Music Video Lesson: Should You Follow Metronome Markings in Your Music?

I'm Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The question is, should you follow the metronome markings in your music? You know, I have students, sometimes they come to me and they say, you know, I'm really trying to get this piece up to speed and it's marking the score as 160. I just can't get anywhere close to that. And they're bidding themselves up wondering, you know, how can they get it at that speed? Well, there's a lot to this subject and I'm going to enlighten you about these metronome markings and scores, but first I'm going to show you something that will shed some light in this whole subject.

I'm going to take a Mozart sonata. This is the G major sonata, K. 283 and the first one is marked Allegro. And I'm just going to play a little bit for you first. So that's Allegro, fast. Well, what is Allegro? Well, I have my trusty metronome here and there's a whole range of Allegro. Let's see what they say Allegro is. So the very slowest Allegro is 126. Let's see what that sounds like.

That's about where I was playing.

Well, so that seems fine, except if you look here, there's a whole range, a whole bunch of numbers that are all Allegro. Now that's the lowest setting that's marked as Allegro here. I'm going to go in one of the middle settings and see what that sounds like. If I do it now at 144, which is also right smack in the middle of what they're calling Allegro. Let's see what this sounds like at this speed. Okay, I almost got it.

Although I think it loses the elegance, but here's what's really crazy. We're still in Allegro and this according to this metronome all the way to, well, I guess 168 is right between. Now this is the right at the top of the Allegro right here.

Oh my gosh, this is considered Allegro according to this metronome.

So that's not much help, is it? I mean, if you're going to use a metronome as a guide, well what, getting back to the subject of the video, in the score you got a metronome mark.

Did the composer put that in there? Guess what? No, composers almost never put metronome marks in. These are editor suggestions that are put in the score. And you know what? If you look at different editions, they can be drastically different metronome markings in the score.

So you really can't go by metronome markings. I say ignore them. They are not of any value, not any value at all. They may or may not have anything to do with musical sensibilities. If you really want to get a sense of what tempo is appropriate for a piece of music, go on YouTube or Spotify or whatever you subscribe to and listen to great artists, great pianists playing the piece and get a feel for the range of tempos. But you know, I've shown this to people before.

Listen to, for example, the Alaturka movement.

Listen to Lang Lang play it, then listen to Glenn Gould play it. These are two noted concert pianists and they are so drastically different in their tempos you can't even believe how different they are. I'll put links in the description so that you can check them out for yourself. It's ridiculous how totally different they are. So artists have very different ideas, but at least you get a range for what the media and what most people are playing. Does that mean you have to play it at that speed? Not necessarily.

You might be able to make a convincing case for a drastically different tempo, as is the case in these performances of Glenn Gould and Lang Lang who chose drastically different tempos for that same movement.

But you should know when you're going against the grain because listeners have a frame of reference and if you're drastically one way or the other, that's going to be a little bit startling to them and you have to have real conviction if you're going to do that. And if you're a student, you want to try to play somewhere in the range of what most people are playing to get a feel for what is musically accepted. Although, to be fair, what is considered appropriate tempos today are different from what tempos were in the early 20th century. A lot of players played faster back then than they do today.

So these are stylistic decisions that have come and go in fashion.

But knowing what other players play is a good guide for you. What's written in the score, ignore them. They most often are not of any value, most of the time.

Interesting story for you. My wife, when she was going to music conservatory in college, she was working on a piece, it was a new piece with percussion and flute and piccolo and she was working really hard and the composer wrote metronome markings on it. So in this case it wasn't an editor, it was the composer and she was having the darnedest time with this one piece trying to get it up to speed and she was practicing diligently doing progressively faster metronome speeds one notch at a time trying to get this thing up to speed, working so hard. Finally they had an opportunity to have a class with the actual composer of the piece and she was so interested and they started playing it and the composer is like, no that's not the tempo.

She showed the metronome marking and goes, oh yeah, I put that in there but I didn't really have a metronome handy when I put it in.

So even the composer didn't take the time to put the right metronome marking in and even if they do it's not etched in stone. There are many valid tempos that can work for a piece of music. You have to have conviction of what works for you and your playing and on your piano or the piano you're playing and the hall you're playing in. Tempo is definitely more art than science.

So I hope this has been helpful for you. Again I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. If you go ahead and ring the bell, the thumbs up and of course if you haven't subscribed, what are you waiting for? Go for it and you'll know about future videos coming your way. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/should-you-follow-metronome-markings-in-your-music/

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