for the creative arts:
168 Ibid., 51.
169
Patterson continued to look for all answers to rhythm and performance in scientific research as
he admitted: “Wundt himself has failed to clarify the final problem of swing, but his insistence on
the importance of the idea of velocity (how fast something is going) is the best beginning we
could have. Probably those persons who are deficient in motor types of mental imagery will never
find a satisfying solution.” See Patterson, 51. Emphasis added.
170
Ibid., 51.
313
To test prose-rhythm, therefore, we do not merely mark the accents with the
ancient classic symbols, and admire, with an optical delight, the “paeonic” or
“dochmaic” pattern presented [in notation]. If rhythm means anything to the
average individual, it means motor response and a sense of organized time. This is
what it means in the playing of flutes, the beating of drums, the singing of songs,
and in dancing.171
Patterson’s monograph, a study of musical as much as spoken time, championed this
“new standard” of time and action informed by chronography, which “is thus established
for passing judgment upon the rhythm of a sentence or paragraph…The new standard has
for its support not so much its apparent novelty, as its subservience to the psychological
facts of individual difference.”172
In Patterson’s claim that rhythm meant “motor
response” to society at-large, the extent to which the values of time had changed in the
cultural consciousness again becomes apparent. In the modern, mechanical age, “mere”
rhythmic notation—which must be subjectively perceived and actualized by the reader—
seemed insufficient and vague, requiring guidance from chronography. In the new
scientific age of the twentieth century, as Patterson implied, the individual’s
psychological response to organized mechanical time was the new, absolute meaning of
rhythm.
Seashore’s Musical Measures
In twentieth-century performance culture, the chronographic bias found one of its greatest
champions in Carl Emil Seashore (1866-1949), psychology professor at the University of
Iowa from 1902 until his death. Seashore’s writings confirm the complete transformation
of musical time to the chronographic paradigm of rhythm and action. Seashore—
171 Ibid., 14.
172
Ibid., 13-14.
314
experienced in administering both child-study tests173
and attention studies174
in the
Wundt tradition—directly promoted the metronomic rhythm of the psychological
laboratory to music educators, scholars, and performers spanning over four decades in
notable journals such as The Musical Quarterly and later the Music Educators Journal,
where his 27-part series on music psychology ran from 1936175
through 1940.176
By Seashore’s account, he and his students had been researching the phenomena
of musical talent in the University of Iowa laboratory as early as 1901,177
and by 1911,
Seashore publicly spoke of an individual singer’s ability for rhythm as a psychological
experiment.178
He reiterated these chronographic values in his early article, “The Measure
of a Singer” (1912), published in the periodical Science:
173 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology,
Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, Vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1904),
153. According to Hall, both Seashore and Meumann were educated in Vierordt’s past
metronomic training methods. By 1899, Seashore had “found that children were able to reproduce
small time intervals of about five seconds pretty accurately at all ages from six to fifteen.
Intervals of ten seconds were shortened to 8.2, those of twenty to 14.4 and those of thirty to 13.5.
From eight or nine years on the improvement in reproducing longer intervals rapidly increased.”
174
Carl E. Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1908), 168.
175
See his earliest articles for the periodical, Carl E. Seashore, “Psychology of Music,” Music
Educators Journal 22 (Mar., 1936): 24-25; and “The Psychology of Music. II. Approaches to the
Experimental Psychology of Music,” Music Educators Journal 22 (May, 1936): 22-23.
176 See his last article, Carl E. Seashore, “Psychology of Music. XXVII. How Do We Express
Specific Emotions in Song?,” Music Educators Journal 27 (Sept., 1940): 38-39+42.
177 Carl E. Seashore, “Scientific Procedure in the Discovery of Musical Talent in the Public
Schools,” Music Supervisor’s Journal 2 (Jan., 1916): 10.
178
He addressed the American Psychological Association in December 1911. See Carl E.
Seashore, “The Measure of a Singer,” Science 35 (1912): 201.
315
While the perception of time is largely associational, we depend ultimately upon
the sensory capacity for the perception of short durations and rhythmic effects.
Rhythm may be expressed through both time and intensity. For a single measure
of the perception of rhythm as a time element, we may eliminate intensity and
measure the least perceptible deviation in the duration of the recurrent sound,
uniform in all respects except duration. This, taken with the measure of intensity-
discrimination, should correlate well with the measure of perception of intensity
in rhythm-accent.179
By 1915, Seashore had brought this epistemology to music educators and performers
through the new periodical The Musical Quarterly. In the first edition of the journal,
Seashore’s article “The Measurement of Musical Talent” reiterates verbatim much of his
previous Science piece, while adding specific documentation on his research methods.180
Over his career, Seashore prescribed ever-greater rhythmical precisions for his musically
inclined readership. In his 1918 Musical Quarterly article “The Sense of Rhythm as a
Musical Talent,” scientific rhythm defined a new quality of musical talent, one
exclusively based on chronographic mimicry. Seashore confirms, “First, the capacity for
rhythm rests upon certain fundamental powers which can be measured serviceably in
various forms by methods now being introduced through experimental psychology.”181
Thus, the sense of rhythm, in Seashore’s pedagogy, became the perception and reaction
to a “true” metronomic-chronographic reference. In the Musical Quarterly, he states
outright the rhythmic epistemology found identically in textbooks by Wundt and
Titchener:
179 Seashore, “The Measure of a Singer,” Science 35 (Feb. 9, 1912): 203-204.
180
Carl Emil Seashore, “The Measurement of Musical Talent,” The Musical Quarterly 1 (Jan.,
1915): 129-148.
181
Carl Emil Seashore, “The Sense of Rhythm as a Musical Talent,” The Musical Quarterly 4
(Oct., 1918): 513.
316
There are two fundamental factors in the perception of rhythm: an instinctive
tendency to group impressions in hearing, and a capacity for doing this with
precision in time and stress. The subjective tendency is so deeply ingrained, on
account of its biological service, that we irresistibly group uniform successions of
sound, such as the tick of the clock, into rhythmic measure.182
Seashore continued to promote scientific traditions of rhythm in his own text The
Psychology of Musical Talent (1919), a culmination of nearly two decades of his own
laboratory research, in which the chronographic bias fully redefined human perception
and action in music performance and education:
The sense of time. The third elemental capacity is the sense of time. This is basic
for all perception of rhythm and for rhythmic action. A limitation in this capacity
for hearing time sets a corresponding limitation upon feeling, thought, and action.
The sense of rhythm. The sense of rhythm rests upon the sense of time, the sense
of intensity, and mental imagery, but it requires in addition a number of affective
and motor qualifications; thus a person may have a keen sense of time and
intensity and still not have a pronounced sense of rhythm. 183
Given that a chronographic apparatus regulated musical time in his laboratory, Seashore
infused the musician’s intentions with mechanical ideals of so many other experimental
psychologists, stating: “The ability to keep time, both vocally and instrumentally, also
rests upon a peculiar gift of precision in action.”184
He verified that inhuman, mechanical
precision became the overriding value for the new musical rhythm in the twentieth
century, and that Wundt’s attention studies now transferred to the fundamentals of music
performance:
182 Ibid., 507.
183
Carl Emil Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent (Boston: Silver, Burdett, and
Company, 1919), 9.
184
Ibid., 11.
317
Musically, the sense of time is the natural capacity for precision in the hearing of
the duration of tones or short time intervals…The perception of musical time is
usually of a motor nature. That is, when we hear the first interval, we respond to it
by projecting ourselves into the thing heard in some form of real or imaged
action, and when the following intervals occur, we either repeat the same real or
imaged movements or match them, as it were, with the one which is being
produced.185
He reiterates the Wundt concept of rhythm as a passive reaction to an external stimulus,
while redefining the “Nature of Rhythm” that was only exposed through chronographic
procedure:
Definition. The sense of rhythm is an instinctive disposition to group recurrent
sense impressions vividly and with precision, by time, or intensity, or both, in
such a way as to derive pleasure and efficiency through the grouping.
A complex process. Rhythm is, thus, not an attribute of sensation, like time and
intensity. It is a complex process and involves literally the whole organism in the
form of responsiveness to measured intervals of time or tone. Rhythm as a whole
presents two fundamental aspects, the perception of rhythm and rhythmic
action.186
Furthering the research of previous psychologists, Seashore envisioned musical time
solely through objective, metronomic impressions, in which the passive subject simply
reacted to external stimulus, either mentally, physically, or both; the value of rhythm thus
became apparent only in a musician’s automatical ability to respond to chronographic
reference. Given these scientific justifications, in which external mechanics regulated
exacting rhythm for internal impulses, Seashore prescribed that correct performances
required the,
Need of precision. It has been said that the appreciation of good music does not
necessarily involve a keen sense of time because musical expression takes
liberties with exact time; but the response to that is that it requires a keen sense of
time to appreciate fully the graceful and artistic deviation from right time. Indeed,
it requires a higher power than that of being merely mechanically exact. Mistakes
185 Ibid.,104-5.
186
Ibid., 115.
318
in time, neglect of time, or irregularity of time cannot per se be regarded as
beautiful. The sense of time is taxed particularly hard in the larger units of
complex rhythms where artistic balances are sought.187
Seashore’s comment yet again reveals the realities of musical performance outside the
laboratory: human “expression takes liberties” in the perception and practice of rhythm
and movement. And yet again, this living reality was redefined for “mistakes” and
“irregularities” against the psychologist’s rigid chronographic bias of exacting
mechanical time and action.
No longer a human sensation or an internally derived quality of movement,
Seashore’s efficient rhythm—regulated with chronographic values—underpinned his new
tests of musical ability. In his laboratory the old time and pulse of musical meter, both
sonically and visually, was entirely effaced in favor of a succession of metronomic
quarter notes. To test a student’s musical memory, Seashore created psychological
examinations in the traditions of Wundt’s attention and fatigue studies: the metronome
ruled and regulated a new, chronographic experiment in the individual’s perception to
sound, now intended for musical training.188
With no indication of meter, affect, accent,
or articulation, these studies bore no relation to compositions or performance practices of
the pre-metronomic tradition. In these new experiments, the clockwork metronome,
which Seashore advised should beat at 94 to the minute, became the new chronograph of
musical ability for twentieth-century education.
187 Ibid., 114.
188
Over the course of his career, Seashore devised and published many musical-psychological
examinations that are beyond the scope for the present study.
319
Fig. 4.9. Seashore’s musical-memory test, in which the metronome served as temporal constant, a
chronographic regulator during this experimental procedure that entirely effaced the physical sensation of
pulse, meter, accent, or musical phrase. Standard time signatures, relating traditional musical pulse, were
completely discarded in Seashore’s notation as well. The subject—as in other chronographic experiments
testing memory, fatigue, or attention—passively absorbed and reacted to the sound series defined by the
monotonous clicks of the metronome. This test was one of many that Seashore used to quantify “musical
talent” in controlled laboratory settings. Printed in Carl Emil Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent
(Boston: Silver, Burdett, and Company, 1919), 244.
320
The Conclusions in Conflicting “Rhythm”
Somewhat ironically, as Seashore promoted experimental psychologists’ methods to the
training of twentieth-century musicians, some experimental psychologists began
expressing great reservations about the Wundt methodology of rhythm, along with the
chronographic study of musicality that followed past lines of experimentation. Some of
these next-generation scientists recognized that the reductive qualities of chronographic
rhythm represented a gross misconception of living practice. Patterson, in The Rhythm of
Prose, explained these critiques of past psychologists and the absolute laws of creative
rhythm that they attempted to expose:
As far back as Meumann, theorists such as Lotze have been accused of confusing
the conventional schedules of musical notation with music itself — the real
succession, not of sounds nor even of sound sensations, but of subjective
“impressions,” with their shifting factors and subtle illusions. It seems all the
more strange, however, that Meumann himself and virtually every one else that
has followed him should ignore, after all these warnings, the full application to
the problem of speech rhythm of what music really is — not what it appears to be
when trammeled by conventional notation; and should fail to see that the
possibilities of acceleration, syncopation, and substitutional equivalence, together
with subjective illusion, quite easily cover, for the sound-organizing type of mind,
every combination of discrete sounds within the ordinary limits of human
sensibility and within the time-limits of grouping distance, experimentally
established. Accordingly, there is no haphazard series of sounds, within these
limits, that cannot be organized by certain minds, when properly attentive, upon a
temporal basis. The problem necessarily remains a matter of individual
difference.189
While Patterson still envisioned rhythmic performance as a passive mental reaction to
external sound, he reported that limited notational data and clockwork sound could never
fully express the realities of musical time—qualities that Seashore and Jaques-Dalcroze
effaced through their metronomic-rhythm exercises and experiments.
Some notable psychologists grew mistrustful of the simplified conclusions
189 Patterson, 45.
321
provided by chronographic research that artificially gauged an individual’s multifaceted
experiences of rhythm. By 1929, psychologist Christian A. Ruckmick, perhaps the most
outspoken skeptic of previous rhythmic studies, had expressed reservations about his
colleagues’ chronographic methods as they mistranslated musical time on the grounds
that:
We cannot summarily remove the rhythmical pattern from the melodic and
harmonic relationships that surround it…But since [the scientific study of]
attention for the moment centers chiefly on the temporal pattern of the rhythm as
a unit we ordinarily neglect for the most part these conditioning factors. An
elaboration of this thought means also, for example, that a rhythm perceived in
any one sensory field like the auditory field is not exactly the same in all of its
relationships as the same temporal form that is perceived in some other sensory
field. Strictly speaking, an auditory rhythm announced by a musical instrument is
not the same rhythm that is visually presented in the score.190
In a footnote to his article “The Rhythmical Experience from the Systematic Point of
View,” Ruckmick voiced this obvious discrepancy between objective notation and
subjective performance—one already expressed by experienced nineteenth-century
musicians: “It therefore follows that the reading of rhythms from score can not be
systematically identified with rhythms that are heard from musical instruments.”191
In
other words, living musical rhythm did not reflect laboratory performances in which
chronographic time precisely and mathematically dictated each distinct, printed note
value—the very hallmark of Wundt’s “rhythmic” conception.
In a sense Ruckmick began to uncover the pre-metronomic underpinnings of
rhythm. All rhythmic notations must be interpreted with non-notated phenomena, yet
psychologists since Wundt had been solely relying upon the metronomic click for their
190 Christian A. Ruckmick, “The Rhythmical Experience from the Systematic Point of View,” The
American Journal of Psychology 39 (Dec., 1927): 366.
191
Ruckmick, 366, n17.
322
rhythmical interpretations. Experienced musicians, as Ruckmick recognized, used
subjective references during concert performances, which were far less controlling or
consistent than the machines employed in the mechanical laboratory. Questioning the
entire purpose of most previous scientific studies on rhythmic perception, Ruckmick
conjectured, “This opens up a long avenue of experiments on what actually occurs in the
reading of rhythms from score and their concomitant production through musical
instruments.”192
As Ruckmick ascertained, the entire tradition of experimental
psychology—spanning, at the time of his publication, over 50 years—based rhythm on
wholly impractical procedures. He concluded that rhythmic “analysis anywhere along the
line of mental processes will always remain, under the category of a science, an artificial
procedure,”193
one entirely unrelated to living, creative action.
As early as 1899, Scripture had also recognized that the laboratory rhythm of the
metronome and musical rhythm in living performance were two distinct epistemologies
of time and movement. In the periodical Science, he concluded, “Two entirely different
forms of regularly repeated action are to be distinguished. In one form the subject is left
free to repeat the movement at any interval he may choose. This includes such activities
as walking, running, rowing, beating time, and so on.” 194
The second form was dictated
through external, metronomic means. (Significantly, he still described individuals with
chronographically unfettered actions as laboratory subjects “left free” to act as
unscientifically as they wished.) Scripture admitted to the complex problems of so-called
192 Ibid.
193
Ibid.
194
Scripture, “Observations on Rhythmic Action,” 807.
323
free human rhythms, problems that seldom seemed to conform to the limits of mechanical
“regularity.” He reflected, “not only does every simple activity have its own natural
rhythms; combinations of activities have rhythms that are derived from the simpler
ones…The natural periods do not always correspond with the enforced periods.”195
In The Rhythm of Prose, Patterson too commented, “Rhythmic experience is so
complex, and individuals differ so largely in the enjoyment of it, that a new phrasing of
its meaning would be necessary for each person, in order to avoid errors of inaccurate
generalization.”196
Patterson admitted that experimental psychologists had no complete
answer for the subjective meanings of musical time. Indeed, inaccurate generalizations
appeared everywhere in the rhythm tests of Meumann, Bolton, and Scripture. Patterson
paraphrased Paul Verrier’s tracts on poetic rhythm, Essai sur les principles de la
metrique anglaise (1909-1919) and “Les variations temporelles du rythme,” which
confirmed, “The equality of time-intervals is an illusion. The individual rhythm of the
speaker adapts itself to the fluctuations of sentiment without giving the impression of
being unrhythmical. Rhythm is pleasing when it coincides with an individual’s inner
rhythm, which in itself is subject to variations.”197
Verrier’s work also suggested that
“natural” rhythm was the antithesis of chronography. In 1923, a reviewer for Modern
Language Notes verified scientists’ failure to define the living rhythm of spoken
195 Ibid., 811.
196
Paterson, 88.
197
Ibid., 35. See also P. Verrier, Essai sur les principles de la metrique anglaise, III (Paris, 1909-
1919), 63; and “Les variations temporelles du rythme,” Journal de Psy. Norm. et Path. I (1913):
18.
324
performances solely through seemingly precise evidence culled from apparatuses and
printed notation:
Regular rhythm in versification is a useful figure to designate a succession of
equal time-units and a consequent regular recurrence of the verse-stresses; but
language has characteristics of utterance and movement that set its rhythm free
from the strict requirements of regular rhythm as described in the physical
laboratory.198
Paull Franklin Baum, a contemporary of both Patterson and Verrier and who was
influenced by their writings, also recognized that laboratory rhythm was incommensurate
with the time of poetry and music, which originated in the subjective and creative acts of
speech and movement. Highly critical of the metronomic methodology currently
employed in analyzing poetic meter and instructing students, Baum expressed the fallacy
behind the limited, reductive rhythm championed by the chronographically biased in his
text The Principles of English Versification (1922). In his first chapter, Baum
distinguishes the various concepts and sensations that fall under the single, entirely vague
term “rhythm,” which can apply to both spatial and sonic patterns.199
“Rhythm, in its
simplest sense,” Baum notes, “is measured motion” and its essential characteristic is not
a priori mechanical repetition, but a “regularity of variation. Whatever changes or
alternates according to a recognizable system is said to be rhythmic, to posses rhythm.”200
Guided by this epistemology, Baum considered that the species of “temporal
rhythms…manifest themselves to us as phenomena of sound; hence the two concepts
time-rhythm and sound-rhythm are commonly thought of as one and the same.” Oddly,
198 J. W. B., “Brief Mention,” Modern Language Notes 38 (Feb., 1923): 127.
199
Paull Franklin Baum, The Principles of English Versification, Third edition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1924), 4.
200
Ibid., 3.
325
while he speaks of images, architecture, and printed points as being rhythmic, Baum
neglected silent, visual motion—such as witnessed in a simple pendulum—as an
important reference of rhythm. Yet, he fully understood that the sound-rhythm of music
was a far more complicated phenomenon than could be heard through clockwork:
The simplest form [of sound-rhythm] is the tick-tick-tick of a watch or
metronome. But such mechanical regularity is comparatively rare, and in general
the temporal rhythms are all highly complex composites of sounds and silences.
Their highest manifestations are music and language.201
In order to explain the complexities of creative temporal rhythm more fully, Baum
separated the actualization of musical performance from rigid scientific procedures—
while ironically employing a chronographic analogy:
Thus we have always at hand both a more or less efficient bodily metronome in
the pulse and in respiration, and also a “cerebral metronome” capable not only of
easy adjustment to different rates of speed but also of that subtlest of modulations
which psychologists call the ‘elastic unit,’ and which musicians, though not so
definitely or surely, recognize as tempo rubato.202
Acknowledging that rubato was an as-of-yet indefinite and unquantifiable musical
quality, Baum also recognized, like William James and countless philosophic minds
before him, that the variable phenomenon of rhythm constituted a subjective sense, and
201 Ibid., 4-5.
202 Baum, 14. In instructing poets on meter, Baum suggests that regularity of rhythm—grounded
by this “internal metronome”—must balance unordered, rhythmic chaos: “While the formal
pattern remains fixed and inflexible, over its surface may be embroidered variations of almost
illimitable subtlety and change; but always the formal pattern must be visible, audible. The poet's
skill lies largely in preserving a balance of the artistic principles of variety in uniformity and
uniformity in variety. Once he lets go the design, he loses his metrical rhythm and writes mere
prose. Once we cease to hear and feel the faint regular beating of the metronome we fail to get the
enjoyment of sound that it is the proper function of metre to give. On the other hand, if the
mechanical design stands out too plainly, if the beat of the metronome becomes for an instant
more prominent than the music of the words, then also the artistic pleasure is gone, for too much
uniformity is as deadly to art as too much variety.” Ibid., 54-55.
Similar to Paderewski’s and Marx’s statements of nineteenth-century creativity, Baum
contended: “No poet ever wrote to a metronome accompaniment.” Ibid., 66.
326
that “The sense of rhythm, as has been said, differs remarkably in different individuals—
just as the sense of touch, of smell, of hearing.”203
And this non-mechanical, variable
feeling for rhythm, as most experienced musicians had expressed for decades (if not
centuries), was heard through the musical meter and phrasing of skilled solo and
ensemble performances:
Very few of us can estimate correctly the passage of five minutes: syllables are
uttered in a few hundredths of a second. We are satisfied with the accuracy shown
by an orchestra in keeping time; but if we took a metronome to the concert we
should find the orchestra very deficient in its sense of time. The fact is that the
orchestra knows better than the metronome, that perfectly accurate time intervals
become unpleasantly monotonous, that we rebel at ‘mechanical’ music. Thus the
time divisions of pleasurable rhythm are not mathematically equal, nor even
necessarily approximately equal, but are such as are felt to be equal.204
Baum’s rhythmic conception was in stark opposition to Scripture’s assessments from the
previous century on the “regular,” chronographic ideal for orchestral performances and
performers. As Baum confirmed, the living feeling of creative rhythm, in both musical
and poetic time, could not be fully explained, intuited, or expressed through the
metronome or psychologists’ chronographic bias.
P. F. Swindle was one of the first prominent skeptics of the scientific knowledge
of “rhythm” in the field of experimental psychology, and with research that prefigured
Ruckmick and Baum, he offered perhaps the most damning assessments of the
chronographic method as applied to living, rhythmic performances. Swindle tested his
subjects’ abilities to physically perform uncommon rhythmic patterns in five, seven, and
203 Ibid. Baum theorized on the experiential rhythm of verbal performances and offered a
conclusion significant for musical performances as well: “Language is therefore a compound
instrument of both sound and meaning, and speech-rhythm, in its fullest sense, is a composite
resultant of the attributes of sound (duration, intensity, and pitch) modified by the logical and
emotional content of the words and phrases which they represent.” See Baum, 10.
204
Ibid., 57.
327
eleven “impressions” and concluded similarly to Verrier and later Baum about the
sensory phenomena of rhythm. As reported in his American Journal of Psychology article
“On the Inheritance of Rhythm” (1913), Swindle realized that the human capacity for
rhythm could not be relegated to mental perception and reaction time alone, nor could it
be exposed through artificial laboratory machines and methods:
All experimental evidence seems to point to the conclusion that rhythm is
acquired by each individual, and that it is not inherited. Biological conditions—
for example, the anatomical fact that we are two-footed, two-handed, and
generally two-sided, not three-cornered or star-fish like beings—are favorable for
the development of those rhythms which have usually been considered to be
instinctive, while the other rhythms can be acquired only under special, somewhat
artificial conditions. The best means for developing rhythm is that which
approaches our ordinary life activities.205
Humans acquire rhythm, Swindle asserts, through lived action and experience, not
through precise, external controls or unaccustomed chronographic training—and thus he
expressed an epistemology shared with skilled musicians of earlier centuries. While
testing his subjects for the inherent “agreeability” of performing rhythm in uncommon
seven-patterns, Swindle found:
As to the preferred tempo [of the experiment] I found that there was a wide
disagreement among the individuals, and that some individuals preferred different
tempos from day to day.206
Given his belief that rhythm stems from basic physical actions, Swindle was highly
critical of Jaques-Dalcroze’s modern pedagogy, which seemingly inculcated artificial and
extreme precisions of rhythmic action upon young students.207
Using what Swindle
205 P. F. Swindle, “On the Inheritance of Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 24 (Apr.,
1913): 202.
206
Ibid., 192.
207
Ibid., 199.
328
recognized as the “counting method,” Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics promoted a new
kind of rhythm, one more allied with psychologists’ chronographic experiments, in which
regulated, mathematically gauged performance acts ingrained a new quality of
mechanized action upon his trainees.208
How little these scientific-mathematical
processes had to do with pre-chronographic musical aesthetics is prefigured by A. B.
Marx in General musical instruction (1839). Criticizing the average, amateur music
education, Marx reflects:
With every new composition, this misery of counting, beating, and stamping
begins afresh, until a mechanical habit of equality is formed, instead of a living
feeling for equal and uniform measure and its expression. It is unfortunately too
true, that most musicians are content with the sense and capacity for mechanical
equality of measure,—for the cold inanimate beat; and consider the rich and
living rhythmical feeling as superfluous.209
Seventy-four years later, Swindle posited that if an individual’s sense for rhythm usually
conflicted with mechanical-mathematical training methods, and if lived experience and
the very structure of the body “is at the basis of rhythmic perception,” then,
The time element in all rhythm should be expected to vary. General agreement as
to tempo would be truly remarkable. The time required to execute the movements,
the time between the movements, the tempo, etc., should make such fluctuations
as can be accounted for only when the nature of the environment that called forth
the rhythm is well known.210
Due to previous psychologists’ neglect of the empirical rhythm outside of the laboratory,
or the rhythms originating in human movement itself, Swindle goes so far as to suggest
that all previous psychological investigations into rhythm were founded on false
208 Ibid., 201-2.
209
Adolf Bernhard Marx, Allgemeine Musiklehre (Leipzig, 1839); English edition, General
Musical Instruction, translated by George Macirone (London: J. Alfred Novello, 1854), 120.
Italics original.
210
Swindle., 193.
329
premises: “It appears at this stage more evident than ever that the more important
problems [of rhythmic perception and action] heretofore investigated may be looked
upon as pseudo-problems.”211
Swindle conjectured that if his findings were accurate, if
individual difference in interpreting and actualizing rhythm was indeed the norm and not
an error of the personal equation, then the entire endeavor of chronographic rhythm-study
was a futile attempt at fruitless knowledge. In brief, the human actualization of “true”
metronomic “rhythm” was pseudo-science.
Swindle’s assessments—along with the many other critiques of laboratory
“rhythm” presented in this study—should raise further questions: Did Meumann, Bolton,
Sears, Scripture, and Seashore conclusively reveal the once-hidden psychological laws of
rhythm? Through their efforts, did they discover an underlying science of poetic and
musical time? Or, rather, did they invent new laws, machines, and practices that served
the purposes of their experiments and beliefs alone? Did their observations and
chronographic data benefit already-experienced composers and performers, offering them
a greater understanding of their own actions and thoughts? Or, rather, did these
psychologists support an opposing value system that, since the founding of Wundt’s
laboratory, modern scientists had invested a great deal of time, energy, and money
promoting; a value system they staked their individual careers and reputations on; a value
system that upheld fellow scientists’ authority over self-defined aesthetic truths while
devaluing the creative individual’s intelligence, ability, and experience? Under the
chronographic bias, experimental psychologists mistranslated musical rhythm through a
scientific tradition that began only with chronographic testing, a tradition that justified
diminishing creative personal interpretation through methods that dictated the time of
211 Ibid., 193.
330
musical performance no differently than the time of a labor-fatigue test or an
astronomical observation.
While certain scientists in the second decade of the twentieth century began
seriously questioning the Wundt methodology of rhythm, the traditions and techniques of
chronography expanded through the writings of Seashore, who aggressively promoted
Wundt’s science to new generations of twentieth-century musicians and educators
through 1945. Indeed, Seashore can be considered the culmination of the experimental-
psychology tradition—a prominent purveyor of the reconceived qualities of musical time,
rhythm, and individual musicality for Western performance culture. Just as Meumann
and Bolton disassociated human music-making from the other subjective speech or dance
practices—allying rhythmical action instead with a series of passive technical actions
unrelated to living thought, expression, or volition—so did Seashore, a self-styled and
highly published musical pedagogue, reduce the once-creative act of performing music to
mechanical-mathematical factors and efficiently reproducible actions, all under the
objective guise of a scientific method. Two years after Swindle questioned the entire use
of psychologists’ previous “rhythmic” research, Seashore expounded upon Wundt’s
original methodology in the first edition of The Musical Quarterly (1915)—where he
devalued the creative, musical mind in favor of his chronographic procedures:
[Musical] Talent, like the dream, has been thought of as peculiarly illusive and
intangible for observation. Yet the science of individual psychology to-day
virtually "dissects" the genius, analyzes and measures talents, sets out limitations,
diagnoses the possibilities, and directs the development of the individual.212
Seashore, propounding the revolutionary aesthetics first cultivated in Wundt’s Leipzig
laboratory, treated the creative musician—the individual thinker and performer,
212 Seashore, “The Measurement of Musical Talent,” 129-130.
331
unencumbered by scientific tools such as the metronome—as mere, lacking in the
essential knowledge bestowed only through psychological experimentation. Seashore
summarized his scientific culture:
Scientific psychology has given us an approach, a tool, a vision…The mere artist
views talent as we view the starlit heavens on a moonlight stroll; the one who
begins to control conditions, to employ instruments, and to apply scientific
principles (inductive and deductive) and measures, views human talents as the
astronomer views the heavenly bodies.
The astronomer magnifies distances, intensifies illuminations, analyzes the
atmospheres, reviews the records of ages, trusts his instruments and gives wings
to scientific imagination; he measures, predicts, and explains; and with it all his
visible universe grows larger, more orderly, and more sublime…The expert in the
measurement of human talents has similar opportunities. The stars form a
macrocosm; the powers of the human mind are a microcosm. Both are orderly.
Astronomy is old; the science of the human mind is barely coming into existence.
The psychology of music is a new field, quite unworked, but full of promise and
fascinating possibilities.213
Seashore, one of the first self-assigned music psychologists, was not the first to envision
the “promise and possibilities” of reducing musicians’ actions through clockwork
quantification. As we have seen, the work of Meumann, Bolton, Scripture, Ebhardt,
Sears, and others set the stage for Seashore and his chronographic prescriptions for
modern music education throughout North America. Ever since Wundt transferred the
sound of the metronome into traditional music notation, experimental psychologists
indeed perceived the phenomena of musicality like astronomers’ observations of prior
decades, applying chronographic automatons to measure and efface the personal
equation. Seashore’s epistemology of time and human action, originating in Wundt’s
laboratory, was like nothing that skilled musicians of the nineteenth century exercised;
his chronographic variety of musical time flourished in laboratories decades before most
professional musicians ever embraced the aesthetics of mechanically regulated
213 Ibid., 148.
332
performances on the concert stage. Only within the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, did these scientists begin applying astronomers’ chronographic time to the
rhythm of trained musicians, in research that eventually influenced the pedagogies of
music, dance, and speech with new values of time and action.
The musician’s innate experience had no place in most psychologists’ mechanical
epistemology of performance. In scientists’ culture of efficient, replicable action,
mechanical readouts and metronomic controls trumped the lived, individual perceptions
of musical rhythm. Since experimental psychologists, as a whole, had a seemingly
passive and second-rate understanding of both music theory and practice, it is perhaps not
surprising that neither Wundt nor his followers ever fully explained the laws of the truly
skilled performers, composers, or improvisers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
traditions—a glaring fact alluded to by skeptical scientists such as Swindle and
Ruckmick. Considering the vast body of research they produced on the science of
“rhythm,” experimental psychologists offered no definitive answers, no chronographic or
mathematical absolutes for the exceptional minds of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt,
Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, or many others. Wundt and his
followers neglected the compositions and performances of musical “artists” spanning
their age, those creative individuals who did not conform to the reductive, mechanical
paradigms found exclusively in experimental psychologists’ laboratories.
While ignoring skilled music performers as they truly existed outside the
laboratory, experimental psychologists’ reinterpretation of rhythm represented a
revolutionary, twofold paradigm shift, a metronomic turn for modern performance
practices: the musician became the observer, a passive subject of a standardized action, as
333
musical notes now represented precise, mathematically gauged objects—outside of the
mind and body, outside of the individual’s will, outside of the personal sense of pulse—to
be observed against exacting chronographic-metronomic regulation. First in the
chronographic laboratory, musical performance became a mental-physical experiment of
mechanically efficient, exacting, and reproducible action. Identical to astronomers’
record of star transits, musicians’ performance of quarter notes, eighth notes, and smaller
units reduced to their passive observation and reaction to a succession of distant, visual
points measured under the absolute rule of chronographic time, Scripture’s “great
independent variable,” the ever-present, uncontrollable “tick-tick-tick” of metronomic
rhythm.
334
CHAPTER V: THE METRONOMIC INFLUENCE
Distraction, Habituation, and Other Human Changes through Metronomic Time
With experimental psychologists using the clockwork metronome as an essential tool in
the research of the mind and body since 1875, it would only be a matter of time for them
to discover the psychological implications machine’s click upon their subjects’ thoughts
and actions. Apart from studying muscular fatigue in metronomic time, memory
recollection in metronomic time, and “rhythmical” perception in metronomic time,
scientists began to methodically test a human’s mental and physical reactions when
exposed to the sound of the metronome itself. Psychological experiments from the late
1880s through the 1930s documented the very real results of mechanical monotony, the
metronome’s clockwork click, upon an individual’s nervous and musculature system. By
the 1920s, behavioral scientists such as Pavlov had confirmed these effects: Maelzel’s
metronome significantly influenced and altered human and animal behavior; it was a
highly effective tool used to stimulate, distract, or habituate the laboratory subject.
The ability of machines to stimulate (make nervous, excitable) or distract (draw
attention away, stifle a train of thought, or cause immediate forgetfulness) may be easily
understood by anyone startled by an un-muffled motorcycle engine, the shrill ring of a
cellular phone, or rapidly firing gunshots. Habituation, however, is a psychological
process that occurs over time, as Titchener explains in his Text-book of Psychology
(1896):
335
“[Habituation is] a tendency, taking shape in the course of a series of similar
observations [experiments], to experience and describe perceptions of similar
character.” The processes of the habituated consciousness are meager, uniformly
indistinct, and definitely directed by determination; the generic likeness of their
description is, therefore, due rather to lack of clearness than to qualitative
resemblance. The habitual tendencies may be classified, in order of persistence
and of influence on consciousness, under five headings: weakest are those that
depend solely upon recency of occurrence; next are those due to situations of
great insistence; stronger are those arising from the professional or other routine
activities of adult life, and therefore referable both to recency and to repetition;
stronger, again, are those originating in training during childhood, and therefore
referable to insistence and repetition. 1
According to this definition, the psyche habituates through incessant and repetitive
training, as routine actions become seemingly thoughtless over time. The Macmillan
Company’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901) adds to the definition, “The
term drill is also used, especially in cases in which an external authority imposes the
exercise for purposes of training, etc.”2 For these reasons according to Titchener, learning
processes based in repetitive acts were most likely to habituate impressionable children
and working professionals. Through the turn of the century, psychologists employed their
scientific metronomes to guide and dictate the repetitive training of individuals, in order
to understand how the mind and body could be habituated through “rhythmic” activities.
As numerous studies by experimental psychologists show, the metronome caused
significant behavioral changes in their subjects over time. Wundt definitively
acknowledged that frequent repetitions of an external sensation, such as the metronome,
1 Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1916), 539.
2 James Mark Baldwin, ed. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. I (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1901), 436.
336
habituate the mind.3 Thus, the fact that the metronome caused distractive, stimulating,
and habituating effects has clear and serious implications for those individuals who began
regular training with the machine by the end of the nineteenth century: the student,
amateur, and eventually professional performers of Western music traditions.
Scientists’ findings on the metronomic influence might not be so surprising if we
consider that—since the early nineteenth-century—critics of the clockwork metronome
noted the psychological “crutch,” the slavishness, and the “ill-at-ease” feeling imposed
by the application of artificial time to natural musical action, as Chapter II documented.
From the very first descriptions of the device, critics noted that the mechanical tick
referencing a student’s practice often produced a mechanical-sounding musician. Before
experimental psychologists quantified the phenomena of habituation through their
scientific method, experienced musicians had already intuited and heard the performer’s
transformation brought about through metronomic training.
Sir John Lubbock used a clockwork metronome in what appears to be an early
methodical attempt at dog training, which prefigured the work of Pavlov, but with less
than promising results. In his book On Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals,
Lubbock himself described that his training apparatus, the metronome, was originally
“the instrument used for marking time when practizing the pianoforte.”4 In 1886, Popular
Science Monthly reported on Lubbock’s scientific applications of the machine, in which
he “tried to train his dog not to take a piece of bread till he had counted seven; but when
3 Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, translated from the second
edition by J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Lim, 1907),
141.
4 Sir John Lubbock, On Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals, Second Edition (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889), 284.
337
he used a metronome the dog showed that he was lost.”5 It seems that his dog became
distracted or confused by the sound, a prominent effect of the clockwork metronome that
psychologists would soon discover. In 1899, Frank Angell, a former student of Wundt
who specialized in the distractive potential of sounds, summarized the various and
seemingly conflicting effects witnessed on some subjects when psychologists applied the
metronome in laboratory research:
In this connection it is curious to observe that metronome beats have been used
sometimes as a means of distraction, sometimes without being noticed, and
sometimes with even the effect of fixing the attention on the regular stimuli. It
illustrates the complexity of the distraction problem that the same kind of stimulus
should come to produce either fixation or distraction according to the attitude of
the reagent.6
Titchener commented that during the standard rhythm-sense experiments, two clicking
metronomes, if continued for over a minute often caused the typical subject to viscerally
react against the barrage of artificial sounds:
Rhythmically disposed O’s [human observers (i.e. subjects)] may not object to a
longer series; but for the most part a prolongation of the clicks to 70 sec., even at
fairly quick rates (.65 and .39 sec. intervals), will render O uneasy, and perhaps
evoke the exclamation “This is horrible!” or “This is unbearable!” The “listening”
to a series of [metronomic] sounds, without the least hit of what is to be listened
for, puts a severe strain upon the attention.7
By the turn of the century, professional psychologists had noted that the metronome—
now the essential temporal reference and regulator for fatigue experiments—altered the
5 M. J. Delboeuf, “What May Animals be Taught?,” The Popular Science Monthly XXIX (New
York: D Appleton and Company, 1886): 170.
6 Frank Angell and Henry Harwood, “Experiments on Discrimination of Clangs for Different
Intervals of Time,” The American Journal of Psychology 11 (Oct., 1899): 71-72.
Edward Bradford Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice,
Volume I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901), 340.
338
subject’s attention, potentially complicating results of the chronographic procedure.
Psychologist F. M. Urban summarized these phenomena in 1908:
There are several ways in which the beats of the metronome might possibly
influence the judgments:
l.) Regular acoustical stimuli produce a feeling process which may be the
immediate cause for judgments in a certain direction.
2.) The beats of the metronome may influence attention, which is the psychical
function affected by the rhythmic motion of lifting the weights.
3.) The acoustical stimuli may interfere with the mechanical contraction of the
muscles in such a way as to reinforce or inhibit the action of the muscles.8
The sound of the metronome had the very real possibility of distracting the mind, which
could subsequently affect the laboratory subject’s muscular reactions and emotions
during any given experiment-performance. While Lubbock’s early attempts to train his
pet under repetitive metronomic clicks failed, the reports of both Urban and Angell
confirm that psychologists by the end of the 1880s seemed far more successful at training
human subjects to react to the stimulus of the metronome, their preeminent laboratory
tool for habituation, stimulation, or distraction.
Edgar James Swift, furthering Ebbinghaus’ work from the preceding years,
published his study on the “Disturbance of the Attention During Simple Mental
Processes” (1892) in the American Journal of Psychology. This researcher used many
different disturbing sounds while the subject performed some physical-mental operation.
One series of experiments traced “the simple muscular reaction in response to an
excitation of the sense of hearing and the same taken while a metronome was ticking one
hundred and twenty times each minute.”9 Swift then changed the metronome rates (the
8 F. M. Urban, The Application of Statistical Methods to the Problems of Psychophysics
(Philadelphia: The Psychological Clinic Press, 1908), 9-10.
9 Edgar James Swift, “Disturbance of the Attention during Simple Mental Processes,” The
339
disturbances) to “40, 80, 120, 160 and 200 times each minute in the respective series.”10
To further complicate matters, he had his subject read a poem, an “English book,” and a
work of Kant to the disturbances of the clicking metronome.11
Swift’s results confirmed
that the sonic imposition of clockwork indeed altered the subject’s performances, as he
admitted of past research, “it would seem that the ordinary muscular-reactions are
affected by a disturbing sound” such as the metronome.12
Scientists recorded similar reactions from experienced musicians when subjecting
them to metronomic studies in the laboratory. Thaddeus Bolton, in his comprehensive
1894 report on rhythmic perception and performance, found that one subject with
“considerable musical talent” and “long and careful training in music” felt ill effects from
the exposure to artificial, monotonous rhythms. During Bolton’s experiment, this skilled
musician perceived “a slight feeling of muscle tension in the ear and back of the
scalp…there was a feeling of innervation of the muscles connected with attention” when
each rate of the clicking apparatus changed.13
Through the turn of the century, additional psychology research certified that
metronomic time—apart from its immediate distracting effects—could habituate the
human mind; repetitive exposure to the metronome facilitated what society would later
American Journal of Psychology 5 (Oct., 1892): 5.
10
Swift, 8.
11
Ibid., 18-9.
12
Ibid., 6.
13
Thaddeus L. Bolton, “Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 6 (Jan., 1894): 192.
Bolton used a telephonic device to project sharp, monotonous clicks in a more precise fashion
than Maelzel’s metronome could provide.
340
recognize as the Pavlovian response. In a notable example, the Yale Psychological
Laboratory devised condition-response experiments to document their subjects’
subconscious reactions to metronomic training over time. In 1896, the periodical Nature
and Science reported on sound and action studies at Yale University where,
Another experiment consisted in dropping a light pith ball on the hand of a person
so placed that he could not see what was done. Each fall of the ball was timed to
correspond with the sound regularly emitted by a metronome. After a while the
ball was no longer dropped, but the subject of the experiment continued to feel, or
imagine that he felt, the touch of the ball at every sound from the metronome.14
In studies that clearly prefigured Pavlov’s behavioral research on animals, Yale
psychologists—which at the time included both Scripture and Seashore15
—found that the
sound of the metronome became ingrained in the subjects’ mind over time through
repetitive action. The subjects were impressed with metronomic time through habitual
training; they performed to the unwavering mechanical click, seemingly without will or
forethought, and inadvertently grasped for (and indeed physically sensed) a ball that was
no longer there.
The father of experimental psychology himself, Wilhelm Wundt, acknowledged
that the metronome elicited involuntary physical effects on his subjects when introduced
in laboratory research, and that the artificial repetitions of the device actually altered
normal bodily functions and emotions. Summarizing decades of research in his Outlines
of Psychology, Wundt states:
14 “Nature and Science,” The Youth's Companion, Jun. 11, 1896, 307. APS Online.
<http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=841142492&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=3338&RQT=309&
VName=HNP>
15
The Yale studies are further related by E. W. Scripture, “Measuring Hallucinations,” Science 3
(May 22, 1896): 762-3. As director of the Yale laboratory, Scripture verifies that Seashore was
working under his guidance.
