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

Alexander Evan Bonus _____________________________________________________

Doctor of Philosophy candidate for the ______________________degree *.

(signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee)

Dr. Mary Davis

________________________________________________

Dr. Daniel Goldmark Dr. Peter Bennett

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

Dr. Martha Woodmansee

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

(date) _______________________

2/25/2010

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

Copyright 2010 by Alexander Evan Bonus All rights reserved

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 MAELZELS MACHINES: A RECEPTION HISTORY OF MAELZEL, HIS MECHANICAL CULTURE, AND THE METRONOME . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 THE SCIENTIFIC METRONOME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

II.

III.

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

FIGURES Figure 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.7. 1.8. 1.9. 1.10. 1.11. 1.12. 1.13. 1.14. 1.15. 1.16. 1.17. 1.18. 1.19. 1.20. 1.21. 1.22. 1.23. 3.1. 3.2. Johann Nepomuk Hummels pulse-sense diagram, 1828 John Wall Callcotts weighted-accent notation, 1810 & 1817 Khlers rhythmical genealogy Riemanns graphical-rhythmical notations, 1884 Groves Accent in music of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, 1879 Gottfried Webers revulsive sensation of rhythm Joshua Steeles accents, 1779 Liszts a-rhythmical melody in Christus Tempo dimbroglio examples from Haydn and Beethoven Detail of the autograph manuscript, Beethovens Op. 111 Steeles invisible accents in duple and triple meters Caccinis 1602 instructions on gestural, rhythmical embellishment Christianis non-metronomic, falling rhythmical gesture Matthesons poetical notation, 1735 & 1874 Christianis correlation between and musical rhythm page 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 32 35 39 41 52 53 56 57

Poetical-musical gestures interpreted in Beethovens and Mozarts music 58 Czernys bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time Caccinis bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time Interpretations of eighteenth-century rubato from Trks Klavierschule Czernys four different ways of interpretation for his Andante An example of Hauptmanns rhythmical schemas Christianis example of confused music notation Christianis example of improved rhythmical notation The Greenwich Chronograph Mercury contact metronome, 1884 60 61 65 68 71 74 78 187 202

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Figure 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 4.9. 5.1. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9. 6.10. 6.11. 6.12. Mercury contact metronome, 1888 MIT observatory chronograph, 1900 Wilhelm Wundts electro-magnetic metronome Apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables Ebhardts chronographic piano-apparatus, 1898 Ebhardts chronographic record of rhythmic passages Scriptures chronographic testing of a gymnast-subject Scriptures chronographic testing of a conductor-subject Scriptures Measuring the Simultaneity in Actions of a Piano-player Scriptures chronographic record of a pianists performance Scriptures interpretation of a non-metronomic performance practice Sears chronographic data underneath a notated Hymn, 1902 Seashores metronomic, musical-memory test, 1919 Liddells soundproof Animal Room, 1926 Landing of Metronome and Sub-division in Shedlocks Music-land General Metronome, King Harmony, and the Court of Music-land Watsons gymnastics studio performs The Indian Club Race, 1864 Example of Albert Ross Parsons musical-gymnastic exercises, 1886 Teachers Pocket Metronome, advertisement in Etude, c1890s Detail, Tests and Measurements in Child Study, 1901 Zeckwer Metronome, U.S. Patent #360,550 U.S. metronome patent #923,094 by C. A. White & E. R. Hunter, 1908 Standard ergograph for endurance tests, 1914 Jaques-Dalcrozes reinvented time-signature notation Example of Jaques-Dalcrozes Eurhythmics exercises Jules Amars chronographic work-fatigue experiment, 1918

page 202 206 215 219 268 270 274 275 279 280 281 301 319 349 368 370 375 384 402 411 416 422 434 445 446 452

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Figure 6.13. 6.14. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. 7.6. Apparatus for Testing the Aptitude of Keyboard Operators, 1926 U.S. Patent #1,496,258, Music Time Indicator, 1923 Jaques-Dalcrozes Eurhythmics students perform an exercise, 1913 Two of Bartks folk-music transcriptions in manuscript, 1906 Historical reconstruction of Bartks music room, c1940 Walt Disneys apparatus for recording movie soundtracks, 1931 Two scenes from Walt Disneys Music Land, 1935 Man Rays Object Indestructible, 1923-1975

page 453 461 472 478 480 524 526 537

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TABLES Table 4.1 4.2 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 page 294 294

Preface: Convergences In Time Temporality and the elements intrinsic to temporalitywhich include duration, instant, movement, speed, pulse, and rhythmare 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 centurieswithout 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 Houles 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 twentiethcentury 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 questionWhat 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 2

See Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953).

See George Houle, Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Stephen Heflings Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Music (New York: Schirmer, 1993) and Richard Hudsons 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. 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). vii
3

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 Kuhns coinage,4 a modern paradigm shift towards positivism, alongside the positivistic, scientific treatments of time and mechanical measurement in general. In the 1940s 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 individualsalthough 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 societys evergrowing 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 Galisons

See this influential science history, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Third Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 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). 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).
6 5

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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 closelyand 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 centuryseldom challenged within the self-vindicating culture of some academic disciplineswhich he considers to be problematic and incommensurate when compared to subjective, sensory experience.8 These science historians assessments of a twentiethcentury 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

See Lorraine Datson and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

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.

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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 objectivitywhich often mistakes metronomic data and regulation for absolute composer intentionconspicuously 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 Schindlers 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 Taruskins observations compelling and justified, however, this dissertation might afford more concrete evidence as to why performance practices of our dayfor both Classical and early-music genresoften sound so radically different in tempo than those from a even century prior.

See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Where cultural histories are concerned, this dissertation takes as a model Stephen Kerns 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 broadranging 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

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 Hickoks 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.

10

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Development of its Philosophic Meaning.12 Since much importance is placed on primarysource 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-twentiethcentury musicone 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).

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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 individuals pulse was considered of the greatest precision, in which a musicians 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 Maelzels 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 pedagoguesintimately aware of the pre-metronomic ontology of musical time analyzed in Chapter Oneoffered ominous and damning assessments of Maelzels mechanical-performance culture, one that eventually sprouted throughout the industrializing world. As documented in following chapters, Maelzels once-uncustomary metronome would eventually stimulate

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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 composers 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: Maelzels metronome. This single inventiona 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 elsewere first actively applied to musicians and

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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 dissertationthat 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, latenineteenth-century laboratory scientists engendered a radically new meaning, practice, and tradition of musical rhythm for the modern twentieth centurya metronomic tradition that, as Chapters VI and VII document, some highly influential twentiethcentury 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. Maelzels 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

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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 scientificindustrial 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

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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.

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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 machinesand Johann Maelzels metronome most conspicuouslyover 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-cultures increasing reliance on metronomes. This history explains how scientific methodologies and machinespromoting metronomic time above all elsewere 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 composerswith their precision-oriented beliefs in metronomic time and rhythmeventually 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. xviii

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 ladys 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 makingnot to mention speaking, acting, and dancingbore little active relationship to the second-bysecond clicks of a mechanical time reference. Perhaps due to modern societies overriding reliance on temporal precisionin which time is indistinguishable from clocks, clockwork, and the base-60 numerical scaleShakespeares 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,

minutes, or especially seconds, as referenced through the silent sundial, sandglass, or typical Renaissance town clocka 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 houra common pre-Industrial problem in the darkness of nighthe was justifiably offended by Malvolios remarks. With clear ambivalence towards the clock, Tobys 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 Shakespeares 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

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.

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 practicesI 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 measurementsthese are the exclusive temporal values of modern science, industry, and educationa 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 cultures faith in temporality, one that alters over the ages. Indeed, knowing the time whether the time of day or the time of musicis 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 cultures time, unconsciously and

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 societieswhether conscious of it or notbelieve 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-PositioningSystem 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

See Peter Galison, Einsteins Clocks, Poincars 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. 4

gnomons, quadrants, sextants, sundials, sandglasses, water clocks, and bell towers all successfully told various species time throughout historymarking 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 culturesmany of which were readily trusted well through the nineteenth centurythe 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 individuals heartbeat, moving hand, or foot. Before the metronome, the time of music was definitively selfreferential. 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, andmost importantly for the present studyphysical activities. To a great extent, time tellers make an individuals 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 timewhatever 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-tellerswith all of the importance they hold in the growth of

civilizationscontrastingly 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 societys increasingly precision-oriented time culture as an intolerable chronarchy.3 And regardless of the rising levels of precision in time keeping, this hegemonyin which external machines redefine internal perceptions and consequent actionshas 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 timetelling, one that applies directly to metronomes: With increasing mechanical-temporal

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. 6

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 temporalitythe time Plautus understood before the sundial and Sir Toby before the clockhas 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 faithfor both the day and musicrested 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

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 timesconceptually or practicallywith past or nonindustrialized 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 proportionalityand by extension, tempo, pulse, and rhythmas 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 performers 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 Mumfords often-cited assertion holds truethe

See notably, Eugne Borrel, Les indications metronomiquesdu XVIIIe sicle, Revue de musicology T.9c (1928): 149-153; and R. E. M. Harding, Origins of Musical Time and Expression (London: Oxford University Press, 1938).

primary tool of modern civilization is the clock6I 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

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.

performance context. True musical time is best sought through an intellectual and cultural history untainted by modern temporal valuesand 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 methodologythe seemingly objective, scientific act of temporal translationwhich assumes that wristwatches, wall clocks, and metronomes tell the same time as historic sundials, sandglasses, public clocks, or the individuals 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

10

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 sandglassesnot to mention nineteenth-century clockwork metronomeshad 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. Diderots Encyclopdie 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 airduring each barwhich was most often related by French or Italian words. It is significant to note that the Encyclopdie defines another mouvement, that of rhetoric, as it concerns the fluctuating passions and emotions elicited through skillful oration.7

Encyclopdie, Vol. 10, 842. Mouvement, s. m. en Musique, est le degr de vtesse ou de lenteur qu'on donne la mesure selon le caractere de l'air. Le mouvement s'exprime ordinairement par les mots gai, vte, grave, lent, &c. ou par les mots italiens allegro, presto, grave, adagio, &c. qui leur correspondent. Voyez tous ces mots.

11

The early Encyclopdia Britannica (1778-83)which owes much of its musical content to the Encyclopdiealso 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 times8all 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 timeperfectly regulated by human movement and sensationwas not the equality of mechanical timeperfectly regulated by redundant tick-tock clockwork. Confirming the distinction, the Encyclopdia Britannica presents an entirely separate discussion of Time Keepers for finding the Longitude, highlighting John Harrisons 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

Encyclopdia 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.

12

military requirements. A supplement for insufficient onboard astronomical readings, Harrisons state-of-the-art chronometer was intended for naval activities far from the values, contexts, and conceptions of eighteenth-century musical performers.10 Harrisons 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 rhythmsalongside harmonies, melodies, ornaments, and gesturesof musical action, skilled performers willfully created musical temporality. This chapteran introduction to this modern history of rhythm, metronomes, and musicalityreveals 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. 13

On the Pre-Metronomic Pulse-Sense From 1600-1900, music treatises and references such as the eighteenth-century Encyclopdie and Encyclopdia 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 proportionalitythe 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.

14

In his 1618 treatise Compendium Musicae, the young philosopher Ren Descartes explained a time that was similarly conceived by Shakespeares 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 earif 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 figureif modern, objective standards of mechanical-temporal addition were applied. Descartes explained that the sonic experience of pulse defined both musical

12

Ren Descartes, Compendium Musicae (Ms., 1618; Utrecht: Jansson, 1650); translation by Walter Robert ([Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), 13. Ibid.

13

15

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 phenomenonset apart from notation, mechanics, and physicsthat 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 mans existence with his profound ability to intellectualize, ironically also linked mans 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 agesthat 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. Ibid.

15

16

For over three centuries, descriptions nearly identical to Descartes expose this sensory, subjective reality of musical time. The eighteenth-century Chambers Cyclopdiafor which Charles Burney wrote many of the musical entriesnoted: 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 Shakespeares 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 2meter], or on the two following times [in a 3-meter]which in fact gives definiteness, 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 rhythmwe 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, Cyclopdia: 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>. 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.

17

Adolph Bernhard Marx, General Musical Instruction (Allgemeine Musiklehre), trans. by George Macirone (London: J. Alfred Novello, 1854), 120.

18

17

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, pulsationformed 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, mesure, 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.

Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The Principles of Expression in Pianoforte Playing (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 33.
21

20

Time, in George Grove, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. IV (London: MacMillan and Co., 1889), 120, n3.

18

Yet in all these verbal descriptions, it becomes evident that this rhythmical sense of pulsation, stress, or emphasis was not explicit in notationit was an assumed element of musical proportion that resided off the page, and only actualized in performance. The eighteenth-century Encyclopdia 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 Groves 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 ensembles 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 timeistpedagogues and

22

Time, Encyclopdia Britannica, 8613. Emphasis added. Beat, Grove I (1879), 158. Emphasis added.

23

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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 Cyclopdia; or, Universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature this innate rhythmical sense was recognized since antiquity: Rhythmwas 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 Lafontaines 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

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. See Abraham Rees, Rhythm, The cyclopdia; 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 25

24

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.

20

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 innateand pre-metronomicsense 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

Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, an Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London: T. Payne, 1779), 67.
28

27

Steele, 20. 21

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 timeists rhythmical feeling preceded mechanical rules or references. In his Ausfhrlich 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.

22

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, Ausfhrlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, volume 1 (Wein: Tobias Haslinger, 1828), 62-63.

It is significant to note that Hummels explication of musical weight, accent, and the beating of time bares no relationship to his instructions on the metronomemainly derived from the Maelzels own wordsthat appears towards the very end of the

23

composers 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 Hummels important musical-time examples, Callcotts 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 accentnot 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. 24

Intimately aware of the insufficiencies when relating the feeling of musical pulse to notated rhythms, Christiani cited Khlers rhythmical-notational interpretations, in which the traditional, sensory hierarchy of accents was likened to a husband-wife relationship, extended through a rhythmic genealogy of sortswith subdivided offspring.

Figure 1.3. Khlers 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,

25

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 Riemanns 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.

26

Figure 1.5. Further depictions of the weighted pulse-sense in measured music. From the entry Accent in Groves 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.

27

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 dynamicswhen placed on naturally weak beatswere often rhythmical impositions, false accentuations that destroyed the metrical feeling (that sometimes were intended by the composer). In Webers 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:

28

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 sensorytemporal 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 nonverbal 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.

29

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 eighteenthcentury Encyclopdia Britannica criticized Rousseaus 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. See Time, Encyclopdia Britannica, 8613.

32

30

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 motionIf 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. Ibid., 118-119.

34

31

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 Liszts 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, Groves 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 Liszts Christus and other a-rhythmical excerpts, in which no rhythm or accent was consistently decipherable, the

35

Grove, I (1879), 15. See Rhythm, Grove, IV (1889), 123.

36

32

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 5/4a 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 sensationsnot precise, metronomic calculationsgrounded 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 beatslacking 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 tripleduple, duple-triple, a quintuple with initial accent, or as a uniformly monotonous quintuple without an initial accentwhich negated the purpose of the time signature to

Ibid. An acquaintance of the composer, Walter Damrosch attested that Liszts influence for Christus was the flowing rhythmical qualities of non-metrical Gregorian chant. See Walter Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1923), 49-50.
38

37

Steele, 128.

33

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 prophesizedfor a musical culture pre-dating ubiquitous metronomic referencesthose 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 weirdnessthe unrhythmicalnessof 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 quintles, 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 quintle or septole division is very sensibly felt.)41 Beyond uncustomary meters, the composers 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 timecommon to all measured musicthat could be thwarted for specific emotional-temporal effects. John Wall

39

Weber, 105. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 107.

40

41

34

Callcott described the embroiled style, in which the prevailing pulse sensation overrode the time signatureand 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 composers (not the performers) 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 dimbrogliothe revulsive displacement of the traditional, nonnotated pulse-sensation. Above, a Haydn minuet, reprinted in Webers A universal dictionary of musical terms, 49. Below, A passage from Beethovens Third Symphony reprinted in Christiani, 72. Weber alternatively considered Haydns 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.

35

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 impliedbut seldom notatedin 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-perminute 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 composers most challenging later-period works. Additional guidance seemed warranted, sinceas his creativity demandedBeethoven intentionally obscured or thwarted the metrical accent, the implied and expected pulse-sense, altogether through techniques such as imbroglio,

44

Christiani, 72.

36

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 Shne in December 1826, admitting such things [metronome markings] are certainly necessaryWe can scarcely have any more tempi ordinari, for one must follow the ideas of unfettered genius.46 Indeed, Beethovens 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 necessarybut still incompleteaid 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 composers realizations of a metronomic necessityfrom Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee, who attested to the temporal confusion engendered by some of Beethovens latest works. Wartensee reports that within the variations of Beethovens 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,

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 dun 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. 37

45

the second variation, which you designated 12/16 [actually 6/16]and wrote listesso 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 listesso 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 listesso 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 Wartensees. Yet, even with Beethovens occasional statements in support of the beats-per-minute scale, contradictory evidence abounds in the practice and publication of Beethovens 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 Shne that the metronomic numbers were now certainly necessary for music that extended beyond an ordinary pulse-sense, the majority of Beethovens 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).

38

affect words while failing to offer such necessary mechanical markings. In the end, Beethoven never answered Wartensees 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 Beethovens 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 Beethovens 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 accentlikely alluding to Beethovens 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 Beethovens 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 movementsfew among [Beethovens] compositions and suggested these display mechanical effects opposite to those based upon sentiment and expression. See Schindler, ed. Moscheles, 130, 107-108, 120. 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).

50

39

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 thatif given a lengthy series of quarter notes without a notated time signaturethey would instinctually perceive the proportional pulse of arsis and thesisagain without any visual guidance. Steele, like Descartes, Weber, Marx, and Christiani, described a rhythmical sensation, an instinctive sense51 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, Steeles 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.

40

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. Steeles 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 processthe time of Shakespeares 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. Steeles 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 composers 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.

41

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 relatedand before the metronome helped redefine the musical measure with mechanical consistencyrhythmical feeling trumped rhythmical notation. Prior to Maelzels 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 Steeles 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 referencecertainly practiced since the Renaissancemade 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 performanceand that all duple or triple meters should sound as suchthe 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:

42

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 agreeit 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 Christianis publication, Maelzels 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 Christianis 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 runningsuch 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.

43

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 signaturesindicate 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:

Michel de Saint Lambert, Principles of the Harpsichord (Paris, 1702), translated and edited by Rebecca Harris-Warrick (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 44.
55

54

Ibid.

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Trait de l'harmonie reduite ses principes naturels, livre second (Ballard: Paris, 1722), 150.

56

44

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 Loulis 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 chronomtre of Louli] 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:

Rameau, Trait de l'harmonie, translated by Philip Gossett (New York: Dover Publications [1971]), 197-8. Johann Joachim Quantz, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flte 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 58

57

Ibid., 289. 45

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 heartbeatreference of musical tempo displayed a high degree of variability, regardless of the performers 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. Ibid., 288. Ibid.

61 62

46

metronomefar from it, as the nearly contemporaneous Encyclopdia 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 arterieswith 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 pulseThe 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 melancholicIn children, the pulse is quick and soft; in adults, greater and more violent. In the old, it is commonly great, hard, and slowIntense 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 heartbeateven the stable, jovial, or healthy pulseto 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 makingan inconceivable practice for Quantz in any case:

63

See Encyclopdia Britannica, 6534-6535.

47

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, Quantzs temporal epistemologydespite the assertions of some twentieth-century scholarswas never metronomic, or transferable to metronomic standards; he never suggested that a clicking machine defined musical pulse or the rhythm of each musical measureeither 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 pieceis 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. Ibid., 289.

65

48

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 Quantzs 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.

49

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 techniquesspecific to various repertoires, nations, and erascannot 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. 50

definitively, accurately, or absolutely be told through clockwork time, or beats-perminute 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 performanceand most opposed mechanical inventionswhile 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.

