Tempo Relations in Music: A Universal?
David Mark Epstein · Birkhäuser Basel eBooks · 1988
Performing musicians devote a good deal of their time to concerns about tempo. Small wonder, for tempo exerts one of the most powerful controls in music, affecting everything that will occur in the performance of a work. Curiously, for a musical factor so far-reaching in its scope, tempo is also a factor with the largest degree of variability in music. By contrast, for example, we can “bend” the pitches of a piece only minimally in the interests of intonation. The margin is small between “coloring” a note in this way and rendering it simply “out of tune.” Likewise, we can bend the rhythms of a phrase only slightly for purposes of expressive nuance. Beyond a certain point, these changes distort the rhythmic shape inherent in the phrase. Again, the margin of variability is small. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.