341
It is observed in such a case that especially the respiration tends to adapt itself to
the faster or slower rate of the strokes, becoming more rapid when the rapidity of
the metronome increases. Commonly, too, certain phases of respiration coincide
with particular strokes. Furthermore, the hearing of such an indifferent rhythm is
not unattended by emotion. When the rate changes, we observe at first a quiet,
then a sthenic, and finally, when the rapidity is greatest, an asthenic emotion.16
Wundt’s subjects, similar to those at Yale, responded sympathetically to the metronome,
reacting to the machine’s artificial rate by involuntarily adjusting their breathing—and
correspondingly their feelings—to match its automatical rhythm. Bolton, too, recorded
these common reactions on musicians during his rhythm experiments.17
By the end of the
nineteenth century, as other researchers had readily noted the physiological influences of
the metronome on laboratory subjects, these effects seemed to become standard scientific
knowledge. In 1905, H. C. Stevens published a chart in the American Journal of
Psychology summarizing the attention studies of such psychologists as Delabarre (1892),
Mentz (1895), Lehmann (1899), which showed that in most cases their subjects’ pulse or
breathing rates increased when exposed to the auditory stimulus of Maelzel’s
metronome.18
Experimental psychologists continued to explore other emotional effects of
metronomic training in the twentieth century, sometimes in great detail. In a 1906
experiment based on Titchener’s methods, Samuel Perkins Hayes used two clicking
metronomes, both hidden from the subject, as disturbance agents. The two metronomes
simultaneously ticked at 14 different rates in seemingly random successions for a total of
16 Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, second revised edition from the fourth revised
German edition (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1902), 193-4.
17
See Bolton, 188, 192 for some instances.
18
H. C. Stevens, “A Plethysmographic Study of Attention,” The American Journal of Psychology
16 (Oct., 1905), Table III, insert between 468-9.
342
546 experiments.19
Hayes faithfully documented the subjects’ feelings, using Wundt’s
standard (and reductive) emotional spectrum: “pleasantness, strain, unpleasantness,
relaxation, excitement, depression.”20
One subject reported that the “Rapid rates often
made her head throb unpleasantly, and sometimes gave her ‘an uncomfortable feeling in
one ear’” while another experienced “a succession of muscular strains ‘in the effort to
keep up with the rate,’ accompanied by more or less confusion and hurry,—a sort of
‘driven feeling,’ that there was also ‘a continuous whirr in the head.’” 21
More
significantly, one subject described an inability to think meaningfully about her situation
when fixating on the sound of the metronome. According to Hayes, the clicking caused
her a great deal of stress:
M. described the feeling of strain as a “general muscular tension, due to a rigid
attitude.” One day this strain seemed to be localized in her forehead. It was
accompanied by a breathless feeling. She was "completely absorbed in following
the stimulus." Consciousness seemed crowded, so that there was no room for
associations. On another day she thought the strain localized in her ears; it
accompanied each stroke of the metronome, but disappeared at the least relaxation
of the attention. The strain often grew less after the first few beats of a group. She
reported that the feeling of strain was generally unpleasant.22
Researchers witnessed another subject sympathetically moving to the motion of the
metronome, a mechanical behavior similarly documented by both Wundt and Yale
researchers:
19 Samuel Perkins Hayes, “A Study of the Affective Qualities. I. The Tridimensional Theory of
Feeling,” The American Journal of Psychology 17 (Jul., 1906), 380, 382.
20
Hayes, 282.
21
Ibid., 383.
22
Ibid.
343
In all the experiments with the metronome, C. noted a constant tendency to “keep
time” with the beats by some sort of muscular movement, with the throat, feet,
hands, etc., and his judgments were based upon the ease or difficulty of this
procedure. C. made 556 comparisons.23
This particular subject found, “Those rates seemed most relaxing that called forth the
least muscular exertion and approximated the ‘natural rhythm.’”24
When the metronome
clicked more rapidly, the subject became increasingly aware of the machine’s artificial,
inhuman qualities as it guided the test. Hayes reports: “The most straining rates, he says,
are those ‘that require the most muscular tension in the effort to keep time, —those that
are farthest from a natural bodily rhythm.’”25
Hayes’ subject, perhaps a musician in some
capacity, realized the implications of his own metronomic performance: his physical
sense movement, pulse, and rhythm often seemed incommensurate with the inhuman
clicks of the scientific metronome.
James Burt Miner, Columbia University Fellow in psychology, too, realized that
metronomic rhythm was not within the normal course of human action. Thus, he devised
a card-dealing experiment to test the “Effect of an Objective Rhythm on Choice” for his
student-subjects’ performances. The “objective rhythm” took the form of amplified
metronomic clicks, which Miner documented in his text Motor, Visual, and Applied
Rhythms (1903):
23 Ibid., 388.
24
Ibid., 389.
25
Ibid.
344
The experiments were to test the effect of the rhythmic beating of a metronome
upon the work done by the subjects in distributing the cards. A series of records
was taken when the subjects were working normally, another when the
metronome was beating at the rate of 40 per minute with the bell sounding on
every alternate beat, and a third series with the metronome beating 200 per minute
with the bell on every alternate beat.26
With the metronome guiding and gauging his subjects’ card-dealing performance, Miner
found that each individual reacted differently to the metronome, owing to personal
variation. But in every case the metronome changed the quality of their actions, as Miner
concluded, “On the whole the slow person is quite likely to profit from an independent
rhythmical stimulus, while the quick person is very much disturbed”27
by the artificial
“rhythm” of the metronome. Valuing the potential of the metronome to improve labor
efficiencies, Miner noted that while quick-thinking minds are most often disturbed by the
machine, “the subject who does mental work indifferently will be excited by the rhythmic
accompaniment and spurred to greater effort. The independent stimulus, which is
ordinarily supposed to be distracting, seems in the latter case to favor more rapid work.”28
In 1918, Cassell and Dallenbach published their research on human attention as
influenced by the metronome, in its now-typical role as “'interrupted-continuous
distractor.” As reported in The American Journal of Psychology, the psychologists set the
metronome, “beating 120 in the minute. It was electrically controlled from the
experimenter's desk, so that it could be released and checked before and after every
26 James Burt Miner, “Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms,” (PhD diss., Columbia University,
1903), 99.
27
Miner, 102.
28
Ibid., 102-3.
345
distraction-series” on the human subjects.29
Cassell and Dallenbach’s results are
revelatory—with significant implications for performers and pedagogues of music—since
subject “R” expressed the specific effects of the lengthy training procedure, his repetitive
metronomic conditioning over time:
“At first I found that the distraction of the metronome upset my determination for
sensory reaction, and I think I tended to give muscular reactions. The metronome
is very unpleasant.” That he did give a different kind of reaction is shown, in
comparison with the normal and the other distraction-series that followed, by the
extremely low average for that day. He reports after a normal series on the second
day (ratio of 1.052): “The reaction without the metronome seems to be more
passive than with it. When the metronome is sounding, I have actively to attend
away from it. When it is not going, I just take the stimuli passively, and react to
them as they come.” After a distraction-series on the 6th day (ratio of 1.01 I):
“While there is still some effort necessary to attend away from the metronome,
this effort is getting less. In this series, my attitude was only slightly different
from that of the preceding - [a normal series], yet it was more effortful, more
active.” And again, after a normal series on the 11th day, when the distraction and
the normal series were practically equal: “I cannot notice any difference between
these reactions and those with the metronome going. I try to take them all in a
passive attitude, just waiting until the stimulus comes without straining for it”;
and after a distraction-series on the same day: “I seem to fall quite naturally into
the ‘set’ for reacting with the metronome. It ‘feels’ natural, and I cannot see that it
distracts me. On the contrary, it is rather a steadying agency. In the preparatory
interval, its sounds drop out of consciousness.”30
As the subject learned to react to the metronome over time, his beliefs and even his
feelings gradually changed; with continual conditioning, he grew to accept the
mechanical clicks both physically and mentally. The metronome, which began as a
distraction, became something else: a psychological and physical comfort. He first had
bodily (muscular) reactions against the distractive metronomic sound, yet eventually
29 Edna E. Cassel and K. M. Dallenbach, “The Effect of Auditory Distraction upon the Sensory
Reaction,” The American Journal of Psychology 29 (Apr., 1918): 132. See the researchers’ Table
V (page 135) for the averaged, accumulated data on their subjects’ altered responses due to
metronomic distraction.
30
Cassel and Dallenbach, 141.
346
came to find the clicks almost soothing. The 1918 experiment discovered the metronome
to be a normalizing influence upon the subject’s attitude: mechanical monotony became a
“steadying agency,” one that gradually felt “natural.” Only after eleven days of repetitive
exposure to the machine tests, the subject felt at ease with the incessant, artificial
regularity of metronomic time.31
As many earlier psychological studies confirmed, this
phenomenon of metronomic habituation could be expected: an individual’s thoughts,
feeling, and even actions altered with repetitive exposure to the clockwork stimulus. In
the minds of certain subjects continually trained in mechanical monotony, an artificial
distraction transformed into an overwhelmingly “natural feeling.”
Other psychologists continued to study the implications of metronomic training
on memory and recollection. The American Journal of Psychology report “On the Lapse
of Verbal Meaning with Repetition” (1919) by M. F. Bassett and C. J. Warne followed
the methods of Ebbinghaus,32
in which the psychologist trained himself to repeat words,
word-series, and nonsense syllables in strict metronomic time. “It is well known,” the
researchers explain, “that if a familiar word be stared at for a time, or repeated aloud over
and over again, the meaning drops away,” thus these scientists attempted to determine
31 In a separate attention-experiment report in 1913 by Dallenbach, another subject echoes this
initial “unpleasant” reaction to the incessant sound of the metronome. When two metronomes
were set going at different rates: “Thus, F reports, after an experiment in which the task was to
add 7 continuously: ‘The sounds of the metronomes, as a series of discontinuous clicks, were
clear in consciousness only four or five times during the experiment, and they were especially
bothersome at first. They were accompanied by strain sensations and unpleasantness.’” See Karl
M. Dallenbach, “The Measurement of Attention,” The American Journal of Psychology 24 (Oct.
1913): 467.
32
Angell and Harwood, 69.
347
“the number of repetitions required for monosyllabic nouns to lose their meaning” in
metronomic time.33
With knowledge of the metronome as a sonic distracter, Bassett and Warne
realized that the click of the machine could mar their subjects’ performances, and
consequently the results of the experiment. Thus, they noted, “The rate of repetition was
controlled by a soundless metronome giving seconds; and both the number of repetitions
and the rate employed were, in a fashion, checked by taking the total time of an
experiment by a stop-watch.”34
After the initial phases of the test, two weeks elapsed, in
which the psychologists recognized a “practice effect” had taken place in the subjects,
which was explained “principally as the result of a gradual stabilization of the attitude
demanded by the instruction.”35
After the two weeks, the final test phase occurred, and
the scientists concluded:
(1) Given a stably passive attitude on the part of the observer, the meaning of a
familiar monosyllabic noun repeated aloud three times per sec. [timed by the
metronome] drops away in about 3 to 3.5 sec. (2) There is a tendency, as practice
advances, for varieties and fluctuations of meaning to give place to an habitual
meaning characterized by our observers as a 'familiar feel.' (3) Meaning may lapse
suddenly or die out gradually: the course of experience in the latter case is
obscure.36
Even with a soundless metronome, their experiment found a subject’s metronomic
performance changed mental processes and sensations through repetitive training. The
automatical experiment caused a two-pronged effect: while subjects forgot the meaning
33 M. F. Bassett and C. J. Warne, “On the Lapse of Verbal Meaning with Repetition,” The
American Journal of Psychology 30 (Oct., 1919): 415.
34
Ibid., 415.
35
Ibid., 417.
36
Ibid., 418.
348
of words, they gained comfort, a “familiar feel,” in the habit of metronomic repetition, a
sensation similarly recorded in previous metronomic experiments. These researchers
confirmed the process of metronomic habituation in their subject’s performance: natural
(common or previous) mental associations disappeared with the routine of monotonous,
mechanical practice. The subjects, who were “passively” trained to utter sounds without
reflection, came to parrot the words they spoke. In the late nineteenth century,
Ebbinghaus was perhaps the first to recognize the effect caused by his seminal word-
repetition experiments, which seemingly transformed subjects into “sheer mechanical
associators” that lost verbal understanding through repetitive training defined by the
clockwork metronome.
The Metronome and Pavlovian Response
By the 1920s, Wundt’s experimental methods and apparatuses had expanded into the
fledgling science of behavioral psychology, which also researched the phenomena of
habituation and conditioned response, now in less willing subjects. Here, as in other
scientific venues, the metronome continued its essential chronographic role during the
testing and training of animals, most notably sheep and dogs. In addition, the metronome
provided the standard means of distraction, stimulation, and habituation for behavioral
psychologists’ animal research.
In 1923, behavioral psychologist G. V. Anrep described the metronome as one
common apparatus in providing a “strong ‘extra stimulus’” for conditioned-response
training of dogs.37
Likewise, a 1926 American Journal of Psychology article, “A
37 G. V. Anrep, “The Irradiation of Conditioned Reflexes,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London. Series B, Containing Papers of a Biological Character 94 (April 3, 1923): 416.
349
Laboratory for the Study of Conditioned Motor Reflexes,” by Cornell University
Psychologist H. S. Liddell illustrated an elaborate (and soundproof) “animal room” for
electro-shock experiments gauged by scientific metronome. Liddell describes that,
besides its typical use in chronographic research and training,
The metronome provides a convenient conditioned stimulus…the metronome is
placed behind the animal and can be started and stopped by the experimenter from
the adjoining room by means of a rod passing through the wall, bearing at one end
a short bar and at the other end the knife of a single pole switch. When the switch
is closed the bar releases the metronome pendulum and at the same time an
electric circuit is closed through a signal magnet which traces the metronome
beats on the smoked paper of the kymograph.38
Fig. 5.1. Liddell’s soundproof “Animal Room” for “the Study of Conditioned Motor Reflexes.” The
metronome, labeled as “C”, appears to the right of the bound sheep and is electrically connected to the
chronographic recording device in the adjoining room. From H. S. Liddell, “A Laboratory for the Study of
Conditioned Motor Reflexes,” The American Journal of Psychology 37 (Jul., 1926): insert.
38 H. S. Liddell, “A Laboratory for the Study of Conditioned Motor Reflexes,” The American
Journal of Psychology 37 (Jul., 1926): 419.
350
According to this researcher, Pavlov had already devised animal rooms containing similar
apparatuses and methods. On May 10, 1928, Pavlov lectured at the Royal Society of
London, describing the tools and techniques he had been using for years in conditioned-
response experiments. During his talk, he considered the permanent effects of external
stimuli on the cerebral cortex of dogs, commenting:
In my recent published lectures an observation was mentioned showing that it is
possible to derange a point pertaining to a separate conditioned stimulus, namely,
the sound of a metronome, leaving points corresponding to other auditory stimuli
undamaged.39
Pavlov noted that, even when he conditioned the dog to negatively react against the
metronome, other sounds were unaffected: “Reflexes to other auditory stimuli, such as
buzzing, hissing or bubbling sounds, remained normal.” 40
Through these experiments, he
realized that such metronomic conditioning could cause permanent psychological effects,
and “by mere repetition of a conditioned stimulus for a prolonged period it is possible to
render the cortical point more or less permanently inhibited. For instance, on repeating an
auditory conditioned stimulus day after day many times in each experiment, it finally
became null and void, a condition which lasted for some time.”41
As Pavlov found, the
metronome had the ability to significantly damage or alter the animal psyche.
Pavlov’s work influenced other behavioral psychologists in following decades, as
researchers continued to employ the metronome in conditioned-response experiments.
39 I. P. Pavlov, “Croonian Lecture: Certain Problems in the Psychology of the Cerebral
Hemispheres,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Containing Papers of a
Biological Character 103 (June 1, 1928): 102.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid., 103.
351
Roger Brown Loucks’ American Journal of Psychology article “An Automatic Technique
for Establishing Conditioned Reflexes” (1932) verified that, “It is frequently desirable in
conditioned reflex investigations to utilize rhythmical stimuli, e.g. a flashing light, an
intermittent tactual prick, or a metronome beat.”42
He summarized Pavlov’s methodology
with the standard scientific knowledge that continual, repetitive exposure to one type of
stimulus—especially the metronome—caused mental and physical detriment to the
subject (the dog):
Furthermore, considerable flexibility is exercised in the routine employed with
one and the same dog. For example, on one day 4 stimuli or trials may be given,
the next day, 12; on one day a flashing light, a bell, and a metronome may be
administered…Pavlov has offered considerable evidence to show that by the
constant repetition of one stimulus a dog may be ruined for further work.43
As Loucks suggested, Pavlov’s research methodology accounted for the relatively
humane treatment of his dogs, which the scientist considered as individuals who
displayed variable character traits.44
These behavioral psychologists seemed to realize
that overexposure to metronome—which initially functioned either to stimulate or
distract—eventually caused psychological damage to his animal subjects. Ironically it
seems, as Pavlov and other behavioralists recognized the metronome’s potential for
psychological damage, most music teachers championing metronomic training in their
42 Roger Brown Loucks, “An Automatic Technique for Establishing Conditioned Reflexes,” The
American Journal of Psychology 44 (Apr., 1932): 338.
43
Ibid., 342.
44
Ibid. “General Procedure. Mechanization of the training involves certain basic principles
which may be briefly considered. In Russian studies of conditioned reflexes, there has been a
marked tendency to emphasize the individuality of each dog. Pavlov looks upon his animals as
exhibiting definite ‘temperaments.’ Accordingly, the training procedure to be used with one dog
differs from that most adequate for another.”
352
modern pedagogies did not readily consider the implications of such mechanical stimulus
upon their young students, or upon themselves.
Metronomic Influences Known in Modern Society
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the general public had certainly gained
greater awareness of the metronomic effect on the human psyche. On February 18, 1914
a whimsical New York Times article “The Dormant Waker” described the ability of an
“unnamed” Harvard professor to enter into a “twilight state” of hypnosis. The writer
reported on one medically recognized way the professor might have achieved such a
trance:
The patient or subject is asked to fixate his attention on some object, while at the
same time listening to the beats of a metronome; the patient’s eyes are then
closed, he is to keep very quiet, while the metronome or some other monotonous
stimulus is continued. After some time…the patient is in a hypnoidal state
favorable for the emergence of subconscious experiences.
In this state of hypnosis, the article continues, the patient is “characterized by a trait of
suggestibility.” 45
The subject, therefore, could then be brainwashed when exposed to the
sound of the metronome. Yet, in a similar experimental procedure, psychologist James
Burt Miner found the metronome to be a disturbing influence upon his hypnotized
subject, recounting in his text, Motor, Visual and Applied Rhythms (1903), “When J was
sound asleep she showed the usual hypnotic condition by accepting simple commands
like, 'you cannot bend your arm,' etc. I then started the metronome and merely told her to
listen to it. Her hand, resting on the table, now seemed to be giving spasmodic jerks.
These were, however, quite irregular.”46
45 “The Dormant Waker,” New York Times, Feb. 18, 1913, 12.
46
Miner, 28.
353
While metronomic hypnosis may not have been a common practice outside of
university professors’ offices, laboratories, or magic shows, writers by the last quarter of
the nineteenth century—an age many historians consider the second wave of the
Industrial Revolution—had intuited the ill-effects of automatical machines on the average
mind in daily life. The American neurologist George Beard (1839-1883) realized that
mechanical precisions created a new tension in urbanized society. His oft-quoted book
American Nervousness Its Causes and Consequences (1881) portrayed the mechanically
effected man, who—well outside of the laboratory—now conformed daily to increasingly
precise and prevalent time-tellers, along with the timetables that invariably corresponded
to the industrial workday and transportation. Beard pinpointed the specific technologies
and technological values that seemed to distract, stimulate, and habituate the modern
citizen’s psyche:
Clocks and Watches. — Necessity of Punctuality.
The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with
modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of
looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or
appointments…A nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when the
time for an appointment or train is near, without affecting his pulse, and the effect
on that pulse, if we could but measure and weigh it, would be found to be
correlated to a loss to the nervous system. Punctuality is a greater thief of nervous
force than is procrastination of time. We are under constant strain, mostly
unconscious, oftentimes in sleeping as well as in waking hours, to get somewhere
or do something at some definite moment.47
Beard did not discuss the effects of the clockwork metronome on the human mind or
pulse for obvious reasons: While American-made pocket watch sales boomed during the
time of his publication, the foreign-made Maelzel metronome had yet to become a
standard device in American students’ music education. The mechanical time keeping of
47
George M. Beard, American Nervousness its Causes and Consequences (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 103-4.
354
music lagged far behind the time keeping of urban life and industrial travel. Nevertheless,
by the turn of the century—once the metronome became a standard apparatus in both the
musical and psychological training of precise “rhythmic” action—musicians and
researches had noted that the machine elicited the very same effects that Beard described
decades prior in the use of pocket watches, effects including the rise of pulse and
breathing rates and other unconscious tendencies. Alongside trains and factory
machinery, the metronome came to exemplify the rapid, artificial pace of a modern
world; as critics suggested—and psychologists confirmed— the metronome was yet
another invention that, through its incessant artificiality, either altered or damaged the
abilities of individuals to think, feel, and move.
For experimental psychologist E. W. Scripture, the faster pace of human life, as
promoted through his scientific methods, represented a significant benefit for the
industrial world. As he intended many of his “rhythmic” studies to show, faster machines
facilitated people to think and act with greater rapidity and efficiency—while reducing
the “mean variation” of individual action. By 1895, Scripture had described the
successful scientific methods that created the modern mind—citing effects that Beard,
more than a decade prior, found to be neurologically destructive:
To-day the mental processes of the mass of the people go at a much more rapid
rate than they did a few centuries ago. The mind has been educated by our whole
civilization to act more rapidly. The difference between the sluggish Englishman
of mediaeval times and the quick Yankee of to-day is delightfully told in Mark
Twain’s “King Arthur.” If it were possible to take a man of two centuries ago and
bring him into the laboratory, the results obtained from experiments upon him
would be entirely different from those obtained from one of the students of to-
day. The reactions of the student would be much more rapid, especially the
complicated ones.48
48 E. W. Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” The School Review 3 (Nov., 1895):
544.
355
As Scripture suggests, modern man has benefited greatly from rapid “rhythmic” rates,
automatic machines, and chronographic training practices, such as those found in his
Yale laboratory.
Not everyone was as enthused by the increasing rapidity of human thought and
existence in the early twentieth century, a Machine Age fueled by scientific values and
industrial progress. Two generations after American Nervousness first appeared, Walter
Lippmann expressed nearly identical concerns as George Beard over the modern,
mechanically affected mind in his book Public Opinion (1922). Realizing the essential
role the metronome played in laboratory research, Lipmann invoked Maelzel’s machine
to expose greater problems in the industrial world and the increasingly mechanized
reality of modern living:
If the comparatively simple conditions of a laboratory can so readily flatten out
discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In the laboratory the fatigue is
slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the
subject's interest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will
depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a
factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and
slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of newspapers
read in street-cars and subways? 49
Scientists found that the clockwork metronome influenced subjects in many ways, and
Lippmann, while acknowledging their reductive laboratory methods, realized the
extended implications of psychological research: metronomic distractions now appeared
everywhere in the modern cityscape, thus it seemed only logical that these omnipresent,
artificial sounds altered the thoughts and feelings of the entire industrialized populous.
By 1910, Edward Baxter Perry, too, had recognized that modern machines influenced
49 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 72.
356
even the musical mind. In Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces he expressed his disdain
for the nerve-racking pace of many piano performances, suggesting that musicians’
repetitive day-to-day exposure to automatical machines—either as stimulators or
distracters—effaced the more leisurely, lyrical, and personal interpretations heard in past
performance practices. Perry essentially confirms Scripture’s 1895 assertion of the
increasing mechanical speed of human response and action, as he chides:
Have we no time or taste for anything but hurry up music, because we travel by
express train and do business by wire? Must we also have our music ground out,
machine-like, on high-speed gearing and served against time, like hash at a depot
lunch counter? What wonder that our people have musical indigestion!50
As we read both Lippmann’s and Perry’s very similar line of questioning, as well as the
findings of experimental psychologists that spanned over three decades, further inquiries
regarding the clockwork metronome’s effect upon musicality should logically surface,
including the following: Was Maelzel’s device a culprit in a new musical nervousness, a
new “machine-like” performance practice? Was the metronome a habitual influence upon
the minds of modern musicians, driving them to subconsciously “hurry up” without
forethought or reflection, informing their performances with the rapid “rhythm” of
mechanical clicks, rather than the subjective rhythm of poetic meter, the variable
movement of rhetorical speech, or the emotional sway of their own internal pulse?
According to many skilled musicians, educators, and perceptive critics over the course of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the resounding answer to each of these
questions was a definitive “yes.”
By 1924, poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), writing under the pseudonym William
50 Edward Baxter Perry, Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser
Co., 1910), 43-44.
357
Atheling, a prominent Parisian music critic, had also heard the metronome actively
changing the nature of musical time in living performances. Indeed, he believed
Maelzel’s machine had noticeably effaced the once variable and expressive qualities of
musical time itself. In his guise as the musical traditionalist Atheling, Pound perceived
that,
After a century of trained orchestral performers, and of the present system of
training, we find “musicians” who are solely sensitive to size. Their ability to
count, their metronomic ability, has engulphed them, and they have become
insensitive to shape.51
Pound presumed that all professional musicians embraced the metronome as early as the
famed automata showman Maelzel had introduced it, and that skilled performers
habituated to its click for nearly a century. He argued that those performing
“musicians”—his quotes distinguish them from creative musical “artists”—who slavishly
trained in metronomic time became desensitized to nuanced and expressive techniques in
the process. Pound seemed particularly aware of the metronome’s ability to habituate the
modern musician to mechanized “rhythm.” He heard “musicians” performing as if trained
to utter sounds without any meaning; without reflection or personal choice, Pound’s
metronomic “musicians” recall the “sheer mechanical associators” of Ebbinghaus’ word-
repetition experiments.
Similar to Beard, Scripture, and Lippman before him, Pound also perceived that
modern life, increasingly inundated with automatical machines, continued to alter the
mind towards greater values of artificial, metronomic accuracy. In The New Criterion
(1926), Pound intuited that these scientific values, alongside the chronographic bias,
51 Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968),
132.
358
informed the performances and compositions of his age; that the ever-increasing,
precision-oriented machines of the twentieth century seemingly ingrained performers’
with new standards of rhythm and movement:
The mind, even the musician’s mind, is conditioned by contemporary things, our
minimum, in a time when the old atom is “bombarded” by electricity, when
chemical atoms and elements are more strictly considered, is no longer the
minimum of sixteenth century pre-chemists. Both this composer and this
executant [George Antheil and Olga Rudge]…have acquired—perhaps only half
consciously—a new precision.52
As Pound keenly recognized, “exactitude” and “precision” are values that develop over
the ages through the culturally specific machines and methods employed to define those
vales. Perhaps aware of the numerous critical and scientific sources documenting the
effects of automatical machines upon the individual, the modernist poet’s recognition was
fundamentally correct: mechanically regulated action—first actualized in the nineteenth-
century sciences—had continued to alter human thought, action, and “even the
musician’s mind” itself.53
Yet, unbeknownst to Pound, the habitual, metronomic
influence he heard in contemporary orchestra and chamber performances was a relatively
recent phenomenon, a distinct performance practice of modernity established only within
52 Pound, 148-9.
53
By 1927 music critic Paul Rosenfeld had similarly described this habitual shift in modern,
musical mentality: “It can almost be said that the ideal unconsciously animating the best
musicians of to-day is the expression of positive, decided feeling in a very impersonal, reserved,
and stone-like form…Just what the causes of these almost universal changes of feeling so
decisive for the forms of art are, remains, it must again be confessed, pretty definitely hidden
from us.” See Paul Rosenfeld, Modern Tendencies in Music (New York: The Caxton Institute,
1927), 37.
Perhaps confirming Pound’s assessment, George Antheil explained his practice regimen
during the 1920s as a habitual process, calculated to achieve musical-mechanical precision: “You
keep on. You must never stop. And so technique comes to you. It begins to fit like a suit. You
play concert pieces so many times that you could hardly play a wrong note in them if you wanted
to. The hind part of the brain takes over.” See George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Reprint,
Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), 68.
359
his lifetime. Indeed, sources suggest that musicians did not take a century to habituate to
metronomic action, but just over a generation.
As the next chapter explores, roughly three decades prior to Pound’s 1924
assertion that musicians habituated to the metronome en masse, young students first
began comprehensively training under the values of precise mechanical rhythm and the
constant regulation of clockwork time—in direct correspondence with the rise of the new,
scientific music education. Alongside a host of other pedagogies influenced by
experimental psychology and its chronographic bias, modern music training employed
the clockwork metronome to engender seemingly automatical qualities of action in the
student, which paralleled other performance-procedures found in the progressive fields of
science and industry. By the mid-1890s, in what can be considered a dramatic paradigm
shift in education, these scientific teachers had considered automatical responses and
habitual actions—invariably dictated by metronomic “rhythm” and chronographic
methods—as prized qualities in the study and training of the modern child. By the turn of
the century, while experimental psychologists conclusively documented the mind-altering
effects of the metronome on laboratory subjects, metronomic habituation became a
predominant technique in teaching a new generation of students throughout Western
society in the modern values of “precise” and objective rhythmic action.
360
CHAPTER VI: THE METRONOMIC EDUCATION
In order for consumers to embrace recently emergent technologies—such as simple
pendulums, clockwork metronomes, or quartz wristwatches—inventors, educators, and
other proponents must develop instructional methods for these inventions. Despite the
potential value and convenience behind new inventions, machines have no inherent
meaning or purpose until a community of users imparts meaning and importance into
them in a standardized fashion. People must become educated in the utility and
importance of new tools for these devices to form a part of practical life. We are taught—
either directly through instruction or indirectly through long-standing social
conventions—that hammers are useful for building chairs, not opening cans; that
vacuums clear floors, not cut grass. We are taught how to write with a pen, to play the
violin, to ride a bike, to use a mobile phone. Indeed, the child (not to mention the
untrained adult) does not enter the world with a priori understandings of the values of
tools or how they should ideally function. Machines are only important if and when
society instills importance in them through formal or informal educational training, which
over time instills an assumed and communally accepted tradition of use.
A tradition of use for any given invention can even transcend the creator’s
original conceptions. While inventors often introduce machines for specific and limited
purposes, over time, a community’s ever-changing needs and desires might significantly
alter or adapt these technologies in ways not originally envisioned by their inventors.1
Such adaptations are clearly witnessed in the use of the clockwork metronome. The
1 For example, the Internet—originally intended for specialized scientists to exchange research
data quickly and efficiently, and which has become a primary avenue of global commerce,
communication, and entertainment—is perhaps the best example today of a technological
divergence from an original purpose.
361
preceding chapters revealed that different communities placed different values on an
identical invention. Throughout the nineteenth century, so many skilled performers and
composers found the artificial clockwork metronome—regardless of its mechanical
“accuracy”—entirely meaningless as it related to their still-living traditions of musicality,
while, in the very same century, experimental scientists seemed to make the machine
their own with no qualms whatsoever, even improving its precision for their own
purposes. The metronome, with its invariable clockwork rhythm, practically suggested
itself as the most useful and necessary apparatus in the mechanical laboratory for
“experimental” scientists throughout the Western world. While skilled musicians did not
find the metronome a priori important and purposeful as a temporal dictator—since a
simple pendulum could always suffice for an initial pulse reference—nineteenth-century
physiologists and psychologists were truly the first to collectively discover and champion
the lasting meaning and utility hidden within Maelzel’s clockwork metronome as the
constant chronographic reference and regulator for their clinical experiments.
As past chapters have documented, the clockwork metronome and metronomic
indications were neither intuitive nor sufficient when applied to music notation and living
performances. Maelzel, keenly aware that systematic education in his new machine was
required for its adoption, found it essential to provide publishers and composers,
including Beethoven, with detailed instructions on metronomic tempo transcription,
which many musicians ignored, misinterpreted, or reinterpreted with their own intentions.
In a letter dated April 19, 1818, Maelzel even described to Beethoven his seemingly
unsuccessful attempts to teach something new to those handfuls of professional
362
musicians, amateurs, and publishers first introduced to the clockwork metronome and its
cryptic numerical-temporal scale. Maelzel railed:
There are stupid and lazy people who must be fed the truth with a cooking ladle,
and who do not want to take any, not even the least trouble to learn something—
and there are only too many of these in Paris.2
Over a year earlier, while in London, Maelzel similarly attempted to instruct consumers
at large in the values—the “truth”—of the clockwork metronome and its beats-per-
minute scale through his obscure “Metronic Tutor” (c1817).3 Maelzel’s final attempt to
teach the “stupid and lazy” in the superiority of metronomic tempo dictation and practice
occurred through his “Kurze Abhandlung” (1836).4 As the inventor-promoter recognized,
no potential consumer would buy the metronome if the purposes of the machine remained
vague and trifling. But Maelzel, by himself, did not succeed in his entrepreneurial
pursuits; he failed to inculcate musicians and consumers of his generation with the value
of the clockwork metronome as an aid for music publications and practice. It would take
many more decades before pedagogical communities accepted the machine as the
temporal standard of music training, publication, and performance in the Western
2 Theodore Albrecht, ed., Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, Volume 2 (Lincoln &
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 137, Letter 248. Albrecht, in footnotes to this
letter, provides useful source information on Maelzel’s various metronome-chart iterations that
the inventor distributed during this time.
3 [Classified Section,] Times, Feb. 19, 1817, 1. In a self-aggrandizing—and highly fictitious—
manner perhaps expected from the celebrated automata entertainer, Maelzel’s London metronome
advertisement read: “METRONOME, or Musical Time-keeper.—Mr. MAELZEL respectfully
informs the Musical Public, that he is returned from the Continent, where his endeavors to
establish universally the standard measure for musical time, indicated by the Metronome have
met with complete success. Metronomes in any quantity, and at various prices, may now be had
at his manufactory, 50, Berwick-street, Soho, and at the principal music shops: likewise his
Metronic Tutor, being a book of rudiments for the pianoforte, calculated, with the assistance of
the Metronome, to render the pupil a steady timeist, price 7s, 6d.”
4 Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, Kurze Abhandlung uber den Metronomen von Maezel und dessen
Anwendung als Tempobezeichnung, sowohl als bei dem Unterricht in der Musik (Mainz, 1836).
363
tradition. Indeed, the utility of the metronome and the importance of metronomic
“rhythm” had never come to fruition in nineteenth-century musical culture or aesthetics
as it had in the experimental sciences; past creative “artists” never trained under the belief
that the automatical swing or click of the metronome overrode their internal sense and
personal expression of musical time. As strongly suggested by compositions,
performances, and the musical discourse spanning the nineteenth century, musical
“artists’” living epistemology of time was completely distanced from the external clicks
of mere clockwork.
The gradual establishment of a tradition of use for technologies depends upon
developing social, historical, and educational contexts, and this cultural phenomenon is
especially apparent in the history of automatic timekeepers and time tellers, Maelzel’s
metronome included. Consider that most individuals in modern civilization, those who
learned to read precise (or even unmarked) watch-faces, multi-function clock hands, and
synchronized digital displays down to the millisecond, find sundials—the most prevalent
and long-standing time-telling technologies in history—valueless or even indecipherable.
Sundials are not “bad” time tellers when compared to wristwatches or mobile phones;
they are vastly different than wristwatches or mobile phones, displaying a different value
system—a past epistemology of time not accounted for in the modern world. People
seldom look at sundials, even when available, because most find these objects of no
importance in light of more modern and “precise” mechanical technologies. Indeed,
while most moderns know how to set a digital watch or program a cell phone, few are
educated in reading or installing a sundial, a device that acts more like a trite sculpture
today than a time teller. The tradition of use for sundials—along with other non-
364
automatical time-telling tools and techniques—has definitively passed. One New York
Times reviewer in 1920 summarized his contemporary culture’s very recent embrace of
automatic (metronomic), precise, and globally synchronous time telling, acknowledging:
Modern life is run on a timetable. The stop watch is perhaps the most typical
modern invention, because it symbolizes the infinite subdivision of time that has
come in since the industrial revolution…Really precise time telling has not been
needed in the world until within a few years…It would be hard to run the
Twentieth Century on a sun dial.5
It would be equally preposterous to suggest that the medieval world could run on
stopwatches.6 Just as many learned to operate stopwatches, take photographic portraits, or
ride bicycles in the late nineteenth century7—an age when “really precise” mechanical
time-telling came to fruition for industrialized society—new generations in Western
civilization became trained to use, value, and believe in the “truth” of Maelzel’s
clockwork metronome, now outside of high-technology science laboratories, as the
prevailing and eventually sole temporal reference for musical education and subsequent
performances. This chapter shows how the emerging applications of the clockwork
5
“Time and Clocks,” New York Times, June 27, 1920, 60, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. As I
argue, the metronome perhaps more than the stopwatch was the modern, industrial timekeeper
par excellence. Indeed, the same book reviewer described pocket watches as “solar metronomes.”
6
To further exemplify the contextual values of machines in society, I could employ what Einstein
would have considered a “thought experiment:” a twenty-first-century laptop computer would
certainly seem pointless to an isolated nineteenth-century agrarian township that spent the day
tilling or irrigating land without electricity. For technologically underdeveloped societies, a
laptop computer would not be a priori useful, important, or even interesting in the way our
contemporary Western society finds the machine to be; I could conjecture that, when put in this
anachronistic context, the laptop computer would be best employed somehow as a farming
implement. Indeed, the personal computers of today had no place—conceptually or physically—
in civilizations of the distant past, just as the untold inventions of the next century are both
unavailable and unfathomable to us in the present.
7 See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Second Edition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2003) for a history detailing the influence of emergent technologies,
notably the bicycle and the photographic camera, within late nineteenth-century culture.
365
metronome in public education had little to do with the past “artistic” traditions of music
creation or interpretation alluded to by so many musicians and critics over the nineteenth
century.
The metronome, by the late nineteenth-century, had some profoundly invasive
applications in public education when incorporated in novel experimental pedagogies,
which promoted the new paradigm of “rhythm” first employed by nineteenth-century
laboratory scientists. And, while the chronographic method effaced personal rhythm in
the laboratory, pedagogues’ application of continual and precise metronomic time
eventually eroded and replaced the subjective values of pulse, meter, rhetoric, and
interpretive movement in modern music training. Thus, while the invention of the
metronome occurred early in the nineteenth century, the systematic use and socio-cultural
importance of Maelzel’s metronome only coalesced through new pedagogies in the late
nineteenth century that prescribed mechanically “rhythmic” timekeeping for the efficient,
standardized, orderly, replicable—and ultimately “scientific”—training of human action.
This chapter charts a now-familiar technology—the ticking, clockwork metronome—as it
drastically transitioned in importance and utility for Western society; through new
“scientific” values of “rhythmic” training, the clockwork metronome—once an anathema
within the past traditions of artistic performance—transformed into the unquestioned rule
of time and action, creating both a new cultural tradition of use and a new performance
practice for modern industrial civilization.
366
Prior to the Scientific Pedagogies, Military and Gymnastic Methods
By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, while both physiologists and the new
experimental psychologists employed the often-modified metronome for chronographic
research in their laboratories, certain educators had begun using the clockwork device in
new ways for more efficient, regimented education. Prior to experimental psychologists’
direct influence on modern pedagogies, teachers often associated the rigid techniques of
metronomic training with military paradigms. One unique example published in 1876, A
Trip to Music-Land, A Fairy Tale by Emma L. Shedlock, offered a creative means of
music instruction for young British schoolchildren, in which the clockwork metronome
played a prominent role as drillmaster of musical time. The author makes clear that her
fairy tale should not be taken to explain the complexities of music to “Artists and
Professionals.” Rather, her intention was to “obviate this ‘drudgery’” of teaching “the
rudiments of Music” in standard music classes through the use of an imaginative (albeit
lengthy and intricate) story, explanatory images, and entertaining objects.8 She concluded
her preface with her hope that, “If by these means I have rendered teaching the Elements
of Music any pleasanter at once to teacher and to pupil, the sole object of a Trip to Music-
Land will have been fully attained.”9
For restless young schoolchildren, her musical novel may have seemed an
entertaining multi-media spectacle. The teacher would perform a show-and-tell, reading
the fairy tale and explaining each element of music notation as it appeared through the
course of the narrative, all while displaying high-quality cartoons by J. King James
8 Emma L. Shedlock, A Trip to Music-land (London: Blackie & Son, Paternoster Buildings,
1876), vii.
9 Shedlock, viii.
367
within the book (in addition to the music paraphernalia, which included the clockwork
metronome, purchased separately through the publisher or another source).10
Shedlock’s
tale either objectified or personified each detail of music composition and notation: King
Harmony had the body of a Cello, Time (the Prime Minister) was a hybrid creature, a
man “that nature (Music-Land nature of course) had endowed…with a large [audibly
ticking] clock in the very center of his chest.”11
Other characters included Dr. Rest,
Queen Melody, Rhythm “(Time’s Father),”12
and so on. All printed notes, regardless of
their value, were soldiers in the Music-Land Army, and each was depicted with a human
frame underneath a printed note value as their head. In Chapter VII of the fairy tale, the
Metronome character appears as a pivotal figure in the story; he is an Austrian general
who arrived in Music-Land (an island nation more reminiscent of Venice than England)
to drill the troops, creating order in Time, thus bringing new prosperity and success to the
kingdom.
10
The back-page advertisement for A. N. Myers & Co. products include the “Music-Land Bricks”
and “Dr. Rest’s Cannons” needed to tell Shedlock’s story. While Myers did not produce Maelzel
metronomes, in a final statement, their ad suggests how teachers might obtain a clockwork
device: “Lists of the Separate Kindergarten Amusements and Occupations may be obtained on
application.” See advertising supplement to Shedlock, A Trip to Music-Land, [4].
11
Shedlock, 8. Shedlock immediately identifies, or at least allegorizes, the foundations of musical
time through the most available and precise societal time-teller of her day, the two-handed clock.
Moreover, in her children’s tale, she associates the values of a minim, crotchet, and quaver with
proportional fractions of Time’s clock-face (in seconds). Through the two-handed clock and
Maelzel’s intentions, she helped redefine musical notation with more precise, chronographic
intentions. See Shedlock, 11.
12
Rhythm first appears in Shedlock, 20.
368
Fig. 6.1. Detail of the “Landing of Metronome and Sub-division” in Music-land. Included in the
landing party are General Metronome’s attentive note-soldiers. This is the first of many appearances of the
metronome character in the storyline drawings by J. King James. From Emma L. Shedlock, A Trip to
Music-land (London: Blackie & Son, Paternoster Buildings, 1876), insert after 36.
To facilitate the new musical-military organization of Music-Land, Metronome’s
assistant Subdivision, a rather stout military drum with a sword, whom Shedlock
describes as a “dwarf,” violently chopped the notes of Music-Land into smaller rhythmic
soldiers.13
These note-soldiers formed the improved, orderly Music-Land Army.
The numerous depictions of General Metronome expose an automaton in keeping
with Maelzel’s culture. Metronome’s appendages and head seemed human, yet his heart
housed only clockwork. In Chapter VIII of the tale, General Metronome displays the
innards of his torso to the court and King Harmony:
Then at a touch of his finger, a pendulum inside began to rock steadily backwards
and forwards, with sound indeed loud enough to be heard by the Music-Land
army, while an invisible bell ringing clearly to every first note, distinctly marked
two, three, and four time.14
13
See Shedlock, 36-37 for the first appearance of Subdivision and General Metronome.
14
Shedlock, 44.
369
Shedlock’s metronome-as-military general is an appropriate allegory for the uses of the
machine in nineteenth-century children’s pedagogy prior to experimental psychologists’
wide-scale influence on middle-class teaching methods in the 1890s. (Her publication
appeared only six years after Great Britain established a compulsory, national system of
elementary public education.)15
Indeed, Shedlock’s battlefield metronome had little in
common with artists’ conceptions of living performance—individual expression,
spontaneous creation, or nuanced interpretation formed no part of the mechanical drilling
of Music-Land troops. Shedlock’s General Metronome even exclaims his true hegemonic
intention to the King:
“I do no teaching, not I” said Metronome, again laughing, “I stand on the battle-
field and give my men the rate at which they are to go. Semibreves, Minims,
Crotchets, and Quavers soon learn to march to my one, two and three!”16
15
While the British 1870 education act was intended to be compulsory, historians such as Eric
Hobsbawm note, “It did not become effectively compulsory until 1891.” See Eric Hobsbawm,
Industry and Empire (Reprint, New York: The New Press, 1999), 134.