51

tempered through the interpreters 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 performers willful, musical gestures altered even the simplest of notated rhythmical passages for the sake of variationpractices extending well beyond Descartes fundamental descriptions of pulse-sense.

Figure 1.12. Caccinis 1602 instructions on gestural, rhythmical embellishment. Transcribed and translated in Strunks 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. 52

Caccinis 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 breathneither of which imply mechanical precisionrelated 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-calculableand nonmetronomicgestures extended well through the nineteenth century. Compare, for instance, Caccinis instructions (Fig. 1.12) to Christianis striking similar examples that expose improvised, gestural falls and breaths in the new music of his century:70

Figure 1.13. Christianis 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 nonmathematical and non-metronomic. From Christiani, 157.

Also see Christiani, 174-175, for additional performance instructions that expose greater inconsistencies between notation and the performance of nuanced, gestural rhythms.

70

53

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, selfreferential 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 Encyclopdia 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 attainedthe 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.

54

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 mesure 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 notationfurther 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 Encyclopdia 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-weighta pathetic accentrequired for the graceful mouvement of the melody.

72

Music, Encyclopdia Britannica, 43-44, n4. 55

Figure 1.14. Matthesons poetical notation for expressing the many nuances of musical movement. Originally from Kern melodischer Wissenschafft (Hamburg: C. Herold, 1735) and reprinted in Lussy, Trait de l'expression musicale, Deuxime dition (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 Franois Couperin to assert for the French-style compositions of his age: In my opinion, there are defects in our method of writing musicwe 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

Franois Couperin, L'art de toucher le clavecin (1717), translated by Margery Halford (Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Pub. Co., 1995), 49.
74

73

See Daniel Gottlob Trks Klavierschule, oder, Anweisung zum Klavierspielen fr Lehrer und Lernende: mit kritischen Anmerkungen (Reprint, Leipsig und Halle: Auf Kosten des Verfassers, in Kommission bey Schwickert, 1802), in which Trk interprets the various ways to perform ornaments and graces in late-eighteenth-century keyboard music by C. P. E. Bach, Mozart, 56

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. Christianis 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 Mozarts and Beethovens thematic structures, further suggesting the long-standing traditions connecting musical time, accent, and phrase to poetic meters and spoken inflections.

Clementi, and others. 57

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 notationswhich were employed in education through the late nineteenth-century and were occasionally printed in periodicals such as Etude magazinehint 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

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).

75

58

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 Burmeisters 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 compositionsand likely performance practicesat least since the sixteenth-century Italian madrigalists such as Verdelot and Arcadelt.) As Diderots Encyclopdie 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

While Burmeisters musical-rhetoric concerned compositional techniques, often as they related to text, it seems highly plausible thatin an age of self-referential musical timethey extended to performance practices as well.
77

76

See Encyclopdie, Vol. 10: 842: Mouvement, ou motion, en Rhtorique. Voyez Passion.

59

notation that he analyzed a living interpretation, bar by bar, in terms of rhetorical movements and effects.

Figure 1.17. A passage from Czernys 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 Caccinis Le nuove musiche, a treatise that documented performance aesthetics nearly identical to Christianis Principles of Expression.

60

Figure 1.18. A passage from Caccinis bar-by-bar performance analysis of rhetorical-musical time from 1602. Transcribed and translated in Strunks 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 performers 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

61

elses 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 accenta 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 recitativelike passages in other genres projected a subjective time that was decidedly nonmechanical in concept, sentiment, and practice.

Reprinted, translated, and edited in Strunks Source readings in music history, ed. Leo Treitler (New York: Norton, 1998), 631. Moritz Hauptmann, The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, edited by Alfred Schne and Ferdinand Hiller, translated by A.D. Coleridge, Volume II (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., and Richard Bentley and Son, 1892), 252. 62
79

78

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 fancyotherwise 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 rubatoas musical-temporal fluctuation or variationwas 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 Czernys contemporary Marx thought tempo rubato originated in French and Italian vocal performancesboth sacred and secularfrom 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 Its Won (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1909).

63

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 Pergolesis Stabat Mater) Beethoven had nothing in common; he followed entirely the inner impetusthe demand of the thingwhen he resorted to free movement.81 As Marxs discourse on rubato relates, one musicians theft of time is another musicians freedom from time. By the end of the nineteenth century, pedagogue Franz Kullak recounted Schindlers definition of free interpretation, once heard in Beethovens 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 Beethovens 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.

Quoted in Franz Kullak, Beethovens 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.

82

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understood by tempo rubato.83 Nevertheless, Kullak suggested that the stolen time described by Trk and C. P. E. Bach might hold an answer to the eighteenth-century interpretive practices. Kullak recounted that Trks tempo rubato comprised varieties of voice separationadditionally 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 Trk, Klavierschule, Chapter, IV, Sect. 5, 72. Reprinted in Franz Kullak, Beethovens 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 Christianis 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. Christiani, 299.

84

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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 timebeyond the sensory foundations of pulse, accent, and meterwas 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 Pilkingtons 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 Pilkingtons 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, giustothe strict adherence to the metric pulsewas a no more necessary or implied performance practice than rubato. Each was used according to the musical circumstance, the composers occasionally explicit indications, and ultimately the performers self-referential and rhetorical sense of

85

Ibid. Pilkington, 75. Ibid.

86

87

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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 Pilkingtons 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 Christianis 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. Ibid., 261.

89

Ibid., 263. See also page 300 for Christianis warning that neither technique should be overdone.

90

67

could define living expressions, feelings, or scientific judgmentsall 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 composers 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. Czernys 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.

Beethoven stated as much, as Marx relates: In the autograph copy of the song Nord oder Sd there is distinctly written in Beethovens hand, 100 according to Mlzel; 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

91

Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, 74.

68

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 composers own works. Thus he too confirmed the necessary, underlying subjectivity of musical time:

See Rameau, Trait de l'harmonie, livre second, 161: Chaque caractere & chaque passion ont leur mouvement particulier; mais cela dpend puls du got que des Regles.
94

93

Christiani, 159-160.

69

Every singer imparts, though unconsciously, the coloring of his own individual character to the dramatic character which he sustains. Thus two singerswill give the same composition in a manner widely differentand 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 checka 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 Hauptmanns letter to his mentor Ludwig Spohr on December 1, 1842: We had a wonderfully good performance of your Weihe der Tne in the Gewandhaus the other day. It is a favourite Symphony with our audiences here, and you yourself would have been delightedthe 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 accentrecognized 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. Ibid. Hauptmann, 193.

96

97

70

both composer intention and Hauptmanns own speculative rhythmic schemas. Even for Hauptmann, living gestures presided over perfect symmetries.98

Figure 1.21. One example of Hauptmanns 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

Groves 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 expressionas opposed to the inevitable Accents described in the forgoing articlewith a precision which no educated musician ever failed to understand; and this with an effect so marked, that, when even Ferdinand Davida Conductor of no ordinary abilitytook 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. 71

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 Paderewskiin which variable human movement was not considered temporal thieverywhen 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 indicatedThis 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.

72

performance of French music, Christiani likewise concluded there was an old looseness in rhythmic notation100 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 carelessRhythmic 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 performers 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. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 55. Ibid., 91. 73

101

102

103

Figure 1.22. Above, Christianis example of confused music notation that obscures the performers 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 Chopins melodic gestures. Note that Christiani adds no metronome marks in the revision, only the emotional word agitato. See Christiani, 89.

Marxthe theorist who codified Sonata formalso attested that the individuals rhythmical sense must transcend a servile adhesion to the written directions.104 Thus, he strongly championed skilled performing artists of his age, becausesimilar to compelling actorsthey 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.

74

We have given and proved howall 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 Couperins realizations from the early eighteenth century, the music researcher, editor, and composer Camille Saint-Sans discussed the peculiarities of eighteenth-century performance practicesprimarily citing the Frenchstyle vocal music of Handel and Rameauin which sight and sound often failed to align. Saint-Sans keenly perceived a significant shift in rhythmical conception during his age: In these days music is written almost exactly as it should be performedIn former times, the arithmetical value of the notes was not taken into account as it is nowadaysthere 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 professora 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. Ibid., 257.

106

Camille Saint-Sans, 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.

107

75

Saint-Sans 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-Sanss assertion: rhythmic notations were read in a more mathematical, positivistic light in their day, especially for instrumental compositions, which now offered editorialized dynamics, articulations, phrasingswith revised rhythms as well. As Christiani documents by the last decades of the nineteenth-century, music publicationsin part catering to the wave of amateur consumer-musiciansleft 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.

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what Saint-Sans 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 laxity110 of rhythmical notation upholding the old ad libitum style of interpretation.111 With the trend towards precision-oriented editorial standardsseen through more meticulously subdivided rhythmical notationscame the loss of the interpreters 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. Ibid. Ibid., 53. 77

110

111

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 Blow. Articulations, trills, phrasings, and proportional tempo equivalencebut not metronome marksare 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 thesealongside a newfound, anachronistic adherence to metronome indicationswere 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 definitenesshow, 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

See Edgar F. Jacques, The Composers Intention, in Proceedings of the Musical Association, 18th Sess. (1891 - 1892): 42. 78

112

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 Christianis 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 editors 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 performers 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 rhythmicalnotational assistance, continuing, those who are not so far advanced and their number

113

Christiani, 61. Ibid., 55.

114

79

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 educators 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 editors 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 deliveryin 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. Ibid., 61.

117

80

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, foras only experience could provelifeless things did not regulate the many nuances of rhythmical expression for skilled musicians. As over three centuries of knowledgeable performers, composers, and theorists relate, metronomesthose timedictating machines, simple or complexconsistently failed to offer sufficient, meaningful answers to the nuances of rhythm, tempo, accent, or meter. By historical accountsby historical temporal valuesmechanical 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.

Edward Dickinson, The Education of a Music Lover (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1911), 118-120.

118

81

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 persons variable heartbeat could judge the hour of day.119 As science historians are well aware, the isochronismor equal-swinging qualityof 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 Galileos day, apparently for both music performances and empirical observation. Informed by Galileos 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.

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.

120

82

The tactusthe movement of the hand itselfas 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 timekeeping machines, self-referential standards remained for many the most precise and reliable references available, well through the eighteenth century. Etienne Louli, the inventor121 of the first seemingly practical tempo machine, the chronomtre, also acknowledged the preeminence of human interpretation, and suggested that his six-foot simple pendulum, which he promoted in his 1696 treatise Elments ou principes de musique, was an still an approximation of the initial human tactusa reference especially necessary for the new and foreign music of his day. In Elments, Louli explains the chronomtre 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 Encyclopdia Britannica realizedover 150 years after Mersenne and nearly a century after Loulis Elementsthat the self-referential tempo

121

As early-modern inventor, Louli promoted a design and description based largely on Mersennes tempo-pendulum theories. He did not manufacture the chronomtre for distribution or sale. Etienne Louli, Elments ou principes de musique, trans. and ed. Cohen (New York: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1965), 85. (Italics mine.) Louli assumes the composer-performer to be the primary dictator of tempos.

122

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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 Encyclopdia 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 Tansur, in a telling irony, defined objective pendulum swings using astoundingly apt comparisons:

123

Time, Encyclopdia Britannica, 8613.

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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 guidewhether it was a pendulum swing or a clockwork clickwas 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 chronomtre

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

124

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Beating of Time, translated in Appendix to Grassineaus Musical dictionary, selected from the Dictionnaire de musique of J. J. Rousseau (London: J. Robson 1769), 6.

85

was an ineffectual substitute, Hector Berlioz similarly described the proper use of Maelzels clockwork metronomethe first widely promoted and produced tempo referenceas a mere, mechanized reflection of a more perfect living sense. Like the late eighteenth-century chronomtre, 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 saythat 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 composers recognition that neither the metronome, nor any machine, was a regulator of subjective musical time, misconceptions in the use of the machine abounded during Berliozs 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 directorswith meager musical abilitieswould be more likely correspond to the tempo of onstage performers. Such use of Maelzels metronome was uncommon, and Berlioz admits that not many French opera companies employed his suggestions. 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 Hummels and Maelzels own instructions.

127

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performance adhered strictly to the beatas the term guisto impliedtempo 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. Marx, General Music Instruction, 33.

129

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 indicationBut 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 87

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 executants or directors] 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 machinesthe timekeepers of science, industry, and travelas musical references, since the sensory qualities of rhythm, pulse, and proportionthe wavy outline of musical timeconsistently 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. Ibid. C. M. von Weber, 220.

132

133

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stiffness of clockwork. Affirmations of these human-temporal qualities even appeared in middle-class America, in magazines such as Churchs 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] Beethovenplayed his compositions differently every time.135 It seems that this practice of unfettered rhythmic interpretationbeyond notation, beyond mathematically precise readings, beyond metronomeswas 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 sometimesvery nearly an Allegro; on the other hand, it is often to be

134

[Article 1, no title], Churchs Musical Visitor, January 1882, 102; http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed March 13, 2007). Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, 68.

135

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played Adagio.136 Metronomic indications, according to Ignaz Moschelesan important metronomiser of Beethovens published musicwere never to be employed as objective dictators for the living interpretation of Beethovens compositions. In his 1841 edition of Schindlers 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 variationsThe 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 Rousseauthe 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 Europes largest compendium of knowledge to-date, under the heading Chronometer:

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.
137

136

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), 111fn.

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The connoisseurs in musicobjectto 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 Rousseaus 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 Loulis short-lived simple pendulum design from the late seventeenth century, Rousseaus 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 Grassineaus 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. Rousseau, trans. Grassineau,10-11. 91

139

abilities of the skilled timeist. Yet, as twentieth-century culture attests, Rousseaus assertion did not hold forever; eventually Maelzels 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 performanceas following chapters showRousseaus 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 cultures now overwhelming familiarity with metronomes attests, tempo-machines did not keep to themselves.

The Pulse and the Pendulum in Nineteenth-Century Traditions As Rousseaus critiques allude to, a limited chronomtre traditionfor which twentieth-century performance-practice scholars such as Borrell, Harding, Sachs, and Schwant consider the origins of a modern clockwork metronome traditionfollowed Loulis pendulum design through published writings by French Academy of Science members Joseph Sauveur and Comte dOnzembray, and only one contemporaneous French music publication, Michel LAffilards (1656-1708) fifth edition of Principes

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trs-faciles (1705).140 Yet, if Loulis 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 Systme general des intervalles des sons (1701), Sauveurs improvement of the chronomtrewhich replaced Loulis nonstandardized pendulum ruler with a scale for astronomical inches most familiar to clock builders and Academy membersfollowed the trends of seventeenth-century pendulum scientists, most notably Galileo Galilei and Christiaan Huygens. As such, Sauveurs revised time-scale for the six-foot tempo-pendulum design was more speculative than practical, especially since Joseph Sauveur himself, as sources thorough the nineteenthcentury 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 peoples voice and ears.142 Nevertheless, even Sauveur, with his limited practical or sensory knowledge of musical tone and time, recognized that the chronomtrewhen marked with precise astronomical incheswas still not a clockwork astronomical regulator, but a more limited

Many of the vocal compositions found in LAffilards fifth edition of Principes trs-faciles (1705) were revised versions of his previous edition (1701), which contained no tempo-pendulum indications. (LAffilards fourth edition appeared five years after Louli published the chronomtre design.) LAffilards works are airs de cour representative of the time. As skilled French musicians may have recognizedand as Loulis own indications suggestthese airs do not seem in particular need of pendulum numbers, since they were neither foreign nor unusual in style, meter, or sentiment.
141

140

John Henry Pepper, Cycolpaedic Science Simplified (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1869), 514.

Charles Hutton, A philosophical and mathematical dictionary, volume II (London: Printed for the author, 1815), 357.

142

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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 tempotools, including the chronomtre, 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 Webers recognitionthat eighteenth-century proto-metronomes, including Loulis chronomtre, had heretofore failed in theory and practiceseems 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 Chronomtres of Monsieur Louli, 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. G. Weber, General music teacher, 74.

144

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failed of success. 145 The apparent failure of eighteenth-century tempo machinesnot only of Loulis chronomtre 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 practicesand 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 simplependulum metronome, fitted with Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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.

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and the early Encyclopdia Britannica denied the practicality of the pendulum and chronomtre, some nineteenth-century theorists and pedagogues reconsidered the role of older technology in practice, claiming that Maelzels new beats-per-minute scale was best measured, not by Maelzels new and expensive metronome, but by a far less complicated swinging penduluma basic machine first discounted by Mersenne in the 1630s and later championed by Louli 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 [Maelzels] 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.

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mechanical-temporal precisions, as he encouraged students to construct a simple tempopendulum: 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 Maelzels standardized beats-perminute scale was helpful, Weber considered that the usefulness, accessibility, and convenience of his own methods made Maelzels 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, Mlzel 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 [mtres], or whatever else, as a measure; for, a piece of music thus marked, carries with

147

Ibid., 76.

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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 Louli in the late seventeenth century; discounted by Quantz, Rousseau, and the Encyclopdia Britannica in the late eighteenth century; and only reconsidered in 1813. Between the lifetimes of Mersenne and Weberand despite Maelzels new and obscure inventionvery 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 Marxs contemporary, the French pedagogue and musical conservative Franois-Joseph Ftis (1784-1871),

148

Ibid.

Marx, The universal school of music, 83. In a footnote to the page, Marxs 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.)

149

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while one of the most prominent champions of Maelzels clockwork metronome in the early nineteenth century, too realized that chronometers of the [simple pendulum] kindhave the double advantage of being simple in their construction, and of trifling expense.150 Many pedagogues over the nineteenth century attested that the simple pendulumas a reference to the living, musical pulsewas 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 musicthus 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 timeit 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 metronomea bob with a retractable tape-measurerclosely followed the concept of Webers chronometer. Tufts The Cecilian series of study and song (1892) reports:

Franois-Joseph Ftis, 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, Ftis seems to be unique in stating his preferencein the third decade of the nineteenth centuryfor the clicking Maelzels metronome above various simple-pendulum designs, which contrastingly have the inconvenience of not making sensible to the ear the tick or stroke of time.

150

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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 composers initial tempo indication. John Taylor, in The student's text-book of the science of music, recounted as late as 1876 how the Maelzel metronomea machine far more automatic than the simple pendulumfailed 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 everprompting feelingthe 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 movementthe 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. 100

nineteenth century, most skilled musicians educated in pre-metronomic traditions acknowledged that these long-standing verbal approximationshowever imprecise when compared to standardized mechanical measurementsprovided 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 pedagoguesfrom Descartes to Christiani and beyondall 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 ingale; 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 centuryand 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

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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 existedin various repertoires from respective genres, composers, and national stylesthrough 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 workis beyond words. It is the ultimate perfection of music, accessible only through eminent experience and talent.154 The sensory foundations of musical meterdescribed 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. Quoted from Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953), 321.

154

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invisible accentall 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 agesfrom Descartes to Rameau; Rousseau to Hauptmannthat Adolph Bernhard Marx summarized the vitality of pre-twentieth-century musical time through this longrecognized 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 Marxs ontological definition of rhythm may strike many moderns as flippant, imprecise, and ineffectual; since the twentieth century, Marxs 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. 103

alongside a rigid adherence to such marksfor 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 speedsand with such negligible senses of pulse, weight, or rhetoricthat 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 instrumentalistsfulfilling both judges and their own teachers expectationsmimic exacting gradations of metronomic time, showing how precisely and accurately these applicants consistently maintain tempo indications from music spanning from Beethoven to Mahlereven though Beethovens colleagues and Mahlers 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 pretwentieth 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 swingsso they might accurately translate them to modern, metronomic beats-per-minutewhile all but neglecting the historical knowledge that subjective pulse-senses once guided the

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fundamental qualities of measured musical time. Quantzs meager suggestions to amateurs are treated as scientific proof of precise metronomic tempos, although Quantz knew nothing of Maelzels future metronome and very little of Loulis obscure 1696 Chronomtre. 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 accentthe 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-Warricks translation of Saint-Lamberts Principles of the Harpsichord (1702), stated, Saint Lamberts unit of [tempo] measurement must set a record for vagueness: the step of a man of average height who

156

Sachs, 21. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 173. A similar statement appears on page 201.