16
The King in her tale alludes to the fact that before Metronome’s arrival, each composition—
“each battle”—required new instructions as to the time the army of notes needed to move. See
Shedlock, 44.
370
Fig. 6.2. Detail of General Metronome showing himself, and his clockwork functions, to King
Harmony and the Court of Music-land. Outside, the Music-land note-army wages a battle. From
Shedlock, A Trip to Music-land (1876), insert after 46.
Considering that her highly creative fable merely exemplified the basics of music
notation for kindergarteners, the children listening to her entertaining text did not learn to
physically perform music to the click of the metronome—the machine did not actively
guide their living actions as it did for subjects in Wundt’s laboratory (or the fictional
Music-Land army). Instead, Shedlock employed the imaginary vision of the clockwork
man-machine as an innocuous and superficial entertainment, a supplement to her fable-
lesson, and a way to make the complex and ineffable qualities of musical time substantial
to kindergarteners through General Metronome, the gregarious cartoon-automaton.17
17
While all of the intricate details of her tale cannot be explored in the present survey, it is
significant to note that the narrator, before arriving in the imaginary Music-Land, was practicing
“five-finger exercises” when a fairy appeared by her metronome—which she does not specify
was moving at the time. The fairy reinterpreted the music of the “Instruction Book” on the
371
The metronome’s place in culture, however, began to uncannily mirror
Shedlock’s tale outside of the kindergarten classroom. Only three years before this
kindergarten publication, an English article “‘Company’ Playing” relates how the new
machine could help define and dictate musical-performance goals for an older set of
amateur Victorian music makers. The author was highly critical of the “inferiority of the
average piano-forte heard in society and in the family circle, and the poor return obtained,
for the time and money spent in the teaching girls music, or rather what is called such”
and offers a metronomic method intended to improve performance: “Supposing that you
practise with a metronome, which is a capital thing if you can get one; try to catch up the
time you lost in your rallentando by an accelerando in the second bar so as again to start
your third bar with the first beat or bell of the metronome.” 18
While the above article strongly implies that the metronome was by no means
universally used by musical amateurs in England well through the 1870’s—and was
never to prevent a necessary, a priori temporal flexibility—this new machine indeed
arrived during the nineteenth century to teach a host of students how to “march to the
one, two, three” of a clockwork click for activities completely unrelated to “artistic”
music performance. According to the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary (1880), military
bands (and conceivably military troops) could purchase “a very large and loud
Metronome…by Messrs. Rudall & Carte of London” intended for mass, regimented
narrator’s piano as a regimented army, proclaiming, “Why here are pictures of Music-Land, and
the soldiers marching along to battle in their different regiments, and you call then ‘pieces of
music,’ ‘notes,’ and ‘bars.’” Thus from the very outset of the fairy tale, Shedlock allegorizes all
of music notation, for the sake of her elementary educational methods, through a fundamentally
militaristic, not “artistic” paradigm. See Shedlock, 1-2.
18
See S. R., “‘Company’ Playing,” The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Members of the
English Church XVI (July-December, 1873): 200, 204.
372
actions in mechanical time.19
Proof that the military species of the metronome existed
well through the twentieth century can be seen in a 1900 report by The United States War
Department, describing the training of troops with a drummer invariably guided by such a
device.20
In 1901, a Canadian government document listed essential equipment for
military troops, including a “military metronome” at a cost of $10.22.21
The highly regimented physical pedagogy of gymnastics, a field that closely allied
with both physiological (often dubbed “hygienic”) and military training methods, seemed
to be one of the first non-“artistic” performance activities to embrace the constant use of
metronomic time.22
(We recall French physiologist Trousseau using the metronome-
gymnastics treatment on his patients in the 1830s). And as early as the 1820s, Colonel
Amoros’ Paris gymnastic school—perhaps the first and most prominent government-
19
George Grove, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Volume II (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1880), 320. The reference speculates that such a loud, over-sized machine could be helpful for
ensemble rehearsals of non-military musicians, stating, “an instrument of this kind may often be
used, with great advantage, when a number of vocal or instrumental performers practice
together.”
It cannot be overlooked that Macmillan and Co., the publishers of this music dictionary,
were prominent publishers of physiology texts, both in London and New York, during the
nineteenth century.
20
U.S. War Department, Annual Reports (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), 276.
21
Canada Parliament, “Sessional Paper No. 1,” Sessional Papers XXXV (1901): Q-65.
22
None other than Richard Wagner noted the vast distinction between the sensitive, nuanced
actualizations of music tempos and the popular gymnastics regimens of the mid-nineteenth
century. Contending that “our conductors so frequently fail to find the true tempo because they
are ignorant of singing,” Wagner considered such anti-expressive, misguided musicians to be
people who “look upon music as a singularly abstract sort of thing, an amalgam of grammar,
arithmetic, and digital gymnastics;--to be an adept in which may fit a man for a mastership at a
conservatory or musical gymnasium; but it does not follow from this that he will be able to put
life an soul into a musical performance.” See Richard Wagner, On Conducting (Über das
Dirigiren), trans. Edward Dannreuther (London: William Reeves, 1897), 19.
373
sponsored institution of its kind in modern Europe23
—employed metronomic training
methods for a variety of bodily activities. As reported in the American Journal of
Education (1826), Amoros’ seemingly automatical exercises,
Consist in chanting different pieces, the rhythm of each of which corresponds
with the various movements of the legs, arms, and body, which the pupils execute
on the spot. A metronome regulates these movements. The pupil thus learns to
measure time and space, to regulate with precision the common step, the
accelerated step, and the leaps of the gymnastic course.24
The Colonel’s training regimen for students seems to closely mirror the fictional General
Metronome’s intentions for Music-Land’s army. While nineteenth-century gymnastic
students readily learned to move their limbs by the machine’s clockwork, their training
was not limited to regimented walking and jumping alone. James Madison Watson’s
Hand-Book of Calisthenics and Gymnastics: A Complete Drill-Book for Schools,
Families, and Gymnasiums (1864) is an early American source that suggests the
possibility of metronomic regulation for “gymnastic reading:”
Rhythm may be applied to reading or recitation, in connection with Calisthenics
or Gymnastics, by making the unit of measuring time the same as in music, a beat
of the hand, foot, or metronome, or a motion from any assignable position.25
For Watson, the metronome was one of four methods—and the only externalized,
mechanical method—of performing rhythmically, and his comment suggests that the
23
According to Edouard Foucaud, “Colonel Amoros, a Spanish refugee, was the principal, the
most active, and the most intelligent promoter of gymnastics as connected with the physical
education of children. He founded a fine establishment in Paris (1819)…in which he endeavored
to develop the physical strength and agility of children.” See Edouard Foucaud, The Book of
Illustrious Mechanics of Europe and America, translated from the French by John Frost (New
York: Appelton & Co, 1847), 313.
24 From the London Scientific Gazette, “Intelligence: Col. Amoros’ Gymnastic school Paris,” in
American Journal of Education I (Boston: Wiat, Green, and Co., 1826), 689.
25
J. Madison Watson, Hand-book of Calisthenics and Gymnastics: A Complete Drill-Book for
Schools, Families, and Gymnasiums (New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1864), 70.
374
metronome was not always available or desirable for “measuring time” in such gymnastic
or music instruction, where the hand or foot usually sufficed as a time reference, as it had
for centuries. Yet, it is distinctly possible that Watson implied the use of a simple
pendulum and not the clockwork “metronome” in his exercises. Consider that, for “Vocal
Exercises with Calisthenics,” Watson suggests, “the members of the class count
continuously in concert, from one to eight inclusive, at an average rate of ninety in a
minute, which rate may be most readily determined by the use of a metronome. The
instructor gives the words of command, and the students take the required positions and
execute all the movements in exact time marked by the counting.”26
In his instructions,
the metronome predetermined the rate, possibly by its pendulum swing alone, but the
“exact time” was maintained by the students’ counting, not by the metronome clicking.
Many contemporaneous musical and scientific sources suggested that the simple
pendulum was an exceedingly appropriate temporal reference, and Watson, too, may
have considered the visual swing of the pendulum bob a sufficient indicator to start his
gymnastic performances. Indeed, Watson may not have considered the metronome useful
for traditional music performances at all: he provides no metronome marks for the many
musical examples by Verdi, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, and others that accompany his
callisthenic exercises.27
(The physically perceived dance meters of this music, in two-,
three-, or four-time, required no strict clockwork guidance). Moreover, the drill-book
supplies a highly detailed rendering of Watson’s gymnastic studio, where a musician
26
Ibid., 124.
27 See Watson, 149-153; 158-162; 187-190; and 206-209 for music examples.
375
actively assists during a relay game, known as “The Indian Club Race,” on the spinet
piano, which seems bare of any clockwork metronome.28
Fig. 6.3. Detail of Watson’s gymnastics studio where students prepared to play “The Indian Club
Race.” While Watson states that the pianist merely plays three chords to start the activity, this pianist
clearly has sheet music in front of her and is in the process of performing a work—seemingly without the
regulated assistance of a metronome, an increasingly popular tool for gymnastics exercises. From J.
Madison Watson, Hand-book of Calisthenics and Gymnastics: A Complete Drill-Book for Schools,
Families, and Gymnasiums (New York: Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., 1864), insert before 251.
Nevertheless, the pedagogical regimentation offered through the clockwork
metronome, exploited by military bands and soldiers in training, was significantly
valuable in other non-“artistic” fields of education by the next decade. Metronomic
regulation seemed particularly appropriate for some educators, perhaps inspired by earlier
gymnastic methods, in the teaching of handwriting. The Manual of Free-hand
Penmanship (1877) suggested the novel incorporation of a metronome (which cannot be
certified as the clockwork variety), an “instrument, owned by some schools for beating
time in music, [which] can be very pleasantly used for keeping the concert time in
28
For instructions on the gymnastics race, see Watson, 384.
376
writing, setting it faster or slower as required.”29
The instructors clearly articulate the
controlling purposes of the device in mass, student training:
If we wish to teach a class, they must all write the same thing at the same time:
otherwise the teaching becomes individual, and, with a large class, necessarily
ineffective. Fix this in your mind, then, that the class must keep together. The
rapid must be restrained, the slow urged on, to their mutual advantage. The class,
especially in its earlier stages, must be treated as a machine, and brought into a
unity of working movement. To teach writing successfully, as any thing else,
absolute obedience and exact execution are imperatively needed.30
As these educators maintained, the metronome—which only “some schools” employed
for music training—was both a normalizing and regulative tool that diminished
individuality for the sake of efficient, simplified group instruction. These were the very
same values astronomers and experimental psychologists applied to the chronograph and
metronome when diminishing the personal equation of their “observer”-subjects. The
metronome’s place in the elementary classroom, as in training camps and university
laboratories of the same decade, thus reduced individual expression-in-action—
normalizing children in a mechanical “unity of working movement”—through systematic
exercise.
Adult students, too, relied on the clockwork metronome for non-musical training
prior to the 1890s. In the learning of takigraphy, a rapid note-dictation technique with
condensed spelling rules, the metronome became a coveted tool. In 1886, the periodical
The Shorthand Writer responded to inquiries about the metronome—what it was and
where it could be purchased—confirming that, in North America at least, the still-obscure
clockwork metronome was primarily intended for children’s musical instruction. To learn
29
Alvin R. Dutton, B. Harrison, et al., Manual of Free-hand Penmanship (Boston: J.W.C. Gilman
& Co., 1877), 9.
30
Ibid., 8.
377
takigraphy, however, a metronome “without the bel is just as good for gauging the
dictation in teaching shorthand…The instrument can be obtaind of almost any large
dealer in musical merchandise, or The Shorthand Writer can furnish them.”31
(The
peculiarities of takigraphic spelling are retained). The metronome’s automatical bell
reflected the once-human sensation of metric pulse in music, and as this comment
suggests, it was unnecessary for writing exercises; the efficient regulation of handwriting
needed no such metrical reference. Mechanically aided writing, alongside quasi-military
educational drilling, continued in public schools throughout the early twentieth century.
In 1892, the American Teacher printed a small article “Writing in the Lower Grades” that
advocates for using the metronome in penmanship exercises. It instructs the student to
“Glide across your paper, forward and back, keep time with the metronome. Ready,
write.”32
Albert Ross Parsons, one of the first and most noted American music pedagogues
promoting a new scientific school of piano instruction, championed the clockwork
metronome as well for his systematic and regulated drilling methods in the mid-1880s. In
utilizing Maelzel’s metronome, Parsons seems directly inspired by the educational
models previously employed in military and gymnastics drilling, and he seemed to be one
of the first piano teachers in North America to specifically prescribe the clockwork
machine—not the simple pendulum—for his novel, normalizing training techniques. In
the aptly titled The Science of Pianoforte Practice (1886), Parsons offered his critique of
a few emerging machines, inspired by physiological apparatuses, intended for “scientific”
31
[“Notices,”] The Shorthand Writer V (Jan., 1886): 14.
32
Lyman D. Smith, “Writing in the Lower Grades,” The American Teacher IX (June, 1892): 393.
378
or technique-based piano training including, “First, the technicon, as fundamental to
clavier work; secondly, the techniphone, as a special means of clavier work; [and thirdly,]
the metronome, as regulating and governing clavier work.”33
Parsons’ essay suggests that there was no scientific method yet associated with
Maelzel’s machine in music education, and that current pedagogues disagreed
considerably as to its proper employment. Similar to the other apparatuses rapidly
emerging in the expanding middle-class musical marketplace, the clockwork
metronome—often a scientific reference when tuning organ pipes—was still an
unfamiliar and experimental tool in the field of music education.34
The clockwork
metronome had not yet achieved the tradition of use familiar to students and
professionals in the twentieth century.
Of the three machines he discussed, Parsons was most favorable toward Maelzel’s
metronome. In The Science of Pianoforte Practice he introduced the machine to a
readership still unfamiliar with its purpose, and more importantly, he explained how it
should never be employed:
33
Albert Ross Parsons, The Science of Pianoforte Practice (New York: G. Schirmer, 1886), 15.
34
One year after Parsons’ text appeared, G.-A. Hirn’s Construction et Emploi du Métronome en
Musique verified as much in France. Commenting on Saint-Saëns’ essay “The Metronome,” Hirn
recognized that because of the imprecision from one metronome to the next, there currently was
no single correct use of the machine for music publications or practicing, in contrast to more
standardized tuning methods that now used metronomic indications. Even if a standardized
metronome could be made, Hirn argued, extreme precision was not an issue since the machine
should never be used to regulate music performance in any case. See G.-A. Hirn, Construction et
Emploi du Métronome en Musique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1887), 5-6; and Camille Saint-Saëns,
“The Metronome,” in Outspoken Essays on Music, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922): 122-4.
379
If the metronome suggests only a glance at a certain conventional sign at the
beginning of a piece, and then a mad race through the notes, heedless of
everything save the inexorable tick-tack of the conscienceless machine, then,
confessedly, it is no aid to practice.35
He realized that anyone slavishly attended to automatical “tick-tack” often ignored the
“conventional sign,” (that is, the musical meter) and neglected the sense of metric pulse
vital for meaningful and expressive performance. Moreover, Parsons reiterated the
commonly held belief that musical time was under the lone authority of the skilled
performer, who in no way ought to be influenced by such mindless mechanical action. He
remarks: “A word as to metronomic designations of tempo in pieces…the musician, if he
consults absolute metronomic signs at all, does so chiefly with a view to comparing them
with his own impressions on the subject.”36
While Parsons admitted that the metronome should have no place in the skilled
actualizations of music compositions—and that initial tempo numbers printed for a work
should not be misinterpreted as regulating musical time—he nevertheless prescribed the
machine as a normalizing agent of musical individuality, used to drill typical (non-
“artistic”) students in repetitive technical exercises:
Started at a judiciously moderate tempo, and then set faster and faster by regular
degrees as practice progresses, it enables one to apply himself systematically to
the working out of a given problem, for days or weeks, independent of varying
moods. Without its aid, the tempo of practice varies incredibly from day to day,
nay, even hour to hour, according to the state of the weather, of one's nerves, etc.
Yesterday, perhaps, everything moved on quietly. To-day cloudy skies and a
heavy air cause everything to drag stupidly. To-morrow one's spirits are above
par, and everything fairly spins. But the day after, nervous restlessness induces
injurious hurrying, and an indigestion in the fingers follows, unfitting the hand for
smooth playing for a day or two.
35
Parsons, 21-22. Emphasis added.
36
Ibid., 24.
380
In contrast to this, judicious practice with the metronome means steadiness
and repose of mind and muscles in work. In relieving the mind of responsibility
for steadiness of tempo, and supplying a graded scale for safely increasing the
speed, the mental strain of prolonged practice is surprisingly lightened.37
Parsons admitted to the living realities of time perception: the sense of time varies with
the subject, with the moment, and with the environment. (Roughly six decades prior,
professional astronomers recorded the ephemeral, non-mechanical nature of time
perception, a concept still voiced by philosopher-psychologists such as William James in
Parsons’ day). Moreover, Parsons considered that tempo variability—during practicing
only—manifested as a personal problem of physiology: nerves, moods, and the
musculature system all contributed to unpredictable human-temporal fluctuations. As he
implied, the metronome could cure these aliments. Indeed, Parsons described a process of
“lightening mental strain” that seems to suggest the effects of habituation; as he related,
the mind is “relived of the responsibility” of thinking about (and perhaps even of feeling)
the musical time through repetitive training under “the inexorable tick-tack of the
conscienceless machine.”
Parsons probably did not consider the extent to which his method of mindless,
practice-room drill-work eventually and subconsciously transferred to performance, or
that metronomic training instilled the subject with mechanical qualities, which critics
intuited and psychologists documented through the remainder of the century. A year after
the appearance of Parson’s text, G.-A. Hirn, in his pedagogical essay Construction et
Emploi du Métronome en Musique (1887), reiterated: “ The metronome is destined, not to
beat the measure [time] (this would be exceptional and serve to mechanize Art, as Weber
feared), but to indicate from the outset, to a director or performer, the average movement
37
Ibid., 22.
381
desired by the composer,” and that the skilled musician had the authority and
responsibility to vary the time with nuances essential to the “musical sentiment.”38
Parsons, well aware of such contemporaneous criticisms of the machine, did attempt to
quell fears of his new scientific pedagogy, asking, “Does any one still hold the use of the
metronome to be dangerous to musical sensibility?”39
Parsons, as with following technically minded pedagogues, seemed less
concerned with “artistic” musical traditions, and more with novel pedagogical methods
and tools applied with “scientific” values in order to train a new generation of amateur
musicians. This is not to say that Parsons was uninfluenced by more typical nineteenth-
century instruction techniques as well; he described a student’s practice as a military
battle, where the metronome formed the infantry configurations essential in achieving
victory in practice.40
Significantly, Parsons most rigorously employed the metronome,
not for music training, but for gymnastic exercises of his own invention, which he offered
in the appendix to The Science of Pianoforte Practice. Besides being the dean of
scientific piano pedagogues in late nineteenth century America, Parsons was the author of
38
See Hirn, 4. “Le métronome est destiné, non à batter la measure (ceci ne peut etre
qu’exceptionnel et reviendrait à mécaniser l’Art, comme le craignait Weber), mais à indiquer des
l’abord, à un chef d’orchestra ou à un exécutant, le mouvement moyen que désire le compositeur,
movement auquel on doit se tenir tant que l’artiste n’indique pas de changement, et auquel on
doit sans cesse revenir à travers les petits écarts que commande le sentiment musical.”
39 Parsons, 24.
40
Ibid., 30. Parsons writes: “Therefore, it is well in attacking a new piece not to count too
confidently on achieving it in one unbroken series of conflicts, renewed day by day until it has
succumbed. Rather, let the student throw his whole energies into the work daily as long as ground
is visibly gained, and until the chief difficulties are at least hemmed in. If then its surrender does
not follow within a reasonable time, let it be formally invested, and metronome parallels be run
zigzagging toward its ultimate tempo…This mode of procedure somewhat resembles a military
campaign, in that one does not foresee precisely which objective points will be achieved first, but
only determines the line of effort to be pursued.”
382
gymnastic training books, which were also published by G. Schirmer.41
Indeed, Parsons
envisioned his new scientific piano regimen to be a logical extension of gymnastics and
its mechanized drilling methods:
The use of metronomically-regulated rithms [sic.], both in gymnastic work and in
practice, not only prevents excitement of mood and allays nervous restlessness,
but also, besides awakening and training the rithmic sense which is artistically so
important, it enables the student to get an amount of exercise at a single practice
which would otherwise be impossible without muscular exhaustion. For it is a fact
of consequence to the student that, even when the point of fatigue has been
reached in exercise, a simple change of rithm will enable him to take a fresh start
without the loss of a minute's time, and proceed with a new series of movements,
as though no fatigue had been felt.
The exercises here given occupy less than fifteen minutes in performance
when executed the prescribed number of times, with metronomic beating as
directed.42
The metronome aided in a comprehensive “scientific” education of the body and mind
that Parsons was uniquely qualified to instruct. Parsons again suggested that the machine
quelled the variable emotions of the student over time. The metronome trained-out
fatigue and nervousness, instilling instead a sense of “rithm” keeping with the gymnastic
traditions of repetitive “muscular exercise.”
For the many “Rithmical Exercises” Parsons included in The Science of
Pianoforte Practice, he instructs: “Set the metronome for all of the exercises at ‘100’ for
a movement and a count to each stroke.” How little this training had to do with artistic
performance—and how much it resembled a military drill—is readily apparent as Parson
dictates:
41
Ibid., 44.
42
Ibid., 45.
383
At stroke “1” of the metronome throw the shoulders promptly DOWN. Remain
perfectly QUIET, with the shoulders DOWN until the time of the first note of the
rithm expires. With the second note, let the shoulders return, as with an elastic
recoil, to the original position, UP, here again to remain QUIET until the next
"1.”43
Parsons perhaps realized that his metronomic exercises had nothing to do with the
“artistic” performance of music compositions. While he indeed documented the rhythms
of these physical exercises in standard music notation, Parsons significantly omitted any
time signatures. His rhythmic exercises were non-metrical in appearance and thus suggest
non-metrical qualities in performance. No consistent “strong beat” or “invisible (agogic)
accent” runs throughout the notated excerpts; for the gymnast-pianist, no sense of pulse
or bar emphasis was possible since no bars existed—visually or aurally—in these
repetitive, four-“click” physical exercises. Instead the students actualized mechanically
precise “up and down, back and forward” movements (with “quiet” holds) all while
counting with the clockwork metronome for the greatest possible consistency and
regimentation as defined by this particular militaristic-gymnastic pedagogy.
43
Ibid., 46.
384
Fig. 6.4. One of Parsons’ many musical-gymnastic exercises for modern pianists. Probably derived
from physiological and psychological methods, Parsons’ repetitive drills equalized human motion through
the clicks of the metronome, while revising musical notation to express metronomic rhythm exclusively.
Time signatures, denoting the physical sensation of metric pulse, are thus effaced. Contradictorily, Parsons
stipulated that such metronomic regulation should never transfer to music compositions or “artistic”
performances. From Albert Ross Parsons, The Science of Pianoforte Practice (New York: G. Schirmer,
1886), 49.
Parsons’ treatise represented an emerging trend in arts education, a new tradition
informed by new mechanical apparatuses and scientific methods. His novel educational
approach necessitated the clockwork machine for reasons entirely divorced from past
performance practices and understandings of musical time and action. Yet, even during
Parsons’ lifetime, many musicians and educators across the Western world, such as Hirn,
still understood that the metronome did not provide the a priori time of creative music,
speech, or dance performances, and thus ought not to be a primary aspect of educational
training.
Similar to Hirn, critic Frank Ritchie, in his article “Music and Words” (1899)
from The Living Age magazine, reflected upon the mechanical and “gymnastic” methods
385
of teaching poetry that had also emerged over the previous decades: “As regards the
practice of extending the metrical value of syllables, it may be admitted that considerable
license is permissible and even desirable: to read poetry to the beat of a metronome
would be an atrocity.”44
Lyman’s Normal Music Course (1896) also recounted the
individual student’s rhythmic freedom to be paramount, as his source was one of the last
to advocate for a simple pendulum, a non-automatical time reference for the teaching of
musical time.45
Julia E. Crane in her Music Teacher’s Manual, first published in 1889,
stated a similar belief, realizing that traditional artists and progressive scientists infused
the meaning of “rhythm” with two opposing values:
By accurate rhythm is not meant metronome accuracy. Rote singing should
always be [musically] rhythmical, with no sound of dragging or hurrying. There
can be no absolute rule in this matter, but all teachers must consider that while
dragging and hurrying are musical sins, proper pauses at the close of the phrases,
and musical ritardandos and accelerandos are the signs of artistic excellence. The
meaning of the song and the capacity of the class singing it, must determine the
length of the phrases, and the rate of singing.46
As the metronome became more available, educators such as Crane, Lyman, and Ritchie,
who valued the intrinsic humanity of musical time and rhythm, rejected the machine in
the education of impressionable youth. Even if Crane used a simple-pendulum
“metronome,” a device more commonly used to teach young singers and instrumentalists
44
Frank Ritchie, “Music and Words,” The Living Age, Aug. 26, 1899, 561. APS Online.
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=511051102&sid=7&Fmt=2&clientId=3338&RQT=309&V
Name=HNP.
45
See, for examples, Frederic A. Lyman, The Normal Music in the Schoolroom (New York:
Silver, Burdett and Co., 1896), 28-29, 40-44, 66.
46 Julia E. Crane, Music Teachers Manual, Seventh Edition (Potsdam, NY: Elliot Fay & Sons,
1915), 70.
386
during her age,47
she suggested that any external source could never replace the
importance of interpretation. For these pedagogues, and to some extent even the
scientifically influenced Parsons, musical “meaning” in “artistic” time—which had no
absolute, scientific rules—trumped clockwork. Nevertheless, as modern culture
developed, this value system drastically reversed in general education: what once was
clearly an atrocity for some—the application of the precise clockwork rhythm to
subjective culture—rapidly became a virtue, a goal to strive for, in new psychology-
influenced pedagogies.
The Modern Chronographic Education
The continual, redundant “rhythm” of the clockwork metronome, as first applied in
science laboratories, provided a temporal control for reproducible experiments on
inanimate and living creatures. As we will see, the machine had provided the very same
uses for the general public by the turn of the century. Employed with scientific and
experimental methodologies—founded on laboratory chronography—the metronome
became a common apparatus for the modern, standardized education of the masses. As
first discovered in the psychological laboratory, a subject must train in metronomic time
in order to precisely act in metronomic time. Yet, while experimental scientists most
47
Other sources published in the same year clearly indicate the exclusive use of the simple
pendulum. See for instance L. T. Wade, The Quincy Course of Study in Music (Boston: Silver,
Burdett, & Co., 1889), 24. It recommends that the teacher:
“Affix the metronome supporter to the top of the Chart in such a manner that the
metronome will swing across the page, and adjust length of string to measure forty-eight
inches from supporter to ball.
Set the metronome in motion, and ask the pupils to sing the exercise guided by it,
singing each quarter-note (pointing to each) long enough for the metronome to swing
once across the page, and singing the half-note (pointing to it) long enough for the
metronome to swing twice across the page.”
387
prominently valued strict, mechanical mimicry above individual variation, a new wave of
pedagogues surfaced in the 1890s—years after Parsons’ musical-gymnastics exercises—
who applied the clockwork metronome with intentions once only expressed by these
psychologists. Their stipulation: in order for children to consistently play in precise
“rhythm,” they must be guided by the constant “rhythmic” sound of the metronome.
Due in large part to experimental psychologists’ prescriptions, the meanings of
time and rhythm were rapidly changing towards greater chronographic precisions
throughout Western society. In 1895, E. W. Scripture—the prominent psychologist who
tested musicians in mechanical performance in his Yale laboratory—publicly expressed
the social-industrial need for his new training methods, with their corresponding
chronographic values of rhythmic action, to expand throughout modern education. First
in his text Thinking, Feeling, Doing and later in the periodical The School Review,
Scripture proclaimed:
A great object in the education of children is to reduce their reaction times…A
person should be trained to rapid movements. The arm should be trained to move
quickly as in boxing or in fencing. All things being equal, the quickest man “gets
there.”48
Scripture explained that these values of temporal efficiency, facilitated through
chronographic methods, now applied to all actions of a child’s education, including
sensory perception and artistic creation:
Children should be trained to move all their limbs quickly. Special attention
should be paid to the arm movements which are trained in drawing, writing,
putting things in place, as in sorting colors or grains of corn as rapidly as possible,
etc. Other simple exercises might be added, e.g., the number of dots or the
number of lines that can be made in a quarter of a minute.49
48
E. W. Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” The School Review 3 (Nov., 1895):
544.
49
Scripture, 544-5.
388
The precise durations of a child’s attention span and his physical responsiveness were
great concerns for Scripture, as for many experimental psychologists referencing
metronomic rhythm. Maintaining his chronographic bias, Scripture proclaimed,
“Children should be trained in rapid association,”50
which his science was uniquely
qualified to offer the whole of general education: “Here, too, almost every exercise at
present used in the schools could be so taught as to contribute to education of this
principle and that, too, at a saving, not an increase, of time and labor. The only new thing
required is a thorough knowledge of the principles of the new psychology on the part of
the teacher.”51
The new scientific paradigms of education that ascended by the turn of the
century, championed by Scripture and many others, reflected systematic, automatic, and
habitual training methods: instructional procedures endorsed by experimental
psychologists through the application of metronomic rhythm and chronographic
procedures. The highly influential educator G. Stanley Hall—an early student of Wundt,
founding editor of the American Journal of Psychology, and President of Clark
University—codified this new “experimental” wave of children’s education in Youth: Its
Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, first published in 1904. Like many psychologists
before him, Hall—who oversaw the musical-chronographic “rhythmic” experiments of
his students Bolton (1894) and Sears (1902)—advocated for the automatical training of
children, who seemed merely subjects in a more public laboratory:
50
Scripture, 544.
51
Scripture, 546.
389
The ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social
licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding. Never again [in a child’s formative
years] will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to
habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external
and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical
technic, foreign tounges and their pronunciation, the manipulation of numbers and
of geometrical elements, and many kinds of skill have now their golden
hour…This is not teaching in its true sense so much as it is drill, inculcation, and
regimentation. The method should be mechanical, repetitive, authoritative,
dogmatic. The automatic powers are at their very apex.52
Hall, Scripture, and others called for their laboratory procedures to inform all aspects of a
child’s learning—from music performance to writing, reading, and speaking. As Hall
confirmed, the new pedagogy valued automatism above individualistic thought and
action, which was by nature inefficient, variable, nuanced, and subjective. Scripture, in
1895, uncannily prophesized that these laboratory values would drastically influence
general education, and music education especially, in what he considered:
A new pedagogy as founded on the new (or experimental) psychology. The new
psychology determines by careful observation and experiment the laws of mental
life…The new psychology is founded on carefully obtained facts. It is sincerely to
be hoped that a new pedagogy will rapidly develop on the basis of the accurately
determined methods and carefully established principles of experimental
psychology. The anatomical rooms and the physiological laboratory are the
foundations of the science and art of medicine; the physical laboratory is the
foundation of civil and electrical engineering; before long I hope to see the
psychological laboratory and the psychological clinic at the foundation of all
education.53
Scripture did not have long to wait to see his wish become a reality, to witness the rise of
a chronographic classroom. By 1900, the scientist had corresponded and consulted with
music educators across the world, including Oscar Raif from the Berlin Hochschule,
52
G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton and
Company, 1907), 4-5. This text is a reduction of Hall’s 1904 book Adolescence.
53
Scripture, 547-8.
390
regarding new, experimental teaching methods using the metronome.54
In the following
years, scientific pedagogies, accompanied by scientific rhythm, strongly influenced
general education, invariably defining a student’s actions and perceptions through
normalizing chronographic values, just as they had in the psychology laboratory. And
while these scientifically inspired pedagogies both modernized and streamlined teaching
methods through drilling, habituation, and discipline—under the “external and
mechanical training” of chronography—they consequently diminished the variable and
subjective meanings of living rhythm and movement with aid of the scientific
metronome.
The New Sciences of Music Education and Child-Study with the Metronome
As Parsons’ 1886 text already showed, music pedagogy was not immune to the rising
influence of scientific values, methods, and technologies, and over the decades,
instruction methods increasingly advocated for students to train with ever-more precise
references to objective, metronomic rhythm. Edward Baxter Perry had recognized by the
early 1890s that machines were becoming trusted aids for training middle-class music
students in technical precision, and that this trend was entirely supported by popular
music periodicals and publishers, those with the greatest potential to gain financially
from selling new technologies. Perry believed that some of the very same machines
Parsons described in The Science of Pianoforte Practice actively effaced creativity and
expression in music education and performance, contending that machines, employed
54
See E. W. Scripture, “Cross-Education,” Appletons’ Popular Science Monthly LVI (March,
1900): 590. According to his letter, Raif began metronomic training experiments on his
conservatory students in 1898.
391
with scientific values, stunted the student’s musical sense.55
Voicing his protest in an
aptly entitled article “The Other Side” (1894), Perry alluded to Parsons’ methods and
even more novel pedagogies emerging in the scientifically driven decade:
For some years past our musical periodicals have been the arena in which the
numerous champions of diverse modern methods and modern improvements in
the study of the pianoforte have striven gallantly for pre-eminence…Surgery,
calisthenics and psychology have all been drafted into the service of pianism, as
well as mechanical ingenuity, Yankee shrewdness in surmounting or evading
difficulties, and the habit of systematizing and concentrating effort, engendered
by our practical age.56
Despite Perry’s warnings, the chronographic bias of experimental psychologists
decisively shaped modern drilling techniques at the core of general education during the
1890s. In 1900 aesthetician and psychologist Henry Davies57
penned the introductory
essay, “A Plea for a Science of Art,” in volume XVIII of the widely read periodical
Music, in which he stated an ever-growing allegiance to the new culture defined by
experimental psychology:
One by one the great intellectual interests of men have come under the influence
of the scientific spirit. The so-called individual knowledges are now regarded as
constituting so many illustrations of this fact. The last to stand out, as it were, is
art. But even this interest is destined to yield as, I believe, a foregone conclusion,
55 Perry was consistent in his derision of mechanical apparatuses applied to music education.
Writing in Music VI, Perry exclaims: “I have deplored their introduction somewhat as having a
tendency to emphasize our national error of giving undue weight to the mechanical and technical
side of art work; but when they show us players who are the equals or superiors as artists of those
who have always ignored such mechanical devices, I shall be very ready to acknowledge and
welcome them.” See Edward Baxter Perry, et al., “The Pedagogical Aspects of the Practice
Clavier,” Music VI (May-Oct., 1894): 325.
56 Edward Baxter Perry, “The Other Side,” Music V (November, 1893-April, 1894): 207. Perry
describes many machines currently on the market that Parsons described—in including the
technicon, an artificial harness for the student’s hands—that supposedly improved physical
technique.
57
Henry Davies, “A Plea for a Science of Art,” Music XVIII (May, 1900): 15.
392
especially when respect is had to the achievements of psychological investigation
in recent years.58
Davies believed that the creative arts and experimental sciences were converging ever
closer, for the good of both fields. “The aesthetic of our time,” he reiterates, “seeks to rest
on carefully guarded observation, measurement, statistics, experiment, in a word, on a
method.”59
By the turn of the century, music education had enmeshed with the scientific
methods and values of experimental psychology, as music pedagogues—in the pursuit of
objective, scientific norms—increasingly viewed the metronome as an infallible constant,
a chronograph against subjective musical perception. The metronome was no longer a
reference for subjective, internal movement; it became the objective rule of human
action, redefining once living rhythm with scientific precision in seemingly all aspects of
public education.
The work of experimental psychologists, inventors, and modern pedagogues all
attest to these shifting cultural values: greater mechanical precisions in all aspects of
human performance were appropriate, desirable, and necessary for the new generation of
students—thus a new cultural tradition of use for the clockwork metronome ascended. An
1893 United States patent filing by British inventor John Treadway Hanson provides a
telling analogy of the new metronomic qualities in musical instruction. While living,
professional conductors of the age were often chastised for being metronomic, Hanson’s
new mechanized “metronome”—specifically intended for the amateur, student
musician—replicated the beat patterns of a conductor’s baton with the appearance of a
58
Ibid., 1.
59
Ibid., 8.
393
mindless automaton60
along with a mechanized sound production “much the same as that
of a musical box.”61
Waning from the consciousness of these modern, scientific educators and
inventors was the application of the metronome as a non-regulatory, initial pulse
reference—one that posed less detriment to individual creation, interpretation, and
expression in time. In this scientifically informed age, in which chronographic
automatism and habitual training reigned, a simple pendulum was insufficient compared
to clockwork. Indeed, pedagogues of this new systematic and experimental training—
informed through the chronographic bias—found contextual “meaning” and subjective
interpretation in time too imprecise for a host of performance acts. William Patterson, in
The Rhythm of Prose, voiced the great “problem” in understanding and actualizing
rhythm in twentieth-century culture. Up to the present day, Patterson reported, “Rhythm
has been treated as an art form instead of as a form of motor expression…‘Meaning’
interferes with estimates of duration and intensity,”62
two quantifiable values of the
experimental psychologist’s chronographic understanding of rhythm. Indeed, Patterson’s
assessment was accurate when compared to past beliefs in creative, subjective time:
60
John Treadway Hanson, “Metronome,” U.S. Patent #512,470 (Filed Mar. 13, 1893; Patented
Jan. 9, 1894). On December 12, 1893, Hanson described his invention to the Royal Music
Association and highlighted the glaring omissions from his American patent filing. He admitted,
“It is but mechanical and has the limitations inseparable from mechanism, and can only be of use
for the practice of students when no conductor is present. Still you may possibly think there may
be some advantage in students becoming accustomed to the various beats of a bâton, and learning
to attach a meaning to each of them.”
See John Treadway Hanson, “A New Metronome,” in Proceedings of the Musical
Association, 20th Sess. 1893–1894 (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1894): 23.
61 Hanson, “A New Metronome,” 24.
62 William Morrison Patterson, The Rhythm of Prose, An Experimental Investigation of Individual
Difference in the Sense of Rhythm (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 30. Patterson
cites the theories of W. Brown in Time in English verse rhythm (1908).
394
rhythm was once considered a living, nuanced quality—a creative “art form”—not a
scientific control. Before experimental psychologists applied the scientific metronome to
human action and perception, “artistic” rhythm was interpretive before it was
metronomic—musical and spoken rhythm was complex and meaningful, a rhythm
irreducible to mere mechanics. As Patterson’s comment implied, the messy problems of
“art” and interpretation interfered with the quantifiable (and ultimately reductive)
knowledge of chronographic time and action.
As early as 1894—corresponding to the release of scientific “rhythm” studies by
Meumann, Bolton, and others—American music periodicals espoused ever-greater
mechanical methods of instruction to young and inexperienced students, in which
exacting metronomic regulation was now paramount to the understanding of musical time
and performance practices. As its title exposes, the turn-of–the-century periodical Music:
A Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Art, Science, Technic and Literature of Music
consistently discussed music and education through mechanical reference and technical
knowledge. For instance, W. S. B. Mathews’ Music article “Schumann, the Poet of the
Pianoforte”—appearing in the same issue as Perry’s diatribe against mechanical music
education—deemed with scientific certainty that the theme of the Schumann’s “‘Etudes
Symphoniques’…moves in quarters at the rate of 54 of the metronome.”63
With no
discussion of the importance of the performer’s expressive interpretation, pulse-sense, or
63
W. S. B. Mathews, “Schumann, the Poet of the Pianoforte,” Music V (Nov. 1893-Apr. 1894):
713. Reprinted in Music Its Ideals and Methods (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser, 1897), 87.
From the pre-chronographic past, the caveat of John Alexander Fuller-Maitland provides
the directly opposite instruction: “We must warn the student of Schumann's pianoforte works
against placing any reliance in the metronome marks, which are quite incorrect in all the existing
editions, the composer's own metronome being altogether out of order.” See John Alexander
Fuller-Maitland, Schumann (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1884), 61.
395
individuality, Mathews (the editor of the periodical) thereby reduced the poetry of
Schumann’s music to replicable clockwork. As many periodicals suggest, musical
pedagogues under the influence of scientific “rhythm” applied the metronome not as a
mere reference; the machine began to actively regulate time and action, as it had done in
the laboratory for nearly two decades prior. Thus, for Music’s readership along with those
musical amateurs failing to heed the warnings of experienced musicians such as Edward
Baxter Perry, the chronographic bias began influencing their foundational understandings
of music education and performance.64
By 1895 middle-class music students had gained even greater access to new
methods and machines for instruction, which required the purchase of a clockwork
metronome for their technical-musical training. The article “A Lesson from the
Metronome” by an anonymous writer “H. L. B.” from the Christian Science Journal
attests to this trend, along with the new applications of the Maelzel metronome as a
chronographic regulator of musical action. The narrator, a middle-class mother of a
typical pupil, relates the impact of the new clockwork metronome upon her daughter’s
daily practice. The writer was not an experienced musician and was totally unaware of
the metronome until her daughter brought one home. Indeed, it seems that the metronome
was still not common knowledge in the standard middle-class “musical” household.65
64
Nevertheless, the word “metronome,” even through the 1890s, could alternatively indicate a
simple pendulum, and thus it is difficult to ascertain pedagogical applications of the clockwork
device with absolute certainty during the last years of the nineteenth century. In 1893, for
instance, Music IV reported upon Zeckwer’s patent #360,550 filed in 1886 as a “species of
metronome” in the form of a simple pendulum. See Music IV (1893): 47.
65
It must be stated that, as late as the 1910 edition, The Christian Science Hymnal, which
includes five hymns written by Rev. Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science and The
Christian Science Journal, does not include one metronome mark in the entire book. See The
Christian Science Hymnal (Boston: The Christian Science Publishing Society), 1910.
396
“For the benefit of some who may be as ignorant as I was,” she admits, “let me say the
metronome is a small machine for indicating the correct time and speed at which a
musical composition should be played. It ticks by clock work and rings a tiny bell at
regular intervals thus ‘marking time’ for the musical student.”66
But for this musical
layman, the standard bell metronome reflected far more than marking the time: it was the
truth of time itself. She depicts what must have been a customary scene for the era, as the
novice music student and the well meaning but musically clueless mother wrestled to
conform within artificial, metronomic accuracy:
After our young woman had been at the piano a few moments I heard vexed
exclamations. As I went to her assistance she cried “Oh, Mamma, I can't play with
this thing! It won't come out right!”
Conscious of superior knowledge, I attempted to show her how it should
be done, but speedily found myself in her dilemma. While I counted one, two,
three, four; one, two, three, four; my monitor had marked one, two, three, four;
one, two, three, four; one, two. Again, and again, I tried, and presently began the
movement in proper time. I was jubilant! But a few more bars found me far ahead
of the recording bell and I too, began to say, “Oh, pshaw!” The little machine had
a quiet way of ticking on quite unconscious of my blunders. It was intensely silly
to be provoked with it.67
Despite the young daughter’s and her own inability to perform in strict metronomic
time—as the laboratory subject would be forced to do “passively”—the mother believed
the metronomic reference was the unerring one. She found herself to “blunder” in the
perception of musical time as compared to the metronome, with its mechanical bell
dictating the bar with automatical consistency. Unknowing of the anti-metronomic
aesthetic of musicians such as Hofmann, Saint-Saëns, Berlioz, Sternberg, Brahms, Perry
66
H.L.B., “A Lesson from the Metronome,” Christian Science Journal XIII (April, 1895): 375.
67
H.L.B., 375-6.
397
and countless others, mother and child continued to struggle with automatical time. The
writer continues:
I had often gone to my daughter saying positively, “Child, you are not counting
right”—and had received the answer “it is right.” Now there could be no question
whether her music were right or wrong. If it agreed with the monitor it was right:
if it disagreed it was wrong and there could be also no offense.
Her daughter’s innate rhythmic feeling conflicted with an automaton, and the young lady
adamantly felt that she perceived musical time correctly compared with a machine. Yet
the narrator rationalized with scientific certainty that the truth must lay with the
metronome, and that any diversion from mechanical time only reflected human error—It
was their unique personal equations that were the “problem” when compared to the
clockwork standard. She confesses, “My blunders were absolutely nothing to the
metronome, neither thing nor person was to be condemned, but my own proud self.”68
Against its chronographic precision, only humans could be found wanting. For this
mother, a staunch Christian Scientist, the metronome was not simply the representation of
musical time; her essay was a modern morality tale informed through the chronographic
bias, in which the metronome—a tool the writer was totally ignorant of her entire life—
became the very analogy of God’s rule.69
She states, “Brought face to face with divine
law mortal mind stands abashed,” concluding from the modern lesson in clockwork
performance that “Science is immutably right.”70
Similar to the laboratory chronograph
68
H.L.B., 376.
69
She verifies: “There is and can be no mistake here. God makes the rule and everything short of
strict agreement with his unerring law is discordant. Until work is compared with God's way,
mortals can never be sure it is well done. Brought face to face with divine law mortal mind stands
abashed.” H.L.B., 376.
70
H.L.B., 376-7.
398
and the God of Christian Science, the metronome offered the disinterested, objective, and
infallible truth, one the mere human could only aspire to mimic, albeit imperfectly.
This 1895 Christian Science Journal article allegorizes the significant value shift
in time for middle-class culture, as music teachers and their students began accepting the
metronome as the unerring reference for modern education. Indeed, while few sources
considered the metronome to be godly, by the 1890s, music periodicals, references, and
performing editions nevertheless had attested that the metronome was the scientific (and
thus irrefutable) truth of time, a machine that presided above and beyond the variable
“problems” of human perception. For instance, A Dictionary of Musical Terms (1895),
published by G. Schirmer (a company with an undoubted commercial interest in
clockwork metronome sales ever since Parsons’ music and gymnastic treatises),71
espoused the new chronographic bias of education and performance, stating that the
definitive metronome mark is placed “at the head of a composition for exactly indicating
its tempo” and is “much used by beginners and students, for learning to play strictly in
time, and for timing their practice.”72
Unlike the critical Encyclopedia Britannica entry
71
The obvious fact exists that published music with metronome numbers tacitly requires and
encourages consumers to purchase and use metronomes. Music publishers’ economic relationship
to metronome sales, sheet music, and metronome-advertisement income is not the primary focus
of this study, but it is important to mention that some of the very first music publishers to print
metronome numbers—notably Breitkopf und Härtel and Tobias Haslinger—also sold
metronomes in their shops.
Even Grove’s first edition Dictionary of Music (1880) promoted the emerging economic
interests of national music publishers and metronome manufacturers (who now supplied
machines for new pedagogical texts such as Shedlock’s Trip to Music-Land). Within its
“metronome” definition, the British reference states: “By far the best Metronomes now attainable
are those manufactured in England for Messrs. Cocks, Chappell, Ashdown & Perry, and other
well-known Music Publishers. French Metronomes are far less durable than these, and, as a
general rule, far less accurate time-keepers; though it is sometimes possible to meet with one
which will beat evenly enough, as long as it lasts.” Grove, vol. II (1880): 320.
72
Theodore Baker, A Dictionary of Musical Terms, Third Edition (New York: G. Schirmer,
1897), 121.
399
seen in Chapter II, the Schirmer reference failed to relate the reductive, mechanical
effects that the metronome imbued in the performer, or that living music performance
seldom corresponded—or should correspond—to precise clockwork rhythm.
By the mid-1890s, science and music periodicals had converged in endorsing the
metronome as a premiere external guide of rhythmic action. Strict metronomic regulation
in human training, once reserved exclusively for the laboratory, was rapidly becoming the
standard rule of middle-class music pedagogy. Volume VIII of Music: A Monthly
Magazine Devoted to the Art, Science, Technic and Literature of Music (1895) called for
the amateur student to perform music “rhythmically,” that is, with incessant, metronomic
consistency. In the article “Rubato” by William Smythe Babcock Mathews, the editor of
the periodical, personal interpretation ceased to be a primary factor in an amateur’s
habitual musical training, as he asserts:
Rubato is not something to be sought…What almost every piano student needs to
learn more than any other one thing is first to play in measure. When you have a
rhythmical feeling, so that you can play with the metronome without any
particular hampering of freedom, then the next thing is to learn to feel the
expression…This varying of rhythm [rubato] must be done in such a way that the
hearer is not conscious of it as accelerando or retard, but simply as expression:
and when it is well done the metronome will come right with the playing when
you take the whole eight or sixteen measures in succession.73
Mathews, perhaps unaware of the machine’s habituating effects, recognized that the
metronome defined a “rhythmical feeling” for the student—but it was a “rhythm” of a
mechanical species. For Mathews, the expressive, linguistic, and physical qualities of
time—now reconceived as an atypical and individual variation (in rubato)—must be
regulated first and foremost by the metronome. Indeed, he urged students to use the
73
William Smythe Babcock Mathews, “The Practical Teacher. Rubato,” Music VIII (May-
October 1895): 325.
400
machine when gauging the mechanical time-accuracy of symmetric musical phrases,
even before they “learn to feel expression”—an exactly opposite instruction from Julia E.
Crane’s 1889 assessment of artistic rhythm. Mathews’ advice even contrasts with
Parsons’ metronome-caveat from 1886. Thus Mathews imbued music instruction with an
increasing scientific precision, one that devalued the personal equation of the performer-
student and contradicted the attitudes and practices of skilled musicians and
knowledgeable critics of his day (and of the past century). No longer was the metronome
for simple technical drilling or pulse reference; no longer were the movements of speech
and rhetoric primary aspects of musical phrasing and expression. Mathews implied that
the clockwork metronome actively structured and grounded musical tunes, in both
practice and performance, regardless of a piece’s unique melodic, harmonic, metric, or
formal qualities. Such clockwork conceptions of musical time, along with the rigid and
reductive views of musical rhythm and movement, would become even more precise in
the following decades as scientific pedagogies continued to gain popularity.
By 1897, as the clockwork metronome finally began to be manufactured within
North America, the periodical Music had stressed to music students the importance of the
tool for practicing the latest sheet music and instruction books (with all-important
metronome markings). Conveniently, Music sold clockwork metronomes at a discount
with subscriptions to the periodical. (North American music periodicals used the
metronome-subscription incentive as a common sales tactic in the late nineteenth
century.) Employing redundant, metronomic language, Music’s full-page announcement
exclaims, imperative after imperative, the essential value of the clockwork machine for
the modern student’s precisely regimented musical education:
401
A METRONOME SHOULD BE ON EVERY PIANO.
We have placed a large order for metronomes with the celebrated
American house of the John Church Company, and are now prepared to send
them out as premiums, as given below…
EVERY PIANO STUDENT OUGHT TO HAVE A METRONOME.
EVERY SINGER OUGHT TO HAVE A METRONOME.
EVERY TEACHER OUGHT TO HAVE A METRONOME.
The Metronome tells you the rate of movement at which you ought to play or sing
a piece.
The Metronome tells you whether you can go through the piece in unbroken
measure.
The Metronome tells you whether you have doubled the speed exactly in Mason's
exercises.
The Metronome tells you whether you are playing your Virgil exercises at the
proper speed.
The Metronome is your rhythmic guide, philosopher and friend, without which at
hand for consultation you will be all at sea.
The Metronome tells you whether you are playing your slow movements without
hurrying on the one hand or without hanging back.74
Such blatantly cajoling advertisements for the apparently still unfamiliar Maelzel
metronome were nothing uncommon. As early as 1888, Etude magazine, published by
Theodore Presser, promoted the technological novelty of Maelzel’s machine (in contrast
to the simple pendulum) in an advertisement that read: “What shall I buy for Christmas
presents?…A metronome, with clockwork, is a fine present for the progressive
student.”75
Nevertheless, Etude continued to offer “teacher’s pocket metronomes”—
graduated simple pendulums—in their ad section (and as subscription prizes) through the
1890s. Not willing to miss any opportunity for profit, the Theodore Presser shop directly
sold both kinds of metronome to consumers eager for music instruction.76
Perhaps it is
74
[advertisement], Music XI (Apr., 1897), inside cover.
75
Etude VI (1888): 193. ML e85 v6 1888 no. 12, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of
Music.
76
See, for example, Etude VI: 181.
402
telling that Etude did not consistently print metronome numbers for the many music
selections offered within the periodical until 1895. And by 1898, new advertisements for
the Maelzel metronome—with an enticing image of the clockwork machine—had begun
to supersede advertisements and images of simple tempo-pendulums in Presser’s Etude
magazine.77
Figure 6.5. A typical advertisement in Theodore Presser’s Etude, circa 1890s, for the “Teacher’s Pocket
Metronome,” an adjustable simple pendulum with a graduated scale intended for general music education.
Such devices, commonly used throughout nineteenth-century pedagogy, were solely intended for an initial
or basic tempo-pulse reference.
Finding a home both in the laboratory, classroom, and music studio, the
clockwork metronome was a tool for many purposes by the turn-of-the-century. While
music periodicals stressed the metronome in musical education, other periodicals equally
championed the clockwork metronome for the modern science education. The magazine
Science (1897), for instance, considered Maelzel’s machine an essential apparatus for
public schools in order to “enable the properly trained teacher to give a very thorough
course in laboratory instruction.”78
The textbook A First Course on Physics (1906),
77
See Etude XVI (1898): 83. ML e85 v16 no.3, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music.
78
Franklin W. Barrows, “The New York State Science Teachers' Association,” Science 5
(Mar.19, 1897): 466.
403
suggests that the metronome was a standard schoolroom device, not only for music
training, but also for a variety of physics experiments including tests on Newton’s Second
Law of Motion.79
In the last years of the nineteenth century, educators under the chronographic bias
prominently voiced the importance of this new metronomic education for the typical
student. In the 1896 Musical Visitor article “The metronome; its use,” M. L. Karr
proclaimed the benefits of this still novel tool of musical instruction, stating, “There is a
new school of teaching most successfully in operation and growing in popularity, one of
whose distinctive features is the use of this little instrument.”80
It cannot go unnoticed
that the publisher of the Musical Visitor was the John Church Company, and just over a
year after Karr’s article appeared, the firm would become the first major producer of
clockwork metronomes in North America.81
Karr confirms that clockwork metronomes and metronomic rhythm were indeed
forming the centerpiece of the new scientific method of music education espoused by
eager music publishers and modern pedagogues. For Karr, the clockwork metronome,
like the observatory chronograph or the laboratory kymograph, “encourages precision,
promptness, and accuracy—nay, insists, with its strenuous monotony, on all these.”82
Under scientific prescriptions, monotony and mechanical precision were new cultural
79
Robert Andrews Millikan and Henry Gordon Gale, A First Course on Physics (Boston: Ginn &
Company, 1906), 26, 27, 34.
80
M. L. Karr, “The metronome—its use,” The Musical Visitor 25 (Apr., 1896): 98.
81
See [Advertisement], The Musical Visitor, a Magazine of Musical Literature and Music 26
(Dec., 1897): 335.
82
Karr, 98.
404
values for performance pedagogy. Through this non-living temporal reference, the
metronome vanquishes the child’s volatile emotional state—his personal equation—in
practice and performance, as Karr explains:
It is self that must be conquered, spasmodic, nervous, untutored self, before
anything can be done in public; and this calm, unemotional, logical little ticker is
a support beyond words in the battle.83
Karr, echoing Parsons’ gymnastic-hygienic pedagogy roughly a decade prior, points out
that the variables of the child’s personal equation must be regulated—“conquered”
even—through habitual use of the monotonous, lifeless metronome. As many suggested,
the metronome reflected inhumanity, but for Karr, this was a positive, scientific value;
the metronome reduced all subjective, unpredictable elements of musical interpretation
and action to mechanical certainty, especially for the impressionable young student. In
this modern pedagogy, “logical,” “unemotional” mechanics trumped personal expression.
As Karr describes, the metronome trained both the mind and body of the student through
artificial precision, and,
Is most helpful, too, in the assigning of technical work…Even the driest detail
work will be done by a child if he knows you expect it, and if he knows just how
to do it. Then, too, early practice with the metronome gives fidelity to the whole
time sense…The playing of scales, for instance, first in quarter notes, then
sixteenths, then thirty-seconds, to the metronome, at from sixty to two hundred
beats in the minute, can not fail to give accuracy to the time-thought as well as
facility to the fingers.84
Karr’s novel pedagogy, even more precisely than Parsons’ or Mathews’ instructions,
imbued the building blocks of all tonal music with metronomic regularity. Through
habitual training the child musician learned that mechanical clicks informed all notions of
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid.
405
“rhythm,” ingraining the student with a redundant, accurate “time-thought” for tonal
scales, arpeggios, and the like. Significantly, Karr provides no discussion of the simple
pendulum—it seems that in his increasingly scientific culture, time and action could be
most precisely and systematically trained through clockwork sound. Thus, as Karr
describes the importance of developing the “time sense” in practice, his new brand of
temporal “accuracy” reflected the student’s ability to mimic artificial, metronomic
rhythm.
Similar scientific values appear in volume XIII (1898) of Music where Bertram C.
Henry’s article “The Development of Rhythmic Conception” instructed both the modern
teacher and the impressionable student to act solely in the clockwork rhythm of the
metronome:
In order to feel the rhythm in an uneven succession of tones, the listener must be
able to measure off equal spaces of time. The next step should be directed toward
the cultivation of this power. A metronome is all but indispensable. Set the index
at 100, and let the pupil count in unison with the strokes…Practice of this sort
should be continued until the pupil can preserve the tempo perfectly some twenty
counts after the metronome is silenced, at all rates of speed from 72 to 144. The
slow tempo is apt to offer more difficulty than the fast.85
As reflected in contemporaneous scientific research, new pedagogical methods and
machines created a new precision-oriented goal: it was essential for the student to think
and perform within metronomic time. In Henry’s view, the music pupil must habituate to
every metronomic rate with unflinching mechanical regularity—even when the artificial
time-source had ceased. This training imparted the student with “perfect” mechanical
time before a single composition was ever performed. Henry seemingly failed to consider
85
Bertram C. Henry, “Development of Rhythmic Conception,” Music XIII (Nov., 1897-Apr.,
1898): 469-470.
406
the student’s intuitive or individual interpretation of rhythm to be a primary, vital quality
of musical time in practice or performance.
These pedagogical methods were not isolated examples of the new importance of
metronomic training that emerged in Western civilization during the end of the nineteenth
century. Indeed, the metronome guided a variety of learning-acts in the modern
classroom, as all aspects of education seemed to move towards the scientific method of
chronography. Since the 1880s, as we have seen, experimental psychologists trained
subjects to mimic the rate of the metronome as precisely as possible, employing
procedures nearly identical to Henry’s “Development of Rhythmic Conception.” At
Johns Hopkins University, for instance, experiments “On the Time-sense” ingrained
subjects with a sense of time and action totally unlike anything encountered in their
normal lives. The premiere American psychology journal of the decade, Mind, related the
Hopkins experiments in 1886:
The method of experimenting was somewhat similar to that of Vierordt, and
consisted in a general way, in impressing upon the mind intervals of time by
means of a metronome, and in reproducing the same after the metronome had
been stopped.86
Subjects in the Hopkins study were “impressed” to react in consistent and unwavering
metronomic time for a scientific practice conceived by Karl Vierordt in the 1860s.
Identically to Henry’s music students, the John Hopkins’s subjects performed against the
very same artificial time reference, which they had to “rhythmically” reproduce even
when the machine had stopped. While these experiments seemed logical and worthwhile
for experimental psychologists, skilled musicians of the age—such as those encountered
in Chapters I and II—would likely have found the procedure to be a strange human
86
Lewis T. Stevens, “On The Time-Sense,” Mind 11 (Jul., 1886): 393.
407
pantomime in Maelzelian automatism. The report explains the chronographic process,
devised over a decade before Henry’s Music article:
The individual under experiment tapped the lever synchronously with the beats of
a metronome. When he had become perfectly familiar with the given interval, the
drum was set in motion and the first round of the tracing was taken, with the
metronome still beating; the latter was then stopped, while the person kept on
tapping the lever at the same rate. The average of the intervals recorded in the first
line of the tracing was the standard time; the rest of the tracings gave successive
reproductions of this standard.87
This “rhythmic” training through chronography continued well into the twentieth century.
An Elementary Laboratory Course in Psychology (1916) by Harvard psychologists
Herbert Sidney Langfeld and Floyd Henry Allport codified a practically identical time-
training procedure to the Hopkins’ “time-sense” tests and Henry’s 1898 musical lesson
for “The Development of Rhythmic Conception.” The psychologists report:
Method: The metronome is started at its slowest rate, and the subjects of the class
listen passively for a few minutes until they become adjusted to the rhythm of the
beats. The instructor then measures a time interval of between 60 and 90 seconds
by tapping at its beginning and end. The subject (in each pair of students) listens
passively during this interval to the ticking of the metronome. He should not,
however, see the instrument nor count its beats. The experimenter (in each pair)
carefully times the interval given by the instructor. As soon as the second tap is
given the metronome is silenced, and the subject reproduces the interval as
accurately as possible, not by tapping, but by a movement of the index finger at
the beginning and end of his estimated interval. The error of reproduction (plus or
minus) is noted by the experimenter. Ten such trials are made.
The entire procedure is repeated four times, using four other speeds of the
metronome, including its highest speed, but keeping the same standard time
interval.88
At the turn of the century, the metronome was essential to a host of similar pedagogical
procedures, the purposes of which were to improve classroom performance and quantify
87
Ibid., 394.
88
Herbert Sidney Langfeld and Floyd Henry Allport, An Elementary Laboratory Course in
Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), 76.
408
students’ “innate” abilities through chronographic experimentation. To promote these
aims, experimental psychologists, including Wundt,89
introduced their mental and
physical experiments to the populous under the heading of “child study” in the last years
of the nineteenth century. As a prominent tool of child study, the metronome informed,
defined, and regulated the abilities and actions of children; with the scientific metronome,
psychologists sought to provide infallible and absolute knowledge regarding the mental
and physical capacities of the young mind and body.90
Psychological experiments that tested the normal “musical sense” of children
certainly began before 1888, the year Wildermuth published a study of the auditory
capacities of both typical children and the mentally deficient. According to an American
Journal of Psychology reviewer, “with the still more defective portion of the idiots (30
cases) simpler tests had to be used (noises, a metronome, music-box, etc.) and the effect
judged from the aspect of gesture.”91
Scripture, in his university laboratory, tested
children’s ability to physically mark time with metronomic precision before 1895.92
In
Thinking, Feeling, Doing, he also charted the results of tapping-fatigue tests administered
to New Haven school children, aged six to seventeen years.93
By 1897, Ebbinghaus had
89
See Wundt, “Psychical Development of the Child,” in Outlines of Psychology (Leipzig:
Wilhelm Engelmann, 1902), 316. He devotes considerable attention to a child’s developing
“rhythmic” abilities that clearly prefigures Jaques-Dalcroze’s concerns and teachings.
90
While the topic cannot be approached in depth here, it is important to point out that the
utilitarian purposes of these following experimental-psychology studies served as measures for
child labor, an economically sanctioned practice rampant in the industrialized world during this
time.
91
“Psychological Literature,” American Journal of Psychology 2 (May, 1889): 507.
92
Scripture, “Some Principles of Mental Education,” 541-2.
93
Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 36.
409
created intelligence tests for children to be administered in the laboratory using the
typical chronographic apparatus.94
In the last years of the nineteenth century, child-study experiments rapidly
expanded to public classrooms, especially across North America, where many middle-
class children became passive subjects, quantified and regulated through metronomic
controls for scientific ends. For instance, in 1898, experimental psychologists employed
both a bell metronome and a “metronome, with electrical connection” to test students as
reported in Experimental Study of Children, Including Anthropometrical and Psycho-
Physical Measurements of Washington School Children.95
Child-study psychologists
applied similar laboratory methods and apparatus in Chicago classrooms only years later.
A Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly article entitled “Scientific Child Study” (1901) by
Edward Marshall describes: “Several thousand school children have been examined and
experimented with, as carefully and as scientifically as any student is taught to
experiment with chemicals in a school laboratory.” Marshall explained that the purpose
of child study was to measure a prized value for the modern psychologist: human
normality. “Perfection, to the mind of the scientist, means absolute normality,” Marshall
confirms, and “it is the normal child who makes the best student on average.”96
In search
of this perfectly “normal” child, experimental psychologists measured the size, weight,
94
Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century
Company, 1929), 383.
95
Arthur MacDonald, Experimental Study of Children, Including Anthropometrical and Psycho-
Physical Measurements of Washington School Children, a Bibliography (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1899), 1199-1200.
96
Edward Marshall, “Scientific Child Study,” Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly 51 (Mar., 1901): 3.
APS Online.
410
head shape, breathing capacities, auditory limits, and fatigue tolerances of these young
subjects. To test physical endurance, scientists applied their standard chronographic
machine, an ergograph,
To this table the child’s arm is clamped and strapped so as to prevent, so far as
possible, any motion whatever of any part except the middle finger. Over the
finger a clamp is fastened, connecting with a string, to the end of which is
fastened a weight. The weight, after reference to the previous records made of the
child, is arranged so as to represent exactly seven per cent of the child’s weight.
After the apparatus had been perfectly adjusted, a metronome, the instrument used
to beat time when children are practicing music, was started. The child under
investigation was instructed to raise the middle finger of the locked hand every
time the metronome beat. After the finger was raised it was to be lowered as
steadily as possible. It was arranged that in ninety seconds the finger should be
raised forty-five times, or once every two seconds. A part of the apparatus is a
traveling pencil, which makes, in a waving line, a record on paper, showing the
varying heights to which the weight is raised with every effort of the child. The
usefulness of these ergographic records is easily apparent. They supplied the
missing link in the chain of tests making up the Chicago scheme of physical child-
study. They indicated endurance.97
Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly prints the image of various mechanical apparatuses,
including the scientific metronome that sat atop the ergograph. As depicted, the child-
subject was strapped, regulated, and recorded to study his “normal” metronomic
endurances. The periodical also codified the schema of head shapes of children in order
to determine a student’s levels of mental normality or deviance.98
Head calipers, the
metronome, and other machines, as these experiments confirm, were tools in researching
the “best,” most regular, most normal student—now precisely defined through the
modern experimental science of child study.
97
Ibid., 8.
98
Ibid., 7-8.
411
Fig. 6.6. Detail from “Tests and Measurements in Child Study.” The child depicted to the right is
connected to an ergograph, as he continually lifts his finger to the beating of a metronome to test his
endurance. From Edward Marshall, “Scientific Child Study,” Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly 51 (Mar.,
1901): 3.
Metronomic testing with the ergograph continued well into the twentieth century for all
age levels, both for educational and industrial purposes. A 1903 report in the American
Journal of Psychology describes the standard chronographic test to quantify muscular
fatigue, in which university students repetitively raise their finger, again attached to a
small weight, for as long as possible at various points during the day. The report states,
“The subjects all made uniformly rapid contractions, keeping time to the beat of a
metronome…the subject was required to continue his contractions till he could no longer
bring his finger up” to the appropriate ruler-height.99
During the turn of the century, the metronome clearly performed a similar
function in both child study and scientifically inspired music pedagogy: the machine
became a constant temporal control over the child’s movement, a measure of the personal
equation against a scientifically “normal,” mechanical rhythm. Music: Devoted to the Art,
99
A. Caswell Ellis and Maud Margaret Shipe, “A Study of the Accuracy of the Present Methods
of Testing Fatigue,” The American Journal of Psychology 14 (Jul.-Oct., 1903): 233.
412
Science, Technic and Literature of Music continued to be an outspoken vehicle for the
chronographic bias, metronomic pedagogy, and the new science of music education. Thus
we find that T. Carl Whitmer’s Music article, “The Time-Marking System in Music”
(1900) reads like a laboratory experiment where the metronome offered the undisputed
rule of action, placed above and beyond the variable qualities of human performance.
Indeed, the very definition of “natural” musical rhythm becomes mechanical as Whitmer
states:
There are the natural and the artificial accents to deal with when an attempt is
made. The difference must be settled by the metronome. A natural accent is that
accent which the metronome describes, so to speak, by a complete single
oscillation. Measure, by hearing, the impression made from the click to the end of
its swing one way only. That is natural accent. The artificial accent is more
violent, and is in ordinary use in conservatories.100
According to Whitmer, the click of the clockwork metronome was “natural” time in
music: a stunningly reversed epistemology from skilled performers of the age, yet one
highly familiar to experimental psychologists. Whitmer, in the tradition of scientists and
astronomers before him, believed metronomic time offered the single, true rhythmic
reference for human action. Thus, for this scientific pedagogue, chronographic methods
logically presided over the personal equation of the student musician as well. In
Whitmer’s pedagogy, the temporal paradigm shift had occurred in full: the externalized
“rhythm” of the metronome replaced the “imprecise” (once natural) human rhythm of
musical time. (By 1917, in his book The Way of My Mind, Whitmer had encouraged
100
T. Carl Whitmer, “The Time-Marking System in Music,” Music XVIII (June, 1900): 172.
413
music teachers to “read new books…on psychology to bring your teaching methods up to
date”101
and to “expect absolute accuracy in mechanical matters from your students.”)102
Infused with scientific goals, the clockwork metronome was rapidly displacing
old epistemologies and teaching techniques for all aspects of education, while the values
of rhythmic automatism increasingly became part of a youth’s standard music education.
This trend can be witnessed in new patents filings for improved clockwork metronomes,
which rapidly appear from 1897 to 1902 in no less than six independent designs.103
Two
inventions filed in 1902 represent the increasingly precision-oriented use of the
metronome in music training, in which the primary goal of the machine was not to
artificially reference the initial human pulse of musical meter, but rather to project the
objective, redundant sound of clockwork. United States Patent #738,093 by J. Brady is a
metronome strikingly fashioned as a gothic church, one that forgoes a bell—the inventor
101
T. Carl Whitmer, Indicating the Whitmer Methods for the Development of Individuality in
Piano, Musical Composition and Appreciation (Pittsburgh: Siviter & Co., 1917), 37.
Of the new instructional methods of composition, Whitmer states: “It is, of course, a
truism to say that an intimate knowledge of mental processes is essential to every instructor of
composition or anything else. Indeed, keeping abreast of all contemporaneous movements in
psychology is one of our first emphatic needs.” See Whitmer, The Way of My Mind (Pittsburgh:
Pierpont, Siviter & Co., 1917), 85.
In Whitmer’s 1917 text, however, the discussion of the metronome is palpably absent.
Whitmer may have recanted his radical metronome championing from the turn of the century
perhaps due to the musical effects heard through overusing the machine. He now calls for the
moderation of purely mechanical-technical music pedagogy. Commenting on the instructors of
his age, Whitmer conveniently distances himself from any particular school of thought,
proclaiming: “The sentimentalists in music have produced players who were all gush and little
technic; the materialists have given birth to ‘inferior pianolas.’” See Whitmer, The Way of My
Mind, 11.
102
Ibid., 30.
103
Also see U.S. Patents #618,336; #637,624; #619,857; #662,568. These inventions do not
include the improved metronome regulators for player pianos or pianolas that appear from 1893
through 1901.
414
considered the metrical reference “a distraction” from the “regular sound of the beats.”104
Inventor Ernest Adams—patenting what seems to be one of the first electric metronomes
designed specifically for music instruction (#734,032)—defined the metronome as an
apparatus recently accepted in teaching, one that now ruled over a student’s daily practice
and rhythmic sense, stating:
In the study of music the metronome has come to be an important element not
only in determining the tempo that a certain composition shall be played at, but in
aiding the student in technical exercises to maintain a precision of rhythm in any
tempo from largo to presto. There is, however, a disadvantage in the present
marketable types, that consists in the necessity of stopping frequently and often in
the middle of a difficult passage to wind up the barrel-spring of the device.105
For Adams and the student musicians he exemplifies, the overriding purpose of the
metronome was now to provide automatical consistency throughout musical practice:
When the machine stopped, so did the child, until he wound-up the ticker again. With
Adams’ motorized metronome, the young student could now faithfully hear the redundant
sound of clockwork for every note of his daily practice routine and music
performances—all without dropping the “precision of rhythm” so valued in contemporary
laboratory and classroom chronography.
Yet, traditional techniques and tools had not completely disappeared in the face of
technical progress and scientific pursuits. As already explained, pedagogues of earlier
nineteenth-century traditions found silent, simple pendulums to reflect a less artificial
time—one that still afforded human variation, expression, and interpretive choice in both
practice and performance. Thus, music periodicals continued to run advertisements for
104
James Brady, “Metronome,” U.S. Patent #738,093 (Filed Apr. 5, 1902; Patented Sept. 1,
1903).
105
Ernest Adams, “Electric Metronome,” U.S. Patent #734,032 (Filed July 30, 1902; Patented
July 21, 1903): 5.
415
simple pendulums into the twentieth century. These “pocket metronomes” offered an
easy pulse reference using Maelzel’s standard beats-per-minute scale, which dictated
through a finite swing the publisher’s initial tempo mark, while still affording the
musician his own artistic interpretations of pulse, rhythm, gesture, and movement. Music
periodicals sold and offered these pendulum metronomes as subscription prizes to their
readership. United States patents suggest a continued but waning interest for tempo
pendulums—with more precise and adjustable scales—into the twentieth century, as
witnessed in sporadic filings from 1886,106
1890, 1911, 1916, and 1922.107
The 1886
tempo-pendulum patent #360,550 was marketed to the American public for a time,
advertised in Etude magazine and other periodicals by 1888 as the “Zeckwer
Metronome.”108
106
Richard Zeckwer, “Metronome,” U.S. Patent #360,550 (Filed Dec. 22, 1886; Patented Apr. 5,
1887).
107
See U.S. Patents #449,635 by A. G. Pinfold (1890); #1,157,042 by C. Richmond (1911);
#1,191,285 by E. Cushing (1916); #1,548,738 by M. Pappas (1922).
108
See Zeckwer, 1. Also Etude VI (1888): 173, 193. Sibley Library ML e85 v6 1888 no12.
416
Fig. 6.7. Front and side detail of U.S. Patent #360,550, filed on December, 22, 1886, known as the
“Zeckwer Metronome,” one of the more popular simple-pendulum metronomes marketed in late-
nineteenth-century America. Zeckwer’s silent tempo-pendulum incorporated Maelzel’s beats-per-minute
scale for use with music publications and etude books. It provided tempo numbers when referencing both
the half-swing and a complete oscillation.
As late as 1916, Clarence G. Hamilton, in his treatise How to Use the Metronome
Correctly, reported that antiquated simple pendulums—which now displayed “grave
disadvantages” compared to clockwork metronomes—were still used in very limited
settings, admitting: “even to the present day, the chronometer style of metronome is
sometimes employed for chorus work, especially in connection with the public
schools.”109
109 Clarence G. Hamilton, How to Use the Metronome Correctly (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser
Co., 1916), 4.
417
Despite these remaining simple tempo-pendulum references, the majority of
metronome patent filings and new music periodicals attest that a host of instructors,
inventors, and publishers—including Hamilton, Whitmer, and Adams—found the
clockwork metronome to be the only temporal standard for a truly scientific music
education. While some teachers continued to cling to the old educational practices and
pendulums, Whitmer realized that even those modern instructors who first embraced the
clockwork metronome did not use the machine as consistently or as methodically as he
believed necessary. Indeed, with the recent wide-scale embrace of this clockwork
technology, personal discrepancies abounded in the application of the metronome; a
standard tradition of use had not fully surfaced by the turn of the century. In 1900,
Whitmer urged his readership to become more scientific (more precise) in the application
of the clockwork metronome as the temporal control for music education. He proclaims:
The metronome is, then, an all important factor in our plan. Its use has become
more and more general, but there seems to be no uniform treatment of it. Or,
rather, does its use have no vital principle involved. As our own "values" must be
made more vital so must the metronome be used more and more consistently and
uniformly in order to render absolute those values.110
For his part, Whitmer “uniformly” applied the metronome to the music student much like
a psychologist experimented on a subject. Whitmer instructs his musical audience:
In the first place calculate all note-values when used as units by the
auricular measuring of metronomic or natural accent.
In the second place make the metronomic unit correspond to the time-unit
and not, as is so often at present, with a unit greater or less than the time-unit.
The difficulty of measuring those impulses by the metronomic oscillation
is great, but then it is accurate. Unless this necessity be recognized as a first step
the vitality of our values will never be developed. If we desire to become sensitive
we must have manual, ocular and auricular problems to solve.111
110
Whitmer, “The Time-Marking System in Music,” 172-3.
111
Ibid., 173.
418
Whitmer, writing in this “scientific” music periodical, makes clear that laboratory
methods ought to apply to all creative acts: rhythmical accuracy now meant metronomic
mimicry. Whitmer called for a new musical education, in which the “problems to solve”
involved normalizing the personal equation. The metronome, then, offered a “vital”
reference for a subject’s problematic rhythmic sense, which must be made scientifically
“consistent,” “accurate,” and “uniform.” (It seems no coincidence that Whitmer himself
was a subject of musical-psychological experiments in the University of Missouri
laboratory, as reported in Max Meyer’s “Experimental Studies in the Psychology of
Music” (1903) in the American Journal of Psychology).112
Indeed, Whitmer, a pedagogue
completely swayed by the chronographic bias, suggested that if the metronome could also
provide “accurate” emotions, the human musician would be well advised to abide by the
machine’s unerring reference:
We have no moodal metronome and so a word becomes of use to indicate a
certain spirit or mood — when once the grammatical accents are decided by our
metronome. But away with all those useless French, German, Italian and English
names. A piece of music is too polyglot.113
To perform with a semblance of spirit, Whitmer contends, one must first use the
clockwork metronome to decide the rhythm. For Whitmer, these imprecise (now
“useless”) verbal signifiers—which, as Hummel noted as early as 1828, held clues to
112
Max Meyer, “Experimental Studies in the Psychology of Music,” The American Journal of
Psychology 14 (Jul.-Oct., 1903): 192-214. Whitmer’s comments appear 210-12.
113 Whitmer, “The Time Marking System in Music,” Music XIX (Apr., 1901): 123.
419
more complex, nuanced, and emotional interpretations114
—could not compare to the strict
rule of mechanical guidance, for either musical time or expression.
James Matthew McLaughlin, Director of Music for Boston Public Schools, in his
Elements & Notation of Music (1902), further uncovers the conflicting relationship
between past rhythmical values and present applications of the clockwork metronome,
made apparent through Whitmer’s scientific pedagogy. McLaughlin seems to straddle
two epistemologies of musical time: one subjective and internalized, the other mechanical
and externalized. He recounts the importance of the simple pendulum115
along with the
physical sense of meter116
taught by A.B. Marx, Riemann, Lussy, and others from the
nineteenth century. He paraphrases these past pedagogues’ realizations that the
metronome only provides “the average rate of speed at which the composition should be
taken; for music, in the course of its expression of the emotions and its revelation of the
free action of the mind, would at once become spiritless and uninspiring if fettered by
arbitrary mathematical distinctions in time-measurement.”117
Nevertheless, McLaughlin
incorporates new teaching methods of musical time that contradict these pre-metronomic
educators and their traditional values of musical performance; McLaughlin’s new
instructions are nearly identical to psychological memory experiments of the age:
114
For his discussion of Italian affect, movement, and tempo words, see J. N. Hummel,
Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, I (Wien: T. Haslinger,
1828), 5th
Kapitel, 66-68.
115
James M. McLaughlin, Elements & Notation of Music (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1902), 78-
79.
116
Ibid., 21-24.
117
Ibid., 78.
420
304. How to memorize q=60. Guided by the second-hand of a watch, count the seconds as follows:
One-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three, etc. With a little practice the speed of this rhythm can be readily recalled when the accented syllables, one, two, three, etc., will indicate the value of each quarter-note in the standard tempo q=60. From this, other tempi may be at least approximated.
305. To discover the rate of speed of a composition during its performance count
the number of beats in a quarter of a minute and multiply by four.118
As Vierordt, Wundt, Ebbinghaus and other experimental psychologists well understood,
one must learn to react, memorize, and repeat in the rhythm of precision clockwork in
order to perform like clockwork. The writings of McLaughlin, Whitmer, Henry, and Karr
suggest that this peculiar training within metronomic “rhythm” became the normal course
of a student’s education, one that focused on habitual and mechanical repetition above
personal insight or perception. Even in athletics—most conspicuously in the quasi-
militaristic field of gymnastics—metronomic regulation continued to be a highly prized
aspect of instruction, which further extended to the “rhythmic-gymnastics” of Jaques-
Dalcroze. In The Training of the Body for Games, Athletics, Gymnastics, and Other
Forms of Exercise and for Health, Growth, and Development (1901), medical doctor F.
A. Schmidt prescribes that,
You should always practise the expected and regular before the unexpected and
sudden. That is to say, you should let a movement become a habit, a regular habit,
before you use it in an emergency. Therefore at the outset Rhythm is very
important. Later on, I suggest a Metronome, or perhaps a Phonograph, as a great
help for the maintenance of Rhythm. For, if you can see or hear anything keeping
time, your motions will be far more rhythmical.119
118
Ibid., 80.
119
F. A. Schmidt and Eustace Hamilton Miles, The Training of the Body for Games, Athletics,
Gymnastics, and Other Forms of Exercise and for Health, Growth, and Development (New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1901), 7.
421
Guided by this rapidly emerging culture where automatical machines defined the absolute
“Rhythm” of human movement, schoolroom and private teachers embraced mechanized
teaching methods, in part because they inculcated seemingly efficient habits upon their
child-students. And habitual metronomic training—not skilled “artistic” performance—
was the prevailing, positive value in a youth’s modern education according to
experimental psychologists of the age.
In the years corresponding to the rise of metronomic music training, child-study
experiments continued to quantify a range of performance abilities in students. Ellis and
Shipe tested children’s reading fatigue in average words per second, as dictated by a
metronome, measured down to the thousands of a second.120
As related in The American
Journal of Psychology (1904), Binet tested a subject’s intelligence through the “Accuracy
in Counting Metronome Taps and in Counting Dots.”121
The Outlines of Educational
Psychology: An Introduction to the Science of Education (1911) by William Henry Pyle
offered an additional intelligence experiment that tested memory retention and attention
span while reading in the classroom. “While one paragraph is being read,” Pyle instructs,
“distractions may be furnished by a metronome and an electric bell.”122
Patent filings for new clockwork metronomes continued to appear in the first
decade of the new century. No less than two inventions from 1908 strikingly conflate the
metronome with those now-popular timekeepers of the urban-industrial world; patents by
120
Ellis and Shipe, 240-1.
121
C. Spearman, “’General Intelligence’ Objectively Determined and Measured,” The American
Journal of Psychology 15 (Apr., 1904): 217.
122
William Henry Pyle, The Outlines of Educational Psychology: An Introduction to the Science
of Education (Baltimore: Warkick & York, Inc., 1911), 203.
422
the American Charles White (#923,094) and the Swiss inventor Henri Coullery
(#1,058,659) depict metronomes in the form of the ubiquitous pocket watch. Each patent
suggests that Maelzel’s (rather Winkel’s) old design, with its seemingly superfluous
pendulum, was inefficient when compared with the sleek portability of these new,
automatical pocket-watch metronomes.123
While these particular designs found little
acceptance with manufacturers, their patent texts clearly endorse the new instructional
values for the modern youth. Metronome “improvements” such as these continued to
offer greater and more precise automatism, while the sound of clockwork “rhythm”
completely replaced the vision of a pendulum swing. Indeed, modern technology
continued to efface the simple pendulum, not to mention the human body itself, as the
predominant reference for musical time of previous centuries.
Fig. 6.8. Detail of U.S. metronome patent #923,094 by C. A. White & E. R. Hunter. Filed on October
20, 1908, this modern metronome—which now completely lacks the visual pulse reference of a swinging
pendulum—has an outward appearance and internal movement that is virtually indistinguishable from a
contemporaneous pocket watch or stopwatch. This and other “improved” clockwork metronomes attest to
the rising influence of the chronographic method—and the increasing neglect of silent, visual, and finite
tempo references—in twentieth-century music education and performance.
123
See Henri Coullery, “Metronome,” U.S. Patent #1,058,659 (Filed Feb. 24, 1908; Patented Apr.
8, 1913): 4; and Charles White, “Metronome,” U.S. Patent #923,094 (Filed Oct. 20, 1908;
Patented May 25, 1909): 4.
423
Despite some inefficiencies and inaccuracies when compared to more popular
time-telling machines like the pocket watch, Maelzel’s clockwork metronome continued
to thrive in the modern musical marketplace. A slew of music publications increasingly
promoted the machine to the novice musician as a necessary companion for newly
published etudes and method books that stressed technical achievement above all. For the
sake of musical precision, proponents of the metronome unreservedly urged the young
music student to use the machine regularly and consistently, while the silent “non-
scientific” simple pendulum seemed to disappear from pedagogical discourse entirely.
For example, under the definition of “string pendulum,” the editor of the Musical
Dictionary of the American History and Encyclopedia of Music (1910) simply prints,
“see metronome” (the clockwork variety), while completely bypassing his own printed
citation for the nineteenth-century “Weber chronometer” (an actual string pendulum).124
The clockwork metronome, as opposed to the simple pendulum, became essential
in the piano-training methods of J. Alfred Johnstone, who published a slew of texts on
music technique and interpretation between 1908 and 1927.125
Yet Johnstone, similar to
many technically oriented pedagogues, seemed to conflate the concepts of creative
musical interpretation with chronographic training, as once-expressive gestures became
solely ruled by metronomic time. Louis Charles Elson’s piano-centric Modern Music and
Musicians (1918) recounts Johnstone’s modern, mechanized pedagogy:
124
W. L. Hubbard, ed. Musical Dictionary, in series The American History and Encyclopedia
(New York: Irving Squire, 1910): 501, 512, 575.
125
See for instance, J. Alfred Johnstone, Touch, Phrasing, and Interpretation (London: W.
Reeves, 1900); J. Alfred Johnstone, Essentials in piano-playing and other musical studies
(London: W. Reeves, 1914).
424
The slow trill of two notes is repeated thirty to forty times with each pair of
fingers, at a metronome rate of 40 to 60 for each note. The trill is taken at its
slowest at first, and it is even practicable to let the student rest a beat between
each note for a time…The slow trill is to be practiced continually, with the
metronome mark raised in later lessons until 96 is reached…as the pupil grows
more and more proficient, he may take double notes or triplets, with each beat,
then with each half-beat, and so on. But speed should never be increased unless
the movements are kept correct.126
Since scale passages [in actual compositions] often occur in varying
rhythms, Johnston advocates the use of a metronome, and the playing of many
rhythmic figures, such as an eight-note followed by two sixteenths, and eighth-
note followed by a triplet of sixteenths, and so on.127
Broken chords are emphasized as being a good preparation for arpeggios
[in actual compositions]…Each should be repeated from ten to twenty times, with
the metronome.128
As Johnstone’s exercises show, the clockwork machine offered modern methods of
training musical action, now anachronistically transferred to pre-metronomic musical
techniques of trilling, arpeggiation, and scale runs. Johnstone’s redundant, precise, and
automatical training techniques could not be actualized with the simple-pendulum
“metronome” of the previous century, not to mention the subjective pulse-sense.