157

158

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 beatsvaried 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.

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walks one and a quarter leagues in an hour.160 Considering other historical instructions, Saint Lamberts 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 Crafts modern performance practices. In 2008, New York Times reviewer Bernhard Holland, detesting pianist Lang Langs gestural performance style, suggested that conservatorieshire 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 traininga clockwork time-studyfor 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 efficiencyonly espoused in pedagogy since the turn of the twentieth centuryis 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. 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.

161

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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 machinesa tyranny only suggested by Beethoven and Maelzels vision of selling a clockwork metronome to every village schoolmasterwould 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. Beethovens justification for this potential mechanical imposition: It would be better than to accuse us of feudalism.

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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. Butlers prophecy seemed to culminate in twentieth-century performance culture, in which mechanical precision in musical time is not only commonplaceit 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 regulationsfor the sake of modern performance-precisionbecomes the desirable aesthetic? The result, according to Theodore Adorno, was that individualistic, temporal qualities were very much lost by the mid-twentieth century:

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

163

Dickinson, 118.

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Today there is no music showing any trace of the power of the historical hour that has remained totally unaffected by the decline of experienceby 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 thinginto an object of its own organization.165 The following chapters document how this change first came abouthow machines and mechanical rhythm first became definitive references for once subjective actshow 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

From Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (1948), reprinted in Daniel Albright, ed. Modernism and Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 77. 109

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innate musical perception and mechanical objectivityalongside the results of clockwork dominationwhen 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 IIs personal-temporal crisis foreshadows a reality for twentieth-century performance culture. His once-internal sense of time became externalized, regularized, and mechanizedredundant clockwork time now controlled him, as his own living movements lost their innate meaning and proportion; the monarchs timeswitnessed in the intrinsic and the extrinsichad submitted to the clock. The situation of many modern musicians closely resembles Richard IIs 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 timeno 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 heretoforeunacknowledged paradigm shift: a metronomic turn in which musical time has audibly

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and visibly mechanized. Today, a host of performers, theorists, pedagogues, and musicologists readily profess an allegiance to modern temporal machines and precisionoriented measurements, seemingly unaware that the historical and cultural contexts of time, meter, and rhythmespoused for over three centurieshave 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.

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CHAPTER II: MAELZELS 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, Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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

Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 186.

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given to these qualities, automatical,2 which the widely popular Websters 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 Maelzels 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 Websters 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 Derhams and Sullys 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 earlymodern 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,

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. 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, Rgle artificielle du tems (Paris: Gregoire Dupuis, 1717).
3

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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 selfmoving machine, without life.5 Thus, for Maelzels 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 Maelzels America. The 1828 edition Websters Dictionary did not even define the terms minute6 and second7 with any acknowledgement to clock time. Indeed, Maelzels public found precision-based mechanical time to be uncustomary and unnecessary in daily life. Singlehand civic and church clocks were still regulated by the local time of the sundial each

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 heart2. Intrinsic; real; as the internal rectitude of actionsWebsters Unabridged Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster's (accessed September 20, 2007).

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. Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster's (accessed September 20, 2007).

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. Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1828). Online http://machaut.uchicago.edu/ ?resource=Webster's (accessed September 20, 2007).

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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

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.

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. 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).
10

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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 gentlemens accessory for urban life, Maelzel was a seminal figure in the emerging culture of the machine. As nineteenthcentury readings expose, his self-moving inventionsindeed, all nineteenth-century clockwork machineshad 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, Maelzels metronome directly related to his other clockwork creations; nineteenth-century society perceived the metronome to be just another of Maelzels 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 Maelzels automatical creation. In an often-overlooked statement regarding Maelzels tempo-clock, Beethoven wrote the publisher Bernhard Schotts Shne in 1826:

11

Landes, 304.

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This is to inform you that the quartet was delivered to Frank a week agoThe metronome markings (the deuce take everything mechanical) will follow followfollow12 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 Beethovens 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 Beethovens initialand perhaps indefinite metronomic indications.15 Indeed it seems that the composer often found the machine a

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

12

Adolf Bernhard Marx, Introduction to the Interpretation of Beethoven Piano Works, translated by Fannie Louise Gwinner (Chicago: Clayton F. Summy Co., 1895), 68. Beethovens quote, stemming from Schindlers biography, was often repeated in sources throughout the nineteenth century, including Franz Kullak, Beethovens 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, 116117.

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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 Beethovens music less than two decades after the composers passing.16 Evidence suggests that Beethoven often considered Maelzels 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 Shne on March 1825, my own is ill and has to recover its even steady pulse at the watch-makers.17 Some communications make

Wagner had a similar experience and admitted in ber 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 MetronomeIn 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 (ber 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 performerssubjectivities not under the purview of composers intentions. In response to Liszts 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.

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.

17

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clear that Beethoven, late in life, found metronoming his own music to be a tedious, complicated, and taxing processentirely divorced from his compositional or performance practiceswhen he wrote on May 20, 1826, the metronome marks you will receive in a week by post. It proceeds slowly, as my health requires care18 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 Beethovens deeper musical intentions: Let Beethovens pianoforte 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. Ibid., 465.

19

20

Ibid., 458. From a December 1826 letter to Bernhard Schotts Shne in which Beethoven again related the ex post facto process of metronoming his music: The metronome marks will shortly follow; do wait for them. Schindler, 116.

21

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 cant 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. 119

22

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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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.

Franz Liszt, writing the publishers Breitkopf und Hrtel in 1863, reiterated Beethovens antimetronomic 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 Beethovens words in pronouncing his verdict upon Maelzels metronome when publishing his piano scores of Beethovens 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 Scribners Sons, 1894), 75.

24

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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 Wards 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 facsimilesmere clockwork representations of man or beastnumerous writers defined automata to be anti-human. Ren 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
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. 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 26 25

Ren 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.

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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 landlordherehereis her catalogue of curiositiesIf 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, (17451809) described an automaton as a living imbecile, as one character chides, you act remorse, and feign this pity for / a thingwho, 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. Holcrofts 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).

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). 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).
31

30

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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 (17461826), in his 1785 treatise The conjurer unmasked; or, la magie blanche dvoile: being a clear and full explanation of all the surprizing performances, described Mr. van Estins 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. Estins 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 Kempelens chess player, the famed device Maelzel purchased in Vienna and

Henri Decremps, The conjurer unmasked; or, la magie blanche dvoile: being a clear and full explanation of all the surprizing performances exhibited ... (London: Printed for C. Stalker, 1785), 69.
33

32

Decremps, 97.

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exhibited in America two decades later.34 Automaton shows in American urban centers were not uncommon prior to Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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'galit.... (Philadelphia: s.n., 1795), Early American Imprints, 1st series, no. 29161 (filmed).

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).

36

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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.

Maelzels 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 Europedepended for a livelihood on exhibitions of his mechanical contrivances.38 Moreover, Maelzels notoriety was not due to his inventiveness as much as his entrepreneurialism and showmanship. Indeed, numerous writers contest Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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.

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many of the early automata that Johann exhibited throughout Europe.39 And just as Johann co-opted Winkels metronome, Maelzel merely assumed, copied, or bought many of the renowned automata that became allied with his name. Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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 Maelzels fame as ingenious inventor during his lifetime. An 1827 North American article on the history of Kempelens automaton chess player detailed the latest handlers 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 Johanns 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. See Clarence G. Hamilton, How to Use the Metronome Correctly (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1916), 5.

42

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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 Maelzels least recognized machine. By the end of Maelzels 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 Maelzels curiosities, the metronome accounted for one small portion of his ingenuity. The article noted:

Automaton Chess Player, North American. Or, Weekly Journal of Politics, Science and Literature, May 19, 1827, 1.
44

43

The history of Maelzels reported thievery of Winkels metronome is out of scope for the present survey, but it is well represented in many nineteenth-century music references and Beethoven biographies. 127

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 Rheimsa 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 performerthe 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 Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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 Maelzels oeuvre. The device was eclipsed in a list populated by Maelzels more wondrous mechanical entertainments. A brief pedigree of the metronomepatented in Europeagain 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.

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metronome factory in the United States as he had in France or England. Even after Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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 Maelzels Metronome, The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical Science, Literature and...Feb. 29, 1840, 67. Landes, 344-5.

47

Scientific American, Feb. 21, 1874, 123. The suggestion was made to use Webers simple pendulum as substitute for the clockwork metronome.
49

48

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.

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Magazine, which praised Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels automata, Holmes found the first successful attempts to mimic life in mechanical form.51 Ironically, nearing the end of his own life in

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 inventoraccompanied by a full band of living musiciansIn the Journal des Modes, whence this account is derived, it is declared that the tones produced by Maelzels automaton were even fuller and richer than those got out of a trumpet by human lungs and lips; because mans breath imparts to the inside of the instrument a moisture which deteriorates the quality of the tone. 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 contrivancesTo 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 beingsTo 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 Maelzels 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).
51

50

130

the 1890s, Holmes felt himself automatically imitating Maelzels 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 Maelzels most unassuming clockwork invention, the metronome, to be of primary importance. Explaining why the metronome surpassed Maelzels 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,

Expressing a significant theme that recurs throughout this study, Holmes compared unthinking, habitual behaviors to the actions of Maelzels 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. 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. 131
53

52

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. Maelzels biography from Illustrious Mechanics, which appeared in an 1847 English edition, seems entirely paraphrased by Parker. In Foucauds grandiose estimation, the inventor was destined for the immortal annals of science due to his only useful invention. Yet Foucaud fully acknowledged Maelzels renowned entertainment career, stating, Such are Maelzels 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 forgottenThis 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 inventors name, unless it originated in a barbarous ageMaelzel 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.

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: Bthune 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.

55

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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 Foucauds and Parkers 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
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 performingPeople 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 56

See P. T. Barnum, The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Second edition (London: Ward and Lock, 1855), 58. Recounted in Metzner, 186.

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 Thayers assessment, 133

58

In contrast, John Delafield, in his study Mysticism and its Results; Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy, invoked Maelzels name with the history of public deception. In Delafields 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 Maelzels metronome praised in Delafields 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 juggleryMaelzel'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 Maelzels 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

Maelzels 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.) 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).

60

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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 Maelzels 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
Edgar Allen Poe, Maelzels Chess Player, Southern Literary Messenger II (1836): 318-326. Many scholars consider Poes article to be his nascent attempt to establish the detective-story genre.
62 61

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.

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 Maelzels 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 legislatorsyes, sir, speaker, orators, and all. See Register of Debates in Congress, volume XIV (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1837), col 1441.

63

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As nineteenth-century documents attest, Maelzels 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 Winkels 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels many posthumous visages, his death in 1838 signaled the true downfall of automata-display. Maelzels self-fashioned career was singular in nineteenthcentury culture, and while other mechanical-showmen flourished for a time, no exhibitor

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. 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 65

64

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.

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resonated in the publics imagination like Maelzel. Barnum and other entertainers would employ some of his methods, but Maelzels brand of performance-spectacle was never again repeated. As few heirs to his career followed, Maelzels 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 Philadelphias Chinese Museum in 1854 relegated the mysterious chess player to the status of legend.68 Decimated in WWII, Maelzels gargantuan Panharmonicon always too cumbersome for traveling exhibitionssurvived 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 Maelzels complex and non-duplicable clockwork inventions fell into obscurity, the metronome continued to garner acceptance in the nineteenth century as a tool for childrens music education. Ironically, Maelzels 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 Maelzels machines. Many in this past Western culturethose who prized human volition, variability, and expression above mechanical imitation, replication, and precisionperceived the clockwork
68

Metzner, 188. 137

metronome similarly to all self-moving automata. They understood that Maelzels most lasting machine also lacked the innate, volatile qualities of action and intellect that comprised the very essence of humanity.

Maelzels 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 Maelzels famed automaton trumpeter in similar conceits. The performance and history of the machine is well documented. In 1813, it dbuted as soloist in highprofile benefit concerts that included Beethoven, Hummel, Sphor, and other Viennese musical greats. This hybrid man-machine concert, which included Beethovens Battle Symphony (a work originally intended for Maelzels Panharmonicon), was so profitable that Maelzel and the trumpeter traveled across Europe, replicating the performancespectacle with other live orchestras. During the trumpeters premiere performances in London, listeners recognized both Maelzels mechanical ingenuity alongside the machines 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 Maelzels reputation as inventor of the metronome, the British reviewer proclaimed of Maelzels 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.

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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 automatons 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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.

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As to Mr. Charles Braham, his voice is good and he manages it well, but Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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 Maelzels musical timekeeper. The term later critics in the century would use for this artificial quality was metronomic.72 The trumpeter was only one of Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 subjects skill as an orator, which bares striking similarity with Strongs 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 Scribners 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 Coopers narrative style, commenting, [George] Washington, as shown to us in The Spy, is a formal piece of mechanism, as destitute of vital character as Maelzels automaton trumpeter. See The Atlantic Monthly 9 (January, 1862), Gutenberg eBook #13924, http://www.gutenberg.org (accessed September 20, 2007).

140

in the Viennese Wunderkammer of Maelzel.73 Long after the Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 bellowsthe 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. Panharmonicon, Western Recorder, Aug. 23, 1825, 136.

74

THE VIOLIN. Hogarth's Musical History, The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical Science, Literature... Aug. 17, 1839, 270.

75

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writers 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 enthusiasticTheir heads and fans had often, during the performance, covibrated, like Maelzels 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] Gardiners Music of Nature, The New York Review V (July, 1838): 46. Musical Outlines, The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, May 9, 1829, 384.

77

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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 machineit was a standard assessment, expressed throughout the century, of the noticeable drawbacks in educating with the metronome.

78

Ibid., Like a peculiar watch of Breguets invention, in which two distinct balances force each other into simultaneous vibration so did these sisterly pair

Musical Instruction, The Zodiac, a Monthly Periodical, Devoted to Science, Literature, and the Art...Dec. 1835, 86.

79

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Perhaps the most prominent early critic of the machine was none other than Beethovens contemporary Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). And while Hummels 1828 pedagogical publication Ausfhrlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel presented the clockwork metronome very early on to students through Maelzels own promotional languagethe composer-performer Hummel strongly warned musical students against the artificial rhythm imbued by the metronome. As late as 1861, periodicals such as Dwights Journal of Music and the Saturday Evening Post translated Hummels 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 generalinterest publication appears in The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany from October, 1817. In An Explanation of the Notation Employed in the Scale of Maelzels Metronome, the writer defines the techniques required translate Maelzels beats-perQuoted in Musical Customs and Practices, Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 28, 1861, 4; APS Online.
80

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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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels more compact invention. The machine as described may therefore be the earlier and more cumbersome design by Maelzel, otherwise a modified clock with Maelzels scale. Despite the differences in appearance, the described machine functioned, and more importantly sounded, with the same basic qualities as found in Maelzels more familiar metronome. The 1815 British patent announcement for Maelzels 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, Beethovens collaborator and confidant in London. Ries music, published by Clementi & Co., was some of the first to include the unfamiliar metronome indicationsalong with the supposedly dreaded Italian affect words that metronome numbers were intended to replace. See Sylvanus Urban, Review of New Musical Publications, The Gentlemans Magazine, Mar. 1816, 251.

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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 Maelzels 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 hisalong with Beethovens and Hummels cultural age. Musical time, as he explained, was essentially an internal phenomenon that the performer had sole authority over. The writer contendedas so many other perceptive musicians over the century would similarly explainthat 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 musicas Philharmonicus was one of the first to acknowledgethe 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 Maelzels 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). 146

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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 pupils 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 Maelzels Metronome, The Musical Magazine; or, Repository of Musical Science, Literature...Feb. 29, 1840, 67. http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed April 13, 2009).

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 147

86

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 Beethovens publications. Schindler scorned, to here these Sonatas [Beethovens Op. 27] according to the metronomic signs affixed to them leads one to wish that all pianoforte 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 superficialif, indeed, it has not already submitted to that authority.87 As editor of Schindlers text, Moscheles admitted that he himself was included in the metronomising of Beethovens 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 Beethovens 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 amateursEvery 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. Ibid., 106fn. 148

88

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 Schindlers Life of Beethoven, Moscheles too recognized the subjective, non-mechanical nature of musical time, and he could not comprehend the biographers 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 understandingthat metronomic guidance was of slight and limited importancewas 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 musica mere beater of time is worth nothing, but to embarrass all parties and to kill the music, and Maelzels metronome were quite as good a thing and less expensive.90 As many suggested, the activities of the industrialized worldwhich functioned in lockstep with automatical machineshad 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 [Beethovens] 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. Musical Review, Harbinger, Devoted to Social and Political Progress, Mar. 7, 1846, 204.

90

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 MetronomeThe 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). 149

cast-iron, invariable, hard, and inexpressive qualities were considered just as useful as Maelzels tempo-clock. As we recall, the contemporaneous critics of Maelzels other automata concurred, no machine has whims and inflections. Thus, while George Templeton Strong considered Maelzels 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 Maelzels machine guided their actions. As amateur and professional musicians increasingly used the metronome to reference tempo, critics began to discuss a performers 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

Schindlers life of Beethoven, edited by Moscheles, The Times, April 10, 1841, 6.

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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 Maelzels metronome can possibly produce a piece of music as it existed in the composers 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 Maelzels 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 Smedleys story Edith Kinnaird (c1845), one character recites a well-worn poem with uncommon, anti-human performance practices: Mr. Dalton volunteered to read aloud Tennysons 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 rhythmwhich combined the qualities of accent, movement, phrasing, dynamics, and expressionreceded 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 transportationthose utilitarian offspring of Maelzels 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 AuntNo. V, Sharpes London Magazine, Dec. 4, 1847, 92.

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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 Maelzels Automatical Values in Industry As cultural critics, music educators, and performers heard the sounds of trains and factory machinery in Maelzels machines, it may come as no surprise that significant nineteenthcentury politicians and labor theorists found the artificiality of Maelzels automata to be positive, influential symbols for the industrializing world. One notable example of Maelzels cultural influence appears in a speech by Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852) from 1836. Possibly recollecting Maelzels Boston exhibitions, Webster described the importance of machines in Americas new industrial society: It is thus that the successful application of science to art increases the productive power and agency of the human raceThese 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 Maelzels 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.

Daniel Webster, "Technical Progress and Prosperity," The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster Hitherto Uncollected I (Boston, 1903), 6378; in Annals of American History. http://america.eb.com/america/ (accessed August 3, 2007).

96

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same movements and purposes.97 Webster was not concerned that factory machines did not appear like Maelzels 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 Maelzels actual clockwork creations. The writings of other early nineteenth-century labor theorists strongly suggest that Maelzels 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 Maelzels inventions specificallypresently 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. Raisins 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 servitudeA 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), 293300.

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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. Ures modern factory, with its human factory laborers, represented a mechanical collective that would rival even Maelzels 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 cooperating body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate delicacy and speed, and
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 Maelzels chess player, like Raisins 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 98

Ibid., 13-14.

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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 Maelzels machine culture, George Fitzhugh explained how Ures 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 childrenwho lost the sense of their own interpretive will through mindless repetitive actionsbecame 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).

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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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels automatical metronome. In the metronome, critics continued to hear the very
Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management (Reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972), 125.
103

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same mindless, monotonous qualities of time and motion that Ures and later Taylors 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels overly artificial creation, concluding: Maelzels 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 timemeasurer, and Henry Smart (the violinist, and father of the composer of the same name) made another in 1821, both before that received as Maelzels 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 Maelzels metronome has universal acceptance, the silent metronome and still more Webers 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 Handels work without the aid of the metronome.

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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 Taylors 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 Maelzels

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. Beethoven, Letters, ed. Anderson, II, 727.

107

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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 Taylors modern factory workersand by mechanical association, Maelzels historical automata. The composer Camille Saint-Sans 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-Sans and the New York Times reviewer, the metronome promoted the values of an artisan, in binary opposition to an artist.110 The 1913 Websters Dictionary verifies the pejorative term and compares the two opposing concepts, where idea of mechanical conformity to ruleattaches to the term artisan, [while] the ideas of refinement and of peculiar skillbelong to the term

108

The Symphony Society, The New York Times, Jan. 4, 1894, 2. Camille Saint-Sans, Letter 4No Title, Century Illustrated Magazine, Nov. 1891, 156.