But, as their own pedagogies expose, modern music educators seemed
unconcerned with past practices or the questionable aesthetic effects arising from their
progressive, mechanically aided teaching methods. In another example from the
American History and Encyclopedia of Music, the article “Letters from a Musician” in
the volume The Essentials of Music (1910) depicts a seemingly experienced pedagogue
who advised his young nephew (a common middle-class music student) on the superior
benefits of metronomic-musical training. “I wish to start you out on your musical studies
126
Arthur Elson, “Modern Piano Methods,” in Modern Music and Musicians, Louis Charles
Elson, ed., vol. I (New York: The University Society, Inc., 1918), 70.
127
Ibid., 72.
128
Ibid., 72-3.
425
with a wholesome idea about the metronome,” the writer Edward Morris Bowman
confides, while acknowledging the prominent caveats against the machine that he has
obviously heard in the past:
Possibly Miss Proctor will say to you: “O, don't practise with that thing; it will
make your playing mechanical.” Or some one else will exclaim: “My! No artist
ever plays with a metronome, or like one, either!”
Another will say: “I would not have one in the house; makes me so
nervous to hear it!” “I tried it once, and I could not keep with it at all. That thing
is of no use whatever!”
Now, just listen to your uncle. A good metronome is one of the greatest
helps that you can use. Get one immediately, use it for certain purposes right
along, until it is worn out and then — buy another. Never be without one. They
are made with and without a bell.129
With the unbridled zeal of a metronome salesman, Bowman summarizes and then
discounts all of the valid invectives against the clockwork metronome that had appeared
over the preceding decades: Maelzel’s machine reduces musical meaning in time; skilled,
creative professionals (i.e. “artists”) did not accept it; the metronome creates mechanical
qualities of performance never intended by composers; one must be trained to act with
such artificial qualities; furthermore, the machine creates a mental distraction, altering the
user’s time-sense through habitual repetition. Despite these well-worn rejections, this
writer found the clockwork metronome—a machine that he suggests is still uncommon in
129
Edward Morris Bowman, “Letters from a Musician to His Nephew,” in The Essentials of
Music, Volume 1, Emil Liebling, editor; in series The American History and Encyclopedia, ed.
W. L. Hubbard (New York: Irving Squire, 1910), 154.
As the text states, Bowman, among many accomplishments, “is Dr. Mason’s successor as
a teacher of piano.” Mason’s novel technical exercises, as related by Music metronome ads of the
late 1890s, were some of the first pedagogical etudes specifically paired with the clockwork
metronome.
426
the “provinces”130
—to be the most important tool of a child’s instruction for instilling a
“normal” sense of rhythm.
Bowman’s essay continued to promote the metronome solely for its mechanical
precision, as he drastically revised past conceptions of musical time in favor of greater
chronographic methods. Indeed, he divorced the metronome ever further from the
reflection of human rhythm, stating that the “bell is not of much value.” The bell, as
many recognized, was the only way of distinguishing the once-physical phenomenon of
metric pulse within the redundant clockwork clicks. (Indeed, only fifteen years prior, a
Christian Science Journal writer considered the metronome’s bell divinely infallible).
Yet “Uncle” Bowman seemed to exclusively value incessant clockwork monotony,
stating, “The chief value of the metronome is in the regular tick of the machine, rather
than in the tap of the bell.”131
By disavowing both the swing of the pendulum and the
sound of the meter-bell, this novel music educator—similar to some inventors of the
age—regarded musical time as a mere series of automatical sounds with no remnant of
physical rhythm or visual movement whatsoever.
It seems that throughout his career E. M. Bowman was one of the most vocal
champions of the clockwork metronome for the average American student’s musical
education. Published two decades prior to his “metronome letter,” the Bowman’s-
Weitzman’s Manual of Music Theory (1879) pleaded for greater regularity in tempo
interpretation, stating: “The relative values of notes always remain the same, but the
130
He states: “The quick exercise will require the use of a metronome. I suppose now that you do
not have metronomes up at Barton. No, you could not plow with them or cut hay or slide down a
hill on them.” See Bowman, 153.
131
Ibid., 154.
427
absolute values change with every change in tempo. The Metronome, invented by
Maelzel, indicates the tempo with mathematical exactness, and it is to be regretted that it
is not more generally used.”132
Through each successive decade in the twentieth century, it seems, the
metronome became applied in music education with ever-increasing chronographic
values. By 1910, Bowman had valued the machine as a purely objective, scientific
reference and regulator of musical time. Among the many reasons that the writer placed
“so much value on this appliance,” the industrial and scientific values of efficiency, cost,
and habitual regulation stand out:
The metronome will give you an exact standard of meter and rhythm, and help to
train your sense of time… Unless there is a strong natural talent in time-keeping,
it is a long and, of course, expensive task to train a pupil to correct habits in this
respect.
The use of a metronome establishes in a short time, even in otherwise
discouraging cases, a standard of time-sense. The metronome is a cold-blooded
machine. It works the same way every day. It never gets excited or discouraged. It
does not balk or run away.133
Being a good “timeist” in the nineteenth century was always considered an innate,
subjective musical talent, yet in this emerging pedagogy where scientific methods
trumped individuality, metronomic time now regulated expressive techniques, “rhythm,”
“time-sense,” along with musical movements and fluctuations once intuited by skilled
performers alone. As with child study, the metronome’s purpose in music, according to
Bowman and other proponents, was to habitually drill an artificial and normalizing time-
sense into children. An education in thoughtful, individual, or insightful interpretation
132
Carl Friederich Weitzman and E. M. Bowman, Bowman’s-Weitzman’s Manual of Music
Theory a Concise, Comprehensive and Practical Text-Book on the Science of Music (New York:
Wm. A. Pond & Co., 1897), 17.
133 Bowman, “Letters from a Musician to His Nephew,” 155.
428
seemed less of a consideration.134
Indeed, the benefits of the metronome were evident: it
provided efficient and cost-effective instruction, two predominant values of modern,
“scientifically managed” labor training. And while “uncle” refrained from considering
the cold-blooded metronome to be godly, as The Christian Science Journal correspondent
did fifteen years prior, Bowman’s words imply that the metronome’s inhuman,
controlling rhythm was in fact infallible, especially when teaching unmusical children.
Indeed, he later instructed his nephew to habitually practice once-subjective techniques of
accelerando and ritardando under perfect clockwork guidance, realizing, “Mechanically
safe and systematic work of this character cannot be done without a metronome.”135
Even
while championing the device, Bowman unwittingly concurred with skilled musician-
“artists” of the age: the metronome begets mechanical behavior in musical performance.
The Recollection of Musical Time Past
As these modern metronome advocates suggested, the machine generalized or normalized
musical time with objective, reproducible certainties. But in the process, the clockwork
metronome re-standardized the meaning of rhythm within chronographic goals and
scientific values. Thus, the personal equation of the musician, which reflected subjective
134
After relating the importance of this metronomic regulation in pedagogy, the writer realizes
that printed metronome marks themselves are often impractical, since there are many
discrepancies between editions of the same composition. He suggests taking the average of
several different publications to derive the “exact” speed intend by composers. Ibid., 156.
135
Bowman realized, however, that the metronomic yoke must eventually be broken in order to
achieve expressive playing, but only after the student has been thoroughly trained in the values of
mechanical perfection: “If the time is found to be correct and the music can be played up to the
proper speed, the metronome should not be used further with that selection, as the piece is now
ready to be played in that flexible style which is demanded by the laws of expression and
emotional delivery. To practise with the metronome while studying expression is, of course, a
misuse of the little machine. Expressive playing constantly varies, more or less, in speed. In such
playing, the metronome is not to be used.” Ibid., 155-6.
429
expression itself, became a mere relationship between mechanical speeds, rates, and
reactions. By the twentieth century, the scientific discourse of musical time had revolved
around a simplified, metronomic standard of action, as the new music educators had
defined children’s technical training and rhythmical abilities solely through clockwork
movement.
Those musicians trained in pre-metronomic performance practices and teaching
methods heard and criticized the effect: the continual clockwork click erased a student’s
subjective perception of musical time. Speaking at the Music Teachers National
Association Conference in 1907, Kate S. Chittenden, from the American Institute of
Applied Music in New York, remembered the onset of this new scientific pedagogy,
proselytized by periodicals such as Music and the Musical Visitor and accepted by music
instructors across the continent. Chittenden confirmed that this habitual metronomic-
musical training began, as the present survey suggests, only at the end of the nineteenth
century:
Piano-teaching has changed so much in the last fifteen years that grade work in
one sense is not so hard to arrange as formerly; that is, if one be governed by
technic exercises played with the click of the metronome — so many notes in a
trill, in scale, in arpeggio, octaves, chords, etc. (which implies a hand-position and
good fingers). It was a great boon to piano-teachers and students when this minute
system was condensed and presented to the public, simplifying as well as making
thorough this one branch of pianistic teaching.136
Chittenden too recognized that the metronome was an efficient aid for mass education;
the metronome simplified pedagogy—reducing, regulating time and movement to
136
Kate S. Chittenden, “Report of Piano Conference,” in Studies in Musical Education History
and Aesthetics, Papers and Proceedings of the Music Teachers’ National Association (December
27-31, 1907): 144-145.
430
reproducible certainties. The metronome made teaching easy.137
Yet she also realized that
the machine reduced the subjective perceptions of musical expression to mechanized
clicks. Like so many skilled performers, she pined for the nuanced, individualistic, and
subjective music education of the pre-metronomic past, stating, “I would myself rather go
back and take Christiani's order of requisites: talent first; then emotion, the aesthetic
element; intelligence, the scientific element; and last, technic, the mechanical, in its
proper place.”138
In modern piano pedagogy—increasingly distanced from the culture and
aesthetics of Christiani— she found some new teaching methods to be “built rather too
much on the dangerous metronomic basis of mere exercises which develop machines.”139
For Chittenden, a musical pedagogue of former traditions, the metronome clearly created
automatical students, reducing performance values to scientific precisions and
techniques, reducing musical meaning to clockwork. She recognized, like many
musicians of the past century, that the efficiency and ease afforded by this new
metronomic pedagogy did not equate to living musicality. Yet systematized performing
methods, technique-based etude books, and clockwork metronomes had become the
pedagogical controls for a normalizing education that reduced creativity and
137
This reductive pedagogy appears in the contemporaneous Half-hour Lessons in Music, in
which all external, objective time-timekeeping is conflated for simplified explanations of musical
tempo and rhythm. It instructs the young novice: “’Now time in music, children, is expressed by
steady, even counts, or beats…We reckon time by the clock in seconds and minutes, and the
metronome ticks in exactly the same way as the clock…Each tick of the clock means one
second—each beat of the metronome means one quarter.”
Without further discussion on the sensation or perception of internal pulse and
movement, the pedagogue finally states: “Remember, when you learn to play, use the metronome
only a moment, to show you what time was in the composer’s mind. Never depend on it wholly to
keep steady time.” See Mary Ann Torrey Kotzschmar, Half-hour Lessons in Music (Boston:
Oliver Ditson Co., 1907), 13-14.
138 Chittenden, 145.
139
Ibid., 146.
431
individuality, seemingly for an entire generation of musical amateurs. Chittenden
admitted outright that, “This is the hardest task of the teacher, to round up into some
scheme a proper selection [of pedagogical pieces] which shall admit of a chance of
individualism in the pupil (for, thankfully we can say, they are not all automatoms.
[sic.])”140
The most renowned performers, the musical “artists” of Western music continued
to express an equal resentment of the effects of mechanical regulation on human
creativity, even through the first decade of the twentieth century. In his book Success in
Music and How it is Won (1909), Henry Theophius Finck wrote of Ignacy Jan
Paderewski (1860-1941), one of the last performers of pre-metronomic traditions, that his
musicality reflected an individual spirit, one in opposition to the redundant, normalizing
rhythm that currently informed every action of the young piano student:
140
Ibid., 145. As early as 1854, Adolf Bernhard Marx, too, chastised the growing wave of ill-
equipped music teachers in their attempts to train German middle-class musical amateurs through
routine and regulative methods, in which ultimately, “Art is made mechanical, and as a
mechanism transmitted to the people.” In The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture,
Marx—prefiguring both Christiani and Chittenden’s realizations—continued his diatribe against
the consumer-driven culture of music production with its anti-artistic, standardized methods of
musical instruction:
“Compare the never-ending exercises of our myriads of amateurs, virtuosi and would-be
virtuosi on the piano, with the number of real works of art with which the learner is made
acquainted, putting artistic comprehension and performance altogether out of the
question. And, finally, inquire how few are rewarded with adequate success for all their
toils and sacrifices; and how many, on the other hand, after years of laborious study,
either give up music altogether, or never advance a step beyond their last lesson. After
such an examination, every one will concede that unless these far-extended studies and
exercises can be made to yield greater and nobler results, or the labour and time of
preparation reduced to a fair proportion, with the attainable success, the practice of
music, instead of benefiting mankind, is only a means of culpably squandering away our
time and money, and our nervous energy.
So far, however, are most people from seeing this, that they absolutely mistake
the means for the end. One might show this in every sphere of musical practice, but no
where so plainly as in the wide-spreading branch of pianoforte-playing.” See Marx, 75.
432
No matter what Paderewski plays, he usually seems to be improvising, to follow
the inspiration of the moment, to create the music while he performs it. His
playing is the negation of the mechanical in music, the assassination of the
metronome.141
In Finck’s text, Paderewski himself defined the vast distinction between subjective
musical time of the past and the objective, scientific time of the present. He employed a
technical analogy to prove his point: the metronome was intended for a world of science,
not the creative performance arts. Speaking from experience, Paderewski explains:
Our human metronome, the heart, under the influence of emotion, ceases to beat
regularly—physiology calls it arythmia…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.142
Paderewski too acknowledged that the metronome could be useful for unmusical
children, but he made clear that no nineteenth-century composer conceived of musical
time with scientific regulation, stating that “a composer’s imagination and an interpreter’s
emotion are not bound to be the humble slaves of either metronome or tempo.”143
Indeed
the renowned pianist hurled a special insult upon those who slavishly perceived music to
141
Henry T. Finck, Success in Music and How it is Won (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1909), 321.
In a telling comparison from the pro-scientific periodical Music, Emil Liebling criticizes
Paderewski for his non-mechanical musical qualities. In the process, Liebling presents his own
modern, metronomic aesthetic: “Perhaps the most reprehensible liberties are taken with rhythms
and tempos. In this regard Paderewski has much to answer for. Without desiring to apply the
metronome to his performances, it yet is undeniable that he hardly ever preserves the
[metronomic] rhythm of a movement long enough to give the listener an absolute idea of
[metronomic] time.” See Emil Liebling, “A Pianistic Retrospect,” Music I (Nov., 1891-Apr.,
1892): 585.
142
Finck, 455.
143
Ibid., 456.
433
move in mechanical time, especially in Beethoven’s works. Such misguided pedagogues
and performers were “the tempo-sticklers and metronome-believers.”144
The Expansion of Metronome Believing and Metronomic Training
in Twentieth-Century Society
As Paderewski’s comments imply, the modern world, now structured in precise,
synchronized mechanical time, and the musical culture of the past were in conflict. Yet
mechanical execution was everywhere in the new century: the metronome now imbued
youth education, child study, experimental psychology, and industry with the same
incessant clockwork rhythm. In the second decade of the twentieth century, many
experimental psychologists “believed in” the machine more than ever, and they continued
to test public school children guided by the values and rhythm of metronomic time. The
Conservation of a Child (1912) by psychologist Arthur Holmes described and
photographed a variety of child studies that incorporated the metronome and ergograph,
“an instrument for measuring muscular co-ordination, attention, and power of
endurance.”145
In the 1914 publication Mental and Physical Tests: A book of directions
compiled with special reference to the experimental study of school children in the
laboratory or classroom by Guy Montrose Whipple, the metronome quantified and
regulated “physical and motor capacity” and “endurance of grip”146
in children.
Whipple’s text provides a highly detailed image of the arm-clamping machine with the
144
Ibid., 456.
145
Arthur Holmes, The Conservation of the Child (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company,
1912), insert after 230.
146
Guy Montrose Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore: Warwick & York,
Inc., 1914), 116-7.
434
ticking metronome-reference. Further aiming experiments consisted of children striking
“in time with the beat of the metronome, following a two-beat rhythm, so that the pencil
hits the target at the one beat and is drawn back at the next”147
at 138 beats-per-minute.
Fig. 6.9. A standard ergograph for endurance tests on laborers and students. The Maelzel metronome,
regulating the tempo of the performance, appears at the far right corner of the chronographic apparatus.
From Guy Montrose Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore: Warwick & York, Inc.,
1914), 121.
In 1914 the Bucknel Foundation in California sponsored tests to quantify “Mental
Deviation Among Children” using the now familiar “apparatus and materials necessary
for physical and mental tests, including scales, stadiometer, dynamometer, kymograph,
Marey tambour, spirometer, tachistoscope, metronome, head calipers, anthropometric
tape, target test, vision tests, and an assortment of printed forms for use in intelligence
testing. The value of the equipment is approximately $800.”148
By 1920 the New York
City school system had devised child-studies for many psychological measures, including
the memorization of numbers in metronomic time. Using a series of cards with digits, the
147
Ibid., 149-150.
148
Lewis M. Terman, Research in Mental Deviation Among Children (Stanford: Stanford
University, 1915), 14.
435
experimenter described the process to the student-subject, gently saying, “I’ll start this
little ticker going to show us how fast to read the numbers. (Start the metronome at rate
of 60.) See, we say a number every time it ticks. (Illustrate.)”149
It seems the industrial world was not concerned with Paderewski’s criticisms
either. The training systems devised by noted Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg
also relied on the metronome to measure and regulate the activities school children,
students, factory laborers, and office workers in the twentieth-century. Münsterberg’s
work seemingly upheld a mantra that labor-mastermind Frederick Winslow Taylor first
proclaimed in his preface to The Principles of Scientific Management (1911): “In the past
the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”150
In 1913 the New York Times article “New Science Suggested to Solve Social
Problems” summarized Münsterberg’s labor methods, reiterating the now-prevalent
belief: “There is already far-reaching agreement that the problems of artistic creation, of
scientific observation, of social reform, and many similar endeavors must be
acknowledged as organic parts of applied psychology.”151
For psychologists the
“problems” of human activity, which included “artistic creation,” were actually
“problems” of individual variation. These problems required, according to psychologists,
chronographic methods and machines to both register and reduce the variations of
149
Evelyn Dewey, Emily Child, and Beardsley Ruml, Methods and Results of Testing School
Children (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920), 58-9.
150
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1911; Reprint, Mineola: Dover, 1998), iv.
151
“New Science Suggested to Solve Social Problems,” New York Times, Feb 9, 1913, SM10.
Further details of this labor study are found in Margarete Anna Adelheid Münsterberg, Hugo
Münsterberg (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), 213-214.
436
personal equations to mechanical certainty, for all activities of industrialized society.
Thus, outside of the Harvard laboratory, Münsterberg applied the standard aiming tests to
the work of telephone operators, where the metronome controlled the subjects’ individual
hand-eye movements when operating a pencil. Such tests found an employee’s “psychical
rhythm,” their ability to perform efficiently in the prescribed time of the metronome.152
While chronographic methods became infused into modern culture and industry,
astronomy too did not forget the scientific origins of the metronome as objective
regulator of the observer’s stellar perceptions. Sarah Frances Whiting’s book Daytime
and Evening Exercises in Astronomy, for Schools and Colleges (1912) instructed the
student astronomer on how to act and react with metronomic accuracy, stating, “Practice
with the transit, clock, and chronograph may be gained by using a chronograph to find
the time of the beat of a metronome to the tenth of a second.”153
The same precisions
sought with difficulty by professional astronomers in the early nineteenth century through
the eye-and-ear method eventually became standardized practices, easily acquired by
university students using the objective rhythm of the now ubiquitous clockwork
metronome.
Among their seemingly infinite uses for the scientific metronome, psychologists
devised a learning experiment in 1913 where a subject repeatedly ordered a deck of cards
152
“New Science Suggested to Solve Social Problems,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1913, SM10.
Systematic typing in “words per minute” likely owes something to the metronomic
training practices used to increase efficiency and productivity in office employment.
153 Sarah Frances Whiting, Daytime and Evening Exercises in Astronomy, for Schools and
Colleges (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912), 51 n1.
437
strictly guided by metronomic time.154
In 1918, The United States Military found the
metronome to be the most effective temporal regulator for certain motion studies on
aviator pilots.155
By 1913 some surgeons had used the metronome at the rate of 100
beats-per-minute to “rhythmically apply” electric shocks in the treatment of obesity.156
A
1927 patent filing documents a physiology apparatus similar to those used in nineteenth-
century operations on frogs; it seems that the metronome continued to provide a temporal
control for artificial respiration, but as Robert Swope’s invention suggests, an improved
metronome-breather could be successfully applied to the human subject.157
Metronomic reading, writing, and speaking continued well through the first half
of the twentieth century as now-standardized practices in the modern, scientific
education. In 1910 the New York Times advocated for writing with metronome to
strengthen penmanship and attain scientific precision in action. To execute these newly
devised writing drills,
154
Mildred Browning, Dorothy E. Brown, and M. F. Washburn, “The Effect of the Interval
between Repetitions on the Speed of Learning a Series of Movements,” The American Journal of
Psychology 24 (Oct., 1913): 580-583, 580.
The researchers explain: “The cards were numbered on the back. The observer, always
with eyes closed, sat holding the pack, her hands above a mark on the table against which the
center of the diagram rested. The experimenter took hold of her right wrist, and moved her right
hand, to the time of a metronome, in such a way as to sort out the pack of cards correctly on the
diagram, putting each card in the compartment bearing the letter which corresponded to the letter
on the card.”
155
War Department, Medical Research Laboratory (Washington D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1918), 189
156
Sinclair Tousey, Medical Electricity, Röntgen Rays, and Radium (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders
Company, 1921), 428.
157
Robert Swope, “Resuscitation and Artificial Respiration Apparatus,” U.S. Patent #1,848,232
(Filed Sept. 29, 1927; Patented Mar. 8, 1932).
438
It is required that these should be made in one minute. This is about regular
practice speed. The regularity of movement is as carefully watched as in music. A
jerky, spasmodic motion may be found reflected in the letters. In some cases a
metronome or musical instrument is employed, while others merely beating time
with a ruler or chalk box.158
The 1922 University of Chicago publication, The Elementary School Journal, defines a
far more precise regimen in “A Course in Handwriting:”
The metronome is introduced for the first time at the beginning of the second
month. Up to this time the children have not sufficient control to enable them to
follow the beat of a mechanical instrument. The teacher must indicate the count
with her voice and vary it to suit the capacities of the children. Even now the
children will have to be accustomed somewhat gradually to the regular beat. The
rate of 50 beats per minute is suggested to begin with.159
When performing the dramas of Shakespeare, too, the metronome became a new
rhythmic standard. Clayton Meeker Hamilton, in Studies in Stagecraft (1914), suggests
that playwrights and directors “take a scene from Hamlet and another from The
Thunderbolt and ask themselves precisely how rapidly or slowly these passages should be
played in order to achieve their best effect upon the stage. Let them, if necessary,
experiment with a metronome until they get the rhythm right.”160
Metronomic training in
precise “rhythmic” gradations continued to inform the modern cultural education well
into the twentieth century. As late as 1938, a Vice President of the University of Chicago
had proclaimed in The Scientific Monthly, “Rhythmic Reading is good reading. A
158
“For Muscular Writing, A New Method of Penmanship and Why It Is Popular as Well as
Strenuous,” New York Times, Mar. 6, 1910, SM12.
159
Frank N. Freeman, “A Course in Handwriting: II,” Elementary School Journal XXII (Sept.,
1921-June, 1922): 445.
160
Clayton Meeker Hamilton, Studies in Stagecraft (New York: Henry Hold and Company,
1914), 193.
439
metronome, or even beating time with the hand, helps at first in acquiring smooth, even
eye jumps.”161
Yet, as many over the last century recognized, a machine that ingrains “precision”
also restricts and reduces personal variation. Thus Robert Robertson Rusk, in
Experimental Education (1919), reflected upon the drawbacks of instructing students to
write though these modern, mechanical techniques,162
stating, “Children display fewer
independent impulses than when writing without the [metronomic] beat. The compulsion
to [mechanically] rhythmical writing thereby induced causes the child's writing
artificially to approximate to that of the adult. Writing to a beat has on the whole a
marked influence on handwriting…It is consequently important that the tempo of writing
to the beat should not be made too quick…Into the exact psychological and pathological
analysis of writing we cannot here enter, but as writing, like speech, is a form of
expression.”163
Rusk implied, as Paderewski and Chittenden before him, that individual
expression—the personal equation so derided by psychologists—was thwarted by
objective metronomic regulation. The metronome imposed an artificial “rhythmical”
161
William Burnett Benton, “Speeding Up Our Reading,” The Scientific Monthly 47 (Sept.,
1938): 263.
162
In 1914 text, The Teaching of Handwriting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914),
Frank N. Freeman was less dogmatic about the external time source for classroom instruction,
stating, “The time is usually marked by counting, making a series of raps with a ruler, handclaps,
or metronome beats. A still better method of indicating tempo, which has long been used for
marching, dancing, gymnastic exercises, etc., is music.” See Freeman, The Teaching of
Handwriting, 105.
This statement contrasts with his more precise indications found in “A Course in
Handwriting: II” from the 1922 Elementary School Journal XXII.
163
Robert Robertson Rusk, Experimental Education (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919),
287.
440
value upon a child’s performance, merely “approximating” a natural and nuanced rhythm
learned only through personal experience.
Comprehensive, Automatical Pedagogies
Despite Rusk’s realization, the new aesthetic of habituation and automatism, described in
1904 by psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall, took hold in general education, as
students increasingly learned to speak, write, and perform by chronographic standards.
The most conspicuous and influential proponent of this scientific trend of “experimental
education” was Eugene Jaques-Dalcroze. His new pedagogy, Eurhythmics or “rhythmic-
gymnastics,” seemed to impart the child-student with a precise, externalized rhythm
exploited by physiologists and experimental psychologists decades before him.164
In 1905
164
Jaques-Dalcroze readily acknowledged that Eurhythmics was necessary, in large part, due to
the increasing demand in modern society for amateur middle-class children to learn, seemingly to
the exclusion of all else, the technical fundamentals of music. By 1909, Jaques-Dalcroze had
attested, “Schools of Music, formerly frequented only by born musicians, gifted from birth with
unusual powers of perception for sound and rhythm, to-day receive all who are fond of music,
however little Nature may have endowed them with the necessary capacity for musical expression
and realization. The number of solo players, both pianists and violinists, is constantly increasing,
instrumental technique is being developed to an extraordinary degree, but everywhere, too, the
question is being asked whether the quality of instrumental players is equal to their quantity, and
whether the acquirement of extraordinary technique is likely to help musical progress when this
technique is not joined to musical powers, if not of the first rank, at least normal.”
As Jaques-Dalcroze contested, the culture of educating creative musical “artists” was on
the wane: “Of ten certificated pianists of to-day, at the most one, if indeed one, is capable of
recognizing one key from another, of improvising four bars with character or so as to give
pleasure to the listener, of giving expression to a composition without the help of the more or less
numerous annotations with which present day composers have to burden their work, of
experiencing any feeling whatever when they listen to, or perform, the composition of another.
The solo players of older days were without exception complete musicians, able to improvise and
compose, artists driven irresistibly towards art by a noble thirst for aesthetic expression, whereas
most young people who devote themselves nowadays to solo playing have the gifts neither of
hearing nor of expression, are content to imitate the composer's expression without the power of
feeling it, and have no other sensibility than that of the fingers, no other motor faculty than an
automatism painfully acquired. Solo playing of the present day has specialized in a finger
technique which takes no account of the faculty of mental expression. It is no longer a means, it
has become an end.”
See Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, “Rhythm as a Factor of Education,” reprinted in The
Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze (Boston: Small Maynard and Company, 1913), 15-16.
441
Jaques-Dalcroze presented Eurhythmics performances to the public, and around 1906 he
started to comprehensively instruct teachers in his methods.165
By 1907, Jaques-Dalcroze
had described his seemingly habitual training techniques in the article “Initiation into
Rhythm,” stating:
By means of movements of the whole body, we may equip ourselves to realize
and perceive rhythms.
Consciousness of rhythm is the faculty of "placing" every succession and
combination of fractions of time in all their gradations of rapidity and strength.
This consciousness is acquired by means of muscular contractions and relaxations
in every degree of strength and rapidity.166
In 1909, Jaques-Dalcroze succinctly confirmed that his educational methods were yet
another outcropping of the typical psychological child-studies in time and action:
Before teaching the relation which exists between sound and movement, it is wise
to undertake the independent study of each of these two elements. Tone is
evidently secondary, since it has not its origin and model in ourselves, whereas
movement is instinctive in man and therefore primary. Therefore I begin the study
of music by careful and experimental teaching of movement. This is based in
earliest childhood on the automatic exercise of marching, for marching is the
natural model of time measure…This method is entirely based upon experiments
many times repeated, and not one of the exercises has been adopted until it has
been applied under different forms and under different conditions and its
usefulness definitely proved.167
With a rhythmic epistemology strikingly opposite of Paderewski’s and identical to both
Wundt’s and Scripture’s, Jaques-Dalcroze even discounted the heartbeat as a sufficient
measure for musical time in the modern age.168
In 1912 a British correspondent to The
165 Percy B. Ingham, “The Jaques-Dalcroze Method,” in The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze
(Boston: Small Maynard and Company, 1913), 34, 35.
166
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, “The Initiation into Rhythm,” in Rhythm, Music, and Education,
translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 79-80.
167 Jaques-Dalcroze, “Rhythm as a Factor of Education,” 17, 18.
168 Jaques-Dalcroze, “The Initiation into Rhythm,” 82.
442
New York Times described Jaques-Dalcroze’s methods as yet another form of psychology
experiment, one performed outside of the laboratory on child-subjects: “All the exercises,
it is said, develop the sense of hearing, the power of accurate time and rhythm memory,
and, above all, demand a high degree of attention.”169
To a great extent, Jaques-
Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics was not concerned with the performance traditions of creative
artists such as Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Hofmann, Brahms, or countess others of past
centuries. In 1915 Jaques-Dalcroze was quoted as saying, “My pupils themselves began
to realize that they were not merely being taught music, but were being generally
educated. They were undergoing psycho-physical transformations.”170
The Times
reported on one of Jaques-Dalcroze’s child-training demonstrations in London on
November 12, 1913 (he would produce many over the next decade), witnessing that,
His aim is twofold. First he seeks to produce in his pupils the most intimate
possible realization of the rhythms of music by training them to execute a variety
of steps and gestures in exact correspondence with the time of an accompanying
piece. Secondly, he endeavors, by this elaborate training in calculated and
coordinated movements, to teach nerve-control, and establish on the part of his
students a perfect command over all their limbs.171
Jaques-Dalcroze’s pedagogy, however, was not entirely new, as he conflated many past
and contemporaneous techniques of non-musical, metronomic youth-training already
encountered in this survey: military drill, calisthenics and gymnastics, along with child-
study experimentation. Jaques-Dalcroze was clearly the most prominent in a wave of
educators attempting to train humans to move and act with greater, seemingly
169
“Rhythm in Education,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 1912, C4.
170
Quoted in Grace Smith, “The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze,” Journal of Proceedings and
Addresses, National Education Association (August 16-27, 1915): 871.
171
“M. Dalcroze’s ‘Eurhythmics,’” Times, November 13, 1913, 10.
443
automatical regularity. Nevertheless, according to Arnold Bennett’s text Mental
Efficiency (1911), numerous Eurhythmics-like pedagogies were readily available to
modern American and British citizens. Bennett states, “In all the American newspapers
and all the American monthlies are innumerable illustrated announcements of ‘physical-
culture specialists,’ who guarantee to make all the organs of the body perform their duties
with the mighty precision of a 60 h.p. motor-car that never breaks down…vast numbers
of people must be worried about the non-efficiency of their bodies, and on the way to
achieve efficiency. In our more modest British fashion, we have the same phenomenon in
England. And it is growing.”172
Harkening to Bennett’s assessment of these modern, regimented physical
pedagogies, the New York Times (1914) reported on one of the earliest Eurhythmics
schools in North America, directed by former Jaques-Dalcroze student Ida
Lenggenhagen:
The visitor to Miss Lenggenhagen’s studio will be amazed to see a class
“realizing” one of these complicated rhythms and at the same time preparing for a
fresh and still more complicated one. For while arms are beating a certain rhythm
and feet are expressing eights and sixteenths, the music will change to a different
rhythm, and, while still continuing, the dancers will listen and mentally register
the new rhythm being played. At the signal “Hopp!” they are ready to change,
while the music may have slipped into still another intricacy.173
As the New York Times reporter expressed, Eurhythmics was a very new and unusual
performance practice to behold, remarking, “It all seems absurd enough until you get the
172
Arnold Bennett, Mental Efficiency and other Hints to Men and Women (New York: George H.
Doran Company, 1911), 7-8. Bennett makes no specific mention of Jaques-Dalcroze or his
Eurhythmics.
173 “Dalcroze Eurhythmics Have Come to New York,” New York Times, Jan. 25, 1914, SM5.
444
idea.”174
The reporter’s initial reaction to the sight of these performances is perhaps
understandable, since Eurhythmics exercises were grounded in a chronographic time, in
which a small, automatical note-unit presided over every perception and actualization of
human motion. Regardless of meter, phase, harmony, or affect, “the quarter note is
translated into a single movement and is the unit of the rhythm.”175
In another exposé of Lenggenhagen’s young studio, this time during a New York
performance, Margaret Naumburg’s 1914 report “The Dalcroze Idea, What Eurhythmics
is and What it Means” in Outlook magazine confirmed Jaques-Dalcroze’s new method of
chronographic education, in which the student’s individual will for movement became
subsumed through a scientific system of response training:
The Dalcroze method makes bodily movements depend on the exact musical
values, so that the music and the bodily expression are so closely related that
together they formed a whole…the Dalcroze method depends on exact
interpretation of note and measure duration.176
Jaques-Dalcroze’s musical-time exercises published in Rhythm, Music, and Education
(1921) confirm this “rhythmic” practice: a constant, metronomic time-unit—usually a
quarter or eight note—grounded every bar in each of his novel etudes. Traditional metric
notation seldom applied; standard meters are replaced with new signatures, dictating the
number of invariable note-units per bar. Indeed, traditional meters are not applicable to
the actualization of Jaques-Dalcroze’s music studies: the student must subdivide in
mechanically equal “clicks” to perform his etudes accurately. One cannot glean the ictus
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid.
176 Margaret Naumburg, “The Dalcroze Idea, What Eurhythmics is and What it Means,” Outlook,
Jan. 17, 1914, 130. APS Online.
445
metricus, Riemann’s agogik, the invisible accent—and certainly not Christiani’s “wavy
outline”—through Jaques-Dalcroze’s revised time signatures; while Jaques-Dalcroze
provides the necessary translation from traditional time signatures to his new constant-
beat “measure denominator,” the sensory hierarchy of metrical rhythm, pulse, and
rhetoric, no longer underlies his objectivist Eurhythmics notation.
Figure 6.10. Jaques-Dalcroze’s reinvented time-signature notation for Eurhythmics that stresses the
mathematical-automatical equality and constancy of small internal beats—regardless of bar length.
Correspondingly, the notational system effaced the physical sense of pulse, swing, and movement once
represented by traditional time signatures. From Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music, and Education (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), “Musical Supplement,” 1.
As with Wundt’s, Titchener’s, and Seashore’s exercises in the perception of rhythm,
physically perceived meter, movement, or pulse no longer held sway, either in print or in
practice. A comparison of these scientific rhythmic training examples shows their
446
uncanny similarity: Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics studies are strongly reminiscent of
experimental psychologists’ testing methods from the last decade of the nineteenth
century.
Figure 6.11. Some of Jaques-Dalcroze’s many Eurhythmics exercises for the training of precise rhythmic
performance, where the mathematical-automatical consistency of small note-unit “divisions” was of
paramount importance. As with similar rhythmic procedures from gymnastics regimens and physiological
experiments, this now-objectified “rhythm” was de-contextualized from musical phrase, harmony, the
traditional, physical sense of meter, alongside rhetorical gesture and affect. From Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm,
Music, and Education (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), “Musical Supplement,” 3.
Naumburg’s 1914 Outlook article further explained that the “rhythm” imparted through
Eurhythmics correspondingly effaced individual interpretation, and diminished the
prevalent “problems” of personal rhythmic action for the sake of normalized, mass
regulation. She quotes Jaques-Dalcroze:
447
“Most children have no instinct for time, for time values, for accentuation, for
physical balance, because the motor faculties are not the same in all individuals
and because a number of obstacles impede the exact and rapid realization of
mental conceptions. One child is always behind the beat when marching, another
always ahead, another takes unequal steps, another, on the contrary, lacks balance.
All these faults, if not corrected in the first years, will reappear later in the
musical technic of the individual. Unsteady time when singing or playing,
confusion in playing, inability to follow when accompanying, accentuating too
roughly or with lack of precision, all these faults have their origin in the child’s
muscular and nervous control, in lack of coordination between the mind which
conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits, and the muscle
which executes.”177
As Jaques-Dalcroze himself explained, Eurhythmics was an extension of physiology,
experimental psychology, and child-study; Eurhythmics was a new chronographic
science training “creative” human movements under mechanically informed, precision
time. Eventually, Jaques-Dalcroze’s music and dance pedagogy helped infuse
automatism—the metronomic rhythm first espoused by experimental psychologists—into
a modern, industrial-inspired performance arts, a mechanical-mathematical aesthetic first
recognized by many in the music of Igor Stravinsky, as Chapter VII relates in greater
detail.
Jaques-Dalcroze, the pedagogue of modern, twentieth-century “Rhythm,” had
wide-ranging influence in modern culture, in the fields of music, language, dance, and
177
Naumburg, 130-131. Also printed in Jaques-Dalcroze, “Rhythm as a Factor of Education,” 18.
In a lecture given to the Dresden Teachers’ Association on May 28, 1912, Jaques-
Dalcroze further explained the rhythmic “problems” of unmusical children consist of muscular
and neurological disorders—problems commonly perceived by experimental psychologists
through chronographic child-study: “There are always children who are not able to sing in time,
or even to beat time, to walk in time, or to graduate the strength and rapidity of their movements.
Such children are unrythmic, and it will generally be noticed that these children are stiff and
awkward, often also over-excitable. This lack of rhythm is almost like a disease. It is caused by
the lack of balance between the mental and physical powers…To repeat, the causes of this lack of
rhythm all lie in the important but insufficiently recognized psycho-physiological sphere of the
co-ordination of brain, never-paths and muscles.” See “From the Lectures of Jaques-Dalcroze,” in
The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze, 27-28.
448
even psychology. Perhaps affected by Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmic pedagogy, William
Patterson prescribed in The Rhythm of Prose (1916) that,
If the student wishes to develop his time-sense systematically, he should make
himself expert in the automatic performance of syncopating tasks, such as tapping
two's against three's or even five's against seven's…let him tap off the drum-beat
rhythm of his most impelling experience with a sentence till he learns it.178
With this habitual training in absolute, objective rhythm, the student of both music and
literature aspired to be a living automaton—a quality valued by experimental
psychologists, not traditional performance “artists.” Correspondingly, the chronographic-
metronomic time that predominated educational methods by the second decade of the
twentieth century effaced the values of individual movement and experience in music,
speech, and dance. William Patterson’s influences and intentions, too, were abundantly
evident as he writes: “Meumann has already made clear the fact that all regular or
rhythmical movements tend to become automatic and that this automatism is of great
service to a performer in the matter of keeping time.”179
Trained under these comprehensive, automatical pedagogies, the individual’s
perception was no longer part of the performance equation. The student-subject’s new
challenge—even in prose speech—was to conform to metronomic rhythm. As Rusk
reports in Experimental Education, influential psychologist Ernst Meumann challenged
elementary-school children to beat-time in music as mechanically precise as possible
during various experimental exercises. He found that,
178
Patterson, 99.
179
Ibid., 23.
449
The highest rate at which the seven-year-old child can perform this task is when
the notes succeed one another at 4/10 second interval; the power thus to
accompany fails with many twelve-year-old children when the interval is greater
than two seconds. With the shortest times the tapping is too slow, with the longer
too quick, and it is observed that children frequently do not notice their mistakes.
These children consequently cannot apprehend and reproduce musical measures
involving intervals of less than .4 seconds or greater than about 1.8 seconds, and
the duration of notes or divisions of notes beyond these limits cannot be
appreciated or reproduced by many children.180
While children naturally failed to perform musical rhythms with the exacting automatical
qualities defined by the chronographic method, Rusk recognized that Meumann’s work
was not an attempt at futility. Rusk reflected on how the première twentieth-century
pedagogue of modern rhythmic-training continued to habituate youth in mechanically
precise performances, stating that a child’s automatical-rhythm “ability can be greatly
improved by training, such systems as that of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze prove beyond
doubt.”181
Indeed, Jaques-Dalcroze described his own pedagogy of Eurhythmics as a
chronographic experiment in habituated mechanical action:
The object of the method is, in the first instance, to create by the help of rhythm a
rapid and regular current of communication between brain and body…It is a
question of eliminating in every muscular movement, by the help of will, the
untimely intervention of muscles useless for the movement in question, and thus
developing attention, consciousness and will-power. Next must be created an
automatic technique for all those muscular movements which do not need the help
of the consciousness…Thanks to the co-ordination of the nerve-centers, to the
formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor habits, my
method assures the freest possible play to subconscious expression.182
Jaques-Dalcroze defined “rhythm” identically to experimental psychologists such as
Meumann, Myers, Sears, Scripture, Wundt, and a host of psychologists currently training
180
Rusk, 69.
181
Ibid.
182 Jaques-Dalcroze, “Rhythm as a Factor of Education,” 18-19.
450
an industrialized society in efficient, mechanized actions and responses. Recalling the
methods of Vierordt and in his seminal metronomic-action studies from the 1860s, Percy
B. Ingham in 1913 confirms the scientific-rhythmic traditions of Jaques-Dalcroze’s
educational theories and practices:
A rhythm in music consists of a regularly recurring series of accented sounds,
unaccented sounds, and rests, expressed in rhythmic gymnastics by movements
and inhibitions of movements. Individuals who are rhythmically uncertain
generally have a muscular system which is irregularly responsive to mental
stimuli; the response many be too rapid or too slow; in either case impulse or
inhibition falls at the wrong moment, the change of movement is not made to
time, and the physical expression of the rhythm is blurred.183
As the educational values of Jaques-Dalcroze attest—and as they directly reflect the
theories of Scripture and Hall—twentieth-century training methods in the fields of
industry, art, and science all seemed to be converging through the identical applications
of objective, efficient, and externalized rhythmic regulation. Correspondingly, these
pedagogies tacitly contained the now-prevalent chronographic bias against individual,
subjective action.
Factories around the world continued to bring laborers “up to date” in the
chronographic methods of experimental psychology as well. It can be no coincidence that
two German businessmen, Harald and Wolf Dohrn, built, funded, and administrated
Jaques-Dalcroze’s College for Rhythmic Training, otherwise known as the “Temple of
Rhythm” in Hellerau, their fabricated garden city near Dresden.184
In the 1921 book Mind
and Work: The Psychological Factors in Industry and Commerce, psychologist (and
183 Percy B. Ingham, 42-43. The writer also notes, “The Jaques-Dalcroze method aims at nothing
more or less than the training of rhythmic innervations.” See The Eurhythmics of Jaques-
Dalcroze, 39.
184 Ibid., 36. See also Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States
(Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), 7.
451
Member of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board) Charles S. Myers codified the
standard fatigue test where the laborer-subject’s “finger is voluntarily bent and extended
to the rhythm of a metronome, the cylinder winds the wire round it and the weight is
raised.”185
Jules Amar, the Director of the Laboratory of Physiological Research in the
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, described similar labor fatigue experiments in his
book Physiology of Industrial Organization (1918), in which a subject “voluntarily”
responded while “The rhythm is measured by a metronome, and the weight to be moved
by the muscular contractions does not vary.”186
Amar also reported on re-training efforts
for disabled factory workers, during strength exercises in which “The pace will be set by
a metronome, marking from 30 to 300 oscillations.”187
185
Charles S. Myers, Mind and Work: The Psychological Factors in Industry and Commerce,
(New York: Putnam's Sons, 1921), 39. As skilled nineteenth-century musicians could argue, if the
finger moved to the externalized, artificial beat of the metronome, the subject’s actions were not
really “voluntary.”
186
Jules Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization and the Re-employment of the
Disabled, translated by Bernard Miall (London: The Library Press Limited, 1918), 92.
187
Ibid., 148.
452
Figure 6.12. One of Jules Amar’s subjects, an 18-year-old athlete, during a typical work-fatigue
experiment based on chronographic methods. Apparatuses employed include an “ergonomic cycle,”
“respiration gauge,” a “Tonograph,” “Pneumograph,” and the metronome, which appears at the left corner
of the table. From Jules Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization and the Re-employment of the
Disabled, translated by Bernard Miall (London: The Library Press Limited, 1918), 84.
Scientific “rhythm” training continued to gain ever-greater precisions in all aspects of
general education, music pedagogy, and labor training. In Measure Your Mind: The
Mentimeter and how to Use It (1920), Frank Parker Stockbridge and M. R. Trabue
recounted the now industry-standard aiming tests that measured performance accuracy
through metronomic regulation. While the subject placed a brass pencil in various small
holes, “The speed of the subject’s movements was controlled by a metronome, so as to
allow thirty trials per minute.”188
This standard chronographic test eventually applied to
serious music students as well. Psychologist Carl Emil Seashore promoted identical
188
M. R. Trabue and Frank Parker Stockbridge, Measure Your Mind: The Mentimeter and how to
Use it (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920), 81-82.
453
methods and apparatuses when training a musician’s “Precision in Movement,” as he
related in The Psychology of Musical Talent (1919):
The precision target. To test for direction of movement in its simplest form, we
use what is known as the precision target… The test consists of determining how
many holes the subject can put the needle into without touching the target plate.
The metronome is beating, and he is required to put the pointer into each
successive hole at the rate of one in two seconds.189
As Seashore implies, the student musician was now the “subject” of the standard
precision-target training. Horace B. McChesney’s 1926 patent filing develops upon a
similar labor-training machine for “keyboard operation” in telegraphy; it is an invention
that clearly recalls not only the traditions of other laboratory apparatuses but also the
modern trends in scientific piano-pedagogy, in which the clockwork metronome presided
over the precise time and exact rhythm for the efficient human’s every key-stroke.190
Figure 6.13. Details from U.S. Patent #1,688,935, an “Apparatus for Testing the Aptitude of Keyboard
Operators,” filed on September 27, 1926 by H. B. McChesney. The modified, electrical-contact Maelzel
metronome appears to the right.
189
Carl Emil Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent (Boston: Silver, Burdett, and
Company, 1919), 183.
190
Horace B. McChesney, “Apparatus for Testing the Aptitude of Keyboard Operators,” U.S.
Patent #1,688,935 (Filed Sept. 27, 1926; Patented Oct. 23, 1928).
454
Similar to other scientific pedagogues of his age, Carl Emil Seashore transferred
every value of experimental psychology and labor training to the mechanical study of
human music making. In the 1918 Musical Quarterly article “The Sense of Rhythm as a
Musical Talent,” Seashore applied the same “rhythm” of Wundt’s laboratory to his
musician-subject’s talent for “musical rhythm,” based on experimental methods and
clockwork apparatuses.191
Once again this experimental psychologist neglected a skilled
musical artist’s intuition, intelligence, or performing experience in these laboratory
procedures; the subject’s internal or expressive understanding in time had little
relationship to the prevailing techniques of psychology. Rather, Seashore’s goal was
identical to other child-study psychologists of the new century: the quantification of
normality through standardized laboratory methods and machines. He proclaims in the
Psychology of Musical Talent, “The musical mind is first of all a normal mind. Indeed,
the normal mind is musical to the extent that it is normal.”192
With the purposes of both
defining and indeed creating a normal student, Seashore confirmed that even “music may
use science for its own benefit in the understanding and mastery of technique. By definite
tests scientifically determined, it is possible to determine which children possess musical
ability of a high order and may therefore be given the opportunity to become artists.”193
With his professional experience, not as a performing musician, but as a child-
study psychologist, Seashore became the self-appointed arbiter of correct musical time
191
Carl Emil Seashore, “The Sense of Rhythm as a Musical Talent,” The Musical Quarterly 4
(Oct., 1918): 507.
192 Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 6.
193
Ibid.
455
and by extension the personal equation of the modern musical “artist.” He reiterated
psychologists’ self-defined problems with human performance:
That enormous individual differences in this [“sense of rhythm”] endowment
obtain is a noted, if not notorious, fact. There are three ways of approaching the
problem of concrete analysis or measurement for the purpose of securing reliable
information about the relative presence or absence of this talent.194
According to a host of experienced experimental psychologists, traditional music
instructors were incapable of recognizing or solving these problems in their individual
students. Indeed, Seashore expressed some disdain for traditional and individual teaching
methods, since with such anti-scientific instruction “only a small fraction of this baffling
field [of traditional music pedagogy] gets into print, because, of all the subjects of
instruction, none has more individual ‘systems’ of instruction and in none is there so
much of the atmosphere of trade secrecy. Master teachers develop methods which are
more or less original and the students of the masters come to form groups between whom
there is the keenest rivalry.”195
To counteract these highly subjective teaching methods, Seashore devised
musical-talent experiments for both young children and professional musicians in-
training, in which “The merit of the test lies in the fact that it is stripped down to its
elements, which can be accurately defined, controlled, and measured.”196
In his Manual
194
Ibid., 124.
195
Ibid., v. He admits, however, “The cause of this does not, of course, lie entirely within the
personal idiosyncrasies of teachers of music, vocal and instrumental; rather is it due in great part
to the imponderability of the aesthetic element in music. Interpretation and expression are not
easily measured in any exact way: taste and individual differences are constituent factors in any
verdict about the relative superiority of rival methods, and these have not yet been, and in all
probability can never completely be, subjected to definite measurement.”
196
Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 202.
456
of Instructions and Interpretations for Measures of Musical Talent (1919), Seashore
reduced the quantifiable aspects of “Musical Action”—defined as the “natural capacity
for skill in accurate and musically expressive production of tones”—to these criteria: “1.
Control of pitch / 2. Control of intensity / 3. Control of time / 4. Control of timbre / 5.
Control of rhythm / 6. Control of volume.”197
As Seashore rightly acknowledged, such chronographic research and training
methods were well outside the reach of traditional music teachers. Due to the lack of
laboratory apparatus in the music studio, Seashore realized that only experimental
psychologists could define “true musicality” with the tools and techniques they had been
using for decades. Thus Seashore envisioned the extension of experimental psychology
even further into the realms of performance practices, since his process was,
Unfortunately not adapted for general use by musicians themselves. It
presupposes a technique, an equipment, and a skill in psychological analysis
which the musician does not possess. It requires a specialist trained in music and
psychology and will tend to open a new profession—that of a consulting
psychologist in music. Since the elaborate measurements will be made only on
those who have serious aspirations for a professional career in music, many will
not be needed; but laboratories might well be maintained in a few of the principal
music centers.198
Keeping with the chronographic bias of his field, Seashore supposed that every human
impulse reduced to mere mechanical processes, that the individual’s interpretive will was
quantifiable in clockwork. The processes used in child study and labor training, in
Seashore’s view, logically transferred to all aspiring professionals working within the
197
Carl Emil Seashore, Manual of Instructions and Interpretations for Measures of Musical
Talent (New York: Columbia Phonograph Company, [1919]), 16. Seashore devised this manual
based on The Psychology of Musical Talent as a companion to phonographic records produced by
Columbia, which were employed as the testing apparatus for musicians-in-training.
198
Carl Emil Seashore, “The Measurement of Musical Talent,” The Musical Quarterly 1 (Jan.,
1915): 146.
457
confines of “rhythmic action.” In the Psychology of Musical Talent (1919), Seashore
explained how his scientific training methods drastically redefined the performance goals
of the modern musician:
Precision in the time of rhythmic action may be measured by varying the timed
action tests so as to produce long and short intervals, the duration of which may
be controlled as in actual playing…We, therefore, use the telegraph key with the
chronograph, as before, and required the subject to mark a given musical
rhythm…To this measure of time precision, we might easily add the measure of
the precision of stress or accent, as described for intensity. To record this, the
telegraph key is mounted on a spring which is attached to a similar spring on the
phonograph, carrying a tracing point which marks the degree of pressure by a
tracing parallel to the time line and similar to it, except that the measure is in
terms of the degrees of pressure…Such apparatus might be available and effective
for specific training in precision of time and touch in the essentials of musical
rhythm and might well furnish a series of exercises in a conservatory.199
The “essentials of musical rhythm” that Seashore valued so highly were those not of
Beethoven but of the astronomical observatory and psychological laboratory, where
“precise” mechanical accuracy was placed far above the individual’s creative, subjective
perceptions. Seashore’s essential rhythm was defined in unremitting clockwork, a time
that completely replaced the movement and pulse of living music performance. Seashore
even stated that his “timed action test may be regarded as an imitation of keeping time, as
in the playing on the piano, marching, dancing, and all other forms of rhythmic
movement.”200
His widely published articles and books, spanning the first half of the
twentieth century, suggest that these values of experimental psychology became accepted
norm in music education. Indeed, his article “The Measurement of Musical Talent”
199
Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 203-4.
200
Ibid., 202. Seashore did not intend his methods for mere scientific observation, but for a new
scientific education, which “will train both the ear and hand because the graphic record is
quantitatively exact and records smaller differences than the [chronographically] untrained ear
can hear or hand execute.”
458
appeared in the very first volume of The Musical Quarterly in 1915. Seashore’s work
exposes the extent to which scientific methods had irrevocably revised the fundamentals
of musical time in education: the scientific metronome controlled rhythm—constant,
automatical rhythm—for every movement and perception of the twentieth-century
musician. With assistance from Seashore, the metronome-as-chronograph had finally
arrived to dictate and define the personal equation of “musical talent” in the twentieth
century;201
the methods and machines of Wundt’s experimental laboratory finally seemed
appropriate and desirable for this new incarnation of chronographic child-study. Thus, a
new tradition of use for the metronome had ascended: Chronographic regulation became
a pedagogical standard for the comprehensive technical training of both amateur and
conservatory musicians in the now accepted and sought-after precisions of scientific
rhythm.202
Seashore was one of the most prominent teacher-technicians to apply scientific
machines and methods to once complex and subjective performance-acts, but he was not
alone. A host of scientific pedagogues continued to apply the metronome as an apparatus
specifically intended for chronographic music training. In 1920, for example, inventor
and pedagogue James Rigg devised a breathing apparatus for student singers and wind-
201
Seashore wholeheartedly considered that a child’s musical-physical ability could reduce to a
series of experiments, thus exposing: “The personal equation. The permanent traits of an
individual, as conceived in terms of capacities, are sometimes spoken of as his personal equation.
One person is slow and sure; another is quick and sure; one lives in the world of feeling, another
in the world of reflection; one has a remarkable sense of rhythm; another is devoid of this
capacity. The knowledge of such traits or capacities can be built up into a personal equation
which will enable us to predict with reasonable certainty the aptitude and probable promise of
achievement of such a person.” See Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 15.
202
While the topic is not in the scope of the present survey, it is important to note that Seashore
had a long-standing relationship with the Eastman School of Music, where he actively applied his
scientific methods under the approval of the school’s director Howard Hanson.
459
players where a metronome regulated lung-training exercises.203
Dutch inventor Maurits
Jonas Goudsmit likewise treated the music student as a subject in mechanical
performance. In his 1923 patent filing, the inventor reiterated the now-commonly held
belief in the modern metronome, a belief in which human interpretations, sensations, and
perceptions were of little consequence:
As the indications given in pieces of music, such as allegro, andante, and other
indications, are too indefinite to indicate to the pupil or the practicing artist the
exact time to keep when studying a piece of music, for this purpose use is made of
the metronome, as is known.204
Mechanical exactitude, not sensory interpretation, was the goal of chronographic research
and education in twentieth-century culture. Under this epistemology, “indefinite” verbal
descriptions no longer held qualitative value in musical interpretation and performance;
only a definitive metronomic rhythm would suffice “to keep” musical time in the
student—and, as Goudsmit suggests, eventually the “practicing artist.” As these inventors
realized, chronographic precisions could always be improved upon. Thus some
technologically progressive scientists, teachers, and inventors no longer considered the
clockwork metronome precise enough to consistently regulate musical practice in the
twentieth century. Goudsmit, like the inventors of pocket-watch, electric, and
phonograph205
metronomes, believed that to ingrain precise mechanical consistency in
the child, Maelzel’s old design with its now-superfluous pendulum should be discounted
203
James Burlington Rigg, “Means for and Method of Regulating Breathing…” U.S. Patent
#1,354,212 (Filed Feb. 9, 1920; Patented Sept. 28, 1920).
204
Maurits Goudsmit, “Music Time Indicator.” U.S. Patent #1,783,537 (Filed Aug. 2, 1923;
Patented Dec. 2, 1930): 1. The inventor also filed this device for a Germany patent on April 10,
1928.
205
Adelaide Ewing, “Device for Counting Time,” U.S. Patent #1,496,258 (Filed Nov. 1922;
Patented June 3, 1924).
460
altogether. He states:
The disadvantages connected with studying with the aid of the metronome are of
many kinds…It is troublesome for the player to have to pay attention by ear to the
rhythm by the ticking of the metronome, while he must at the same time
accurately observe the pitch…A further disadvantage consists in that when the
metronome is in front of the player, the swing of the pendulum has a disturbing
effect on the eye itself, as it must read the notes at the same time.206
Again, for those with a chronographic bias, the modern student’s dilemma—his personal-
equation problem to solve—was in being completely automatical: One could seldom stay
slavishly faithful to the swing or click of the metronome while simultaneously reading
the music notation. Clarence G. Hamilton, in his music-education treatise How to Use the
Metronome Correctly, concurred that the rhythm of the clockwork click now
predominated over the pendulum movement, attesting that the ear “should be taught to
apprehend the beats, since it is frequently inconvenient to watch the pendulum and often
confusing to attempt to do so.”207
The solution to this unwieldy performance practice, which distracted the student
from the most perfect automatical-rhythmical accuracy, was obvious to Goudsmit, since
child-study psychologists had already practiced a better method of inducing mechanical
action: connect the student directly to the chronographic device. His “invention consists
of an apparatus, which imparts the time of the music to be played mechanically to the
foot of the player.” Patent filing #1,783,537 shows the striking similarity of Goudsmit’s
new metronome-apparatus to the contemporaneous ergograph.
206
Goudsmit, 1.
207 C. G. Hamilton, 11.
461
Figure 6.14. Detail of U.S. Patent #1,496,258, filed on August 2, 1923 by Maurits Goudsmit, showing a
“Music Time Indicator” that connects to the performer’s foot and physically dictates the “exact”
metronomic rhythm for “the pupil and the practicing artist.” Forgoing both the visual and sonic rhythmic
reference of Maelzel’s old clockwork design, this modern metronomic harness could additionally dictate a
redundant, artificial metrical accent to the performer’s appendage.
Thus, a music student, like the subject of a child study, would physically conform to the
metronomic source in full. By the time of Goudsmit’s work in musical chronography,
subjective and creative values had largely given way to scientific-mechanical values. The
intentions of scientific pedagogues, such as Jaques-Dalcroze, Patterson, and Seashore,
were transparent: habitually infuse the child with the most precise “rhythmic” values
possible as defined by a scientific apparatus—a coolly objective (once considered
mindless) automaton. In 1916 music professor Clarence G. Hamilton, summarizing the
now prevalent values of the scientific-musical culture, likewise allegorized the
metronome as the “balance wheel” for the “temperamental extravagances” the music
462
student—the metronome became the essential mechanical regulator for a child-
performer’s internal clockwork.208
Through the values imposed by scientists, scientific
pedagogues, and their intertwined methodologies, a drastic and lasting temporal shift had
clearly occurred within Western society: a machine now controlled and defined the once-
subjective meanings and practices of musical time. For these scientific-music educators,
the metronomic hegemony was not only acknowledged but also completely welcomed; a
hegemony in which constant clockwork motion effaced nuanced rhythmical feeling, and
automatical sound quashed the comparatively imperfect, imprecise pulse-sense.
208
See C. G. Hamilton, 10: “For the student, however, the metronome’s most important office is
to give command over absolute time-values. Tempo is so dependent upon the mood of the
moment that students, especially with those of highly emotional natures, should practice technical
exercises and parts of pieces daily with the metronome as a balance wheel to their temperamental
extravagances.”
463
CHAPTER VII: THE ORIGINS OF A CHRONOGRAPHIC
MUSICAL CULTURE
Objective regulation, control, and efficiency through standardized, precision
measurement: these were the essential values of the scientific metronome—values
diametrically opposed to the beliefs and practices of creative nineteenth-century
musicians. Only in the new scientifically organized society of the twentieth century did
the metronome become a fundamental cultural reference for human endeavors, in which
music making was one metronomic act among many. A Dictionary of Military Terms
(1918) by West Point instructor Edward S. Farrow confirms the primary usefulness of
Maelzel’s machine as infallible temporal regulator for standardized training. Not
surprisingly, while individualistic human musicianship was not an issue in Farrow’s
definition of the military metronome, he recounts another cold-blooded, anti-musical
automaton of identical origins:
Metronome.—A machine for indicating the correct time or cadence. It was
invented in 1815 by the inventor of the automatic trumpeter. The test of a correct
metronome is that when set at 60 it shall beat seconds.1
“Correct time” for the marching of troops, the testing of children, and the training of
workers in the new century was invariably mechanical; in a culture where Yoga initiates
were even instructed to “get a metronome or a watch or a clock…set it going, so that you
have an exact measurement” for meditative breathing,2 the “correct time” for the modern
1 Edward S. Farrow, A Dictionary of Military Terms, (Revised Edition, New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell Company, 1918), 379. Farrow’s definition is slightly truncated from stock descriptions
appearing since the nineteenth century, including Chambers’ Encyclopedia, Revised Edition, Vol.
VI (London: W. and R. Chambers, 1874), 429.
2 Hereward Carrington, Higher Psychical Development (Yoga Philosophy), an Outline of the
Secret Hindu Teachings (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920), 61.
464
Western world reduced to mere clockwork. As Hereward Carrington’s modern brand of
“Yoga Philosophy” verified, “there must be perfect rhythm established,” a perfect
metronomic rhythm totally anachronistic, non-traditional, and artificial when compared
to organic human actions and past physical-mental practices. Thus, in all aspects of
modern Western living, the clockwork metronome redefined the nature of time as it
actively regulated people—whether in meditation, marching, or music making—along
with their personal equations through scientific methods of training, education, and
experiment.
In the twentieth century, metronomic time became the primary “rhythm”
throughout much of Western society. Jaques-Dalcroze, Münsterberg, Seashore, Patterson,
and others promoted automatical pedagogies grounded by a “time” and “rhythm” entirely
separated from individual experience, subjectivity, or volition. Amar’s 1914 labor
training reference The Human Motor, or, The Scientific Foundations of Labor and
Industry, too, championed distinctly artificial time as applied to living action (well
beyond the book’s striking title). In The Human Motor—a virtual mirror for modern
society’s prevailing values of industrialization—automatical machines predominated, as
Amar defined the “musical pendulum” no longer as the silent, simple pendulum but
exclusively as the clockwork metronome: the premiere chronographic regulator of the
new century.3 Indeed, by the publication of Amar’s text, it seems that the definition of
time and rhythm was found in the clockwork metronome alone:
3 Jules Amar, The Human Motor, or, The Scientific Foundations of Labor and Industry (London:
George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1920), 35.
465
197. Measurement of Time.—The unit of time is the second. It is rarely
necessary, in the phenomena under consideration, to measure small fractions of a
second. However, in walking at 100 or 150 steps a minute, or in operating the
keys of a piano, or a typewriter, etc. the duration of each movement may be from,
say, 1/2 to 1/5 of a second. It suffices in most cases to use a metronome, which
will give the cadence of the work, will regulate it invariably, and will indicate the
duration of any isolated, mechanical act. 4
Amar confirmed that the metronome was one of the most valued time sources in the
scientific-industrial century for the precise temporal control of human activities—
typewriting and playing the piano among many “mechanical acts.” Even modern music
periodicals espoused the metronome for the most efficient, objective, and unfeeling
measurer of musical training and education. In 1854, only astronomers required such
exacting rhythmic regulation, which was made possible through the observatory
chronograph first installed at Greenwich. Yet in the twentieth century the metronome
became the ubiquitous chronograph of an industrialized society. Just as in astronomical
observation, metronomic rhythm redefined and reduced the personal equation from all
“operations” of science, industry, and education. Meanwhile the human’s individual
perception, as astronomers realized in previous decades, became subservient to this
objective mechanical rule and reference. Modern educators such as Jaques-Dalcroze
furthered this chronographic belief—that even musical time was primarily based in
mechanical precision. Indeed, in 1919, the premier “Rhythm” pedagogue described the
measurement of metered music with striking similarity to Amar’s “time-measurement”
definition, as an objective attempt “to shade sounds in all degrees of speed…(by a
4 Ibid., 266.
466
mathematic division of each sound into fractions of a half, third, quarter, eighth, etc., of
its time-value).”5
Maelzel’s metronome never represented the nuanced and variable nineteenth-
century practices of creativity or expression in music, dance, or spoken performance; its
often misinterpreted and mis-transcribed numbers never represented anything more than
slight, initial references to human movement and pulse. During much of the nineteenth
century, Maelzel’s clockwork metronome only reflected the initial swing of the simple
pendulum; its bell an artificial facsimile of a physically derived sense of meter—Just as
the simple pendulum once reflected a fundamental human movement, tactus, or pulse.
Indeed, the metronome was an overly precise tool for artistic musicians of the nineteenth
century, and it did not factor into the actions or thoughts of those instilled with former
temporal values based on physicality, language, and intuition. As Paderewski
experientially understood, “Mechanical execution and emotion are incompatible.”6
Before mass education fell under the influence of experimental psychologists, scientific
rhythm—distinguished solely by automatism—and “artistic” human rhythm were
considered two opposing qualities.
Nevertheless, humans readily learned to act to the click of a metronome during
laboratory experiments, private practicing, and classroom instruction. In both the arts and
sciences, old temporal perceptions gave way to new time-telling technologies, and the
5 Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, “Eurhythmics and Moving Plastic,” in Rhythm, Music and Education,
translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 274.
6
Henry T. Finck, Success in Music and How it is Won (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1909), 455.
467
values of time and action correspondingly grew more mechanically precise with habitual
training. Eventually, mechanical precisions trumped the understandings of physical
movement, meter, and pulse, as scientific methods and technologies continued to
modernize mass education. Scientists and educators alike forgot the physical basis of
musical tempo and motion in favor of the metronome’s automatical, redundant click—a
reference constantly to be improved upon for the sake of scientific endeavors—to be
made more accurate, efficient, and exacting over time. Thus, inventors and scientists
continued to modernize even Maelzel’s metronome through more precise gearing,
motors, electrical current, and eventually quartz technology. Indeed, the goals of
automatical technology know no end. First in the laboratory and then the practice room,
external metronomic timekeepers continued to increase in artificial precision and
regularity—and they continue to do so through our day. Over time, performer’s practices
and perceptions of musical movement and rhythm seem to parallel these technological
trends; in the twentieth century, the standardized performance-arts education seems to
move in lockstep with these increasingly precise, and wholly artificial, time-keeping
apparatuses.
In the laboratory of the 1920s behavioral psychologists such as Pavlov continued
to show that the clockwork metronome affected and altered the mammalian mind through
repetitive training.7 Sometimes the monotonous clicks sonically distracted a subject’s
7 For instance, see C. J. Warden and L. H. Warner, “The Sensory Capacities and Intelligence of
Dogs, with a Report on the Ability of the Noted Dog ‘Fellow’ to Respond to Verbal Stimuli,” The
Quarterly Review of Biology 3 (Mar., 1928): 13. The researchers note, “Other work by Pavlov’s
students indicates remarkable discriminatory ability for notes alike in pitch but differing in timbre
or tone color, and also extreme sensitivity to differences in the periodicity of the beating of a
metronome.”
468
ability for thought and action, at other times the mechanical stimulus influenced a
recurring, habitual behavior. The conditioned responses caused by the machine’s click
were not a guarded secret, and experimental psychologists readily acknowledged that
metronomic sound habituated people, especially impressionable youths, in a host of
activities. Florence Edna Mateer in Child Behavior; a Critical and Experimental Study of
Young Children (1918) noted that even the most fundamental of human sensations, such
as hunger, could be controlled and re-trained through the metronome. She described
psychological metronome-experiments on children that mirrored Pavlov’s tests, which
induced dogs to salivate. Mateer reports:
An auditory stimulus, the ringing of a metronome, was used for ten seconds and
then ten seconds after the ringing stopped the child was fed. As early as the
second trial the reaction occurred, but it occurred during the ringing of the
metronome. Gradually it came later and later after the initiation of the auditory
stimulus and finally after 15 trials was delayed until the metronome has stopped.
The results of the work upon these eight children left no doubt in the mind
of the experimenter as to the feasibility of applying the method of conditioned
reflexes in the study of young children.8
Ironically, while Pavlov’s new branch of experimental psychology limited metronomic-
training experiments to animals, the metronome grew all the more essential in the
habitual training of young, amateur musicians. Henry Granger Hanchett, in his 1905 text
The Art of the Musician, acknowledged these habitual metronomic methods that rapidly
emerged during his time devalued the student’s musicality and creativity for the sake of
mechanical proficiency. Hanchett likened these scientific-musical pedagogies to the
severe, inhuman labor methods of the industrial factory, and argued:
8 Florence Edna Mateer, Child Behavior; a Critical and Experimental Study of Young Children by
the Method of Conditioned Reflexes (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1920), 134-5.
469
Great music stimulates great technic; but when we shall have gained a true
conception of what music study means we shall not concern ourselves to spend
hours upon scales, arpeggios and etudes, and only brief moments upon tone-
poems…does not he resemble the man with the muck-rake, who while ignorant of
the wealth of tonal imaginings strives day after day under the lash of the
metronome to attain a velocity of a thousand notes a minute?9
For roughly a century, skilled musicians instinctually understood that incessant practice
with the clockwork metronome reflected a tyrannical, artificial imposition upon the
student’s creative sense. Even Rachmaninoff noticed the dangerous effects that scientific
training methods had upon youth, stating by 1913:
I do not approve of continual practice with the metronome. The metronome is
designed to set the time, and if not abused is a very faithful servant. However, it
should only be used for this purpose. The most mechanical playing imaginable
can proceed from those who make themselves slaves to this little musical clock,
which was never intended to stand like a ruler over every minute of the student's
practice time.10
Could it be that twentieth-century music students and teachers became habituated en
masse to the metronome through modern pedagogies, of which Eurhythmics was both the
most scientific and the most severe? Were not Paderewski’s “metronome-believers” in
conservatories and concert halls, Hanchett’s “muck-rakers” and Rachmaninoff’s “slaves”
in practice rooms—in addition to Pavlov’s laboratory dogs—trained under the very same
external stimulus? Many non-musicians and critics in an industrializing society had
grown to recognize that automatic machines influenced and altered the human psyche.
9 Henry G. Hanchett, The Art of the Musician, a Guide to the Intelligent Appreciation of Music
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 314.
10 James Francis Cooke, Great Pianists on Piano Playing: Study Talks with Foremost Virtuosos
(Reprint, Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1917), 213. Rachmaninoff comments, “The
metronome itself must not be used ‘with closed eyes,’ as we should say it in Russia. The player
must use discretion.”
470
Indeed, cultural critic Walter Lipmann recalled what seemed to be common knowledge
by 1922, that “the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence.”11
Yet modern rhythmical education was grounded in automatical behavior. Jaques-
Dalcroze justified his pedagogical intentions through these scientific values, which were
directly based in the regulative, drilling experiments of psychologists such as Hall,
Meumann, and others. In his 1914 article “Rhythmic Movement, Solfège, and
Improvisation,” Jaques-Dalcroze prescribed that his “special gymnastic system,
habituating muscles to contract and relax, and corporal lines to widen and shrink in time
and space, should supplement metrical feeling and instinct for rhythm.”12
Valuing the
new role of experimental psychology in societal education, Jaques-Dalcroze proclaimed:
“The better our lives are regulated, the freer we become in every way…The more
automatism possessed by our body, the more our soul will rise above material things.”13
Nearly a decade earlier, educator and psychologist G. Stanley Hall also expressed this
paradoxical view of automatical humanity, stating “the ascent from drudgery to freedom”
in education “comes through automatism.”14
Other scientific-musical pedagogues including Harriette Moore Brower also
admitted to the mechanized, habitual effects of their rhythmic-training:
11 Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 72.
12
Jaques-Dalcroze, “Rhythmic Movement, Solfège, and Improvisation,” in Rhythm, Music, and
Education, 115.
13
Ibid., 116.
14
Hall, 46-7.
471
I cannot urge too strongly the constant effort to play in time…we must have a just
sense of the mathematical values of notes. This is only acquired by constant
timekeeping and counting.15
Time-beating exercises may be made by using short
pieces of moderate difficulty and tapping the time value of the notes to the beat of
the metronome. Easy movements from the Mozart sonatas will furnish abundant
material.16
The only way to have a metronome in one’s head, that is, to have a
thoroughly grounded sense of rhythm, is to make good use of this valuable little
monitor. Let us stand up for this tireless little “policeman.”17
For the modern pedagogues of rhythm, Jaques-Dalcroze most conspicuously, habituation
to standardized and precise mechanical action—with the corresponding loss of inefficient
mental reflection and subjective judgment—was a virtuous influence on the modern
child, whose “physical movements repeatedly performed create corresponding images in
the brain…The more the pupil concentrates while making that movement, the clearer will
be the corresponding mental image, and the more fully will the sense for meter and
rhythm be developed. We might say that these movement images store up the
innervations which bring about the actual movement” in Eurhythmics training.18
15 Harriette Moore Brower, Self-Help in Piano Study (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1920),
16-17.
16
Ibid., 18.
17
Ibid., 120-121.
18
Ingham, 43.
472
Figure 7.1. Jaques-Dalcroze’s young Eurhythmics students perform an exercise in his neo-Hellenic school
at Hellerau, Germany—otherwise known as the Temple of Rhythm. From Ethel Ingham, “Lessons at
Hellerau,” in The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1913).
Beyond the activities devised for many isolated laboratory experiments, it is
certain that metronomic rhythm aided, informed, and influenced children and adults in a
myriad of performance acts only beginning at the turn of the century. And as education
with the clockwork metronome grew, the belief in metronomic action grew. The
metronomic research that originated in the astronomical observatory moved rapidly to
many modern laboratories by the 1870s, where the metronome’s precise clockwork sound
guided a variety of chronographic tests on human physicality, perception, and
performance through the scientific paradigm of “rhythm.” By the last decade of the
nineteenth century, experimental psychologists moved out of their university-funded
laboratories and imbued their mechanical methods upon the mass education of an
industrializing, middle-class culture. In 1904 Stanley Hall stated in Youth: Its Education,
473
Regime, and Hygiene that children’s “conduct should be mechanized as early and
completely as possible. The child’s notion of what is right is what is habitual, and the
simple, to which all else is reduced in thought, is identified with the familiar.”19
Thus
evidence suggests that in the thirty years from 1890 to 1920, the metronome became
“identified with the familiar” in public education; the simple clicks of the metronome
became “what is right” in musical time. The clockwork metronome and its rhythm
became, for many teachers and students, what behavioral psychologists might have
recognized as an “expectation” to standard musical thought and action; for those trained
under metronomic reference, the combined practice of reading precisely typeset notation
while listening to a continuous, unremitting succession of clockwork clicks became a
new rhythmic reality, the new unquestioned underpinning of modern music performance.
Starting in the mid-1890s, both teachers and scientists applied the metronome
with the same intentions: to measure and inculcate the standards of clockwork movement
upon their subjects. As a new wave of “scientific” teachers began drilling young amateurs
to efficiently perform scales, trills, accelerando, and ritardando within artificial
metronomic constrictions, it seems probable that the nature of music performance
fundamentally and irrevocably changed in the minds of a new generation of twentieth-
century performers subscribing to these methods. With the individual sensation of pulse
and movement effectively devalued in education, the modern student trained with the
goal of scientifically synchronizing melodic phrases, gestures, ornaments, and harmonies
to objective, precise metronomic rates alone. The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze (1913)
confirmed the regimented values of mass, rhythmic youth training:
19 Hall, 336.
474
Although feeling for rhythm is more or less latent in us all and can be developed,
few have it naturally perfect…By means of these [exercises] the pupil is taught
how to arrest movement suddenly or slowly, to move alternately forwards or
backwards, to spring at a given signal, to lie down or stand up in the exact time of
a bar of music—in each case with a minimum of muscular effort and without for a
moment losing the feeling for each time-unit of the music.20
Thus, musical time—once predominantly conceived through the variable qualities of
human pulse, rhetoric, movement, and gesture—converged ever closer to the temporal
invariability heard in the precise clockwork “time-unit” and metronomic “impression.”
Through their neglect of the silent, simple pendulum, a new generation of
twentieth-century performers, pedagogues, critics, and researchers considered that a
finite, swinging pulse was too vague and imperfect a reference for modern times—during
an age where chronographic methods and metronomic precisions practically dominated
over all facets of mass education—an age that “would be hard to run on a sun dial.”21
As
the simple pendulum became an arcane tool in both the arts and the sciences, even the
swing of Maelzel’s metronome became the remnant of a past epistemology, a hopelessly
“imprecise” and inefficient signifier of musical movement. The metronome’s clockwork
click alone now defined the true time, a new precision-oriented rhythm: the
homogeneous, chronographic constant for a normalizing and standardized education.
As a last generation of skilled musicians warned of the anti-creative, anti-
expressive, and anti-human qualities of metronomic action, automatical values rapidly
became the rule of movement in time; despite the final caveats of those such as
Constantin von Sternberg, the rhythm of the machine began to efficiently train and
20 Ingham, 43.
21“Time and Clocks,” New York Times, June 27, 1920, 60.
475
educate the whole of an industrialized civilization in a new performance culture. Indeed,
Carl Emil Seashore, in 1919, verified the acceptance of the modern, chronographic
procedure of musical performance with little regard for—or even knowledge of—past
practices, values, and traditions, as he definitively claimed: “The capacity for rhythm
rests upon certain fundamental powers which can be measured serviceably in various
forms by methods now being introduced through experimental psychology.”22
The Automatical Musician Actualized, Circa 1920 and Beyond
All skilled musicians—seasoned scholars and educators, too—begin their intellectual and
creative lives first as students. The effects of elementary pedagogies upon advanced
practices have yet to be explored by musicologists in greater detail. Yet given the
scientific knowledge that metronomic habituation on the mind and body can indeed occur
over time, a strong possibility exists that musicians inculcated with metronomic-musical
time—the modern, chronographic “capacity for rhythm”—during early ages may
maintain mechanical ideals of performance practices and aesthetics in adulthood. If a
metronomic effect on the mind and body exists, then a metronomic “musicality” taught
during youth may not diminish with age; those roots, when unchecked, possibly grow
stronger.
The continuing intellectual and cultural history presented in this final chapter
further shows that many twentieth-century music researchers, performers, and
composers—either educated in or favorable towards metronomic values—continued to
redefine musical time and action through scientific, mechanically oriented aesthetics. As
22 Seashore, “The Sense of Rhythm as a Musical Talent,” 513.
476
the musical practices and pedagogies of our time confirm, “metronome believing”
eventually became an accepted and standard practice of music making. While Hofmann,
Paderewski, Sternberg, and Rachmaninoff represented the waning tradition of pre-
metronomic musicians, more scientifically influenced researchers, composers, and
performers—many educated through music-conservatory regimens at the turn of the
century—clearly promoted the modern clockwork metronome in ways that seemingly
effaced prior notions and qualities of musical temporality. When playing like a
metronome once seemed “odd,” “uncanny,” “abhorrent,” or even “impossible,” the third
decade of the twentieth century witnessed the practice eventually become expected and
“commonplace”—and a completely positive trait of musicianship. No longer limited to
children’s practice routines, metronomic-musical time became a new fundamental for
skilled musicians, musical scholars, and modern composers alike. The remainder of this
study shows how a new wave of professional researchers, educators, and creative
musicians in the twentieth century espoused a new “musicality,” in which mechanically
objective rhythms and tempos became a guiding a priori aesthetic for compositions and
performance practices both past and present. It is a chronographic “musicality” that, as I
suggest in this conclusion, still prevails in many of the research methodologies,
performances, and compositions of our age.
Although musicians such as Jaques-Dalcroze and Mary Hallock seem to
foreshadow this larger, century-long trend, Béla Bartók (1881-1945) perhaps most
conspicuously exemplifies how modern scientifically oriented musicians in the twentieth
century began to consider music notation, performance practices, and musicological
research through greater chronographic precisions. Bartók’s ever-growing reliance on
477
precise mechanical time controls—including the metronome and the stopwatch—to
define initial tempos, tempo fluctuations, and performance durations is well documented
in recent years by László Somfai.23
As a more scientifically oriented musician, concerned
with more precise ways of documenting musical time and performance practices for folk,
classical, and modern musical cultures, Bartók’s use of the metronome was far more
rigorous and consistent than Beethoven’s, or any composer-performer’s application of the
machine from previous centuries. It should be noted that Bartók’s penchant for musical-
mechanical time study more faithfully mirrors contemporaneous the laboratory research
of Seashore and the labor-training methods of Frederick Taylor and Hugo Münsterberg.
Around 1906, Bartók began transcribing Hungarian folk tunes with highly precise
metronomic markings, in ethnographic musical research also similar to experimental
psychologist Charles Samuel Myers’s studies, which occurred less than a decade prior.24
23 László Somfai, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, and Autograph Sources, Volume 9 of
Ernest Bloch lectures (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 252-262.
24
See C. S. Myers, et al., “Anthropological Reviews and Miscellanea,” The Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 29 (1899).
478
Figure 7.2. Two of Bartók’s folk-music transcriptions using high-precision metronomic data to help define the tempi and rhythms of performances that did not originally use or necessitate such mechanical time controls. These studies were in keeping with contemporaneous ethnographic research done by experimental psychologists such as C. S. Myers. The tempo markings “Parlando x =320” and “Tempo giuso q =94” attest to Bartók’s penchant for detailed, scientific-metronomic calculations of musical time. See http://www.merian.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-47840-5.html. Accessed September 20, 2009.
While Bartók regularly took the clockwork metronome with him to record folk
tunes as far away as Turkey,25
evidence also suggests that the metronome was a near-
permanent fixture atop Bartók’s piano to more precisely convey musical-temporal
intentions for both his creations and the compositions of others. Encouraged to be a
technically proficient pianist in his youth, Bartók once described his common routine-
based practice sessions, perhaps under the lash of the metronome, with his mother, his
first piano teacher, keeping close watch. In 1931, he admitted to a writer for The Living
Age, “practicing scales bored me, as it does every child, bored me to death.”26
Yet, the
25 A. Adnan Saygun, “Bartók in Turkey,” The Musical Quarterly 37 (Jan., 1951): 6.
26 Desider Kosztolanyi, “Béla Bartók, Hungarian Composer,” The Living Age, Aug. 1931, 566.
479
metronome and mechanical time controls seem to have been a close part of Bartók’s
musical education, scholarship, and certainly his compositional processes his entire life.
Indeed, Bartók provided meticulous metronomic information for many of his pedagogical
piano compositions, a fact which one music educator commented upon in 1961 as it
related to the modern values of “musicality:”
As regards specifics of musicianship in the Mikrokosmos [1926, 1932-9], the
observer probably will note the exactitude in musical terms how the pieces are to
be played…almost all of the pieces contain three kinds of tempo indicators:
traditional tempo marks in the Italian language, metronome marks, and time of
performance expressed in minutes and seconds. The performer is left with no
doubt as to Bartók’s intentions and, what may be more important, he is provided
with the opportunity to acquire a concept of tempo in tangible [i.e. mechanical
and objective] terms.27
Bartók, through his research methods and compositional processes, exemplifies this
cultural paradigm shift in the values of musical time, which necessitated a newly
“skilled” professional musician to work alongside the clockwork metronome for a now
desirable mechanical accuracy in practice, performance, and musical creation. For many
modern performer-composers, the clockwork metronome—once primarily intended to
gently assist novices, amateurs, and the perpetually un-musical—became a primary tool
in the promotion of more exacting beats-per-minute “rhythms” and “tempos” for
increasingly precise performance practices. While musicologist Robert Philip rightly
notes that Bartók’s own recordings confirm his musicality to be far less “rigid” that those
of today, the contemporaneous reception of Bartók’s piano playing was, at times, telling
of the new metronomic aesthetic in professional music making. In 1922, Percy Scholes,
perhaps most notably described Bartók’s style in the London Observer as “a hard, cold
27 Benjamin Suchoff, “Béla Bartók's Contributions to Music Education,” Journal of Research in
Music Education 9 (Spring, 1961): 6
480
rattle of a keyboard, violently attacked in chance combinations of keys and notes, with
the stiffened metal muscle of a jerkily rhythmic automaton.”28
Figure 7.3. An historical reconstruction of Bartók’s somewhat machine-oriented music room, circa 1940,
containing a phonograph, a typewriter, and a clockwork metronome, which sits directly atop the piano. The
importance Bartók placed upon the clockwork metronome and metronomic indications was far greater than
that of composers from previous centuries, Beethoven especially. See
http://www.merian.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-47840-2.html. Accessed September 20, 2009.
Bartók was neither the first nor the last performer-composer in the modern
century to be considered a musical robot due to his new conceptualizations and
28 Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004), 174.
481
actualizations of the metronomic pulse. Some contemporaneous critics recognized that it
was Stravinsky who most prominently refashioned modern musicality and musical time,
seemingly bringing a century-old Maelzelian world to full fruition. Indeed, the
mechanical culture Maelzel first exhibited on isolated stages seemed for many to be the
hallmark of Stravinsky’s creativity—in which an unfeeling, automatical rhythm
predominated over variable, rhetorical expressions of musical time. Critic Paul
Rosenfeld, for example, heard The Rite of Spring in 1920—seven years after its
premiere—moving with the inhuman rhythmic precisions of the modern mechanical
world:
The new steel organs of man have begotten their music in “Le Sacre du
printemps.” For with Stravinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art.
With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the
spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest…Through him, music has
become again cubical, lapidary, massive, mechanistic…
Above all, there is rhythm that lunges and beats and reiterates and dances
with all the steely perfect tirelessness of the machine, shoots out and draws back,
shoots upward and shoots down, with the inhuman motion of titanic arms of steel.
Indeed, the change is as radical, as complete, as though in the midst of moonlit
noble gardens a giant machine had arisen swiftly from the ground and inundated
the night with electrical glare and set its metal thews and organs and joints
relentlessly whirring, relentlessly functioning.29
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring seemed for many, including Rosenfeld, Pound, and later
Adorno, to project an inhuman “time” founded on incessant, mechanical movement.