109

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 kindthat is to say, all teaching that does not appeal to intuitive perception of the subject and active participation in itis void, dead, and can only mislead. See Marx, 265.

110

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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 Krehbiels 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 Maelzels metronome resulted in an ensemble that again evoked two more of Maelzels 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 Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 86.

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 abilitiesTalent, 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 Christianis 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

112

Listening to Music, New York Times, Mar. 6, 1897, RB2.

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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 diminuendohe suddenly rapped on the music stand before himwith hand and foot acting together he imitated the movement of an organ-grinderThe 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 Berliozs transcription of Webers 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 Maelzels metronome would exhibit all the qualities of a strange, lifeless corpse: I do not mean to saythat 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 Maelzels 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. The Lamoureux Concerts, The Times, Mar. 29, 1897, 13.

115

116

Hector Berlioz, A Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary Cowden Clarke (London: Novello, Ewer, and Co., 1856), 246.

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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-Sans 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 Stavenhagens 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 Worlds Progress for the Year 1907 (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1908), 523.

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movement119 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 recitativeswere 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 nonmetronomic 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 (18501934), the famed conductor and founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was perhaps the most outspoken detractor of the metronomic interpretations of Beethovens symphonies. As editor of Sir George Groves published letters, Henschel described two qualities in conflict: Maelzels automatical metronome and Beethovens musical spirit. The tension between them was especially problematic in Beethovens grandiose Ninth Symphony: These marks had been sent by Beethoveneight days before his deathto 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 studentto 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 beatswho 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 Stavenhagens Recital, The Times, Nov. 25, 1891, 3. Bristol Musical Festival, The Times, Oct. 12, 1905, 4. See Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 1198, for a common-usage concurrence.

120

121

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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 onceexpressive interpretations of Beethovens monumental orchestral works. Ironically perhaps, a 1911 performance of Beethovens Symphony no. 8apocryphally inspired by Maelzels clockwork metronomewas 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 Beethovens 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, Maelzels 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 Groves Analyses of Beethoven, The Musical World, Nov. 3, 1888, 850. Music. Concerts from New York, The Times, Nov. 25, 1911, 12.

123

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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, Louli, 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 Chopins Berceuse as an example, Perry argued that interpretive practices must oppose the influence of metronomic thinking. While equal, rigid, and repetitive rhythms appeared in Chopins 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 Maelzels 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 musicians heartthe once standard reference for musical timewith 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. Ibid.

125

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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 worlds 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 recordingwarned 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 unrhythmicaland 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 premechanical performance traditions. Indeed, he believed that the individuals rhythmic

126

Edward Baxter Perry, Descriptive Analyses of Piano Works (Philadelphia: Theo. Presser Co., 1902), 106.

Edward Baxter Perry, Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces (Philadelphia: Theo. Presser Co., 1910), 181.
128

127

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. Joseph Hofmann, Playing the Piano Successfully, The Ladies Home Journal, Mar. 1905, 9.

129

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sense could not translate into mechanical beats, movements, or measures.130 Hofmanns 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 Christianis and Hofmanns 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 Christianis 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,

In 1901, Hofmann explained his anti-metronomic aesthetic in the same journal: As to rhythmics of performance: I mustremark 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

130

Adolph Friedrich Christiani, The principles of expression in pianoforte playing (Philadelphia: T. Presser, [1885]), 260. See Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 1238-9.

132

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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 Christianis and Hofmanns 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 selfplaying 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 epistemologyan individualistic, interpretive practicedistinctly 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 minda 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.

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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 twentiethcentury 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 Youths 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 Groves Analyses of Beethoven, The Musical World, Nov. 3, 1888, 850. The Theory of Practicing, The Youth's Companion, Feb. 1, 1912, 66.

136

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On the whole the dictum may be allowed to stand, with the insistently necessary proviso that there are many different kinds of irregularityand 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 performers 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

Rhythm and tempo rubato, The Times, April 16, 1910, 13. The word delusion carries more weight and meaning than commonly understood today. The critics wording is highly germane. See the 1913 Websters 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 beliefSyn. -- 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

137

Rhythm and tempo rubato, The Times, April 16, 1910, 13.

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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 lifeblood 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 discrezion 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 compositionsgood 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. Ibid, 96.

140

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 Its Won (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1909).

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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 performanceand that the phenomenon of rubato was part and parcel of the customary, elastic quality of good musicianship. Furthermore, Hamiltons instructions echoed Hummels 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 pupils 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 freedomhampering both the composers and performers figurative blood. The metronome was not intended for the interpretation of Brahms Requiem, Beethovens
142

C. A. B., George Groves 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.

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symphonies, or the meaningful performance of any composers 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 Maelzels lifetime, to be mechanical meant to be skilled in making machines. By 1913, a new and ominous usage of the term appeared in the Websters Unabridged Dictionary, citing Mechanical3. 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 Websters dictionary, a musician under the influence of Maelzels metronome was a machine3. A person who acts mechanically or at will of another.146 A century earlier, Maelzels audiences would have recognized such a figure as a mere automaton.

144

Rhythm and tempo rubato, The Times, April 16, 1910, 13. Ibid. See Websters Unabridged Dictionary (1913), 897, 906. 173

145

146

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 usedand could only be usedas 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. 174

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 students basic technique. Yet, as a crude teaching tool, the metronome did not dictate a composers true intentions, nor could it document a skilled performers 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.

175

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 Beethovens 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, Maelzels 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 machines click. Maelzels 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 Maelzels machines exposed them to be mere mechanical copies of more complicated, living creations. Continual acknowledgments described Maelzels 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 faade, he was human). As sources attest, the nineteenth century witnessed Maelzels 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. 176

Recognizing that automatical machines influenced and altered living rhythm and musical time, a few perceptive musicians knew that Maelzels mechanical culture directly extended to the metronomethat automata and tempo-clocks shared an identical origin, both in design and application. Constantin von Sternberg intuited that Maelzels renowned automata-career corresponded precisely to the mechanics posthumously successful metronome, and in 1917 he offered a damning assessment of the tempomachine 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 organbuilder. 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 Foucauds assertion in Illustrious Mechanics, Maelzels reputation as automataexhibitor would not be forgotten. For Sternberg and others spanning a century, the metronome reflected the very same qualities witnessed in all of Maelzels self-moving machines. The metronome was yet another Maelzel automaton, one that aided in the actualization of automatical behavior. Maelzels 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. 177

Beethoven, Napoleon, Poe, Daniel Webster, P. T. Barnum, and Oliver Wendell Holmes for one significant reason: Maelzels 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 lifes work. As insufficient copies of humanity, Maelzels devices represented for many the antitheses of creativity, individuality, volition, and expression. Simply stated, Maelzels creations represented the mechanization of life. In Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 performers feeling.153 The metronome recast musicianstheir 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 178

rhythmical actions and perceptionsinto a shallow clockwork imitation. Subjectivity, variability, and metric pulsation were lost and forgottenmetamorphosedin the heartless click of a tempo-clock. The metronome, therefore, was the very embodiment of Maelzels 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 Maelzels clockwork trumpeter and Panharmonicon. Maelzels 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 Maelzels 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 performers 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 definitenesshow, 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 Composers Intention, in Proceedings of the Musical Association, 18th Sess. (1891 - 1892): 42. 179

CHAPTER III: THE SCIENTIFIC METRONOME

Chronography, the Clockwork Metronome, and the Personal Equation: An Introduction During Maelzels 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 highpowered telescope and referenced by an ultra-accurate sidereal clock. Stoddards Encyclopedia Americana (1884) explained the specialized astronomers complex series of assessments and reactionsconstituting his performance in precision, mechanical timetypical 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, Stoddarts Encyclopedia Americana, Volume II (New York: J. M Stoddart, 1884), 88. 180

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 readingstheir personal interpretations of natural phenomenaseldom 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 individuals 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

See G. J. Whitrow, Time in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), ii. Whitrows chart of time-telling precision is based on the research of F. A. B. Ward. 181

same stellar events displayed great personal errors, mistakes that could ultimately transfer to official star charts, time tables, almanacs, civic clocks, and other essential timereferences. 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 astronomers personal perception in 1796 at the Greenwich Observatory. Maskelynes 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 Knigsberg 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 Kempelens celebrated Automaton Chess Player, and Maelzels Automaton

182

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 equationthe 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

See the advertisements, Kempelens Celebrated Automaton Chess-Player, Times Jan. 7, 1819, 1, col. A; and Maelzels 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 oclock. 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 Maelzels 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 Beethovens collaborators and publishers. But the details of this history are not in the scope of the present study. One year prior, in 1818, Maelzels 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 Rpertoire des arts et manufanctures (Paris: Chaingnieau, 1818), 260, 261. E. W. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (Meadville: The Chautauqua-Century Press, 1895), 40.
4

183

With the initial hope of defining and reducing these personal-equation errors in astronomy, Bessel discovered that no true objectivity was possible in an observers perception of time and movement when gauged by the clock. Psychologist and historian Edwin Boring recounted Bessels important contribution to the modern, nineteenthcentury 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 Maelzels metronome as a novel, and potentially useful pedagogical tool for children and amateurs, a new metronomic machine for professional astronomersthe observatory chronographhad actively improved the science of astronomy in the nineteenth century. The chronograph recorded and regulated the exact time of the observers perception of a stellar transit; through the sound of metronomic time, the chronograph ultimately corrected for the astronomers problem, his personal equation during a performance.

Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1929), 137.

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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 pendulumclock dictating seconds-a very large, ultra-accurate clicking metronomewith 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 astronomers 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

E. C. Sanford, Personal Equation, The American Journal of Psychology 2 (November, 1889): 19-20. Also recounted in Boring, 139. 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 performers actions in precise, constant intervals of time. See Landes, 3, 457 n35.
8 7

J. Norman Lockyer, Stargazing Past and Present (London: Macmillan and Co., 1878), 261.

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humans 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 astronomers observation-performance in precision, repetitive time, the inconsistencies of any individuals 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.

Boring, 139-140. 186

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 Stoddarts Encyclopedia Americana (1884), 261.

187

Stoddarts Encyclopedia Americana (1884) recounted the boon of the chronometer to astronomical observatories across the world, since the mechanical timerecorder replaced the eye and ear method, as it is called, which required the observers 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 eyeand-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. Ibid. Boring, 133. Ibid., 140.

11

12

13

188

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 nineteenthcentury 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 timethe vital element of the chronographic methodexpanded well into the twentieth century in ways completely unrelated to the subjective, creative practices of skilled musicians from premetronomic traditions. As evidence in the fields of both science and music pedagogy strongly suggest, the metronomes home in the second half of the nineteenth century more than on the skilled performers piano or the composers deskwas 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 Maelzels 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, scientistsnot composers or experienced performersfirst valued Maelzels machine as a precision-oriented timekeeper and chronographic regulator. Employed by scientists for

14

Sanford, 24. 189

precise temporal measurement, reference, and regulation in controlled settings, Maelzels 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 rhythma 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 Maelzels metronome

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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 extentwith far less contentionthan 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 Trousseaus 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.

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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 Trousseaus 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels metronome and could run for an extended time that no musician would consider an appropriate reference for expressive, meaningful performance.

This comment verifies that Maelzels metronome was also a visual reference of pulse. The swaying pendulum of the metronome had rhythmic significance beyond the machines audible click.
17

16

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 patients 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. American Society of Dental Surgeons, French Medical Societies, American Journal of Dental Science IV (Dec., 1843): 127.

18

192

Besides these seemingly unusual treatments, evidence strongly suggests that British physiologists were the first to consistently and successfully employ Maelzels 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. Richardson, 495.

20

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of Technology, advised in his Elements of Physical Manipulation (1873) the use of a Metronome Pendulum21 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 markBy graduating the tape properly, we may readily construct a very serviceable metronomeWhere the greatest accuracy is required, as in astronomical observations, a chronograph is used.22 Similar to Webers musical pendulum, Pickerings 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 toola finite visual reference, not a ticking clock intended to artificially dictate and control action in perpetuity. The metronome-pendulum displayed a different precisiona different epistemology of rhythm viewed as a seamless movementa 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 Pickerings 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. Pickering, 16-17.

22

194

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 Johns-street, Tottenham-courtroadPrevious 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.

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, 195

24

Some technologically minded photographers, too, found Maelzels 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 precisionas the antithesis to human creativitytechnical 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 photographythe technique of chronophotographyis 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.

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.

26

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Engineer Allan Cunningham also recognized that Maelzels 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 Cadetts and Cunninghams 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 Maelzels 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 Maelzels automatical machine:

27

Allan Cunningham, Roorkee Hydraulic Experiments ([n.p.]: Thomason College Press, 1881), 350.

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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 commentedin contradistinction to mechanical engineersbut 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.

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

28

Ibid.

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Over a decade after Maelzels 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 midcentury through the incorporation of novel automatic machines.30 In the 1860s, after Richardsons 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 nervetissue 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

Sven Dierig, Engines for Experiment: Laboratory Revolution and Industrial Labor in the Nineteenth-Century City, Osiris 18 (2003): 118. Dierigs article, while it details the incorporation of chronographs in German physiology laboratories, makes no mention of the widescale incorporation of electro-magnetic metronomes through the last decades of the nineteenth century.
31

30

Report on Physiology, British and Foreign Medico-chirurgical Review LXV (Jan., 1864): 233.

Thomas R. Fraser, On the Physiological Action of the Calabar Bean, Journal of Anatomy and Physiology I (Nov., 1886): 329. 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.
33

32

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metronome.34 By 1878 American doctors had timed frogs pulse rates during exploratory operations to the metronomes 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 metronomes 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-

James Dewar, On the Physiological Action of Light, in Royal Institution of Great Britain, Proceedings VIII (1875-1878): 147-8. 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 35

34

John Scott Burdon-Sanderson, Syllabus of a course of lectures on physiology, Second Edition (London: K. Lewis, 1879), 133.

H. Newell Martin, Respiration of the Frog, in Studies from the Biological Laboratory I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1877-1878): 159.
38

37

Dierig, 127.

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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 Ketchums 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

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

39

Isaac Ott, The Action of Medicines (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1878), 26-7. Ott, The Action of Medicines, 27.

41

42

Joseph Ketchum, Apparatus for Producing Artificial Respiration, U. S. Patent #320,070 (Filed Apr. 1, 1885; Patented June 16, 1885): 3.

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Figs. 3.2 and 3.3. Mercury contact metronomes for experimental physiological surgeries. Left, from J. MGregor-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 Otts 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. MGregor-Robertson of the University of Glasgow documented the nowstandard 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
202

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 McKendricks 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 clockwork for measuring time in music; also employed to test hearing power.45

Maelzels Metronome as Laboratory Chronograph While physiologists first revised Maelzels 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

J. MGregor-Robertson, The Elements of Physiological Physics: An Outline of the Elementary Facts (London: Cassell & Company, 1884), 71-72.
44

43

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. Duglisons earlier editions of the Medical Lexicon from 1846 through 1874 do not include a definition of the metronome.

T. OConor Sloane, Standard Electrical Dictionary, Second Edition (New York: Normal W. Henley & Co., 1897), 610.

46

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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. Halls 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 Wrterbuch, 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. Ibid., 329.

48

Physiological instruments manufactured by the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company (Cambridge: Printed at the University Press, 1899), 26.
50

49

Egbert von Hoyer, Franz Kreuter, Technologisches Wrterbuch, Deutsch-englisch-franzsisch: Gewerbe & Industrie (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergman, 1902), 486. Joseph Moeller and Hermann Thoms, Real-Enzyklopdie der Gesamten Pharmazie, Volume VIII ([Leipsig]: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1907): 668.

51

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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. 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., 1901Nov., 1902): 240.

55

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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

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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 Beethovensand most nineteenth-century composersoriginal applications. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, scientists found a new life for Maelzels 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. 207

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 Maelzels 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 observers (i.e. the laboratory subjects) every physical action and innate perception. In the new nineteenth-century science of experimental psychology Maelzels 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, Maelzels 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 polygraphThe 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.

James Mark Baldwin, ed., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, Volume 1 (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1901), 614.

58

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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 rhythmfrom 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-bysecond 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. 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.

60

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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 Bessels problem first recognized in the astronomical observatory: the personal equation, the individuals 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. Boring, 142.

62

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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 Wundtwho originally trained and researched as a physiologistsought 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 chemistthese times are of further and great usein analyzing complex mental phenomena, and in studying the nature of attention, volition, &c.64 According to Wundt, the human mind, even the individuals 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, Wundta strict empiricistbelieved 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:

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

63

James McKeen Cattell, The Psychological Laboratory at Leipsic, Mind 13 (Jan., 1888): 45.

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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 Wundts experimental psychology sought to completely objectify the seemingly ineffable processes of the human mind. In studying mental phenomena through clockwork machines, Wundts 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, Wundts early doctoral student at Leipzig and highly influential North American psychology professor, argued that Wundts new science was the next step in physiology, since experimental psychologists now had the abilityusing the very same apparatuses familiar in physiologyto chart the human mind with a chronographic precision never before attempted.66 Titchener explained in A Beginners Psychology (1916):

Thodule Ribot, German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James Mark Baldwin (New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1886), 192.
66

65

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.

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Now it is possible to measure all these organic changes; to record the rate and height of the pulse, for instancephysiology 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 feelingsall organic changesto scientific certainties. But the metronome served another purpose in the experimental laboratory; the artificial rhythm of Maelzels 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 subjects 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 subjects near-term perceptions. Like physiologists earlier in the century, however, experimental psychologists occasionally revised Maelzels metronome with electrical contacts and battery power, so the machine could tick indefinitely for more

Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginners Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 82-3. 213

67

controlled and consistent experimentsto 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. Wundts 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 subjects 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.

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Fig. 3.5. Wilhelm Wundts 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 Maelzels 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,

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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 Wundts 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 subjects reaction time and nervous system.71 Titchener, a primary proponent of Wundts 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. Jastrow, et al., The American Journal of Psychology 3 (Apr., 1890): 275-6.

71

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. Petzoldeach Mk. 7.50 / 57. Simple metronome. Willyoung3.75 / 58. Metronome with mercury contacts. Kronecher. PetzoldMk. 36.00 / 59. Interrupter-clock, cased. Baltzar. ZimmermannMk. 170.00.

Stella Emily Sharp, Individual Psychology: A Study in Psychological Method, The American Journal of Psychology 10 (Apr., 1899): 345.

73

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consciousness.74 As scientific sources attest, Maelzels 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 subjects special sense in relation to metronomic time.78 Titchener codified one such experiment, which tested a subjects 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.

Arthur H. Daniels, The Memory and After-Image and Attentions, The American Journal of Psychology 6 (Jan., 1895): 563. He summarized the work in Wundts laboratory on rhythm perception with the metronome.
76

75

W. G. Smith, The Relation of Attention to Memory, Mind 4 (Jan., 1895): 62.

Edgar James Swift, Disturbance of the Attention during Simple Mental Processes, The American Journal of Psychology 5 (Oct., 1892): 5. 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 78

77

Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 27.

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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

Theodate L. Smith, On Muscular Memory, The American Journal of Psychology 7 (July, 1896): 456. Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 381. Ernst Meumann, The Psychology of Learning, translated by John Wallace Baird (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1913), 162-3.
82 81

80

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Fig. 3.6. The Apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables. As depicted, the batterypowered 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.

Meumanns 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 Wundts, Ebbinghaus and Meumanns experiments, keeping with a host of psychological studies founded on chronography, was by very definition metronomica 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:

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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 individuals 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 valueas a peculiar performance practice in becoming automatical, in slavishly imitating Maelzels 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 Thodule 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 Wundts 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. 220

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 trainingjust as it had for astronomers using the chronograph. Ebbinghaus well understood that over time his methods effaced the personal equationthe intrinsic variability of human actionto 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

Thodule Ribot, German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James Mark Baldwin (New York: Charles Scribners and Sons, 1886), 273.
85

84

Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology, 382. Ibid. 221

86

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 laboratoryfor its purposes are seemingly endlessthe 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 experimentseach founded on the chronographic methods of astronomymechanical 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.

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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 fasteror 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 peoples daily time-telling epistemologies, since one does not

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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 valuesproviding 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 onceexperiential 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 Wundts laboratory, this new scientific culture redefined an individuals 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 Wundts 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, Wundts school viewed the human observerboth inside and eventually outside the laboratoryas a passive,

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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 Vierordtwho incorporated the metronome into human experiments by the 1860sWundt believed that in testing a subjects 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

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a psychological theory of rhythm1 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 Wundts 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 Wundts tradition of laboratory rhythmwithout any ambiguities or nuanceswas 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 subjects sense of rhythm:

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.

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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, Meumanns time-sense apparatus, consisting of Baltzar kymograph, time-disc, set of contacts, and sound-hammersThe metronome recommends itself, for the initial experiment, both by its cheapness and by its wide range of rate3The 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

Titchener, Experimental Psychology, 338. Ibid., 339.

See, for another example, Wilhelm Wundt, Outlines of Psychology (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1902), 230-236.

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).

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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 Wundts 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 soundsWundt 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 Wundts initial metronome experiments well into the twentieth century. James Burt Miner in

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. Ibid., 205.

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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 Wundts 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 rhythmIt 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
James Burt Miner, Motor, Visual, and Applied Rhythms, (PhD Diss., Columbia University, 1903), 23-4.
11 10

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:

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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, rhythmas perceived by human-subjectswas 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. Titcheners experiments often effaced the visual element of rhythm entirely, as the psychologist placed the subjects 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.

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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 Hofmannor countless other composer-performers who rejected mindless, metronomic thought and action. Nevertheless, Wundts 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 subjects 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:

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.

13

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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 subjects 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.

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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 musicdealers 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 subjects 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.

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performing works of music, poetry, dance, or drama.) In a Beginners 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 subjects 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 individuals initial perceptionsor whether they perceived groupings or notexperimental 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

Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginners Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 103-4. Emphasis added.

17

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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 individuals 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 Maelzels 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 comprehendand for how longwhen it is exposed to exacting and unwavering metronomic time. Psychologists attention-span
Edward Bradford Titchener, An Outline of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902), 184.
19 18

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.

235

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 Wundts 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 Wundts 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 Wundts tridimensional theory of feeling, Vierordt performed the earliest research on human

20

Titchener, A Beginners Psychology, 81.

For a discussion and critique see Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 250-257.

21

236

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 judgmentan 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 Wundts scientificmechanical 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 Wagners 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 Wagners sense of tonality could be explained through an objective, metronomic equivalent.

See Karl Vierordt, Der Zeitsinn nach versuchen (Tbingen: H. Lauppschen Buchhandlung, 1868).
23

22

James, 618-619. Titchener, A Beginners Psychology, 82.

24

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For Wundt himself, it clearly seems that living rhythms lost their subjectivity, variability, and individualityboth in theory and practice. Neither rhythm, time, nor emotions were innate, active, or experiential phenomenainstead, rhythm represented the wholly passive subjects reactions and impulses to metronomic exposure. The laboratory subjects 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 Wundts concept of emotional response; since rhythm was purely external and metronomica sound to perceive and react tothe 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 Wundts 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 minds 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.

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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 Wundts 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 metronomeWundt 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 Wundts 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 Wundts epistemology. In Beethovens lifetime, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung often criticized the composers unique rhetorical penchant for unexpected rhythmic

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

26

Ibid., 377.

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motives and uncustomary time signatures as being highly bizarre or difficult, and only disappointing to the extent that Beethovens music tried the amateur performers 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, satisfactionnay, in many instances pleasure out of such unexpected rhythmic inventions.29 Gottfried Weber, in contrast, associated unexpected syncopations in musicstrong-beat juxtapositions against the regularly perceived metrical pulsewith the visceral feelings of shock and revulsion, but not of disappointment.30 Yet nowhere in Wundts scientific aesthetics do composers creative stylesor, for that matter, skilled performance artists interpretationsalluded to by
For instance, AmZ published the following review of Beethovens 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 Beethovens Compositions by His German Contemporaries, Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 145, Letter 65. Moritz Hauptmann, The Letters of a Leipzig Cantor, edited by Alfred Schne 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 throughModern works are conspicuous for want of rhythmical perfection. 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. 240
30 29 28

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 agencytheir personal equationsfrom 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 Wundts attention studies, the

31

We must recall Adolph Friedrich Christianis 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 Thodule 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. Wundts 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 Wundts founding of the Leipzig laboratory, Ribot recognized this somewhat anachronistic justification suffices to indicate Wundts 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 241

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 Wundts mind, the metronome was no meager initial pulse referenceit 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 Thodule Ribot, German Psychology of To-day: The Empirical School, translated by James Mark Baldwin (New York: Charles Scribners 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.

242

Wundts 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 notefor 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. Ibid., 263.

35

243

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 Wundts attention-study examples, music notation was reduced to invariable metronomic precision. Wundt mistranslated the redundant succession of metronomic clicksexpressed 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 formsa 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 Wundts 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. Ibid., 265.

37

244

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 Wundts 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 partsand 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 widescale problem of mental perception, in which experienced musicians, dancers, or poets consistently failed to mentally grasp a succession of complex rhythmsinvolving, 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 timethat is, Wundts revision of

245

musical time as an equal and repeating series of metronomic impressionswas 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 Wundts 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 Wundts 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 Wundts 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 forconsisting of internalized anticipations and perceptions of pulse, spoken rhetoric, and physical movement. Ribots 1886 English edition of German Psychology To-day offered one scientists conjecture on why metronomic time in Wundts laboratory had little to due with musical time in living performance:

38

Ibid., 265. 246

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 subjects tests by a metronome to the professional musicians performance by the conductors batona significantly different temporal reference. Wolf likened the directors baton to the accuracy and precision of the clockwork metronome, implying that the musicians performance on stage was identical to the subjects 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 Wundts 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 timewhich the industrializing civilization increasingly relied uponbore 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.

247

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 withminutes, hours, and days40have 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 mens practical interests altogetherTo 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-byinstant mechanical rhythm an abstraction to the experiential, sensory flow of time and its movement. Precise artificial timethe chronographic reference in Wundts 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

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. 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. 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.
42 41

40

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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

See The English Mechanic and World of Science 53 (April 24, 1891): 188; and (May 8, 1891): 233.
44

43

William Grey, Time, The English Mechanic and World of Science 39 (May 9, 1884): 218. Ibid.

45

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incommensurate with simplified, referential metronome numbers.46 Greys 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, Greys 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 epistemologiesmechanical indications and expressive wordsare 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. Greys assessment bares close similarity to Gottfried Webers comment on the impracticality of the clockwork metronome during Maelzels 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. 250

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 periodicaland probably a trained musicianwriting under the pseudonym Organon, confirmed and elaborated upon Brocklehursts 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 accentthe 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, Wundts 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. Ibid. Ibid., 253. 251

49

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 Wundts 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 Wundts new science, the musician was considered under these same guidelinesas a mere, faulty performer when referenced against mechanical time. It was the psychologists duty to uncover these performer errors, and indeed, even correct for the musicians 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, Wundts 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:

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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, buttick, tick, tickthe 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 Wundts most successful students, and he later became director of Yales 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 conductors baton to a monotonous chronograph, one in which the orchestra musician strove precisely to conform to, all while factoring in the personal equationthe 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 gesturesor even the comments of skilled musicians regarding their own experienceswere not factors in Scriptures assessments of regular musical performance and subsequent musician error represented by their non-metronomic musicality. Unchecked by chronography, an individuals 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. E. W. Scripture, Some Principles of Mental Education, The School Review 3 (Nov., 1895): 542.

52

253

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 explanationSuch 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 psychologists 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.

Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. 394-5. Wundts 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 Carpenters discussion in The Principles of Psychology, 117. 254

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In describing learned and habitual activities, Wundt exemplified mediocre, amateur musiciansstudents 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 musicians skill to manifest in blind, will-less, and mechanical actionsunconscious reflexes made apparent only to the experimental psychologist. Wundts disparaging attitude towards all musicians resonated throughout his scientific discipline, well into the twentieth century. Ernst Meumann, one of Wundts most influential students, viewed musiciansexperienced performers no lessnearly identically to his teachers mechanical ideal. An American Journal of Psychology (1902) article explained Meumanns 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 Meumanns non-experiential understanding of musicians and musicality confirms Wundts laboratory culture, in which chronographic practices informed and influenced all aspects of time and action. Under psychologists chronographic bias, the ideal musical performerlike the ideal laboratory subject habituated through repetitive, precise

Charles H. Sears, A Contribution to the Psychology of Rhythm, The American Journal of Psychology 13 (Jan., 1902): 30.

55

255

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 expressionheld 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 pianists 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, nave and simple ceremonial games, which are:

56

Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 398.

256

Religious ceremonies secularized for the purposes of amusement. Here belong the dance, the march, and many childrens 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, Wundts 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 Wundts 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 Stumpfs experiments on sound perception, believing that his colleagues musical education actually detracted from objective, scientific research. Indeed, Wundt considered his own lack of musical expertise to be a scientific virtue. Boring paraphrased Wundts self-assessment: He relied on laboratory results with apparatus and the

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. 257

57

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 Wundts 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 endowmentconsists in a

58

Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1929), 354-5.

Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the ThoughtProcesses (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1909), 205.
60

59

Ibid.

Invoking the increasingly popular mid-nineteenth-century musical family as depicted by Titcheneralong with the typical dearth of musical talent contained thereinAdolph Bernhard Marx, the Founder of the Berlin Conservatory, was highly critical of the new trends of middleclass music pedagogy, which specifically arose in Germany during Wundts youth. Marx believed that the educational models intended to instruct the masses in the technical skills of pianoplayingdue to overriding social and economic interestsdevalued an individuals 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 socalled higher or more refined circles of society, music has long been looked upon as an 258

61

quick and comprehensive understanding of a composition, a sort of logical and aesthetic Einfhlung, 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 Titcheners highly personal aesthetics and education: he perceived music composition, and by extension music performance, as he would the sensibility of a subjects mind and the fitness of his body, through a physiological-psychological examination.63 While lacking in musical expertise, experimental psychologistsgiven their training, traditions, and environmentseemed 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 inclinationwe 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 manBut 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 interestmuch 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.

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 nonmechanical arsis and thesis. Nevertheless, he faithfully follows Wundts modern metronomemethodology 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 259

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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 ideaswe 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 movementrhythmical movements.65 Through his extensive and influential publications, Wundt continued to refashion rhythmical action with chronographic intentions. His interpretations of a living individuals 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 amplitudeEvery 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 psychologists exclusive understanding of rhythm as a perception and reaction to external, mechanical stimulusprimarily in the repetitive, periodic rhythm of the scientific metronomeWundt 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 Wundts epistemology, into music notation, in which the eighth-note assumed metronomic consistency. See Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, 182-3. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology, 159. Wundts original emphasis makes the relationship between automatical machines and the epistemology of scientific rhythm all the more striking.
66 65

Ibid., 160.

260

precision, and isochronism. Indeed, Wundt seemed to describe the perfectly moving human as the perfectly regulated clockwork metronome. To summarize, Wundts 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 Wundts 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 equationtechnically 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! 261

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 psychologistsbeginning with Ernst Meumann in Europe and Thaddeus Bolton and Edward Wheeler Scripture in North Americaactively employed the chronographic method on trained musicians, testing their subjects musical abilities through the exactitudes offered only through precision time-keeping machines. Guided by Wundts 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 Wundts 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. 262

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 Smiths study Rhythmus und Arbeit (1900), imprinted under Wundts 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 Smiths 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, Smiths isolated laboratory experiments proved that subjects, guided only by a physical sense of rhythm, did not naturally or usually move with metronomic rhythm. Smiths 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 Smiths 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. Margret Keiver Smith, Rhythmus und Arbeit (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1900), 165. Bei der Kunst aber (nmlich bei der Poesie, der Musik und auch vielleicht bei dem Tanz), wo der Rhythmus mathematisch bestimmtwird, ist eine viel grere Regelmigkeit und Genauigkeit zu finden. Reported in Patterson, 27.

69

70

263

that subjects own internal perception faithfully guided their time-beatsthey 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 musicianThe 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. 264

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 Pattersons own words, an intrinsic, in fact troublesome, individual difference of the subjects. Fueled by Wundts research into a subjects mental rhythmic groupings of metronome clicks, Ernst Meumanns 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 Meumanns 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 Meumanns 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 Smiths Rhythmus und Arbeit and Karl Bchers influential labor study Arbeit und Rhythmus, Third Edition (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1902). Bcher was the economics professor at Leipzig University, and was undoubtedly familiar with Wundts and Meumanns studies on muscular fatigue and attention span. 265

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 actionin mathematical fractions of mechanically referenced timeMeumann 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 assistanceno chronographic referencewas 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 individuals creative interpretation, Meumann simply andif we heed the comments of skilled musicians themselvesincorrectly considered a good performers 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 Vierordts seminal metronomic-action experiments from as early as 1868research that clearly influenced Meumann in his musical-rhythm studiesfound that a subject, when asked to reproduce the beats of a metronome after

73

Sears, 29. Ribot, 273-4.

74

266

the metronome had been stopped, would usually recall faster clicks slower, and slower clicks faster. Metronomic time, as Vierordts 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 Vierordts law.75 As Vierordts 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 Beitrge 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 Wundts 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. Ribot, 273.

76

Summarized in Sears, 32. For Ebhardts tests, conservatory musicians performed various music selections by Mozart and Schumann, with harmonic accompaniments and without. See Kurt Ebhardt, Zwei Beitrge zur Psychologie des Rhythmus und des Tempo (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1898), 53, for his chronographic documentation for each performance. Ebhardts explanation of feeling and chronographic variation appears on page 52.

77

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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. Ebhardts chronographic piano-apparatus used to research subjects metronomic exactitude during music performances. From Kurt Ebhardt, Zwei Beitrge 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 musiciansfor the exactitude and correctness stipulated by objective, chronographic

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.

78

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rhythmto perform with the metronome, in methods similar to their fatigue and attention studies. Sears documented Meumanns 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 Vierordts, Wundts, and then Meumanns 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. 269

Fig. 4.2. The chronographic record from a subjects 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 Beitrge 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 Meumanns 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 fatiguea common measure in other metronomic labor studiescaused further

270

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 musicians 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 performers rhythmical interpretations were but errors as defined by clockwork: In relation to the accentuation of single notes these investigations found that a tendency exists1. 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. Ibid., 31. Ibid.

81

82

271

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.

Scriptures Principles Strikingly similar to the studies by Binet and Coutier in France and Ebhart and Meumann in Germany, E. W. Scriptures rhythm experiments in America concerned the need for a humans efficient and regular response time, guided by the researchers 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 pulseor the ever-shifting emotional, structural, and rhetorical content of the specific music conductedbut 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 Wundts 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. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 263. E. W. Scripture, The New Psychology (London: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1907), 181.

84

85

272

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. Ibid., 257-8. E. W. Scripture, Observations of Rhythmic Action, Science 10 (Dec. 1, 1899): 809. Scripture, The New Psychology, 181.

87

88

89

273

Fig. 4.3. Scriptures 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 Scriptures rhythm originated in the labor-fatigue and attentionfatigue experiments from Wundts 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 conductors baton, and by extension the conductor, to the evertrustworthy chronograph. He documents:

90

Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 262.

274

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. Scriptures 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 rhythmfinding ever-greater problems of human irregularity. He intended these

Ibid. Scriptures chronographic tests on conductors, it seems, were not isolated to his Yale laboratory. T. OConor Sloane, Standard Electrical Dictionary, Second Edition (New York: Normal W. Henley & Co., 1897), 586. The text describes Scriptures original apparatus, and its overriding scientific purpose: Baton, Electric. An orchestra conductors 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.

91

275

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 conductors 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 Wundts 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 Scriptures 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. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 261. Italics original. Scripture, Some Principles of Mental Education, 536.

93

94

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Not only for conductors, children, and weight lifters, Scriptures 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 Scriptures interpretation of musical timethat all quarter notes were a priori automatically equalstemmed 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 quarternote 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 perceptionboth in his laboratory and on the concert stagewas 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. 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.
96

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Even the most rhythmically regimented of traditional instrumental performancesthe military drummers cadencewas not metronomic enough for Scriptures tests when gauging the precision of a sergeants time-marking. Scriptures disdain for the chronographic errors derived from the individual musicians personal equationa scientific attitude first expressed by Wundtcould 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 himwe will attend to that laterbut 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 sergeants 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, Scriptures 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 playinga clear indicator of the musicians flawed
97

Ibid., 255-6. Ibid., 256.

98

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.

99

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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 chronographicpiano 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-lineWhen 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 Scriptures 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.

Scriptures answer to his own question was a resounding nopianists did not use their two hands like two synchronized laboratory metronomes:

100

Ibid., 31-32.

279

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 orderThe 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 pedalingall 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. Scriptures chronographic record of a pianists performance of a mere two notes (represented by the two dots). The read-out shows the performers 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 Scriptures 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. 280

diverged from mechanical simultaneity by .005 seconds. Indeed, Scripture considered a pianists 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. Scriptures interpretation of an anti-scientific, non-metronomic performance practice. Justified by the chronographic method, Scripture transcribes a hypothetical performers 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 alongmusic 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 pianists problems of metronomic imprecision represented a clear danger of over-looking small differences which must

281

be dealt with by the music teacher, whowithout 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 teachers correction.102 Scripture assumed that music instructorsand more importantly passive auditors must hold the same chronographic biases as experimental psychologists. To facilitate such musical-temporal perfection, Scriptures 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 pianoplayer, 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 playerthe 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. Scripture, Some Principles of Mental Education, 537.

104

282

As Scripture relates, while the pervasive problems of chronographic imprecision continued to plague musical performances, for now at least, Maelzels metronome would succeed in solving many of the errors intrinsic to the players personal equation.

Boltons Rhythm In 1894, the very same year Meumanns influential thesis on rhythm was published in Leipzig,105 and one year before Binet, Courtier, and Scriptures publications on musical chronography, Thaddeus L. Boltons 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 Hallthe founder of the first experimental-psychology laboratory in North America106sought to reduce rhythm to a more fundamental activity of mind.107 In keeping with Wundts methodologies, Boltons 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
See E. Meumann, Untersuchungen zur psychologie und aesthetik des rhythmus, (Ph.D. diss., University of Leipzig, 1894).
106 105

Scripture, The New Psychology, vii.

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

107

Ibid., 150-2. Ibid., 151, 155.

109

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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 measurethat is, the strong accent occurs at regular intervalsbut 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 Wundts initial mistranslation of musical meter from attention experiments, Bolton defined a natural musical accent as a performers objective manipulation of volume intensity along with his maintenance of mathematicalmetronomic precision at each measure. Indeed, every note in any given meter, according to Bolton, was objectively distinguished only in degrees of volume, nothing elsea
110

Ibid., 166-7.

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highly automatical interpretation of musical performance, one directly opposed to Christianis, Webers, and Marxs multifaceted understanding of musical accent and pulse. Bolton still acknowledges, at least, Christianis 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 rhythmIn 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. Ibid., 206.

112

285

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 Maelzels metronome (with Wundts electro-magnetic modifications) an imperfect, unscientific machine: The difficulty was with Wundts 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 two113The Sound of the metronome which Dietze employed is full and rich and has great carrying power [within the subjects 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 redefinedand continued to redefinetraditional 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. Ibid., 207.

114

286

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 resultsThe 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 Boltons 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 subjects 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. Ibid., 184.

117

287

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 experimentsIn my own case and in some others there was a tendency to sway the body with the [imagined] pendulumIt was quite visible at times.119 They visualized and moved to a far less precise, regulatory, or modern rhythmical referenceone 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 sciencea 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.

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

119

See Titchener, An Outline of Psychology, 182-3.

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After his meticulous chronographic testing, Bolton averaged the resultsthe mathematical de-emphasis of individual variationsdown to the thousands of a second. Then, he verified Wundts 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 Boltons 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 Boltons 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. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 238.