Rosenfeld, in 1927, continued this assessment by painting a verbal portrait of Stravinsky
as a peculiar brand of modern musician, seemingly habituated to the automatical rhythm
of his age:
29 Paul Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 191-2.
482
No doubt, the mechanistic view of life, the vision of a world almost emptied of
divine and human energy and moving with the relentless precision of clocks and
machinery, was to a great extent in Stravinsky a purely sensuous reflex from the
prodigies of the age of steel, from the feelings of the huge modern cities so far
removed from the irregular, unpredictable rhythms of Nature, and from
industrialism’s mechanical application of the preferred individual function.30
Similar to Scholes’ description of Bartók, Rosenfeld suggested that Stravinsky was on
some level a musical automaton—but for Rosenfeld, by 1920 at least, this had become a
positive value in support of a modernist-mechanical aesthetic. For Rosenfeld, Stravinsky
reflected a precision-based musician devoid of all problems inherent the personal
equation, a perfect reproducer of metronomic motions:
It is as though the infection of the dancing, lunging, pumping piston-rods, walking
beams, drills, has awakened out of Stravinsky a response and given him his power
to beat out rhythm. The machine has always fascinated him.31
Many became fascinated with the prospect of a “musical-mechanical rhythm” during the
age, and for some, the machine now projected the only “rhythm” for which to aspire. Not
limiting himself to children’s education, Jaques-Dalcroze—a significant influence on
Ballets Russes dancer and Rite of Spring choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky32
—was similarly
enthralled with the aesthetics of the automatical. Beyond his Temple of Rhythm, which
had closed due to World War I, Jaques-Dalcroze aspired for a modern musical culture
seemingly regulated through a continuous, industrialized “rhythm” of the factory. In his
essay “Eurhythmics and Musical Composition” (1915), Jaques-Dalcroze expresses
30 Paul Rosenfeld, Modern Tendencies in Music (New York: The Caxton Institute, 1927), 49.
31
Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits, 199.
32
See Margaret Naumburg, “The Dalcroze Idea,” Outlook, Jan. 17, 1914, 131. As the source
relates, Nijinksy visited The Temple of Rhythm prior to 1914.
483
fascination for a modern Maelzelian stage, where the very heart of “rhythm” could be
found in the movements of modern automata:
No true musician, entering a hall of machinery in full movement, could fail to be
captivated by the whirr of the fabulous symphony produced by the magic of
combined and dissociated rhythms, and to be tempted inevitable to extract the
secrets of this moving and quivering life that animates nature, man, and his work
alike.33
For many, including Rosenfeld, Pound, and Jaques-Dalcroze, the actualization of the
automatical—stimulated in part by scientific-industrial training methods appearing earlier
in the century—was indeed occurring throughout Western musical culture well into the
1920s. And for many, this audible standard of continuous, externalized, mechanical
rhythm—which the clockwork metronome prominently provided in compositional,
pedagogical, and performance practices—was a necessary and positive aesthetic of
“musical time” to embrace.
While numerous Eurhythmics schools were in existence throughout the world by
1924,34
Stravinsky, a decade after the première of le Sacre, seemed to be at the vanguard
of an aesthetical trend first promoted by Jaques-Dalcroze—a desire for objective,
calculable rhythms and continuous, standardized tempos uninfluenced by personal
interpretation. While this historical reception has been somewhat downplayed by Richard
Taruskin in his meticulous and comprehensive Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions,
33 The essay is translated and reprinted in Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music, and Education (1921), 146.
34
In the 1925 publication The Importance of Being Rhythmic, author Jo Pennington documents
the rapid spread of Eurhythmics training; she lists no less than 28 independent schools that
trained Jaques-Dalcroze’s methods to musicians, actors, and dancers in major metropolitan areas
throughout the United States. See Jo Pennington, The Importance of Being Rhythmic, Appendix
“List of Private and Special Schools in the United States Where Dalcroze Eurhythmics Is
Taught,” 141-142. The list was complied in the summer of 1924.
484
some contemporaneous perceptions in the 1920s of Stravinsky’s rhythmical-mechanical
qualities are significant to mention here. In 1924, New York Times critic Olin Downes
likened Stravinsky to a scientist, who constructed the rhythms of le Sacre with atomic
energy.35
A New York Times article from 1925, expounding on the composer’s affinity
for the pianola, quoted Stravinsky proclaiming: “I began mechanical music.”36
Of course, the Italian Futurists could be considered the first truly mechanical
composers of the twentieth century, as they took musical time and performance practices
outside of the realm of living pulse and human movement entirely. For Russolo, the
personal equation of musicality and the pulse-sense held no relevance within a culture
that “possesses today more than a thousand different machines, each with a distinctive
noise. With the incessant multiplication of new machines we shall some day be able to
distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises.”37
Yet, less radically than the Futurists, Stravinsky had seemed at times to be
modernity’s greatest living embodiment of Johann Maelzel’s automaton culture by the
1920s. Mitzi Kolisch, writing for the Independent in 1925, further pointed to Stravinsky’s
Dalcrozian sensibilities when she commented, “Stravinsky had turned
mathematician…his mind has become too involved in the geometric problems of splitting
rhythms.”38
Identically to Wundt, Jaques-Dalcroze, and Seashore, Stravinsky strongly
35 Olin Downes, “Music,” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1924, S5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
36
M. B. Levick, “Stravinsky Sees Vision of a New Music,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 1925,
SM12. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
37
From Russolo, “The Art of Noise,” reprinted in Ernest Newman, A Musical Motley (New York:
John Lane Company, 1919), 298-299.
38 Mitzi Kolisch, “Stravinsky--Russian of the Russians,” The Independent, May 16, 1925, 559.
485
believed that “musical time” was an objective, scientific process of action and reaction
outside of individual control. In his ironically titled collection of published lectures,
Poetics of Music, Stravinsky explained the science of musical time:
The laws that regulate the movement of sounds require the presence of a
measureable and constant value: meter, a purely material element, through which
rhythm, a purely formal element is realized. In other words, meter answers the
question of how many equal parts the musical unit which we call a measure is to
be divided into, and rhythm answers the question of how these equal parts will be
grouped within a given measure.39
He described that musical time had at its basis “an obsession with regularity” formed
exclusively through “isochronous beats.”40
It can be no wonder that even late in life,
Stravinsky, once-hailed a musical machine, kept close by a pocket-watch metronome
with “hands [that swing] back and forth,” as his student Earnest Andersson noted in
1940.41
Perhaps the most conspicuous promoter of the radical metronomic-aesthetic of
musicality in the 1920s was also its most unlikely champion—he was a once-promising
student of Constantin von Sternberg, that last of the traditional pedagogues to howl down
the clockwork metronome as destroyer of musicality for students and professionals alike.
Sternberg’s former pupil, the young musician who mechanized living tempo and rhythm
to its greatest extent to date: George Antheil. According to Antheil himself, the impetus
for creating his “infamous” Ballet mécanique (1924-5), was on some level, a brash,
39 Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, translated by Arthur Knodel &
Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 28.
40
Ibid., 29.
41 H. Colin Slim, “Lessons with Stravinsky: The Notebook of Earnest Andersson (1879-1940),”
JAMS 62 (Summer, 2009): 389.
486
“youthful” reaction against the pre-metronomic aesthetics and culture of his elders
Sternberg and Joseph Hofmann. While critics including Pound and Rosenfeld certainly
heard the metronomic imprint of Stravinsky in the Ballet mécanique—most notably from
the stage-works le Sacre (1913), Renard (premiered 1922), and the heavily Eurhythmics-
charged Les Noces (premiered 1923)—Antheil’s work represented for many the most
blatant attempt to mechanize musicality through an industrial-scientific ideal: an aesthetic
which continued to sublimate the personal equation, the living sensation and actualization
of rhythm, to objective mechanical time and motion, as Robert Forrest Wilson noted in
1925:
When first he heard an automatic piano play a scale he know that the human hand
and the human equation in the rendition of music were doomed. Virtuosity could
never hope to equal the flawless even beauty of that performance; and so George
Antheil turned to the composition of the precisian, machine made music for
electric driven pianos.42
According to Bartók, Stravinsky considered the benefit of the mechanical player piano
for related reasons. Bartók recalled, “some famous composers (Stravinsky for instance)
wrote compositions specifically for pianola…The intent, however, was not to achieve
superior performance but to restrict the an absolute minimum the intervention of the
performer’s personality,” that is, the performer’s personal-equation of rhythm.43
As with
Stravinsky before him, Antheil found the automaton to now provide the inspiration and
actualization of a musical “virtuosity” in which individualistic musicianship expressed
through rhetorical rhythmic gestures all but died.
42 Robert Forrest Wilson, “Paris for Young Art,” The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life (Jun.
1925): 408.
43 Quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 164.
487
Yet even before Antheil composed the Ballet mécanique, in which musicians
played a role identical to the chronographically pounding pianolas on stage, Antheil’s
performance practices as a famed recitalist garnered considerable recognition for its
remarkable mechanical “virtuosity”—perhaps matching that “flawless even beauty” he
reportedly heard in mechanical pianos. It was Erik Satie who, in recognition of this
uncanny musicianship, reportedly shouted at the riot ensuing Antheil’s 1923 solo recital
in Paris: “What precision!”44
Pound likewise proclaimed Antheil to be the new musician
who performed and composed under “a new precision” particularly suited to the
mechanical age. Indeed, Wilson’s 1925 portrait of the young composer suggests that
Antheil was imprinted by the incessant, mechanical rhythms emanating from the
industrial environs of his childhood, explaining, “the sounds of Trenton—its machine
shops, its potteries, the Pennsylvania trains rushing through the station—are the sounds of
America that he remembers.”45
Beyond these mechanical influences, Antheil’s seemingly uncommon musical-
mechanical performance quality, as the pianist-composer implied decades later, came
about through a near-automatical practice procedure:
You keep on. You must never stop. And so technique comes to you. It begins to
fit like a suit. You play concert pieces so many times that you could hardly play a
wrong note in them if you wanted to. The hind part of the brain takes over.46
44 George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Reprint, Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), 133. Satie
seems to have taken an interest in mechanical pianos and music making since Stravinsky’s
pianola compositions. Writing to Stravinsky in October 1922, Satie, in considering the new
objectivist aesthetic, recognized “the stupid prejudice that artists (?) have against all mechanical
interpretation, and I point out [in an article] all that we owe to you in this respect” of mechanizing
music. See Stravinsky: Selected Correspondence, ed. Robert Craft, volume I (New York: Knopf,
1982), 12.
45
Wilson, 409.
46
See George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 68.
488
Looking back on his controversial career, Antheil depicted himself as something of a
Wundtian or Pavlovian laboratory subject, who was exposed daily to chronographic
repetition and reaction. Admitting to a habitual training regimen, Antheil seemingly
sought to become musically automatical, a living pianola, or what psychologist
Ebbinghaus once called a “sheer mechanical associator.” Stravinsky similarly considered
composing as habituation to a mechanically objective sounds and actions, stating in 1929,
“every musical work comes by impression which, crystallizing in the brain, in the ear,
little by little but mathematically, become finally concrete in notes and rhythms.”47
As
Antheil and Stravinsky suggest—and the pedagogies of Hall and Jaques-Dalcroze
verify—musical automatism held little stigma in the modern century for modern culture.
Even disregarding the anecdotal evidence suggesting that Antheil habituated to
metronomic rhythm early in life, Antheil’s practice routine—which resulted in the
musical-mechanical precision that many contemporaries thought essential to mention—
was undoubtedly informed by a modern chronographic pedagogy and aesthetics well
distanced from the compositional teachings of Sternberg. Indeed, Antheil did not keep his
Dalcrozian-Stravinkian concepts of musical time a secret. After achieving notoriety from
the Ballet mécanique première, he occasionally attempted to promote and market a new
system of “Antheilicized Notation, Or Music for Everybody Who Can Tell One from
Two and Two from Three.” In his manuscript treatise, Antheil offers an increasingly
common scientific aesthetic of musical time and rhythmical notation—espoused by
47
Boris de Schloezer, “A Classic Art,” The Dial; a Semi-monthly Journal of Literary Criticism,
Discussion, and Information, Jul. 1929, 597. American Periodicals Series Online.
489
Scripture and Seashore before him—that correspondingly discounted the subjective,
verbal, and sensory epistemologies of the past:
There is no literature or fantasy about this notation. It is absolute, mathematical,
and pictorial…Any system denoting the movement of time in space in an
unmathematical, sentimental, and literary way is to be condemned as
incomprehensible.
One can only measure spaces with mathematics!48
[The new system] will be a universal musical housecleaning. [It is] the greatest
thing that musical art [can do] to flourish in an age that is forever [becoming] less
sentimental, and more practical, and [of] greater speed.49
The mechanical efficiency of time and musical action espoused by experimental
psychologists in laboratory settings seemingly grounded Antheil’s musicality in the
practice room and on the concert stage. Due to Antheil’s distinctly mechanistic and
mathematical concepts of tempo, rhythm, and speed, some critics heard not only
precision in his European piano recitals, but also a performance practice devoid of
humanity—a quality applying both to his own mechanically inspired compositions and
his interpretations of historical music. The Times noted on June 23, 1922 that a
corresponding devaluation of rhetorical gesture and individual rhythmical pulsation
resulted from Antheil’s precision-based performance practices:
Nowadays the style and method have become commonplace, and one soon finds it
difficult to keep one’s attention unless maybe, some very strong personal factor
comes into play in the performance. Mr. Antheil’s playing is too superficial for
that, and though he can be noisy and vehement and has plenty of facility and
agility, it all sounded very dry and unconvincing.
48 George Antheil, “Antheilicized Notation, Or Music for Everybody who Can Tell One from
Two and Two From Three, Without previous experience anyone can now read music at sight.
Instantaneous System of Reading Music,” (Manuscript), Box 10, p. 3-4, Antheil Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
49
Ibid., 5.
490
This critic recognized that Antheil’s modern aesthetics of musical time—which for some
“have become commonplace” in the early 1920s—also transferred to the pre-metronomic
past. Similarly unconvincing musical results were heard “with his treatment of some
Chopin; technically often not without point—for he has a certain crispness of touch and
rhythm which is attractive—but of poetry not a trace.”50
Many reporters, hearkening to
the pre-metronomic aesthetics of Antheil’s former teacher Sternberg, Paderewski, and
Hofmann, suggested that musical poetics—that rhetorical-musical time gleaned through
traditional meter—was incompatible with the “new precision” heard in mathematically
metronomic performance practices.
Consistent metronomic motion seemingly applied to most of Antheil’s
pedagogical, interpretive, and compositional practices, as Richard L. Stokes intuited after
Antheil’s inglorious 1927 concert in New York City. The critic ascertained that the Ballet
mécanique was musically elementary, expressively stilted, and just as engaging as a
metronomic practice routine since “its material was composed of melodic figures as
rudimentary as finger exercises and of rhythmic noise. And these rhythms were so
monotonous, so iterative and so dull that they grew a weariness to the flesh.”51
The New
York Herald Tribune critic heard a similarly odd, chronographic musical quality, since
the piece was “written in three parts—Allegro—Allegro—allegro. The composition
50 “‘Modern’ Piano Pieces,” Times, June 23, 1922, 7F.
51
Richard L. Stokes, “Realm of Music,” The Evening World, Monday April 11, 1927. Clipping
from George Antheil Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
491
begins in one tempo and ends in one tempo; it starts forte and ends forte.”52
Even of
Antheil’s more-tempered, “neo-classical” opera Transatlantic, Alfred Einstein concluded
in 1930: “This music intrinsically possesses no organ of expression. It has, further, no
tempo, and this despite the inclusion within its pages of every sort of rhythm in [notated]
outline.”53
It seemed that in the modern musicality of Antheil, more so than for any
performer-composer preceding him, a metronomic education informed a decidedly
metronomic aesthetic.
Chronographic Aesthetics, Modern Musicality,
and Historical Performance Practices
Ironically, as Bartók and Antheil were being criticized for their automatism, their lack of
musical poetry and living pulse in the recital hall, a prominent promoter of inhuman,
chronographic aesthetics emerged in academia: Carl Emil Seashore. In leaving antiquated
and morally questionable child-study research behind him, Seashore became de facto one
of Western civilization’s first performance-practice musicologists in the early 1920s. In
this capacity, Seashore again charged himself with solving the ever-present problems of
the personal equation, which he clothed in an uncanny new term: “Artistic Deviation.”
Seashore clearly considered that the search for “deviation” was no longer limited to
laboratory subjects or classroom children, but experienced concertizing musicians as
well. Seashore’s “artistic deviation” was, as to be expected by the chronographic
methodology, a human “deviation” from the automatical. Guided by values of
52 “Boos Greet Antheil Ballet of Machines,” New York Herald Tribute, April 11, 1927. Clipping
from George Antheil Collection, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
53
Alfred Einstein, “‘Transatlantic’ in Frankfort,” New York Times, Jun 22, 1930, X5. ProQuest
Historical Newspapers.
492
normalization and standardization, mechanical measurements and efficient, reproducible
actions, Seashore, in 1923, described how his chronographic science applied to the
professional musician of the twentieth century: “Everything in the nature of musical
emotion that the musician conveys to the listener can be recorded, measured, repeated,
and controlled for experimental purposes; and that thus we have at hand an approach
which is extraordinarily promising for the scientific study of the expression of musical
emotion.”54
But empirical research using modern methods and machines was not his only aim;
Seashore did not merely wish to chronographically record the musician’s feelings and
actions for posterity. As with the work of other experimental psychologists, Seashore’s
isolated research was to be employed in standardized pedagogies, through modern
conservatory training and beyond. His new chronographic pedagogy touted, implicitly
and explicitly, new modes of performance, a new standard of musical time, and
correspondingly, a new aesthetics of musicality for modern culture en masse. With his
musical-chronographic studies, Seashore vindicated a modern epistemology in which
mechanical action was the first principle to musical time, and indeed, all “time.” In the
1925 article “Deviation from the Regular as an Art Principle,” Seashore expounds upon
the new scientific musicality, in which the mechanically regular, the chronographically
consistent, was the fundamental state of rhythm and tempo, even in advanced practices of
the most skilled performers:
54 C. E. Seashore, “Measurements on the Expression of Emotion in Music,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 9, No. 9 (Sept. 15, 1923): 325.
493
The unlimited re-sources for vocal and instrumental art lie in artistic deviation
from the pure, the true, the exact, the perfect, the rigid, the even and the
precise…The variation from the exact which is due to incapacity for rendering the
exact is, on the whole, ugly. The artist who is to vary effectively from the exact
must know the exact and must have mastered its attainment before his emotion
can express itself adequately through a sort of flirtation with it.55
In Seashore’s nascent brand of musicology, an “exacting” chronographic culture, a
“pure” scientific aesthetics came to full fruition, which explained away volatile human
actions as inconsistencies—considered nothing more than “deviant” behavior from the
strictly mechanical. The chronographic-laboratory ideal of precise automatical action,
espoused decades earlier by Wundt, Hall, Scripture, and others, now became the
objective musical ideal for scientists and singers alike: The “rigid” is “perfect;” the
mechanically “precise” is “beautiful.” “Ugliness,” in contrast, is variation from the
mechanical norm, an aesthetical fault in the now a priori exacting metronomic standard
of rhythm—a standard now applicable to music of all ages.
Seashore’s laboratory aesthetics of musical attractiveness dictated that expression
was no longer innate to musicality, but a logistical deviation from a mechanical absolute.
His epistemology of musical time, in keeping with many proponents of the new scientific
culture, became ever distanced from the time of rhetoric, pulse-sense, or physical
movement. Devaluing the humanity of musical time to greater extents, Seashore
considered that the necessary capacity in being musical was in first being metronomic—
the very foundations of musicality were to be decided in terms of now a priori
chronographic procedure. In his 1942 article “Artistic Deviation as an Esthetic Principle
55 C. E. Seashore and Milton Metfessel, “Deviation from the Regular as an Art Principle,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 11 (Sept. 15,
1925): 538.
494
in Music,” Seashore explained how the individualism inherent in music making—the
personal equation—continued to pose problems for all performers of the modern century
to identify and solve. Citing a myriad of human inconsistencies in musical time and
action, he clearly defined “artistic deviation” from “regular musical time” as an
individual variation from chronographic beats-per-minute precision:
Assuming that the [professional] artist is competent so that the constellation of
variations is significant, the student of esthetics must ask for every cross section
of the score: Why did he augment or diminish the interval to this degree at this
point? Why did he increase or decrease the loudness in this direction and to this
degree at this point? Why did he take liberties with the metronomic time by
lengthening or shortening, by anticipating or by over-holding the note at this
point?56
Seashore recast a complex of musical performance practices in time and tone, along with
human expression, musicality, and aesthetics, into a laboratory procedure established in
Bessel’s nineteenth-century astronomical observatory. He portrays a new musicologist—
the new cultural-scientific aesthetician—as “musical astronomer,” who views the skilled
musician as producer of an objective “constellation of variations.” And like the
astronomer, this performance-practice researcher looked through “every cross section” to
find individual “points” gauged by the ever-present absolute of “metronomic time.” For
Seashore, scientific performance practices became musical performance practices.
Seashore’s “why” dealt with anachronistic mechanical precisions rather than performers’
active, variable processes of rhetorical expression and pulse-sensation. His “why” failed
to consider if a beats-per-minute epistemology factored into the musician’s temporal
“liberties” in the first place. Yet, for those with the scientific-aesthetician’s
chronographic bias—in which all rhythmic values from all ages implied a metronomic-
56 Carl E. Seashore, “Artistic Deviation as an Esthetic Principle in Music,” The Scientific
Monthly 54 (Feb., 1942), 104.
495
mathematical absolute—performance-practice research sought a mechanistic ideal that
never existed; it espoused precisions and values of precise action that, prior to the
twentieth century, never existed.
Seashore’s musical aesthetics—in which musicians of all centuries and abilities
were indeed recast as secondary, largely passive agents in the phenomena of musical
temporality—foreshadowed and to some extent promoted values which remain prevalent
in performance-practice research to this day. Seashore’s science informed musicological
subtexts such as these: Innate sensations and feelings for musical pulse and meter are
largely discounted; musical time is ultimately mechanical in description, transcription,
and origin; rhythm has little to do with human agency, and it merely reflects the
performer’s secondary reaction to the objective or mechanical standard. Modern
researchers and musicians subscribing to these subtexts seemed no longer content with
qualitative verbal descriptions founded upon an imprecise sensory knowledge, which
implied an a priori variable and individual nature to musical time and performance. Their
scholarly tradition was increasingly distanced from the experiential performance-practice
pedagogies of Rousseau, A. B. Marx, G. Weber, Christiani, and others. Rather, they
tended towards the scientific, the quantifiable, and the objective—albeit reductive—
temporal “proof” found in machines, mathematical calculations, and metronomic devices.
Directly informed by these scientific subtexts, Béla Bartók explicitly devalued
more individualistic folk musicians during his ethnographic-musicological research, in
favor of often-unattainable norms referenced through ever-increasing mechanical
measures. Bartók in his 1936 article “Why and How Do We Collect Folk Music?”
answered the questions of pre-mechanical music making through modern scientific
496
methodologies and apparatuses. As experimental psychologists such as Seashore and
Scripture before him, Bartók quickly devalued the subjectivity of musical interpretations;
he discounted real performance variability in the speculative search for an objective,
modern musical norm. Bartók explains:
Sometimes the melody is good but the performance is affected…it is important to
avoid recording persons who perform in an inadequate way. A certain bold or
haughty performance, glissades, sentimental slackening of the dance rhythm is
met, fashionable for decades—especially with men and boys—which in my
opinion is a regrettable influence of the city gipsy music or, rather, the
performance mode of the upper classes. However, we must investigate this
transformed type of performance from the scientific viewpoint, no matter how
mediocre we may feel it to be from the aesthetic one. Since we are aquatinted
with it to the point of satiety, it is advisable not to record performances of this
kind.
During the notation of the melodies on the spot, use of the metronome will
enable us to determine the tempo as exactly as possible. If a phonograph is used,
it may also be necessary to time the length of the strophes by means of a
stopwatch.57
For Bartók, those performing outside of the musical-mechanical standard—which
striking included both the lower-class Gypsies and upper-class esthetes, but not “regular”
middle-class musicians such as himself—could easily be disregarded in his scientific
studies. While Bartók probably believed his tools and methods would best document
unfamiliar music for posterity through modern notation and metronomic transcriptions,
he admitted that on occasion his techniques were incommensurate with performance
realities. In documenting Bulgarian performance practices, for instance, Bartók mis-
transcribed certain dance tunes with “faulty rhythms,” thus creating far more simplified
compositions that upheld the modern values of metronomic consistency and
57 Reprinted in Béla Bartók, Essays, edited by Benjamin Suchoff (New York: St. Martins Press,
1976), 18.
497
impersonalized rhythm.58
Bartók also admitted that his more mechanized understanding
of tempo and meter did not always relate to a pre-metronomic musicality, commenting in
1938, “When I first saw these unfamiliar [Bulgarian] rhythms, in which such fine
differences are decisive, I could hardly imagine that they really existed. But then I
seemed to remember that in my own collection of Rumanian material I had come across
similar phenomena, but at the time had not dared—if I might put it that way—to take
note of them.”59
This typical scientific methodology that rejected the unquantifiable
seamlessly transferred to a new aesthetic of musicological and performance practice
research; it favored the reductive laboratory tradition of chronography above a more
complex, individualistic, and pre-metronomic musicality, which could not often be
“precisely” documented through traditional Western notation or beats-per-minute
indications.
Elements of this methodology are likewise found in musicologist Curt Sachs’
Rhythm and Tempo (1953), which occasionally diminished the individual performer’s
movement and pulse sense—the rhythmical-personal equation—in favor of anachronistic
temporal epistemologies. Sachs took pains to assert, “the [human] tactus was wholly
unconcerned with the actual rhythm, with grouping or accent…the tactus, does not, and
cannot, reflect the rhythm of a piece.”60
Unquantifiable historical-rhythmical movement,
for Sachs, often seemed an unfounded and indefinite guide of tempo and rhythm. The
58 Béla Bartók, “The So Called Bulgarian Rhythm” (1938), reprinted in Essays, 42-43.
59
Ibid., 44-45. Perhaps pointing to his epistemological discrepancies, Bartók first “heard” these
rhythms, he did not “see” them. Since these performances were born of an aural culture, the
“Bulgarian rhythm” was not originally notated.
60 Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953), 242-3.
498
human tactus, that is real physical motion, seemed at times to be a mere and imperfect
metronomic substitute—perhaps one reason why Sachs translated nearly all historical
repertories with metronomic tempo numbers and consistently described “rhythm” under
mathematically “additive” or “divisive” formulations. And despite evidence to the
contrary, he discounted that any significant feeling for musical time existed in past, pre-
metronomic practices when he surmised: “The strength of good beats…varied
considerably according to the nature of a piece. But performers and listeners were hardly
aware of these minute shades and had no reason for mentioning them.”61
The evidence
presented in Chapter I of this study suggests the need to rethink Sachs’ assumptions and
assertions.
Sachs also considered the performer’s pulse-sense, the once weighted “accent” of
metered music, to be a psychological process of imagining order out of monotony—and
not active or intentional rhythmic expression. Like Seashore and Bartók before him,
Sachs redefines musical time in terms of modern performance practices and
chronographic aesthetics, while neglecting the subjective epistemologies of the past:
The present author thinks that the best antonym of “metrical” would be
“accentual”… Unfortunately, this word is not quite adequate either. Actually, we
accent very little unless there is a sforzato mark on a note; and considerable part
of our allegedly accentual literature is played on organ, and another part was in
earlier centuries performed on the harpsichord, where [volume] accents are
outright impossible…The term “accentual” is, however, acceptable as long as we
keep in mind the basic fact that, as pointed out before, accent, albeit regulative, is
not necessarily perceptible, provided that we ourselves project into music our
awareness of an accentual pattern.62
61 See Sachs, 256-7.
62 Ibid., 28.
499
Sachs points to a marked turn in the modern musical-temporal epistemology, since meter
and accent were, well through the nineteenth century, often considered a symbiosis. His
modern devaluation of an “alleged” subjective feeling for musical “accent” in favor of an
implied, temporal absolute continues in more recent scholarly studies, as witnessed in
George Houle’s Meter in Music (1987) in which musical “accent” is also akin to a
passive mechanical adjustment of dynamics, not a variable sensation of sonic weight.
Houle, again without supporting evidence, but with a metronomic bias present throughout
his book, states that “accent, defined as dynamic stress by seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century writers, was one of the means of enhancing the perception of meter, but it
became predominant only in the last half of the eighteenth century.”63
Both Sachs and
Houle covertly discounted the subjective sense, the “weight” or “lingering” of musical
accent, since it cannot be definitively quantified through a metronomic indication or
chronographic epistemology.
Without the individual’s “invisible,” “weighted” pulse-sense as guide, the
historical word “tempo” then became for Houle, as it did for many in the twentieth
century, an implicit beats-per-minute value with louder “good” notes distinguishing
themselves from weaker “bad” notes. “Tempo,” Houle believes is “a word that evolved in
the seventeenth century from a mensural term to one meaning the speed of notes. It was
subsequently accepted into English, as designating the [objective] speed of he musical
beat.”64
Under Houle’s modern definitions of a seemingly motor-driven musical time—
63 George Houle, Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), viii.
64
Ibid., 21. Ironically perhaps, Houle recognized that French term for tempo may have more
subjective meanings when he stated, “temps can be translated ‘beat,’ ‘pulse,’ or ‘time’ [thus]
500
which transferred to historical musical time—the human pulse-sense, movement, and
rhetorical expressivity played little role. Rather, musical meter was a scientific problem
for the professional musician to solve, even when no precise scientific method existed.
Houle places the modern scientific bias upon historical musical interpretation:
It seems to be the belief of most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists that
musical meter is naturally and adequately perceived by the listener and only
secondarily heightened through performance techniques.
Ever since Wundt’s time studies, it has been the listener who primarily hears—and not
the performer who primarily expresses—the chronographic process of “rhythm.” While
Houle, throughout Meter in Music, urged musicians to learn these historical
“performance techniques” through historical treatises in order to better meet the needs of
long-deceased composer’s exacting wishes,65
he perhaps hypocritically offered
justifications through modern performance practices, which often demand today’s
musician to passively react to an largely uncontrollable “time:”
Most performers today are aware of how crude it is to suggest that the measure is
defined by a regular accent or dynamic stress based on bar lines and time
signatures. This confidence in the listener’s basic metrical perception as defined
by quantitas intrinseca gives rise to a remarkable variety of subtle articulation
techniques that delicately enhance and shape the perception.66
For Houle, this “quantitas intrinsica”—by no means a universally understood, described,
or documented term—became akin to the universal-historical chronographic science of
musical time: it formed an objective succession of “good” and “bad” notes, a tick-tock
English equivalents must be chosen with caution.” He did not explain what cautionary measures
to take, or why they were necessary. See Houle, 37.
65
See for instance, Houle, viii.
66
Ibid., 84.
501
binary, precisely defining historical performance practices in a continual “tempo giusto”
through a passive process of “metrical perception.” Under this performance science, a
musician ought not to “click” a metrical accent too loudly, for a seemingly individualistic
“crudity” (Seashore’s irregular musical “ugliness”) would result—Houle gives this
prescription again with the mistaken assumption that “accent” only equals an objective
and calculable volume change. Yet, this imagined and absolutist rule of historical musical
time—one hearkening to the rule of metronomic-musical regulation in his century—did
not hold for historical treatises spanning 1600 to 1900 such as those seen in Chapter I.
Indeed, Houle hints at incompatibility between his modern aesthetics and pre-
chronographic musical-temporal practices when, in critiquing Rameau’s time-beating
instructions, he states: “The assignment of a je-ne-sçai-quoi de gracieux to the unequal
beats, while charming, is not precise enough to help the performer. It is not easy to
describe the subtleties of measure organization.”67
Even in 1987, it was modern
mechanical “precision,” an ever-increasing variable, not the imperfect whimsical
“charms” of personal temporal agency (the true historical constant) that seemed to shape
scholarly beliefs in an absolutely quantifiable, objective “organization” for past musical
time.
A Continuing, Chronographic Refashioning of Historical Musical Time
through Neo-Classicism, Modern Performances,
and Scientific-Musicological Scholarship
The move away from subjective rhythm and tempo—which previously occurred in
metronomic pedagogies, furthered in Seashore’s methodologies, and heard in concert
performances by Bartók, Antheil, and Stravinsky—also manifested in the 1920s through
67 Ibid., 52.
502
compositions that some might consider neo-classical in style. In certain “historically
inspired” works, the mechanical-musical time of modernity further subsumed the
subjective, rhetorical “time” of the past—an outcome not often realized by performers,
critics, or even composers of the age. While such “barbaric” (sometimes “folk”-inspired)
compositions such as Bartók’s “Allegro Barbaro” (1911) and The Miraculous Mandarin
(1924); Stravinsky’s le Sacre; Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite (1914-15) and Le pas d’acier
(“The Steel Step,” 1925); and Antheil’s Ballet mécanique and A Jazz Symphony (1925)
made explicit to many a rough and violent rhythm driven by metronomic motion, a
contrasting neo-classical aesthetic—such as heard in Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin
(1914, 1917); Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony (1916-17); Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1919-
20) and Oedipus rex (1926-7); and Antheil’s Transatlantic (1927-8)—masked this very
same automatic-chronographic time and “beats-per-minute mentality” through a
seemingly dispassionate use of traditional forms and compositional techniques. In
compositions such as these, the mechanical brutality of early modernists’ works
seemingly “evolved” into a more tempered metronomic pulse—but it was a mechanical
pulse nonetheless, and most significantly for this performance-practice history, it was
often mistakenly received as the musical pulse of the “classical” past. During this age,
many past compositional forms and rhythms were revamped with mechanical-temporal
precisions. Even a deeply traditional Spanish dance took on modern automatical qualities
for Ravel, who admitted: “I gained much of my inspiration from machinery…I love
going over factories and seeing vast machinery at work. It is awe-inspiring and great. It
was a factory which inspired my Bolero (1927).”68
Once some composers fused modern
68 Reprinted in Daniel Albright, ed., Modernism and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago
503
automatical rhythm to pre-metronomic musical forms and meters, even past compositions
became reconsidered as cold, calculable, and objective—thus, some so-called neo-
classical compositions often shared with historically “classical” compositions the modern
metronomic pulse, which was clearly becoming the homogeneous trait of musical time in
the twentieth century.
While a comprehensive analysis of the significant modern and “historically
inspired” compositions that project or promote an increasingly objective metronomic
time must wait for a future study, it is essential to chart presently how some viewed so-
called “neo-classical” aesthetics without distinguishing between the precise metronomic
times of modernity and the musical rhythm of a pre-chronographic past, and how this
lack of distinction influenced “musicality” for performers, composers, and scholars alike
throughout the century. In his 1926 article “The Younger Composers of France; Esthetic
Tendencies of Generation,” early-music scholar Henry Prunières voiced skepticism
regarding the aesthetics of so-called neo-classicism, which seemed to him shallow
mimicry, a trend which would yield nothing truly new or culturally relevant. Prunières
warned that modern composers “have much to learn from a Josquin or Palestrina,
Montevere, Lully, Purcell, Carissimi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti—but while cultivating these
masters they may conceive other musical forms than those they were taught at school;
they must beware of becoming imitators and losing the imprint of their age.”69
Yet as
many other critics recognized, those seemingly “automatical” modernists, some of whom
Press, 2004), 308.
69
Henry Prunieres, “The Younger Composers of France; Esthetic Tendencies of Generation,”
New York Times, Aug. 29, 1926, X7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
504
have been labeled neo-classicists—Stravinsky, Hindemith, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Antheil
among them—strongly imprinted the compositional forms and techniques of the past
with modern metronomic rhythm and regulation, less blatantly conflating pre-mechanical
compositional techniques and forms with a “Ballet mécanique” temporal aesthetic.
In contrast to Prunières’ skepticism of the compositional trend, the New York
Times in 1928 recognized modern rhythmic tendencies in the neo-classicism of
“Stravinsky, [who] has attempted to install his 1924 twelve-cylinder motor in a post-
chaise built when Bach was cantor at Leipsic.”70
The anonymous critic, in other words,
believed that Stravinsky’s modern, automatic engine of rhythm revamped the very
structure of baroque form—now strikingly considered a historical music-machine of
lesser power and precision. Regarding the specious Bach-Stravinsky relationship voiced
by many during the decade, one perceptive contemporary well understood the distinction
between Stravinsky’s claims to Baroque music and a modern-music reality that some
cultural critics seemingly neglected. In a 1928 Musical Times article, “The Stravinsky
Legends,” Leonid Savaneev considered that it was Bach who became mechanized
through modern, temporally objective aesthetics, and not Stravinsky who was becoming
Baroque:
[Stravinsky’s] Sonata and Concerto have nothing in common with Bach as
regards rhythm, harmony, melody, polyphony, or figuration. Whence, then, the
legend? Are the commentators too little acquainted with Bach, and know him
from hearsay as a 'dry' and 'mechanical' composer, such as he was at one time
regarded by the less cultured elements of the public? In that case they have
probably accepted the dryness and the deliberate in-expressiveness of Stravinsky's
latest works as the qualities which liken him to Bach.71
70 “Looking Ahead In Composing,” New York Times, Apr. 15, 1928, 122. ProQuest Historical
Newspapers.
71 Leonid Sabaneev and S. W. Pring, “The Stravinsky Legends,” The Musical Times 69 (Sept. 1,
505
When listening to other composers inspired by Baroque-music traditions, critic Paul
Rosenfeld too occasionally envisioned historical musical meters and rhythms through the
mechanical precisions—and values—of the present, especially in the music of Paul
Hindemith, a composer who would become a great motivator for the early-music
movement in American academia during the 1940s. In 1927, Rosenfeld already heard the
“obsessional beat” regulating Hindemith’s “Bachian” concerti grossi Kammermusik
(1921), and that the composer, like Stravinsky, was “confronted with the problem of
uniting mechanical ‘objective’ rhythms with ‘subjective,’ personal, and strongly
sentimental elements.” Rosenfeld found that Hindemith’s music exhibited “the pace and
rhythm of contemporary life,” yet somewhat paradoxically, it also contained “archaic
hardness” which moved “to classically dry, precise, snappy rhythm.”72
Telling of the
new metronomic “early-music” aesthetic that continues in some scholarship and
performances to this day, Rosenfeld heard the “archaic” rhythm in Hindemith as a
scientific rhythm manifest through a standardized and exacting time-source. And
significantly, the critic misconstrued this modern quality as a being intrinsic to past
musicality:
In the characteristic rhythms of the early eighteenth century, so spry, robust, and
precise, there lies the suggestion of a kind of movement objective, external,
removed form the empirically personal, and still not incompatible with human
feeling.73
1928): 786.
72 Paul Rosenfeld, “Musical Chronicle,” The Dial; a Semi-monthly Journal of Literary Criticism
(May 1927), 445. American Periodicals Series Online.
73
Ibid.
506
Rosenfeld clearly expressed the rhythmical tendencies of his age, yet he transferred to
them an imaginary “classical” musical past, in which Hindemith’s anachronistically
“objective” and “precise” rhythm—a seemingly “neo-classical” chronographic
aesthetic—reigned beyond the historical values of musical rhythm once grounded on
more immediate, internal expressions for pulse, movement, and rhetoric. Like other
composers of his age, Hindemith seemed to be trained in and accepting of a new
mechanically oriented rhythm. Indeed, Hindemith served as a military drummer for his
German regimental band during WWI74
and took pride in his uncommon ability at this
musical role. In a letter from the field dated February 6, 1918, he made sure to report: “In
the band I bang the big drum with skill and enthusiasm. I am assured that this instrument
has never before been handled with such precise rhythm.”75
Stravinsky, Rosenfeld, and Hindemith were not alone in an imagining of past
musical time through a more mechanically “precise” and seemingly “obsessional” beat of
the modern age. Indeed, it appeared decades earlier in the militaristic-gymnastic arts
pedagogy of Jaques-Dalcroze’s neo-Hellenistic Temple of [Modern] Rhythm. It could be
argued that, in the previous century, Wilhelm Wundt and his followers were the first
proponents to desensitize and objectify musical time through mathematical-metronomic
proportions. Regardless of the origins of this cultural trend, what composers of the 1920s
74 Paul Hindemith, Selected letters of Paul Hindemith, edited by Geoffrey Skelton (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), 17.
75 Hindemith, 18. He also occasionally expressed his desire—similarly to Stravinsky, Bartók,
Ravel, and Antheil—to take personal interpretations, along with individual temporal agency, out
of the performance of his compositions. On May 8, 1930 Hindemith explained his creative
intentions to Elizabeth Coolidge: “I have turned by back almost completely on [professional]
concert music and have been writing almost exclusively for amateurs, for children, for radio, for
mechanical instruments, etc.” See Hindemith, 58-59.
507
considered “objective music”76
—perhaps more accurately described by current science
historians as “mechanically objective” music—often represented a scientific
“rediscovery” of historical compositions, forms, and techniques through the modern
perspective of mechanical-musical time. None other than George Antheil, reflecting upon
the musical culture of his youth, summarized elements of what some recognized as the
neo-classical trend—which, seemingly unbeknownst to Antheil, lingered in the
pedagogies and practices of the 1940s:
The truth of the matter is that we have just emerged from a great stylist period,
where style was everything and content nothing—insofar as human meaning is
concerned. Let us take the “Symphony in C” of Stravinsky. I love this music very
much; it is fine and great music of its period; yet, compared to the great later
symphonies of Beethoven, or even those of Mozart, with which it pretends to be
spiritually aligned, it is cold veal, unemotional as a well-made clock mechanism.77
It is telling that Antheil, by the publication of his 1945 autobiography, had attempted on
numerous occasions to distance himself from his so-called “non-sentimental period” of
the past. And while he chided Stravinsky’s automatical neo-classical music of the 1920s,
Antheil reconsidered his own heartless and metronomic Ballet mécanique with the
admonition: “I am a classist at heart, and the Ballet mécanique is essentially a Romantic
work, breaking all the barriers, the rules and thriving upon it.”78
In recalling his musical-
mechanical indiscretions later in life, Antheil recast himself—as Stravinsky did
likewise—as a “classicist at heart,” who followed classicist compositional ideals, albeit
with often-unacknowledged values of modern mechanical precision. Antheil took this
76 See for instance Bartók, “Mechanical Music” (1937) in Béla Bartók, Essays (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1976), 291.
77
Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 356.
78
Ibid., 140.
508
stance as early as 1927 when he wrote to the traditionalist Joseph Hofmann, claiming the
Ballet mécanique represented the composer’s sturm und drang period of creativity.79
Yet,
as Antheil seems have discounted, his past and present work continued to uphold and
promote a “mathematical-metronomic” musicality, vehemently breaking from the
subjective temporality of both the “Classical” and “Romantic” eras. Despite claims of
being within a classical or romantic tradition, Antheil, similar to other “traditionally
inspired” composers of his age, continued to compose and perform with a strong
chronographic belief in the modern clockwork metronome.80
As chronographic pedagogies and aesthetics were increasingly popularized
through the 1920s, the musical-modernists’ penchant to imbue the values of “mechanical
objectivity” upon past compositions and performance practices—from the so-called
Baroque, Classical, and Romantic ages—seemed to expand correspondingly. While in
1924, the Parisian music critic William Atheling claimed that musicians’ “ability to
count, their metronomic ability, has engulfed them, and they have become insensitive to
shape,”81
Ezra Pound, Atheling’s iconoclastic alter ego, further promoted George
Antheil’s musical-mechanical aesthetics as being connected, by mere degrees, to past
compositional and performance practices. Pound claimed in 1927 that Antheil’s “new
quasi-sculptural solidity is something different from the magnificent stiffness or rigidity
79 See George Antheil, “An Explanation of My Evolution since 1924,” (Manuscript to Joseph
Hofmann, Signed Dec. 1927), p. 3, Box 10, Antheil Collection, Library of Congress, Washington
D.C.
80 One can hear Antheil’s performance practices from the time of his autobiography in the sound
recording Antheil Plays Antheil (San Francisco: Other Minds, 2000).
81
Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968),
132.
509
of Bach's multilinear mechanism.”82
What may have seemed hyperbole or literary
flourish in Pound’s description—that J. S. Bach composed stiff, rigid musical
machines—was becoming the prevailing belief for many: Bach’s music moved to the
metronome. Indeed, the British Times prescribed this Pound-Antheil aesthetic to a larger
Western culture only seven years later, on September 1934, when an anonymous critic
instructs: “Two things are essential to the right interpretation of Bach: a sense of line and
rhythm. The rhythm should be metronomic since any rigidity that might arise is corrected
by the flow of the melodic line.”83
As the musical-temporal culture of Bach became more
distant—and as scientific aesthetics of objectivity came to the fore—the twentieth-
century view of baroque music seemed coolly inhuman, strictly calculable, rigid, “pure,”
“absolute,” and fundamentally chronographic.