122

123

289

creative intentions of musicians themselves. Perhaps unbeknownst to those working within Wundts 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 proceduresin opposition a performers self-actualization of physical pulse and movementBolton 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.

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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 musicians personal equation. From the very first paragraph of his American Journal of Psychology report, Sears states his chronographic biasprescribing how the absolute mathematicalmechanical 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 artistin contrast to the novicedid 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.

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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 psychologists 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 threeFor 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 musicianshipa conceptual paradigm shift influenced by chronographic researchone devoid of expressivity, physical and rhetorical gesture, or a sense of pulse, becomes readily applied when Sears references
126

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 33.

127

292

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 automatons 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. Ibid., 35-8.

129

293

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.

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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 notationmusicians 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. Ibid.

132

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.

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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 secondsclock. 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. Ibid., 41.

135

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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 timea standard epistemology that any skilled musician could have explained to himbut 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. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 43. See Sears, Table VI. Emphasis added.

137

138

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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 secondthus while the tendency is slight to

139

Ibid. Ibid., 44. Ibid.

140

141

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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. Ibid. Ibid., 45.

143

144

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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 intervalsqualities more vocal than mathematical or mechanicalwhich imbued living music performance with a certain mouvement, swing, wavy outline, or ingalit. Yet for Sears and other experimental psychologists, the performers 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 rhythmof 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. Ibid., 46. 300

146

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 durationin hundredths of a secondthat 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:

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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 practicea 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 waningto the detriment of music performanceand 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.

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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 trendthe devaluation of an internalized sense of time perceptionin 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.

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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 phenomenaAnd 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 Wundts laboratory through the chronographic method. As analyzed in Chapter VI, Jaques-Dalcroze, in order to solve the modern problems of rhythm, applied Wundts 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
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). Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, The Initiation into Rhythm, in Rhythm, Music, and Education, translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1921), 81.
152 151 150

Jaques-Dalcroze, Music, Joy, and the School, (1915) in Rhythm, Music, and Education, 171.

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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 Hallocks 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 rhythmproven in the laboratory through mathematically averaged and accumulated datafundamentally 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 civilizations 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 Hallocks article in Poets Lore.

Mary Hallock Greenewalt, The Correspondence of Pulse and Rhythm, The Metaphysical Magazine XXI (May-Dec., 1907): 378. Albert Shaw, ed., Pulse and Rhythm, The American Monthly Review of Reviews XXVIII (July-Dec., 1903): 487.
155

154

305

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, Hallocks 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 minutenot physical pulse or movementand 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.

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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 Whos 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 Searsoriginating in Wundts rhythmical experimentswere 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 generalinterest 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 Hallocks articles, Pulse in Verbal Rhythm (1905), scientific values clearly dominate her modern music pedagogyfollowing a cultural-societal trend further explored in Chapters VI and VII. And similar to scientists such as Sears, Hallock reconsidered a musicians variable expression in timea living practice that she could not realistically denywith absolute reference to the performance techniques of musical automata:

158

Ibid., 379.

See John William Leonard, ed., Womens Whos 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.

159

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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 exceptionan almost mythical performance practiceto 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 lifelikewere 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 Grews 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, sixtime, 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.

Mary Hallock, Pulse in Verbal Rhythm, Poet Lore 16 (1905): 80. Regardless of Hallocks assertions, music publications seldom, if ever, printed metronome marks for each variable, interpretative moment described by Hallocks performance practice.

161

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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 performers continual, albeit variable sense of pulse in metered music. He (and not Riemann) mistakenly assumed that the musicians
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.

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reference to the beating pulse should equate to a precise chronographic regulator, applied over the course of an entire performance. Not surprisingly, Welds 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 subjects 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.

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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. Pattersons 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 twentiethcentury cultural thought. Indeed, Wundts laboratory experiments defined Pattersons artistic rhythm, in what this scientific pedagogue considered The New Standard166 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 twentiethcentury 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. Ibid., xxii.

167

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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 movementwhat Patterson alluded to as a non-notated sense of swing169became 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.

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

169

Ibid., 51.

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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 Pattersons 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 paragraphThe new standard has for its support not so much its apparent novelty, as its subservience to the psychological facts of individual difference.172 In Pattersons 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 notationwhich 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 individuals psychological response to organized mechanical time was the new, absolute meaning of rhythm.

Seashores 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. Seashores writings confirm the complete transformation of musical time to the chronographic paradigm of rhythm and action. Seashore

171

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 13-14.

172

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experienced in administering both child-study tests173 and attention studies174 in the Wundt traditiondirectly 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 Seashores 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 singers 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:

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 Vierordts 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

173

Carl E. Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1908), 168.

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

175

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.

Carl E. Seashore, Scientific Procedure in the Discovery of Musical Talent in the Public Schools, Music Supervisors Journal 2 (Jan., 1916): 10.
178

177

He addressed the American Psychological Association in December 1911. See Carl E. Seashore, The Measure of a Singer, Science 35 (1912): 201.

314

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 intensitydiscrimination, 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, Seashores 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 Seashores 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. Carl Emil Seashore, The Sense of Rhythm as a Musical Talent, The Musical Quarterly 4 (Oct., 1918): 513.

181

315

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 musicians 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 Wundts 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. Ibid., 11.

184

316

Musically, the sense of time is the natural capacity for precision in the hearing of the duration of tones or short time intervalsThe 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 musicians 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. Ibid., 115.

186

317

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 Seashores 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 psychologists rigid chronographic bias of exacting mechanical time and action. No longer a human sensation or an internally derived quality of movement, Seashores efficient rhythmregulated with chronographic valuesunderpinned 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 students musical memory, Seashore created psychological examinations in the traditions of Wundts attention and fatigue studies: the metronome ruled and regulated a new, chronographic experiment in the individuals 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. 318

Fig. 4.9. Seashores 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 Seashores notation as well. The subjectas in other chronographic experiments testing memory, fatigue, or attentionpassively 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.

319

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 timequalities 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.

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provided by chronographic research that artificially gauged an individuals 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 itBut 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 performanceone 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 valuethe very hallmark of Wundts 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. Ruckmick, 366, n17. 321

191

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 psychologyspanning, at the time of his publication, over 50 yearsbased 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. Ibid. Scripture, Observations on Rhythmic Action, 807.

193

194

322

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 onesThe 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 Verriers 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 individuals inner rhythm, which in itself is subject to variations.197 Verriers 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. Paterson, 88.

196

197

Ibid., 35. See also P. Verrier, Essai sur les principles de la metrique anglaise, III (Paris, 19091919), 63; and Les variations temporelles du rythme, Journal de Psy. Norm. et Path. I (1913): 18.

323

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 rhythmsmanifest 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.

Paull Franklin Baum, The Principles of English Versification, Third edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), 4.
200

199

Ibid., 3.

324

while he speaks of images, architecture, and printed points as being rhythmic, Baum neglected silent, visual motionsuch as witnessed in a simple pendulumas 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.

Baum, 14. In instructing poets on meter, Baum suggests that regularity of rhythmgrounded by this internal metronomemust 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 Paderewskis and Marxs statements of nineteenth-century creativity, Baum contended: No poet ever wrote to a metronome accompaniment. Ibid., 66.

202

325

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 Baums rhythmic conception was in stark opposition to Scriptures 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. Ibid., 57. 326

204

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 beingsare 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 trainingand 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-Dalcrozes 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. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 199.

206

207

327

recognized as the counting method, Jaques-Dalcrozes 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 individuals 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.

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

209

Swindle., 193.

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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. Swindles assessmentsalong with the many other critiques of laboratory rhythm presented in this studyshould 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 Wundts 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 individuals 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. 329

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 Wundts science to new generations of twentieth-century musicians and educators through 1945. Indeed, Seashore can be considered the culmination of the experimentalpsychology traditiona 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 practicesallying rhythmical action instead with a series of passive technical actions unrelated to living thought, expression, or volitionso 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 Wundts 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 Wundts Leipzig laboratory, treated the creative musicianthe individual thinker and performer,
212

Seashore, The Measurement of Musical Talent, 129-130.

330

unencumbered by scientific tools such as the metronomeas 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 visionThe 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 sublimeThe 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. Seashores epistemology of time and human action, originating in Wundts 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. 331

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 musicians 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 traditionsa 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

332

musical notes now represented precise, mathematically gauged objectsoutside of the mind and body, outside of the individuals will, outside of the personal sense of pulseto 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, Scriptures great independent variable, the ever-present, uncontrollable tick-tick-tick of metronomic rhythm.

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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 machines 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 humans 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 metronomes clockwork click, upon an individuals nervous and musculature system. By the 1920s, behavioral scientists such as Pavlov had confirmed these effects: Maelzels 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):

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[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 Companys 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,

Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-book of Psychology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 539. James Mark Baldwin, ed. Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, vol. I (New York: Macmillan Company, 1901), 436.
2

335

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 thatsince the early nineteenth-centurycritics 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 students 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 performers 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 Lubbocks 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
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. Sir John Lubbock, On Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals, Second Edition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1889), 284.
4 3

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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 Os [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 experimentsaltered the

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. 337

subjects 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 subjects muscular reactions and emotions during any given experiment-performance. While Lubbocks 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

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 338

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 Swifts results confirmed that the sonic imposition of clockwork indeed altered the subjects 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 Boltons experiment, this skilled musician perceived a slight feeling of muscle tension in the ear and back of the scalpthere 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 timeapart from its immediate distracting effectscould 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. Ibid., 18-9. Ibid., 6.

11

12

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 Maelzels metronome could provide.

13

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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 Pavlovs behavioral research on animals, Yale psychologistswhich at the time included both Scripture and Seashore15found 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:

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

14

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.

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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 Wundts subjects, similar to those at Yale, responded sympathetically to the metronome, reacting to the machines artificial rate by involuntarily adjusting their breathingand correspondingly their feelingsto 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 Maelzels 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 Titcheners 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. See Bolton, 188, 192 for some instances.

17

H. C. Stevens, A Plethysmographic Study of Attention, The American Journal of Psychology 16 (Oct., 1905), Table III, insert between 468-9.

18

341

546 experiments.19 Hayes faithfully documented the subjects feelings, using Wundts 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:

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

19

Hayes, 282. Ibid., 383. Ibid.

21

22

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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 machines 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. Ibid., 389. Ibid.

24

25

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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 disturbed27 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. Miner, 102. Ibid., 102-3.

27

28

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distraction-series on the human subjects.29 Cassell and Dallenbachs results are revelatorywith significant implications for performers and pedagogues of musicsince 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. Cassel and Dallenbach, 141.

30

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came to find the clicks almost soothing. The 1918 experiment discovered the metronome to be a normalizing influence upon the subjects 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 individuals 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. Angell and Harwood, 69.

32

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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 subjects 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. Ibid., 415. Ibid., 417. Ibid., 418. 347

34

35

36

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 subjects 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 wordrepetition 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, Wundts 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.

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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 stimulusthe 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. Liddells 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.

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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 conditionedresponse 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. Pavlovs 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. Ibid. Ibid., 103.

40

41

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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 Pavlovs methodology with the standard scientific knowledge that continual, repetitive exposure to one type of stimulusespecially the metronomecaused 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 administeredPavlov 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, Pavlovs 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 metronomewhich initially functioned either to stimulate or distracteventually caused psychological damage to his animal subjects. Ironically it seems, as Pavlov and other behavioralists recognized the metronomes 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. Ibid., 342.

43

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.

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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 patients eyes are then closed, he is to keep very quiet, while the metronome or some other monotonous stimulus is continued. After some timethe 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. Miner, 28. 352

46

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 centuryan age many historians consider the second wave of the Industrial Revolutionhad 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, whowell outside of the laboratorynow 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 citizens 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 appointmentsA 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. Putnams Sons, 1881), 103-4. 353

music lagged far behind the time keeping of urban life and industrial travel. Nevertheless, by the turn of the centuryonce the metronome became a standard apparatus in both the musical and psychological training of precise rhythmic actionmusicians 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 suggestedand 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 efficiencywhile reducing the mean variation of individual action. By 1895, Scripture had described the successful scientific methods that created the modern mindciting 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 Twains 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 today. 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.

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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 Maelzels 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.

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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 machineseither as stimulators or distracterseffaced the more leisurely, lyrical, and personal interpretations heard in past performance practices. Perry essentially confirms Scriptures 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 Lippmanns and Perrys very similar line of questioning, as well as the findings of experimental psychologists that spanned over three decades, further inquiries regarding the clockwork metronomes effect upon musicality should logically surface, including the following: Was Maelzels 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

Edward Baxter Perry, Stories of Standard Teaching Pieces (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1910), 43-44.

50

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Atheling, a prominent Parisian music critic, had also heard the metronome actively changing the nature of musical time in living performances. Indeed, he believed Maelzels 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 musicianshis quotes distinguish them from creative musical artistswho slavishly trained in metronomic time became desensitized to nuanced and expressive techniques in the process. Pound seemed particularly aware of the metronomes 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, Pounds metronomic musicians recall the sheer mechanical associators of Ebbinghaus wordrepetition 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,

Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 132.

51

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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 musicians 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 acquiredperhaps only half consciouslya 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 poets recognition was fundamentally correct: mechanically regulated actionfirst actualized in the nineteenthcentury scienceshad continued to alter human thought, action, and even the musicians 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.

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 formJust 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 Pounds 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. 358

53

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 Pounds 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 timein 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 actionsinvariably dictated by metronomic rhythm and chronographic methodsas 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.

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CHAPTER VI: THE METRONOMIC EDUCATION In order for consumers to embrace recently emergent technologiessuch as simple pendulums, clockwork metronomes, or quartz wristwatchesinventors, 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 conventionsthat 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 creators original conceptions. While inventors often introduce machines for specific and limited purposes, over time, a communitys 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

For example, the Internetoriginally intended for specialized scientists to exchange research data quickly and efficiently, and which has become a primary avenue of global commerce, communication, and entertainmentis perhaps the best example today of a technological divergence from an original purpose. 360

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 metronomeregardless of its mechanical accuracyentirely 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 dictatorsince a simple pendulum could always suffice for an initial pulse referencenineteenth-century physiologists and psychologists were truly the first to collectively discover and champion the lasting meaning and utility hidden within Maelzels 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

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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 valuesthe truthof the clockwork metronome and its beats-perminute scale through his obscure Metronic Tutor (c1817).3 Maelzels 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 Maelzels various metronome-chart iterations that the inventor distributed during this time.

[Classified Section,] Times, Feb. 19, 1817, 1. In a self-aggrandizingand highly fictitious manner perhaps expected from the celebrated automata entertainer, Maelzels 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).

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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, Maelzels 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 sundialsthe most prevalent and long-standing time-telling technologies in historyvalueless 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 systema 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 sundialsalong with other non-

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automatical time-telling tools and techniqueshas definitively passed. One New York Times reviewer in 1920 summarized his contemporary cultures 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 revolutionReally precise time telling has not been needed in the world until within a few yearsIt 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 century7an age when really precise mechanical time-telling came to fruition for industrialized societynew generations in Western civilization became trained to use, value, and believe in the truth of Maelzels 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

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. 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 placeconceptually 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. 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. 364
7

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 Maelzels metronome only coalesced through new pedagogies in the late nineteenth century that prescribed mechanically rhythmic timekeeping for the efficient, standardized, orderly, replicableand ultimately scientifictraining of human action. This chapter charts a now-familiar technologythe ticking, clockwork metronomeas it drastically transitioned in importance and utility for Western society; through new scientific values of rhythmic training, the clockwork metronomeonce an anathema within the past traditions of artistic performancetransformed 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.

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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 MusicLand 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
Emma L. Shedlock, A Trip to Music-land (London: Blackie & Son, Paternoster Buildings, 1876), vii.
9 8

Shedlock, viii.

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within the book (in addition to the music paraphernalia, which included the clockwork metronome, purchased separately through the publisher or another source).10 Shedlocks 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 endowedwith a large [audibly ticking] clock in the very center of his chest.11 Other characters included Dr. Rest, Queen Melody, Rhythm (Times 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. Rests Cannons needed to tell Shedlocks 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]. 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 childrens tale, she associates the values of a minim, crotchet, and quaver with proportional fractions of Times clock-face (in seconds). Through the two-handed clock and Maelzels intentions, she helped redefine musical notation with more precise, chronographic intentions. See Shedlock, 11. Rhythm first appears in Shedlock, 20.

11

12

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Fig. 6.1. Detail of the Landing of Metronome and Sub-division in Music-land. Included in the landing party are General Metronomes 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, Metronomes 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 Maelzels culture. Metronomes 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. Shedlock, 44.

14

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Shedlocks metronome-as-military general is an appropriate allegory for the uses of the machine in nineteenth-century childrens 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, Shedlocks battlefield metronome had little in common with artists conceptions of living performanceindividual expression, spontaneous creation, or nuanced interpretation formed no part of the mechanical drilling of Music-Land troops. Shedlocks 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 battlefield 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

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. The King in her tale alludes to the fact that before Metronomes arrival, each composition each battlerequired new instructions as to the time the army of notes needed to move. See Shedlock, 44.
16

15

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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 metronomethe machine did not actively guide their living actions as it did for subjects in Wundts 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 fablelesson, 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 metronomewhich she does not specify was moving at the time. The fairy reinterpreted the music of the Instruction Book on the 370

The metronomes place in culture, however, began to uncannily mirror Shedlocks 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 1870sand was never to prevent a necessary, a priori temporal flexibilitythis 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 Groves Dictionary (1880), military bands (and conceivably military troops) could purchase a very large and loud Metronomeby Messrs. Rudall & Carte of London intended for mass, regimented
narrators 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. 371

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 metronomegymnastics treatment on his patients in the 1830s). And as early as the 1820s, Colonel Amoros Paris gymnastic schoolperhaps the first and most prominent government-

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

19

U.S. War Department, Annual Reports (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), 276. Canada Parliament, Sessional Paper No. 1, Sessional Papers XXXV (1901): Q-65.

21

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 (ber das Dirigiren), trans. Edward Dannreuther (London: William Reeves, 1897), 19. 372

22

sponsored institution of its kind in modern Europe23employed 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 Colonels training regimen for students seems to closely mirror the fictional General Metronomes intentions for Music-Lands army. While nineteenth-century gymnastic students readily learned to move their limbs by the machines clockwork, their training was not limited to regimented walking and jumping alone. James Madison Watsons 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 methodsand the only externalized, mechanical methodof 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.

From the London Scientific Gazette, Intelligence: Col. Amoros Gymnastic school Paris, in American Journal of Education I (Boston: Wiat, Green, and Co., 1826), 689. 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.
25

24

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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 Watsons gymnastic studio, where a musician

26

Ibid., 124. See Watson, 149-153; 158-162; 187-190; and 206-209 for music examples.

27

374

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 Watsons 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 workseemingly 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. 375

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 metronomewhich only some schools employed for music trainingwas 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 metronomes 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 movementthrough 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 metronomewhat it was and where it could be purchasedconfirming that, in North America at least, the still-obscure clockwork metronome was primarily intended for childrens musical instruction. To learn
Alvin R. Dutton, B. Harrison, et al., Manual of Free-hand Penmanship (Boston: J.W.C. Gilman & Co., 1877), 9.
30 29

Ibid., 8.

376

takigraphy, however, a metronome without the bel is just as good for gauging the dictation in teaching shorthandThe 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 metronomes 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 Maelzels 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 machinenot the simple pendulumfor 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. Lyman D. Smith, Writing in the Lower Grades, The American Teacher IX (June, 1892): 393.

32

377

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 Maelzels 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 metronomeoften a scientific reference when tuning organ pipeswas 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 Maelzels 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.

One year after Parsons text appeared, G.-A. Hirns Construction et Emploi du Mtronome en Musique verified as much in France. Commenting on Saint-Sans 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 Mtronome en Musique (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1887), 5-6; and Camille Saint-Sans, The Metronome, in Outspoken Essays on Music, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922): 122-4.

34

378

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 piecesthe 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 compositionsand that initial tempo numbers printed for a work should not be misinterpreted as regulating musical timehe nevertheless prescribed the machine as a normalizing agent of musical individuality, used to drill typical (nonartistic) 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. Ibid., 24. 379

36

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 variabilityduring practicing onlymanifested 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 Parsons text, G.-A. Hirn, in his pedagogical essay Construction et Emploi du Mtronome 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.

380

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 nineteenthcentury instruction techniques as well; he described a students 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 mtronome est destin, non batter la measure (ceci ne peut etre quexceptionnel et reviendrait mcaniser lArt, comme le craignait Weber), mais indiquer des labord, un chef dorchestra ou un excutant, le mouvement moyen que dsire le compositeur, movement auquel on doit se tenir tant que lartiste nindique pas de changement, et auquel on doit sans cesse revenir travers les petits carts que commande le sentiment musical. Parsons, 24.

39

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 tempoThis 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. 381

40

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 performanceand how much it resembled a military drillis readily apparent as Parson dictates:

41

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45.

42

382

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 existedvisually or aurallyin 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. 383

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

384

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 Lymans Normal Music Course (1896) also recounted the individual students 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 Teachers 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

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

44

See, for examples, Frederic A. Lyman, The Normal Music in the Schoolroom (New York: Silver, Burdett and Co., 1896), 28-29, 40-44, 66.

Julia E. Crane, Music Teachers Manual, Seventh Edition (Potsdam, NY: Elliot Fay & Sons, 1915), 70.

46

385

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 timewhich had no absolute, scientific rulestrumped clockwork. Nevertheless, as modern culture developed, this value system drastically reversed in general education: what once was clearly an atrocity for somethe application of the precise clockwork rhythm to subjective culturerapidly became a virtue, a goal to strive for, in new psychologyinfluenced 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 methodologiesfounded on laboratory chronographythe 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. 386

prominently valued strict, mechanical mimicry above individual variation, a new wave of pedagogues surfaced in the 1890syears 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. Scripturethe prominent psychologist who tested musicians in mechanical performance in his Yale laboratorypublicly 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 timesA 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 childs 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. Scripture, 544-5. 387

49

The precise durations of a childs 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 Hallan early student of Wundt, founding editor of the American Journal of Psychology, and President of Clark Universitycodified this new experimental wave of childrens education in Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, first published in 1904. Like many psychologists before him, Hallwho 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. Scripture, 546.

51

388

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 childs 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 hourThis 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 childs learningfrom 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 lifeThe 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,

G. Stanley Hall, Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1907), 4-5. This text is a reduction of Halls 1904 book Adolescence.
53

52

Scripture, 547-8.

389

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 students 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 disciplineunder the external and mechanical training of chronographythey 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. 390

with scientific values, stunted the students 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-eminenceSurgery, 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 Perrys 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,

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. Edward Baxter Perry, The Other Side, Music V (November, 1893-April, 1894): 207. Perry describes many machines currently on the market that Parsons describedin including the technicon, an artificial harness for the students handsthat supposedly improved physical technique.
57 56

55

Henry Davies, A Plea for a Science of Art, Music XVIII (May, 1900): 15.

391

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 pedagoguesin the pursuit of objective, scientific normsincreasingly 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 studentsthus 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, Hansons new mechanized metronomespecifically intended for the amateur, student musicianreplicated the beat patterns of a conductors baton with the appearance of a

58

Ibid., 1. Ibid., 8.

59

392

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 referenceone 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 biasfound 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 expressionMeaning interferes with estimates of duration and intensity,62 two quantifiable values of the experimental psychologists chronographic understanding of rhythm. Indeed, Pattersons assessment was accurate when compared to past beliefs in creative, subjective time:
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 bton, 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. 18931894 (London: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1894): 23.
61

60

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). 393

rhythm was once considered a living, nuanced qualitya creative art formnot a scientific control. Before experimental psychologists applied the scientific metronome to human action and perception, artistic rhythm was interpretive before it was metronomicmusical and spoken rhythm was complex and meaningful, a rhythm irreducible to mere mechanics. As Pattersons 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 1894corresponding to the release of scientific rhythm studies by Meumann, Bolton, and othersAmerican 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-ofthe-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 Pianoforteappearing in the same issue as Perrys diatribe against mechanical music educationdeemed with scientific certainty that the theme of the Schumanns Etudes Symphoniquesmoves in quarters at the rate of 54 of the metronome.63 With no discussion of the importance of the performers expressive interpretation, pulse-sense, or

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.

63

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individuality, Mathews (the editor of the periodical) thereby reduced the poetry of Schumanns 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 Musics 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 daughters 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 Zeckwers 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. 395

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 daughters and her own inability to perform in strict metronomic timeas the laboratory subject would be forced to do passivelythe 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-Sans, Berlioz, Sternberg, Brahms, Perry

66

H.L.B., A Lesson from the Metronome, Christian Science Journal XIII (April, 1895): 375. H.L.B., 375-6.

67

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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 rightand 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 daughters 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 errorIt 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 metronomea tool the writer was totally ignorant of her entire life became the very analogy of Gods 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. H.L.B., 376-7.

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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 numbersnotably Breitkopf und Hrtel and Tobias Haslingeralso sold metronomes in their shops. Even Groves 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 Shedlocks 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.

Theodore Baker, A Dictionary of Musical Terms, Third Edition (New York: G. Schirmer, 1897), 121. 398

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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 correspondedor should correspondto 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 amateurs habitual musical training, as he asserts: Rubato is not something to be soughtWhat 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 expressionThis 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 machines habituating effects, recognized that the metronome defined a rhythmical feeling for the studentbut it was a rhythm of a mechanical species. For Mathews, the expressive, linguistic, and physical qualities of timenow 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

William Smythe Babcock Mathews, The Practical Teacher. Rubato, Music VIII (MayOctober 1895): 325. 399

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machine when gauging the mechanical time-accuracy of symmetric musical phrases, even before they learn to feel expressionan exactly opposite instruction from Julia E. Cranes 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 performerstudent 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 pieces 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, Musics full-page announcement exclaims, imperative after imperative, the essential value of the clockwork machine for the modern students precisely regimented musical education:

400

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 Maelzels 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 teachers pocket metronomes graduated simple pendulumsin 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.

Etude VI (1888): 193. ML e85 v6 1888 no. 12, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music.
76

75

See, for example, Etude VI: 181.

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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 metronomewith an enticing image of the clockwork machinehad begun to supersede advertisements and images of simple tempo-pendulums in Pressers Etude magazine.77

Figure 6.5. A typical advertisement in Theodore Pressers Etude, circa 1890s, for the Teachers 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 Maelzels 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.

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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 Newtons 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 Karrs 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 accuracynay, insists, with its strenuous monotony, on all these.82 Under scientific prescriptions, monotony and mechanical precision were new cultural

Robert Andrews Millikan and Henry Gordon Gale, A First Course on Physics (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1906), 26, 27, 34.
80

79

M. L. Karr, The metronomeits 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. Karr, 98.

82

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values for performance pedagogy. Through this non-living temporal reference, the metronome vanquishes the childs volatile emotional statehis personal equationin 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 childs personal equation must be regulatedconquered eventhrough 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 workEven 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 senseThe 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 Karrs 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. Ibid.

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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 pendulumit 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 students ability to mimic artificial, metronomic rhythm. Similar scientific values appear in volume XIII (1898) of Music where Bertram C. Henrys 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 strokesPractice 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 Henrys view, the music pupil must habituate to every metronomic rate with unflinching mechanical regularityeven 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

Bertram C. Henry, Development of Rhythmic Conception, Music XIII (Nov., 1897-Apr., 1898): 469-470.

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the students 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 Henrys 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 Henrys music students, the John Hopkinss 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 agesuch as those encountered in Chapters I and IIwould likely have found the procedure to be a strange human
86

Lewis T. Stevens, On The Time-Sense, Mind 11 (Jul., 1886): 393.

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pantomime in Maelzelian automatism. The report explains the chronographic process, devised over a decade before Henrys 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 timetraining procedure to the Hopkins time-sense tests and Henrys 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.

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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 childrens 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 childs developing rhythmic abilities that clearly prefigures Jaques-Dalcrozes concerns and teachings.

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

90

Psychological Literature, American Journal of Psychology 2 (May, 1889): 507. Scripture, Some Principles of Mental Education, 541-2. Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing, 36.

92

93

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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 middleclass 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 PsychoPhysical Measurements of Washington School Children.95 Child-study psychologists applied similar laboratory methods and apparatus in Chicago classrooms only years later. A Frank Leslies 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.

Arthur MacDonald, Experimental Study of Children, Including Anthropometrical and PsychoPhysical Measurements of Washington School Children, a Bibliography (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899), 1199-1200. Edward Marshall, Scientific Child Study, Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly 51 (Mar., 1901): 3. APS Online.
96

95

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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 childs 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 childs 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 childstudy. They indicated endurance.97 Frank Leslies Popular Monthly prints the image of various mechanical apparatuses, including the scientific metronome that sat atop the ergograph. As depicted, the childsubject 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 students 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 studentnow precisely defined through the modern experimental science of child study.

97

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 7-8.

98

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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 metronomethe 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 childs movement, a measure of the personal equation against a scientifically normal, mechanical rhythm. Music: Devoted to the Art,
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.
99

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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 Whitmers 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 Whitmers 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.

412

music teachers to read new bookson psychology to bring your teaching methods up to date101 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 youths 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 bellthe inventor

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 Whitmers 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

101

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.

413

considered the metrical reference a distraction from the regular sound of the beats.104 Inventor Ernest Adamspatenting 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 students 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 performancesall 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 timeone 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.

414

simple pendulums into the twentieth century. These pocket metronomes offered an easy pulse reference using Maelzels standard beats-per-minute scale, which dictated through a finite swing the publishers 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 pendulumswith more precise and adjustable scalesinto 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).

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

107

See Zeckwer, 1. Also Etude VI (1888): 173, 193. Sibley Library ML e85 v6 1888 no12.

415

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 latenineteenth-century America. Zeckwers silent tempo-pendulum incorporated Maelzels 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 pendulumswhich now displayed grave disadvantages compared to clockwork metronomeswere 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

Clarence G. Hamilton, How to Use the Metronome Correctly (Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co., 1916), 4. 416

109

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 publishersincluding Hamilton, Whitmer, and Adamsfound 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. Ibid., 173.

111

417

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 subjects 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 Meyers 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 machines 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 signifierswhich, as Hummel noted as early as 1828, held clues to

Max Meyer, Experimental Studies in the Psychology of Music, The American Journal of Psychology 14 (Jul.-Oct., 1903): 192-214. Whitmers comments appear 210-12.
113

112

Whitmer, The Time Marking System in Music, Music XIX (Apr., 1901): 123.

418

more complex, nuanced, and emotional interpretations114could 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 Whitmers 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; McLaughlins 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, Ausfhrlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel, I (Wien: T. Haslinger, 1828), 5th Kapitel, 66-68.

James M. McLaughlin, Elements & Notation of Music (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1902), 7879.
116

115

Ibid., 21-24. Ibid., 78.

117

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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 quarternote 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 students education, one that focused on habitual and mechanical repetition above personal insight or perception. Even in athleticsmost conspicuously in the quasimilitaristic field of gymnasticsmetronomic regulation continued to be a highly prized aspect of instruction, which further extended to the rhythmic-gymnastics of JaquesDalcroze. 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.

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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 trainingnot skilled artistic performance was the prevailing, positive value in a youths 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 childrens 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 subjects 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.

William Henry Pyle, The Outlines of Educational Psychology: An Introduction to the Science of Education (Baltimore: Warkick & York, Inc., 1911), 203.

122

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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 Maelzels (rather Winkels) 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 metronomewhich now completely lacks the visual pulse reference of a swinging pendulumhas 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 methodand the increasing neglect of silent, visual, and finite tempo referencesin 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. 422

Despite some inefficiencies and inaccuracies when compared to more popular time-telling machines like the pocket watch, Maelzels 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 nonscientific 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 Elsons piano-centric Modern Music and Musicians (1918) recounts Johnstones 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. 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).

125

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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 timeThe slow trill is to be practiced continually, with the metronome mark raised in later lessons until 96 is reachedas 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 eighthnote 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 Johnstones 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. Johnstones 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. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 72-3.

127

128

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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: Maelzels 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 users time-sense through habitual repetition. Despite these well-worn rejections, this writer found the clockwork metronomea 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. Masons successor as a teacher of piano. Masons 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. 425

the provinces130to be the most important tool of a childs instruction for instilling a normal sense of rhythm. Bowmans 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 metronomes 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 educatorsimilar to some inventors of the ageregarded 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 students musical education. Published two decades prior to his metronome letter, the BowmansWeitzmans 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. Ibid., 154.

131

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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 metronomes purpose in music, according to Bowman and other proponents, was to habitually drill an artificial and normalizing timesense into children. An education in thoughtful, individual, or insightful interpretation
132

Carl Friederich Weitzman and E. M. Bowman, Bowmans-Weitzmans Manual of Music Theory a Concise, Comprehensive and Practical Text-Book on the Science of Music (New York: Wm. A. Pond & Co., 1897), 17. Bowman, Letters from a Musician to His Nephew, 155.

133

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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, Bowmans words imply that the metronomes 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 musicianartists 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. 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.

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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 childrens 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 students 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 metronomicmusical 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 pedagogyreducing, regulating time and movement to

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.

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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 pedagogyincreasingly 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 beatsWe reckon time by the clock in seconds and minutes, and the metronome ticks in exactly the same way as the clockEach tick of the clock means one secondeach 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 composers 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. Chittenden, 145. Ibid., 146.

138

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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 illequipped 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, Marxprefiguring both Christiani and Chittendens realizationscontinued 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.

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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 Fincks 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 regularlyphysiology calls it arythmiaTo 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 composers imagination and an interpreters 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 Scribners 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. Finck, 455. Ibid., 456.

142

143

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move in mechanical time, especially in Beethovens 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 Paderewskis 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 grip146 in children. Whipples text provides a highly detailed image of the arm-clamping machine with the
144

Ibid., 456.

Arthur Holmes, The Conservation of the Child (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1912), insert after 230. Guy Montrose Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore: Warwick & York, Inc., 1914), 116-7.
146

145

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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 next147 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.

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experimenter described the process to the student-subject, gently saying, Ill 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 Paderewskis criticisms either. The training systems devised by noted Harvard psychologist Hugo Mnsterberg also relied on the metronome to measure and regulate the activities school children, students, factory laborers, and office workers in the twentieth-century. Mnsterbergs 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 Mnsterbergs 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.

Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911; Reprint, Mineola: Dover, 1998), iv. 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 Mnsterberg, Hugo Mnsterberg (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1922), 213-214.
151

150

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personal equations to mechanical certainty, for all activities of industrialized society. Thus, outside of the Harvard laboratory, Mnsterberg 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 employees 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 observers stellar perceptions. Sarah Frances Whitings 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. Sarah Frances Whiting, Daytime and Evening Exercises in Astronomy, for Schools and Colleges (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1912), 51 n1.

153

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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 nineteenthcentury operations on frogs; it seems that the metronome continued to provide a temporal control for artificial respiration, but as Robert Swopes 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,

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. War Department, Medical Research Laboratory (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 189 Sinclair Tousey, Medical Electricity, Rntgen Rays, and Radium (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1921), 428.
157 156 155

154

Robert Swope, Resuscitation and Artificial Respiration Apparatus, U.S. Patent #1,848,232 (Filed Sept. 29, 1927; Patented Mar. 8, 1932).

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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. Frank N. Freeman, A Course in Handwriting: II, Elementary School Journal XXII (Sept., 1921-June, 1922): 445.

159

Clayton Meeker Hamilton, Studies in Stagecraft (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1914), 193.

160

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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 handwritingIt is consequently important that the tempo of writing to the beat should not be made too quickInto 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 expressionthe personal equation so derided by psychologistswas 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. 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. Robert Robertson Rusk, Experimental Education (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), 287.

162

163

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value upon a childs performance, merely approximating a natural and nuanced rhythm learned only through personal experience.

Comprehensive, Automatical Pedagogies Despite Rusks 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 rhythmicgymnastics, seemed to impart the child-student with a precise, externalized rhythm exploited by physiologists and experimental psychologists decades before him.164 In 1905

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. 440

164

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 measureThis 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 Paderewskis and identical to both Wundts and Scriptures, 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

Percy B. Ingham, The Jaques-Dalcroze Method, in The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze (Boston: Small Maynard and Company, 1913), 34, 35. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, The Initiation into Rhythm, in Rhythm, Music, and Education, translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1921), 79-80.
167

165

166

Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm as a Factor of Education, 17, 18. Jaques-Dalcroze, The Initiation into Rhythm, 82. 441

168

New York Times described Jaques-Dalcrozes 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, JaquesDalcrozes 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-Dalcrozes 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-Dalcrozes 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 childstudy 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. M. Dalcrozes Eurhythmics, Times, November 13, 1913, 10.

171

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automatical regularity. Nevertheless, according to Arnold Bennetts 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 physicalculture 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 downvast 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 Bennetts 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 Lenggenhagens 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. Dalcroze Eurhythmics Have Come to New York, New York Times, Jan. 25, 1914, SM5.

173

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idea.174 The reporters 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 expos of Lenggenhagens young studio, this time during a New York performance, Margaret Naumburgs 1914 report The Dalcroze Idea, What Eurhythmics is and What it Means in Outlook magazine confirmed Jaques-Dalcrozes new method of chronographic education, in which the students 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 wholethe Dalcroze method depends on exact interpretation of note and measure duration.176 Jaques-Dalcrozes musical-time exercises published in Rhythm, Music, and Education (1921) confirm this rhythmic practice: a constant, metronomic time-unitusually a quarter or eight notegrounded 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-Dalcrozes music studies: the student must subdivide in mechanically equal clicks to perform his etudes accurately. One cannot glean the ictus

174

Ibid. Ibid.

175

176

Margaret Naumburg, The Dalcroze Idea, What Eurhythmics is and What it Means, Outlook, Jan. 17, 1914, 130. APS Online.

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metricus, Riemanns agogik, the invisible accentand certainly not Christianis wavy outlinethrough Jaques-Dalcrozes revised time signatures; while Jaques-Dalcroze provides the necessary translation from traditional time signatures to his new constantbeat measure denominator, the sensory hierarchy of metrical rhythm, pulse, and rhetoric, no longer underlies his objectivist Eurhythmics notation.

Figure 6.10. Jaques-Dalcrozes reinvented time-signature notation for Eurhythmics that stresses the mathematical-automatical equality and constancy of small internal beatsregardless 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. Putnams Sons, 1921), Musical Supplement, 1.

As with Wundts, Titcheners, and Seashores 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

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uncanny similarity: Jaques-Dalcrozes Eurhythmics studies are strongly reminiscent of experimental psychologists testing methods from the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Figure 6.11. Some of Jaques-Dalcrozes 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. Putnams Sons, 1921), Musical Supplement, 3.

Naumburgs 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:

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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 childs 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-Dalcrozes music and dance pedagogy helped infuse automatismthe metronomic rhythm first espoused by experimental psychologistsinto 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, JaquesDalcroze further explained the rhythmic problems of unmusical children consist of muscular and neurological disordersproblems 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 powersTo 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.

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even psychology. Perhaps affected by Jaques-Dalcrozes 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'slet 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 automatona quality valued by experimental psychologists, not traditional performance artists. Correspondingly, the chronographicmetronomic 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 Pattersons 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 individuals perception was no longer part of the performance equation. The student-subjects new challengeeven in prose speechwas 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. Ibid., 23.

179

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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 Meumanns work was not an attempt at futility. Rusk reflected on how the premire twentieth-century pedagogue of modern rhythmic-training continued to habituate youth in mechanically precise performances, stating that a childs 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 bodyIt 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 consciousnessThanks 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. Ibid. Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm as a Factor of Education, 18-19. 449

181

182

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-Dalcrozes 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 attestand as they directly reflect the theories of Scripture and Halltwentieth-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-Dalcrozes 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
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 JaquesDalcroze, 39. Ibid., 36. See also Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States (Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), 7. 450
184 183

Member of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board) Charles S. Myers codified the standard fatigue test where the laborer-subjects 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 Mtiers, 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 subjects actions were not really voluntary. 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. Ibid., 148.