It was Béla Bartók who perhaps best articulated this aesthetical trend, the modern
mechanization of historical music, around 1930. Bartók, who measured folk, classical,
and his own music under ever-more precise metronomic indications, and who was heard
as a living musical automaton in 1922, similarly refashioned Bach with metronomic
attributes—with the temporal qualities of Stravinsky, Antheil, or Hindemith more than
with the subjective, rhetorical expressivity of pre-industrial musicians. The birth of the
early-music movement, Bartók seems to relate, was founded on this modern metronomic
aesthetic, which all but ignored past epistemologies of living musical time. By
exemplifying a composer-performer of two centuries past, Bartók defines a prevailing
mechanistic value of his modern culture:
82 Ibid., 49.
83
[“Music Review,”] The Times, Thursday, Sept. 6, 1934, 10.
510
The whole world is calling a halt, returning to Bach and to still earlier composers.
It is demanding an objective, anti-literary kind of music that represents no
subjective feeling but is absolute music. 84
Unlike musicians of the previous century, many by the third decade of the twentieth
century had often reconceived an “early music” in which the personal equation, the
individual’s “subjective feeling” for pulse and movement, ceased to be an essential
factor. The historical music of Bach and others now “demanded” modern mechanical
objectivity in performance. Subjective feeling for musical time, as Bartók relates, was no
longer accessed, “represented,” or warranted beyond the rhythmic notation of the page;
personal choice or expression for tempo and rhythm could not be actualized through the
“unfeeling” music from an imaginary chronographic past. As Bartók would be called an
automaton his own day, the very same composer recast Bach as a mechanically perfect
musician who composed absolute music, in which subjective feeling for musical time
was no longer an essential or desirable quality for auditors or performers.85
These were starkly opposing notions from those of pre-metronomic musicians
such as Marx, Christiani, Sternberg, and Saint-Seäns, who recognized that music notation
traditionally failed to relate the sensory, subjective feelings for living rhythm, and that
“artistic” performers must supply this want. Bach’s music, increasingly distanced from
human movement or sensation as a first principle, was now “absolute” and “objective”—
a performance practice more suited to the ideals of Bartók and Stravinsky the any
84 Desider Kosztolanyi, “Béla Bartok, Hungarian Composer,” The Living Age, Aug. 1931, 565.
American Periodicals Series Online.
85 Bartók admits however—even while he defined musical time through automatical machinery:
“Every art is necessarily human…If it were not so, music would become much too mechanical.
Even Bach expressed something, certain moments in life…” Bartók alluded to Bach’s
compositional technique of text painting, not the potential for rhythmical or rhetorical expression
in baroque performance practices.
511
musician preceding the modern age. Modernist conductor Herman Scherchen made this
mechanization of historic music—and the sublimation of historical rhythmic
expression—obvious in 1946 when he provided his interpretation of Bach’s supposed
“last composition” from the Art of the Fugue. In The Nature of Music, Scherchen goes so
far as to consider the “natural” human pulse and pulse sense completely under
chronographic rule—as the now prevailing rhythmical epistemology throughout musical
history—when he states:
The metronome marking which suites both forms of [Bach’s chorale melody] is: q/e=72 (Maelzel’s metronome). This allows listeners to think in terms of two quavers together…this tempo, which has been arrived at by [modern] theoretical and practical experience, corresponds to the Integer Valor of the Middle Ages, and is the human normal value, by which seventy two pulse beats and eighteen full respirations are produced a minute…[The physical result] corresponds also with the physical fatigue of the blind and dying Bach.
86
For Scherchen, even Bach’s last musical thought, breath, and pulse clocked-in at 72 beats
to the modern mechanical minute: the trusted chronographic norm for “listeners” to
passively perceive. As the “essential” rhythm for modern, early-modern, and “Middle”
ages could now be found in the positive quality of being “metronomic,” a new modern-
musical champion emerged from distant centuries: the “automatical Bach.” This
paradigmatic, yet imagined Baroque composer bridged the past and the present through
modern metronomic rhythm. In his own chronographic study of historical performance
practices, musicologist Sachs similarly “tried to metronomize Bach’s B minor Mass, each
86 Herman Scherchen, The Nature of Music (Vom Wesen der Musik, 1946), translated by William
Mann (London: Denis Dobson Ltd., 1950), 87-88. Scherchen did not consider the fact that a
dying man might not have a steady, continual, or equal pulse that could be so accurately
represented by a modern metronomic tempo.
Paradoxically also, Scherchen concludes his analysis of Bach’s work by stating, “it can
only be understood with reference to the special circumstances under which it was composed.”
Yet Scherchen failed to admit that Bach’s “final composition” was not composed with Maelzel’s
metronome in the Baroque composer’s mind, ear, or vicinity. See Scherchen, 108
512
movement separately and on various days, and found that his beat was consistently near
M.M. 80, covering now a quarter note, now an eighth, now even a half” and so on.87
Given these contemporaneous mechanizations of baroque dance-meters and pulses, the
imagined musical automaton J. S. Bach was perhaps most fully exhumed through the
interpretations of Glen Gould, who in death himself is still praised and promoted as a
premiere icon of a precise mechanical-mathematical “musicality,” a quality once
abhorred by pre-scientific educators, performers, and aestheticians.
Increasingly Modern, Metronomic Regulations for a “Classical Music” Culture
As this final chapter only begins to explain, the distinctions between modern aesthetics,
education, and musicology are by no means “rigidly” defined amongst themselves, and it
will take another study to find the many connections that these twentieth-century musical
disciplines share in their values of past performance practices, musical temporality, and
”metronome believing.” Nevertheless, for modernists valuing the Wundtian and
Dalcrozian goals of precise action informed by a chronographic standard, rhythm became
a notational problem to solve, an objective calculation outside of expressive human
intervention for the music of all ages. Thus, modern music scholars continued to revise
music history correspondingly. Like modernist aestheticians before him, Sachs—who
expressed great interest in the work of Seashore88
and who could not bring himself to
question the historical relevance behind his own metronomic methodology—implied
throughout Rhythm and Tempo that musical form, now far from the primacy of human
87 Sachs, 33.
88
Ibid., 18-19.
513
agency, consisted of static musical measures, calculated building blocks, in which
“rhythm” was the lifeless constructive material within those building blocks. And
although Sachs eschewed any discussion of Eurhythmics, his “rhythm” corresponded
nearly identically with the ideals of Jaques-Dalcroze and George Antheil. Indeed, while
Sachs occasionally acknowledged the importance of personal, “non-metronomic” leeway
in interpretations, any subjective sensory expression for meter and rhythm—once an a
priori rule of musical time—had little to do with Sachs’ own modernist, seemingly
“Antheilicized” summation: “Ours is a mathematically counting notation” 89
and “the
quarter note [is] our motor unit.”90
This implied “motor unit” of musical time—which calls forth alternate visions of
Maelzel’s automata, Wundt’s chronographic laboratory, Jaques-Dalcroze’s rhythmical
prodigies, and the “ballet” of modern industrial machinery—applied to other pre-
metronomic compositions performed since the Mechanical Age as well. For one Times
critic who attended the 1933 Salzburg Festival, an anachronistically “classical,”
metronomic rhythm pervaded a concert conducted by Richard Strauss—a composer
straddling a neo-classical aesthetic of temporal objectivity. The critic described that when
Strauss directed a certain Mozart symphony:
89 Ibid., 168.
90
Ibid., 173. A similar statement appears on page 201. In his text, Sachs eschews any substantial
discussion of Jaques-Dalcroze or Eurhythmics, a pedagogy founded two generations before
Sachs’ study appeared.
514
His style was rigourously, perfectly classical—a metronome beat, a set balanced
colour-scheme. But the effect was dull. Perhaps this was because one was unable
to follow a great man’s vision of finer quintessential outlines; perhaps, however,
because in concentrating so fixedly upon the ultimate details of which a design, if
it is to be significant and vital and not a mere super-imposed mould, must be
composed. 91
As this writer suggests beyond the performance itself, the “classical” became allied with
the objectively “perfect:” a rigid architectural “mould” and metronomic “time” control
outside of the interpretive musician’s will to change or even feel. Not limited to a
Baroque ideal, modernist performance practices seemed to present Mozart through ever-
greater standards of contemporaneous, metronomic action: a continually important and
positive aesthetic to achieve when performing “classical” music. Video documentation of
an elder Richard Strauss conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in 1944 exists, and for
some, he might exhibit movements of a lifeless conducting automaton during even his
own classically formulated rondeaux Till Eulenspiegel; his arms slightly waving to a
decided “metronome beat.” Indeed, conductor George Szell attested that Strauss, in some
performances, would be so emotionally disengaged from the musical time—or maybe
“objectively minded” towards the mechanical time—as to glance at his pocket watch
while the orchestra played before him.92
Strauss was not the only iconic conductor to treat late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century music with greater chronographic precisions. In 1930, a Times critic heard the
modern metronomic world exhibited in a performance of Schubert’s “Unfinished
91 “Salzburg Festival. Mozart and Strauss,” The Times, Aug. 15, 1933, 8, col D.
92 See George Szell interview in The Art of Conducting, Chapter 7 (Video), IMG Artists/BBC
Coproduction in association with Teldec Classics International & Sender Freies Berlin (UK:
International Management Group, Inc., 1993).
515
Symphony” conducted by Felix Weingartner, whose interpretation was “following the
fashion for speed.” The critic reports:
D. Weingartner’s reading of [the finale], consistent though it was in conception,
did not commend itself to us as much as the more obvious interpretation, which
regards it as a kind of translation into music of mechanical speed with the four
minims as the fly-wheel of the engine.93
Under the guise of “absolute composer intention,” other contemporaneous interpreters
took published metronomic numbers as precise guides—for gauging the modern musical
“motor unit”—in their ever-stricter chronographic treatments of nineteenth-century
compositions. This modern interpretive aesthetic of Werktreue, which continues to this
day, often misconstrued historical faithfulness to the composer’s printed indications with
the modern, scientific faith in a near-constant metronomic adherence in performance.94
This pseudo-scientific Werktreue aesthetic has often made as an implicit value a
chronographically objective “truth,” a metronomic “truth,” conversely finding “falsity” in
the more variable personal equation of living interpretive action, which, beyond the
printed page, thrived centuries prior to twentieth-century chronographic aesthetics or
pedagogies.
Thus, some modern writers, pedagogues, and conductors who devalued or ignored
the once-common understanding of rhetorical movement and rhythmic pulse as indicators
of musical time conversely considered the clockwork metronome the most appropriate
93 “London Symphony Orchestra: A Schubert Evening,” The Times, Tuesday, Mar. 25, 1930, 14.
94 While they seem to eschew the mechanical-scientific basis for the twentieth-century Werktreue
aesthetic, Richard Taruskin and Lydia Goehr provide important recent discussions of this cultural
philosophy. See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995); and Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
516
interpretive tool for getting at their imagined mechanical “truth” driving nineteenth-
century tempi, especially for the music of Beethoven. In 1932, a Times correspondent
focused on the metronome as essential to finding “authoritative” musical answers for
compositions nearly a century old. Citing Malcolm Seargent’s interpretation of
Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the writer considers the long-deceased, yet absolutely “definite”
composer’s intention intricately intertwined with the modern clockwork metronome:
Behind Mendelssohn’s metronomic markings there is a definite interpretive idea,
and it is incumbent on every conductor to bring out that idea…The metronomic
marks are frequently disregarded because in so many older works they are not
authoritative but merely the suggestions of an editor. Mendelssohn’s are
authoritative, and the conductor who would give a perfect performance of Elijah
must begin by reading them intelligently.95
As this critic implied, the clockwork metronome seemed to offer a greater truth than it
had during the previous century, supporting positivistic interpretive practices and
objectivist readings of rhythmical notation guided by limited beats-per-minute data. Thus
it seems “intelligent” interpretation and metronomic calculation converged closer in
modern performance practices, as sensory and rhetorical qualities of rhythm and tempo
continued to wane in importance. This greater value placed upon metronomic musical
interpretations could be expected, given that modern educational models of music
direction, such as found in Oberlin Professor Karl Wilson Gehrkens’ Essentials in
Conducting (1919), instructed the aspiring professional conductor that “hours of practice
in beating time will be necessary…it should also be done with the metronome clicking or
with some one playing the piano much of the time, in order that the habit of maintaining
95 “Elijah Restudied: Interpreting The Metronome,” The Times, Saturday, Oct. 29, 1932, 13.
517
an absolutely steady, even tempo may evolve.”96
Entering the third decade of the
twentieth century, even some conservatory-trained conductors, it seems, were habitually
acquiring a new “skill” by practicing, interpreting, and leading a new musical-
automatical “tempo,” one now desirable for Werktreue interpretations and “essential” for
modern performance practices.
In this cultural milieu in which positivistic interpretations, compositional
aesthetics of “objectivity,” industrialism, and music education would all converge
through greater chronographic beliefs in action, Eugène Borrel was perhaps the first
conservatory-based musicologist and instrumentalist to revise past musical practices with
modernist precisions. In the article “Les indications metronomiques…du XVIIIe siecle”
(1928), Loulié’s chronométre, a silent, simple pendulum, took on chronographic qualities
for Borrel, who by the very act of “metronoming” French baroque dances infused,
consciously or not, an archaic and speculative machine—originally intended to reflect the
motion of the human tactus—with more regulative, automatical actions common to the
educational, compositional, and performance practices of Borrel’s culture.97
In 1938,
Rosamund Harding, following Borrel’s published time studies, would strikingly consider
in these scattered, mechanical markings “the origins of musical time and expression”
while offering a revisionist history in which Loulié’s chronométre became the “most
celebrated” attempt to quantify musical time before Maelzel’s metronome.98
Some
96 Karl Wilson Gehrkens, Essentials in Conducting (Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Co., 1919), 35.
97 See Eugène Borrel, “Les indications metronomiques…du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue de musicology
T.9c (1928): 149-153.
98
See R. E. M. Harding, Origins of Musical Time and Expression (London: Oxford University
Press, 1938).
518
musicologists and “historically informed” musicians, well after Seashore, Borrel,
Harding, and Sachs, continued to further their beats-per-minute methodology for early-
music performance practices, perhaps guided by scientific aesthetics and modern
Werktreue philosophies. Yet, by indicating that minuets, gigues, marches, and even vocal
airs—alongside markings such as allegro, tendrement, adagio, vite, or vivace—fell under
a speculative range of absolute beats-per-minute possibilities, they perhaps unwittingly
moved ever closer to the experimental psychologists’ ideal of clockwork action,
devaluing the human agency intrinsic to past musical-temporal epistemologies while
promoting a more regulative and homogeneous aesthetic exclusive to the modern,
mechanical age.
Scientific musicologists’ metronomic studies of historical-musical time did not
remain limited to academic spheres. In 1946, modern-music champion and conductor
Scherchen took Borrel’s “findings” alongside the writings of early-modern pendulum
scientist Joseph Sauveur to justify a chronographic-musical past. As a prominent
upholder of modern aesthetics and Werktreue musicality, Scherchen clearly imposed his
values of time, rhythm, and action on all of Western music history, in what can be
appropriately termed the fallacy of historical precision—a fallacy also forwarded by the
contemporaneous psychologist Seashore, musicologists Sachs and later Erich Schwandt,
and anyone assuming continuous metronomic clicks relate to the tempi and rhythms of
pre-metronomic compositions. In The Nature of Music, Scherchen—not conceptually far
from many twentieth-century performance-practice musicologists—modernizes the
precision of past musical time for modern culture thusly:
519
That Sauveur was correct in his attempt to create a means of measuring music and
acoustics as precisely as possible, is proved by modern practice…his [simple-
pendulum] metronome might have served Bartók, Stravinsky, and others for a
minutely precise indication of tempi and duration of movements, had it only been
currently available [to these modern composers...]
Loulié’s chronometer of 1686 and Sauveur’s more precise echometre of
1701 were greeted with equal enthusiasm, just as a hundred years later Maelzel’s
metronome was applauded by Beethoven and his contemporaries.99
It seems that as the beliefs and actions in musical time moved towards greater, more
modern chronographic precisions, so too did music history and historical performance
practices in the minds of many during the twentieth century. With a historiography
similar to Scherchen’s, Sachs speciously and with no supporting evidence imagined even
Quantz to have considered tempi using a clockwork metronome.100
Marin Mersenne too
became a modern chronographic scientist, as Sachs believed the early-modern theorist—
in a time-culture before precise “seconds hand” clockwork technology—“equated the
[‘un-rhythmical’] tactus beat with a pulse beat…but as this was not precise enough from
person to person and from hour to hour, many contemporaries, he said, preferred the
duration of a second on the dial for the semibreve or motor unit, which amounts to M.M.
60 for the quarter note.”101
In the minds of “metronome believing” musicians and
scholars, a musical culture that thrived well before Maelzel’s “invention” became just as
consistently chronographic as their twentieth-century musical culture that wholeheartedly
embraced the clockwork metronome.
99 Scherchen, trans. by Mann, 32-33.
100
Sachs, 34.
101
Ibid., 273.
520
It then comes as no surprise that other esteemed musicians and pedagogues
including violinist Rudolf Kolisch would completely disregard Beethoven’s comments,
his life, and the history of technology in favor of a modern mechanical aesthetic of
musicality and musical time when performing Beethoven’s masterworks. Kolisch scoffed
in 1942, “opponents of the [clockwork] metronome will even go so far as to make the
unbelievably nonsensical assertion that our modern metronome differs considerably from
Beethoven’s. (My answer: That could be true only if the speed of the earth’s rotation had
changed in the meantime.)”102
Kolsich seemed not to consider that beyond technological
developments, it was Western musical culture—with its scientific faith in chronographic
rules and regulations—that had changed in the meantime. Perhaps implicitly guided by
this disciplinary-wide devaluing of the personal equation in favor of mechanical
objectivity—promoted throughout the twentieth century by such seemingly disparate
figures such as Seashore, Borrel, Harding, Antheil, Scherchen, and Schwandt—
musicologist George Houle even offered historical automata from Engramelle’s machine-
building treatise La tonotechnie as “uniquely precise” evidence of “the effect of metrical
articulation” as it showed “quantitative articulation with absolute clarity.”103
In 1987,
lifeless musical machines, including both historical automata and modern metronomes—
technologies once abhorred for their lack of living rhythm and expression—continued to
prominently inform modern scholarship with a now “precise,” “quantitative,” and
“absolute” source of “musical time” for modern purposes.
102 Rudolf Kolisch, “Tempo and Character in Beethoven's Music,” The Musical Quarterly 77
(Spring, 1993), 90. This article is a reprint from his 1942 work.
103
Houle, 110.
521
During the 1930s, evidence suggests that other modern interpreters, including
Arturo Toscanini, first began rigorously applying metronomic measures in order to
objectively and “perfectly” reproduce musical tempi even for later nineteenth-century
music. While Toscanini’s 1932 concert rendition of Bach’s “Concerto for Four Pianos”
with the New York Philharmonic was for one Wall Street Journal critic, “devoid of the
dread metronomic effects invariably to be looked for in undertakings of the sort,”104
contemporaneous historian David Ewen suggested that the Italian maestro took great
pains to adhere to the metronome for more “Romantic” genres, including nineteenth-
century Wagnerian opera. In his book The Man with the Baton (1936), Ewen supports
Toscanini’s modern, mechanically oriented interpretations:
In Bayreuth in 1930…the “perfect Wagnerites” felt that in the prelude to
Tannhäuser, Toscanini took an altogether unorthodox tempo. Toscanini quietly
summoned his critics to a piano and there, with the aide of a metronome, proved
that his tempo was meticulously perfect, precisely the way Wagner had so
carefully designated in the score.105
Yet Toscanini, as Ewen’s anecdote suggests, might have paid little heed to Wagner’s
more detailed verbal indications, and the composer’s ultimate rejection of metronomic
action as it relates to meaningful interpretations of his operas—and that no single
metronomic “tempo” was consistently applicable to any of his music. As Wagner
explained in Über das Dirigiren, metronomic indications, wherever they sporadically
104 “The Theatre,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18, 1932, 3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
105
David Ewen, The Man with the Baton - The Story of Conductors and Their Orchestras
(Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1936), 194. In keeping with the mechanically objective aesthetics of his
age while rejecting the personal equation, Ewen downplayed Wagner’s own statements on the
flexibility of musical time, even discounting them when he surmised that in the conducting of
Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, “too many exaggerations and dramatics distorted their performances.
However, with all their faults, they definitely pointed the way” to modern conducting techniques
and practices. See Ewen, 85.
522
appeared in his earlier operas, were always secondary to rhetorical-rhythmical qualities,
those necessary variations and nuances that the composer never “designated in the score,”
and which belie any “meticulously perfect” or absolutely “precise” tempo replication, a
chronographic value sought in Western musical culture only since the twentieth century.
In a later trend that can only be slightly cited here, some including Theodore
Adorno and Curt Sachs106
clearly recognized that new musical media and broadcasts
elicited even more exacting mechanical performance practices. Unlike previous
automatical creations such as Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter or the household pianola,
later “mechanical” forms of music presentation—heard notably through wax cylinders,
phonographs, radio transmissions, and moving pictures—further manifested metronomic
attributes in living musicians, alongside listeners’ expectations for the exactly replicable
performance. Accounts suggest that recorded media often required performers to work
with quicker overall tempi, so music could fit to into the fixed time frames allotted by the
recording surfaces or broadcast schedules. These imposed limitations often resulted in
performances with more regulated musical movements and less interpretive variations.
Movie conductors, as reported in a 1934 New York Times article, often beat time “with a
stop-watch…because it is essential that the symphonic accompaniment coincide perfectly
with the action.”107
Fewer subjective rhythmic gestures or rhetorical effects could be
106 Sachs, only in the very last page of his text, describes that “the length of a recording groove
and the inexorable, often tragicomic timing impositions of broadcasts, movies, or television force
the performers and even composers into an often unmusical, antimusical straightjacket.” He
speaks more of the new limitations imposed by recording durations rather than tick-tock
chronographic regulation heard in the modern metronome—a machine he seemed largely familiar
with throughout his lifetime. See Sachs, 380.
107
Frank S. Nugent, “Sound and Fury in Remote Astoria,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 1934, X5;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
523
conveyed when mechanical media constricted the overall duration of any given musical
performance—and composition—to a “start and stop” time.
None other than George Antheil experienced this mechanical imposition in his
role as film-score composer—and the New York Times reporter Frank Nugent did not let
the irony escape his readers:
Mr. Antheil, whose “Ballet Mécanique”…used such “instruments” as anvils,
whirling airplane propellers, electric bells and automobile horns, admitted it was
something of a problem to compose music to split seconds.108
Antheil—once hailed as the most “precise” pianist of his age, a composer who sought to
mechanize music by charging living performers to play identically to automatical
pianolas on the concert stage, a theorist who attested to the mathematical essentiality of
rhythmic notation—eventually found difficulty with the increasing chronographic
precision demanded by new modes of mechanical musicality, specifically, “the matter of
music [timed] by the stop watch.”109
By 1934, Antheil had experienced first hand that
even his “musicality” became ever constricted through mechanical-temporal controls—
away from individual, variable expressions—as the methods and machines of
composition and performance continued to actively and rapidly redefine “musical
precision” during his age.
Thus by the 1930s, with the rise of radio broadcasts, recordings, and movies, it
seems that many professional musical performances had moved ever closer to the
chronographic procedure of the nineteenth-century laboratory. It is likely that through
recordings, listeners’ notions of musical “performance” became detached from the true
108 Ibid.
109
Ibid.
524
agents of musical performance—the living performers themselves—and thus the personal
equation of musicality, alongside the intrinsic humanity of musical time, further receded
in importance for many consumers of twentieth-century media. Recording technologies
of the age often reflect this continued sublimation of individualistic “time”—and the
increasing objectification of an absolutely “correct” time—in music performances of the
Western tradition. In an early example from 1931, Walt Disney filed a patent for a film-
score recording system that better regulated living musicians through constant
metronome clicks—a precursor to the ubiquitous “click-track” recording technologies
employed presently. Disney’s metronomic machine attests to the close similarity that
many modern musical-performance practices now shared with passive, psychological
experiments in “rhythm” from the previous century.
Figure 7.4. Walt Disney’s 1931 metronomic apparatus for recording movie soundtracks. The
clockwork click of the metronome, shown at the lower left (#40), was electronically transmitted from an
adjacent room directly into the headphones of musicians. The process mimics nineteenth-century
chronographic methods in observatories and laboratories, but now it applied to skilled musicians in the
active metronomic regulation of their performances. “Method and apparatus for Synchronizing
Photoplays,” (Filed Apr. 2, 1931; Patented Dec. 26, 1933).
525
Perhaps due to the convergence of modern aesthetics, growing metronomic
pedagogies, recorded media, Werktreue interpretations, and the scientific-musicological
research informing “historical” performance practices, many came to assume that
“classical music” was intrinsically linked to mechanical time controls, that “classical
music” necessitated the temporal tyranny of a modern metronomic pulse. Ironically, two
years after patenting their new chronographic “Method and Apparatus for Synchronizing
Photoplays,” Walt Disney Productions released the short film Music Land on October 3,
1935, humorously confirming that modern mechanical culture imposed a very real
hegemony upon past musical-temporal traditions. When caught by guards from “The
Land of Symphony,” the young protagonist, a love-stricken jazz saxophone, was thrown
into an appropriate “Classical Music Prison” for modern times—he landed inside a large,
clicking clockwork metronome. Trapped within, the saxophone paced back and forth
synchronously to the incessant tick-tock of his stodgy Maelzelian holding cell.110
110 Thanks to Dr. Daniel Goldmark for directing me to a copy of the short film.
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Figure 7.5. Two consecutive scenes from Walt Disney’s 1935 “Silly Symphony” entitled Music Land.
Guards from The Land of Symphony, left, hurled the saxophone from the Isle of Jazz into their physical-
temporal metronome-prison, where inside, right, the hero sympathetically moved in accordance with its
clockwork clicks.
Conclusion: a “Rhythm” Narrowed, a “Time” Deceased
There can be no doubt that twentieth-century Western culture, following the growth of
metronomic pedagogies, witnessed the ascendance of a chronographic aesthetic of
musical objectivity that stipulated more normative and regulative standards of time,
rhythm, and action for compositions both past and present. For some during this age, a
mechanical hegemony was decidedly coming to fruition through “metronome believing,”
and modern culture seemed to be fulfilling the qualities of Johann Maelzel’s automaton
shows of a century prior: Replicating once subjective living actions with metronomic,
beats-per-minute consistencies and precisions was becoming a commonplace occurrence
on the music stage, in the practice room and recording studio.
Perhaps in recognition of the mechanical evolution that Samuel Butler
prophesized “will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants” only 60
years prior, artist Man Ray created an emblem of his Machine Age in the 1920s; it was a
clockwork metronome with a single eye attached to the swinging pendulum. The original
527
title of Man Ray’s uncanny Metronome-Cyclops: Object to be Destroyed. Indeed, in the
first third of the modern century, Maelzel’s “mere automaton,” which a century later
became Brower’s “tireless little policeman,” seemed more like Man Ray’s monstrous
tyrant, continually redefining musicality so that the serious student and professional
performer, even the conducting “maestro,” often seemed a hapless subject against now
“authoritative” mechanical tempi, “definitive” metronomic pulses, and “precisely”
calculable rhythms—all while neglecting or devaluing the physical sensations and
gestures that once informed more subjective musical-temporal epistemologies. New York
Times critic John Martin suggested that this metronomic turn—which hearkened back to
Wundt’s experimental laboratory—actively redefined the creative time of music and
dance on the concert stage and in the broadcasting studio during his age, claiming in
1929:
Rhythm is becoming constricted into ever-narrower meanings; it is already used
almost as a synonymous term for the regularity of the audible beat.111
Martin’s assertion cannot be taken lightly, since evidence suggests that scientific
“rhythm”—objectified chronographic time—increasingly defined and normalized
musicality for a host of students, professional performers, and scholars in the twentieth
century. By 1920, even the early-music pedagogue and composer Vincent D’Indy had
directly paraphrased experimental psychologists when defining “rhythm,” in which
metronomic clicks were the absolute source and measure of a largely reactionary mental
phenomenon.112
Given this growing scientific epistemology of time and action—
111 John Martin, “The Dance: Listening In,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 1929, 108.
112 “When we hear successive sounds of equal duration like those of the metronome, one of the
two has more intensity that the other; we can at will, M. D’Indy tells us, attribute to the more
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appearing in the musical academy, the concert hall, and the classroom—William
Atheling’s 1924 claim that musicians were “engulfed” by their seemingly habituated
mathematic and “metronomic ability” likewise cannot be taken as mere hyperbole. For
those attentive to the incompatibilities between the rhetorical and the mechanical,
qualities of musical time were audibly and perhaps irrevocably changed. Indeed, it seems
that D’Indy, Jaques-Dalcroze, Seashore, Pound, Antheil, Stravinsky, Sachs, and many
others, had long since discounted the pre-metronomic “rhythm” expressed by A. B.
Marx’s profoundly contrasting, anti-scientific summation from a century prior: “Rhythm
is the expression of the will and pleasure of him who formed it; and we recognize in it
either the determined purpose of the artist, or his sensible delight in a well-arranged and
pleasing or significant succession of tonal quantities.”113
The narrowing of “rhythm” into a limited mechanical epistemology, the “engulfment” of
musicians to a de-sensitized musical time, their increasing “metronomic ability” to
synchronize to ever-more precise clicking impressions—these are not matters of a
modernist or neo-classical past. In keeping with a twentieth-century scientific culture, the
mechanization of musicality remains present in many pedagogies, research
methodologies, and performance practices to this very day. Indeed, evidence suggests
that chronographic, or automatical, performance practices grow more precise and
intense sound the odd numbers…or the even numbers. ‘The possibility we have of choosing by a
mere effort of will one or the other of these inequalities, clearly proves that rhythm proceeds not
from the [mechanical] sounds themselves but from a necessity of our own mind’” [in choosing a
pattern from those mechanical sounds.] See Camille Saint-Saëns, trans. Fred Rothwell, “The
Ideas of M. Vincent D’Indy,” The Musical Times 61 (Apr. 1, 1920), 244.
113 Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture, 33.
529
regulative as successive generations of musicians and researchers continue to employ
metronomic machines with a scientific desire to standardize “tempo” and “rhythm,”
alongside the very notions of “musicality.”
Thus, by way of a conclusion, we must acknowledge a historical shift in the
cultural values and actions that define musical time; it is a turn which prominently
emerged in twentieth-century culture, which pitted the desire for objectivity and precision
in a mechanically homogeneous and regulative “time” against those contrasting,
subjective epistemologies that once upheld the variability of rhetorical delivery, physical
movement, and personal-temporal sensation. For a culture increasingly reliant on
machines and mechanical data for the teaching, composing, and performing of music, this
metronomic turn is barely recognized as having occurred at all. Yet, as inheritors of
modernity, how can we claim to understand those historical “musical times” so long as
we cling to pedagogies and research methodologies that uphold the machines and
mechanical-temporal values of modernity? So long as scholars and performers place
greatest importance on those tried and true metronomic stipulations—that one should
play or conduct faster or slower to the clockwork beat, that one should keep the
metronomic “tempo” consistent throughout a piece, that one should first play all notes
“precisely” to the implied tick-tock grounding each musical measure—then we will never
get nearer to the expressive “intention” of a Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, or Monteverdi, or
more realistically, the profoundly creative rhythmical and rhetorical interpretations that
their musical works both warrant and deserve. When academics, pedagogues, and
performers place primary value on metronomes and metronomic data in order to
approach “composer intention and historical knowledge,” they are not solving the
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musical problems of past ages, they are providing limited and normative answers for our
age—for a time-culture that desires efficient musical reproduction and replication before
and beyond individualistic, variable, and anti-mechanical rhythmical qualities.
Pedagogues, performers, and scholars must then account for two truisms
seemingly disregarded by many in our current musical culture. Paderewski expressed the
first: mechanical execution and pre-modern musical expression are incompatible.
Conductor Walter Damrosch, who was ironically labeled a living metronome early in his
career, recounted the second: the possibility exists for musicians to play too precisely to
be good.114
Despite these pre-modern truisms, the standards of musical-temporal
precision and consistency—which increase over the decades as metronome technology
does—obscure and efface the subjective, sensory qualities of musical time by
normalizing and regulating the “precise beat” for young and old, amateur and
professional, performer and scholar. And while evidence suggests that musical-temporal
values and actions were fundamentally anti-chronographic throughout the majority of
Western musical history, modern scientific pedagogies and performance practices
continue to run in opposition to those historical beliefs and actions—again reflecting the
profound metronomic turn in “musical time” that perhaps incited Debussy to exclaim
upon experiencing Nijinsky’s “odd mathematical twist” as a dancer-choreographer, “I
hold Monsieur Dalcroze to be one of the worst enemies of music!”115
114 See Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 320. At
the turn of the century, a European newspaper threw the criticism at Damrosch in reaction to his
New York Philharmonic touring concert.
115 Reprinted in Albright, 85. Despite Boulez’s claims to Debussy’s modernism, Debussy himself
seems to have taken a decidedly non-chronographic, nineteenth-century view towards metronome
indications, stating, “You know my opinion of these metronome markings: They are good for just
531
How can we ever fully describe, conceive, or even experience pre-metronomic
music and musicality when a prevailing Dalcrozian culture continues to equate “good
rhythm” with precise chronographic action in both education and performance? In
learning past performance concepts and practices, can players and scholars fully
disregard their own metronomic education and aesthetics? Can modern musicians fully
un-tether this seemingly ingrained “truth” of mechanical-musical time? Perhaps by first
acknowledging the practical and conceptual distinctions between innate human
sensations and constant mechanical regulations, we may begin to answer these questions
in greater detail, while also recognizing the extent to which metronomic references have
redefined the living pulse-sense for both contemporary and historical music
performances. Furthermore, we ought to acknowledge that the pre-mechanical “timeist”
seems long-since discounted today by a seldom-questioned fundamental of musical time,
one that places tempo, rhythm, and the clicking metronome under a unified epistemology.
And we are unlikely to understand or regain the expressive rhythmical qualities of the
historical “timeist” if scholars, performers, and pedagogues continue to endorse
precision-based methods that unhesitatingly claim the intrinsic and necessary fusion
between the living musician and the modern automaton—such as this one published in
2007:
one measure, as ‘roses last the length of a morning.’” This quote from Debussy’s correspondence
is reprinted numerous times in James R. Briscoe, ed., Debussy in Performance (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 83-4, 99, 276, etc.
532
By setting the metronome at a speed you feel is comfortable for your successful
execution of the passage, you have eliminated the necessity for [self-]governing
the speed of your playing—the metronome will do it for you…When using the
metronome to improve your sense of timing and rhythm…listen to the metronome
tick for a while. Move your body to the rhythm of the ticks. Once you’ve
internalized the rhythm, you’re ready to start playing.
Some students complain that they have a hard time playing while the
metronome is ticking—that’s precisely why they need to use it. It’s paramount
that they get their body and the metronome moving together to develop their
sense of rhythm…Once you have learned a new piece of music, prove to yourself
that you know it well by playing it with the metronome ticking.116
In the eighteenth century, Quantz once considered playing continuously to the living
pulse impossible; Rousseau once considered playing to the silent swing of a simple
pendulum unnecessary, impossible, and impractical. In the nineteenth century, Berlioz
recognized that playing to Maelzel’s clockwork metronome was not only impossible, but
would result in a severely “cold” and “inexpressive” musicality if attempted. Just over a
century ago, Joseph Hofmann warned students never to play with the clockwork
metronome, for a metamorphosis would undoubtedly result in their sense of “musical
rhythm.” Yet beginning in the twentieth century, and proceeding into the twenty-first,
many amateurs and professionals are not only instructed, encouraged, and required to
play and practice with metronomes of much greater automatical precision, but can play
automatically in both rehearsals and concerts—click by click, in quarters, sixteenths,
thirty-seconds, and beyond—with the ease, consistency, and accuracy of cold, calculating
machines. Practicing and performing with mechanical precision is no longer an anomaly
or abhorrence it once was to musical cultures of past centuries. For the majority of
musicians trained in a chronographically biased “classical” and “early-music” tradition,
116 Neil Miller, The Piano Lessons Book: The Piano Student's Guide for Getting the Most Out of
Practicing, Lessons, Your Teacher and Yourself ([n.p.]: CreateSpace, 2007), 214-215.
533
playing to the modern metronome is not simply an acceptable standard practice—it is a
necessary and “paramount” ability to acquire.
It is only since the modern age—which for some constitutes a daily “chronarchy”
of precise mechanical “time” constraints, moving to ever increasing mechanical
“rhythms”—that performing like a clockwork metronome is commonplace. An implicit
metronomic hegemony over musical time has indeed taken place during the modern
century, and it has seemingly overturned the primacy of more subjective, variable senses
of musical temporality. Consider comments from some of the most renowned and
accomplished performers in our age, such as Emanuel Ax—who endorsed and practiced
the very chronographic “rhythm” taught to twentieth-century novices with little
understanding of the foundations, feelings, or actions that defined the pre-metronomic
musical “times.” Speaking to Thomas Robert May in March 2005, Ax said:
[In learning John Adams’ pianola-like concerto Century Rolls] it was an
incredible discovery of having good rhythm. Most classical pianists—myself at
the head of the list, don’t necessarily have such good rhythm. We’re always
thinking about line and harmony but we don’t necessarily have a good feel for the
inexorable pulse. This is why with pieces like the Pulcinella reduction [for piano
and cello] of Stravinsky—which I worked on with Yo-Yo [Ma] this week—I had
a hard time just being accurate, not rushing, not slowing down. It’s incredible
discipline that really helps you with everything. There’s so much to think about
for a pianist: line, harmony, the way that one note relates to the next, because the
sound decays, so we have to think about connecting things; sometimes rhythm
takes a backseat. So I practiced with a metronome, which I’ve been doing ever
since. I’m realizing that you need to put rhythm into the hierarchy that you’re
working out. 117
Since the scientific twentieth century, playing like a metronome means to play correctly,
with “rhythmical precision” and “accurate tempi” for music from all ages—for the
117 Thomas Robert May, The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer
(Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2006), 273.
534
compositions of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Adams included. As Ax implies, the
“inexorable pulse” of the constant metronomic click remains the assumed standard of
“good rhythm,” musical “accuracy,” and even musical “feeling” for many professional
performers—for whom “invisible,” pre-metronomic pulse-senses and musical-rhetorical
gestures seem of negligible importance from the outset.
Ax is not alone in lacking musical-temporal perspective; for many musicians
today, the scientific aesthetic that stipulates an objective metronomic “rhythm” and
“tempo” remains the exclusive value of “musical time” for compositions throughout
history. Under the increasingly metronomic epistemology of tempo in our age,
musicologist Robert Philip found that “it is now difficult to imagine what Scholes was
hearing” in 1922 when the London critic described Bartók’s playing as automatical,118
since Philip himself heard Bartók, in recordings, play “groups of semiquavers more
impressionistically than modern demands for clarity allow,” while “chords are
arpeggiated to a startling extent” in one Beethoven sonata. For Philip, Bartók’s playing,
which “could not be deduced from his scores…sounds surprisingly ‘Romantic’ in its
freedoms.”119
It is telling that for contemporary musicians and musicologists such as
Philip, who are increasingly attuned to ever-more metronomic rhythms and aesthetics, the
musically automatical performances of the 1920s and beyond now sound surprisingly
free, individualist (in that modern pejorative “Romantic”), and anti-scientific by
comparison. Thus individualistic musical “freedoms” have largely been recast as an
affected sense of romanticized “rubato” breaking from an assumed and expected
118 Philip, 174.
119
Ibid., 173.
535
metronomic control. For many decades, the printed New Grove Dictionary noted through
2001, “the popularity of [Joseph Hofmann’s]…free, Romantic style of performance
waned considerably” after the first third of the twentieth century.120
Grove Music Online
continues to cite as an individualistic oddity that the “Romantic pianist” Josef Hofmann
played with “sudden, improvisatory eruptions [i.e. undocumented “invisible” accents
that] served to heighten the tension and emotional content of each piece he performed,”
yet this authoritative reference still fails to ascribe Hofmann’s performance practices to
his self-acknowledged sense of a pre- or anti-metronomic “rhythmicality.”121
In many modern interpretations that now “demand clarity” with little of those
“surprisingly Romantic freedoms”—in which any “rushing” or “slowing down” from an
implicit and continual tick-tock “time” is an audible anomaly—the musical “tempo” of
Bach often sounds like the “tempo” of Bartók; the “rhythms” of Vivaldi often are
indistinguishable from those of Steve Reich; the subjective and variable pulse-sense
underling Beethoven’s concertos and symphonies often approaches the pianola-like,
Dalcrozian “rigidity” of Stravinsky’s Les Noces or Antheil’s Ballet mécanique; in
orchestra concerts today, Debussy’s La Mer often rolls synchronously to John Adams’
ever-more chronographic Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The expansion of a metronomic
education and aesthetic has made this musical-temporal homogeneity possible, expected,
and nearly unquestioned in our age. Thus, it is for our Western musical culture—which
120 Gregor Benko, "Hofmann, Josef," in The New Grove Dictionary, Second edition, Vol. 11: 603-
4.
121 Gregor Benko, "Hofmann, Josef," in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online,
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13172 (accessed December 3,
2009).
536
continues to endorse metronomes in scientific performance-practice methodologies and
mass chronographic pedagogies such as Eurhythmics and the Suzuki Method, with their
anachronistic refashionings of historical “tempo” and “rhythm”—that Adorno’s 1948
realization grows more urgent: “Today there is no music showing any trace of the power
of the historical hour that has remained totally unaffected by the decline of [individual]
experience…The dying out of subjective time in music seems totally unavoidable in the
midst of a humanity which has made itself into a thing—into an object of its own
organization.”122
Man Ray’s original artwork-metronome “Object to be Destroyed” was, as its
name foretold, not long for this world. Yet in the continually expanding mechanical
environment in which he lived—where chronographic measurement and regulation
became a prevailing practice for many cultural, industrial, and educational performance-
practices—Man Ray understood that the destruction of one solitary metronome could not
stave off the seemingly unstoppable expansion of metronomic values and actions in the
modern age. Perhaps in reaction to a century informed and influenced by mechanical
objectivity, he created many following iterations of the clockwork metronome from 1923
to 1975, directly paralleling the growing use and importance of the machine in Western
society. These gazing clockwork replications, housed in museums around the world,
would subversively attest to the dominance that metronomic technologies still hold over
modern pedagogies and aesthetics in our day. The title of Man Ray’s widespread series of
resurrected twentieth-century Maelzel metronomes: Object Indestructible.
122 From Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (1948), reprinted in Daniel Albright, ed.
Modernism and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77.
537
Figure 7.6. One of Man Ray’s series of nearly identical clockwork metronomes entitled
“Object Indestructible,” 1923-1975.
Long after Beethoven and Bessel, the Western world grew to embrace Maelzel’s
machine as the regulator of objective time for once personal, subjective performance.
Considering his brief, fleeting, and inconsistent interest in mechanically aided tempo-
description, Beethoven could never have imagined the machine’s complete “tyranny”
over all facets of education, culture, and society nearly a century after his passing.
Metronomic performance practices thrived only since the twentieth century. Indeed, by
1920—the year that Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, died—it
seems that the metronome was the common temporal denominator of the modern world.
538
Only in this self-dubbed Machine Age did typewriting, weight lifting, eye blinking,123
card playing, speaking, writing, walking, breathing, and even piano playing come to be
measured, regulated, and judged against the same artificial control, the same clockwork
automaton, the same scientific metronome.
123 See for instance C. E. Ferree, “An Experimental Examination of the Phenomena Usually
Attributed to Fluctuation of Attention,” The American Journal of Psychology 17 (Jan., 1906): 81-
120; and Sidney M. Newhall, “The Control of Eyelid Movements in Visual Experiments,” The
American Journal of Psychology 44 (Jul., 1932): 555-570.
539
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