186

187

451

Figure 6.12. One of Jules Amars 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 subjects 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.

452

methods and apparatuses when training a musicians 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. McChesneys 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 humans 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).

453

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 Wundts laboratory to his musician-subjects talent for musical rhythm, based on experimental methods and clockwork apparatuses.191 Once again this experimental psychologist neglected a skilled musical artists intuition, intelligence, or performing experience in these laboratory procedures; the subjects internal or expressive understanding in time had little relationship to the prevailing techniques of psychology. Rather, Seashores 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 childstudy 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. Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 6. Ibid.

192

193

454

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 intraining, 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. Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, 202.

196

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of Instructions and Interpretations for Measures of Musical Talent (1919), Seashore reduced the quantifiable aspects of Musical Actiondefined as the natural capacity for skill in accurate and musically expressive production of tonesto 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 professionthat 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 individuals interpretive will was quantifiable in clockwork. The processes used in child study and labor training, in Seashores 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.

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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 playingWe, therefore, use the telegraph key with the chronograph, as before, and required the subject to mark a given musical rhythmTo 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 pressureSuch 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 individuals creative, subjective perceptions. Seashores 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.

457

appeared in the very first volume of The Musical Quarterly in 1915. Seashores work exposes the extent to which scientific methods had irrevocably revised the fundamentals of musical time in education: the scientific metronome controlled rhythmconstant, automatical rhythmfor 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 Wundts 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 wind201

Seashore wholeheartedly considered that a childs 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. 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 schools director Howard Hanson.

202

458

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 studentand, 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, Maelzels old design with its now-superfluous pendulum should be discounted
James Burlington Rigg, Means for and Method of Regulating Breathing U.S. Patent #1,354,212 (Filed Feb. 9, 1920; Patented Sept. 28, 1920).
204 203

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. Adelaide Ewing, Device for Counting Time, U.S. Patent #1,496,258 (Filed Nov. 1922; Patented June 3, 1924).

205

459

altogether. He states: The disadvantages connected with studying with the aid of the metronome are of many kindsIt 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 pitchA 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 students dilemmahis personalequation problem to solvewas 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 Goudsmits new metronome-apparatus to the contemporaneous ergograph.

206

Goudsmit, 1. C. G. Hamilton, 11. 460

207

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 performers foot and physically dictates the exact metronomic rhythm for the pupil and the practicing artist. Forgoing both the visual and sonic rhythmic reference of Maelzels old clockwork design, this modern metronomic harness could additionally dictate a redundant, artificial metrical accent to the performers 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 Goudsmits 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 apparatusa 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
461

studentthe metronome became the essential mechanical regulator for a childperformers 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 oncesubjective 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 metronomes 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.

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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 metronomevalues 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 Maelzels machine as infallible temporal regulator for standardized training. Not surprisingly, while individualistic human musicianship was not an issue in Farrows 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 clockset it going, so that you have an exact measurement for meditative breathing,2 the correct time for the modern

Edward S. Farrow, A Dictionary of Military Terms, (Revised Edition, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1918), 379. Farrows 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. Hereward Carrington, Higher Psychical Development (Yoga Philosophy), an Outline of the Secret Hindu Teachings (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920), 61. 463

Western world reduced to mere clockwork. As Hereward Carringtons 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 peoplewhether in meditation, marching, or music makingalong 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, Mnsterberg, Seashore, Patterson, and others promoted automatical pedagogies grounded by a time and rhythm entirely separated from individual experience, subjectivity, or volition. Amars 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 books striking title). In The Human Motora virtual mirror for modern societys prevailing values of industrializationautomatical 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 Amars text, it seems that the definition of time and rhythm was found in the clockwork metronome alone:

Jules Amar, The Human Motor, or, The Scientific Foundations of Labor and Industry (London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1920), 35.

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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 humans 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 beliefthat 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 Amars time-measurement definition, as an objective attempt to shade sounds in all degrees of speed(by a

Ibid., 266. 465

mathematic division of each sound into fractions of a half, third, quarter, eighth, etc., of its time-value).5

Maelzels metronome never represented the nuanced and variable nineteenthcentury 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, Maelzels clockwork metronome only reflected the initial swing of the simple pendulum; its bell an artificial facsimile of a physically derived sense of meterJust 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 rhythmdistinguished solely by automatismand 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

Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Eurhythmics and Moving Plastic, in Rhythm, Music and Education, translated by Harold F. Rubinstein (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1921), 274. Henry T. Finck, Success in Music and How it is Won (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1909), 455. 466
6

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 metronomes automatical, redundant clicka reference constantly to be improved upon for the sake of scientific endeavorsto be made more accurate, efficient, and exacting over time. Thus, inventors and scientists continued to modernize even Maelzels 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 regularityand they continue to do so through our day. Over time, performers 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 subjects

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 Pavlovs 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.

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ability for thought and action, at other times the mechanical stimulus influenced a recurring, habitual behavior. The conditioned responses caused by the machines 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 Pavlovs 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 Pavlovs new branch of experimental psychology limited metronomictraining 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 students 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:

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.

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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 tonepoemsdoes 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 students 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 Paderewskis metronome-believers in conservatories and concert halls, Hanchetts muck-rakers and Rachmaninoffs slaves in practice roomsin addition to Pavlovs laboratory dogstrained 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.

Henry G. Hanchett, The Art of the Musician, a Guide to the Intelligent Appreciation of Music (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905), 314. 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.
10

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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. JaquesDalcroze 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, Solfge, 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 wayThe 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.

Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythmic Movement, Solfge, and Improvisation, in Rhythm, Music, and Education, 115.
13

12

Ibid., 116. Hall, 46-7.

14

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I cannot urge too strongly the constant effort to play in timewe 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 ones 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 actionwith the corresponding loss of inefficient mental reflection and subjective judgmentwas a virtuous influence on the modern child, whose physical movements repeatedly performed create corresponding images in the brainThe 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

Harriette Moore Brower, Self-Help in Piano Study (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1920), 16-17.
16

15

Ibid., 18. Ibid., 120-121. Ingham, 43. 471

17

18

Figure 7.1. Jaques-Dalcrozes young Eurhythmics students perform an exercise in his neo-Hellenic school at Hellerau, Germanyotherwise 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 metronomes 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,

472

Regime, and Hygiene that childrens conduct should be mechanized as early and completely as possible. The childs 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 twentiethcentury 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.

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Although feeling for rhythm is more or less latent in us all and can be developed, few have it naturally perfectBy 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 musicin 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 timeonce predominantly conceived through the variable qualities of human pulse, rhetoric, movement, and gestureconverged 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 timesduring an age where chronographic methods and metronomic precisions practically dominated over all facets of mass educationan 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 Maelzels metronome became the remnant of a past epistemology, a hopelessly imprecise and inefficient signifier of musical movement. The metronomes 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, antiexpressive, 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. Time and Clocks, New York Times, June 27, 1920, 60.

21

474

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 foror even knowledge ofpast 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 musiciansseasoned scholars and educators, toobegin 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 timethe modern, chronographic capacity for rhythmduring 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 composerseither educated in or favorable towards metronomic valuescontinued to redefine musical time and action through scientific, mechanically oriented aesthetics. As

22

Seashore, The Sense of Rhythm as a Musical Talent, 513.

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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 premetronomic musicians, more scientifically influenced researchers, composers, and performersmany educated through music-conservatory regimens at the turn of the centuryclearly 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 commonplaceand a completely positive trait of musicianship. No longer limited to childrens 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, Bla Bartk (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. Bartks ever-growing reliance on

476

precise mechanical time controlsincluding the metronome and the stopwatchto define initial tempos, tempo fluctuations, and performance durations is well documented in recent years by Lszl 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, Bartks use of the metronome was far more rigorous and consistent than Beethovens, or any composer-performers application of the machine from previous centuries. It should be noted that Bartks penchant for musicalmechanical time study more faithfully mirrors contemporaneous the laboratory research of Seashore and the labor-training methods of Frederick Taylor and Hugo Mnsterberg. Around 1906, Bartk began transcribing Hungarian folk tunes with highly precise metronomic markings, in ethnographic musical research also similar to experimental psychologist Charles Samuel Myerss studies, which occurred less than a decade prior.24

23

Lszl Somfai, Bla Bartk: 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). 477

Figure 7.2. Two of Bartks 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 Bartks penchant for detailed, scientific-metronomic calculations of musical time. See http://www.merian.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-47840-5.html. Accessed September 20, 2009.

While Bartk 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 nearpermanent fixture atop Bartks 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, Bartk once described his common routinebased 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, Bartk in Turkey, The Musical Quarterly 37 (Jan., 1951): 6. Desider Kosztolanyi, Bla Bartk, Hungarian Composer, The Living Age, Aug. 1931, 566. 478

26

metronome and mechanical time controls seem to have been a close part of Bartks musical education, scholarship, and certainly his compositional processes his entire life. Indeed, Bartk 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 playedalmost 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 Bartks 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 Bartk, 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 metronomeonce primarily intended to gently assist novices, amateurs, and the perpetually un-musicalbecame 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 Bartks own recordings confirm his musicality to be far less rigid that those of today, the contemporaneous reception of Bartks piano playing was, at times, telling of the new metronomic aesthetic in professional music making. In 1922, Percy Scholes, perhaps most notably described Bartks style in the London Observer as a hard, cold

Benjamin Suchoff, Bla Bartk's Contributions to Music Education, Journal of Research in Music Education 9 (Spring, 1961): 6 479

27

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 Bartks somewhat machine-oriented music room, circa 1940, containing a phonograph, a typewriter, and a clockwork metronome, which sits directly atop the piano. The importance Bartk 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.

Bartk 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

Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 174.

28

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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 Stravinskys creativityin which an unfeeling, automatical rhythm predominated over variable, rhetorical expressions of musical time. Critic Paul Rosenfeld, for example, heard The Rite of Spring in 1920seven years after its premieremoving 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 manifestThrough 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 Stravinskys 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.

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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 industrialisms mechanical application of the preferred individual function.30 Similar to Scholes description of Bartk, Rosenfeld suggested that Stravinsky was on some level a musical automatonbut 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 childrens education, Jaques-Dalcrozea significant influence on Ballets Russes dancer and Rite of Spring choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky32was 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. Rosenfeld, Musical Portraits, 199.

31

See Margaret Naumburg, The Dalcroze Idea, Outlook, Jan. 17, 1914, 131. As the source relates, Nijinksy visited The Temple of Rhythm prior to 1914.

32

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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 automaticalstimulated in part by scientific-industrial training methods appearing earlier in the centurywas indeed occurring throughout Western musical culture well into the 1920s. And for many, this audible standard of continuous, externalized, mechanical rhythmwhich the clockwork metronome prominently provided in compositional, pedagogical, and performance practiceswas 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 premire of le Sacre, seemed to be at the vanguard of an aesthetical trend first promoted by Jaques-Dalcrozea 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-Dalcrozes 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.

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some contemporaneous perceptions in the 1920s of Stravinskys 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 composers 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 modernitys greatest living embodiment of Johann Maelzels automaton culture by the 1920s. Mitzi Kolisch, writing for the Independent in 1925, further pointed to Stravinskys Dalcrozian sensibilities when she commented, Stravinsky had turned mathematicianhis 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.

From Russolo, The Art of Noise, reprinted in Ernest Newman, A Musical Motley (New York: John Lane Company, 1919), 298-299.
38

37

Mitzi Kolisch, Stravinsky--Russian of the Russians, The Independent, May 16, 1925, 559.

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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 championhe 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. Sternbergs 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 mcanique (1924-5), was on some level, a brash,

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, translated by Arthur Knodel & Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 28.
40

39

Ibid., 29.

H. Colin Slim, Lessons with Stravinsky: The Notebook of Earnest Andersson (1879-1940), JAMS 62 (Summer, 2009): 389.

41

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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 mcaniquemost notably from the stage-works le Sacre (1913), Renard (premiered 1922), and the heavily Eurhythmicscharged Les Noces (premiered 1923)Antheils 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 Bartk, Stravinsky considered the benefit of the mechanical player piano for related reasons. Bartk recalled, some famous composers (Stravinsky for instance) wrote compositions specifically for pianolaThe intent, however, was not to achieve superior performance but to restrict the an absolute minimum the intervention of the performers personality, that is, the performers 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.

Robert Forrest Wilson, Paris for Young Art, The Bookman; a Review of Books and Life (Jun. 1925): 408. Quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 164. 486
43

42

Yet even before Antheil composed the Ballet mcanique, in which musicians played a role identical to the chronographically pounding pianolas on stage, Antheils performance practices as a famed recitalist garnered considerable recognition for its remarkable mechanical virtuosityperhaps 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 Antheils 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, Wilsons 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 Trentonits machine shops, its potteries, the Pennsylvania trains rushing through the stationare the sounds of America that he remembers.45 Beyond these mechanical influences, Antheils seemingly uncommon musicalmechanical 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
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 Stravinskys 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 44

Wilson, 409. See George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 68. 487

46

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 suggestand the pedagogies of Hall and Jaques-Dalcroze verifymusical 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, Antheils practice routinewhich 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 mcanique premire, 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 notationespoused by

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.

47

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Scripture and Seashore before himthat 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 pictorialAny 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 Antheils musicality in the practice room and on the concert stage. Due to Antheils 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 humanitya 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 Antheils precision-based performance practices: Nowadays the style and method have become commonplace, and one soon finds it difficult to keep ones attention unless maybe, some very strong personal factor comes into play in the performance. Mr. Antheils 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. Ibid., 5. 489

49

This critic recognized that Antheils modern aesthetics of musical timewhich for some have become commonplace in the early 1920salso transferred to the pre-metronomic past. Similarly unconvincing musical results were heard with his treatment of some Chopin; technically often not without pointfor he has a certain crispness of touch and rhythm which is attractivebut of poetry not a trace.50 Many reporters, hearkening to the pre-metronomic aesthetics of Antheils former teacher Sternberg, Paderewski, and Hofmann, suggested that musical poeticsthat rhetorical-musical time gleaned through traditional meterwas incompatible with the new precision heard in mathematically metronomic performance practices. Consistent metronomic motion seemingly applied to most of Antheils pedagogical, interpretive, and compositional practices, as Richard L. Stokes intuited after Antheils inglorious 1927 concert in New York City. The critic ascertained that the Ballet mcanique 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 partsAllegroAllegroallegro. 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.

490

begins in one tempo and ends in one tempo; it starts forte and ends forte.52 Even of Antheils 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 Bartk 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 civilizations 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. Seashores artistic deviation was, as to be expected by the chronographic methodology, a human deviation from the automatical. Guided by values of

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

52

Alfred Einstein, Transatlantic in Frankfort, New York Times, Jun 22, 1930, X5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 491

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 musicians feelings and actions for posterity. As with the work of other experimental psychologists, Seashores 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. 492

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 preciseThe 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 Seashores nascent brand of musicology, an exacting chronographic culture, a pure scientific aesthetics came to full fruition, which explained away volatile human actions as inconsistenciesconsidered 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 rhythma standard now applicable to music of all ages. Seashores 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.

493

in Music, Seashore explained how the individualism inherent in music makingthe personal equationcontinued 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 Bessels nineteenth-century astronomical observatory. He portrays a new musicologist the new cultural-scientific aestheticianas 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. Seashores 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 musicians temporal liberties in the first place. Yet, for those with the scientific-aestheticians chronographic biasin which all rhythmic values from all ages implied a metronomic56

Carl E. Seashore, Artistic Deviation as an Esthetic Principle in Music, The Scientific Monthly 54 (Feb., 1942), 104. 494

mathematical absoluteperformance-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. Seashores musical aestheticsin which musicians of all centuries and abilities were indeed recast as secondary, largely passive agents in the phenomena of musical temporalityforeshadowed and to some extent promoted values which remain prevalent in performance-practice research to this day. Seashores 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 performers 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 objectivealbeit reductive temporal proof found in machines, mathematical calculations, and metronomic devices. Directly informed by these scientific subtexts, Bla Bartk explicitly devalued more individualistic folk musicians during his ethnographic-musicological research, in favor of often-unattainable norms referenced through ever-increasing mechanical measures. Bartk in his 1936 article Why and How Do We Collect Folk Music? answered the questions of pre-mechanical music making through modern scientific

495

methodologies and apparatuses. As experimental psychologists such as Seashore and Scripture before him, Bartk quickly devalued the subjectivity of musical interpretations; he discounted real performance variability in the speculative search for an objective, modern musical norm. Bartk explains: Sometimes the melody is good but the performance is affectedit 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 decadesespecially with men and boyswhich 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 Bartk, those performing outside of the musical-mechanical standardwhich striking included both the lower-class Gypsies and upper-class esthetes, but not regular middle-class musicians such as himselfcould easily be disregarded in his scientific studies. While Bartk 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, Bartk mistranscribed certain dance tunes with faulty rhythms, thus creating far more simplified compositions that upheld the modern values of metronomic consistency and

Reprinted in Bla Bartk, Essays, edited by Benjamin Suchoff (New York: St. Martins Press, 1976), 18.

57

496

impersonalized rhythm.58 Bartk 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 daredif I might put it that wayto 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 performers movement and pulse sensethe rhythmical-personal equationin favor of anachronistic temporal epistemologies. Sachs took pains to assert, the [human] tactus was wholly unconcerned with the actual rhythm, with grouping or accentthe 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

Bla Bartk, The So Called Bulgarian Rhythm (1938), reprinted in Essays, 42-43.

Ibid., 44-45. Perhaps pointing to his epistemological discrepancies, Bartk 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

59

Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953), 242-3.

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human tactus, that is real physical motion, seemed at times to be a mere and imperfect metronomic substituteperhaps 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, premetronomic practices when he surmised: The strength of good beatsvaried 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 performers pulse-sense, the once weighted accent of metered music, to be a psychological process of imagining order out of monotonyand not active or intentional rhythmic expression. Like Seashore and Bartk 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 impossibleThe 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. Ibid., 28.

62

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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 Houles 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 eighteenthcentury 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 individuals 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 Houles modern definitions of a seemingly motor-driven musical time

63

George Houle, Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), viii.

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] 499

64

which transferred to historical musical timethe 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 Wundts time studies, it has been the listener who primarily hearsand not the performer who primarily expressesthe 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 composers exacting wishes,65 he perhaps hypocritically offered justifications through modern performance practices, which often demand todays 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 listeners 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 intrinsicaby no means a universally understood, described, or documented termbecame 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. Ibid., 84. 500

66

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 (Seashores irregular musical ugliness) would resultHoule 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 timeone hearkening to the rule of metronomic-musical regulation in his centurydid 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 prechronographic musical-temporal practices when, in critiquing Rameaus time-beating instructions, he states: The assignment of a je-ne-sai-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 tempowhich previously occurred in metronomic pedagogies, furthered in Seashores methodologies, and heard in concert performances by Bartk, Antheil, and Stravinskyalso manifested in the 1920s through
67

Ibid., 52. 501

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 pastan outcome not often realized by performers, critics, or even composers of the age. While such barbaric (sometimes folk-inspired) compositions such as Bartks Allegro Barbaro (1911) and The Miraculous Mandarin (1924); Stravinskys le Sacre; Prokofievs Scythian Suite (1914-15) and Le pas dacier (The Steel Step, 1925); and Antheils Ballet mcanique and A Jazz Symphony (1925) made explicit to many a rough and violent rhythm driven by metronomic motion, a contrasting neo-classical aestheticsuch as heard in Ravels Le tombeau de Couperin (1914, 1917); Prokofievs Classical Symphony (1916-17); Stravinskys Pulcinella (191920) and Oedipus rex (1926-7); and Antheils 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 pulsebut 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 machineryI 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 502

automatical rhythm to pre-metronomic musical forms and meters, even past compositions became reconsidered as cold, calculable, and objectivethus, some so-called neoclassical 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 socalled 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 Prunires 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. Prunires warned that modern composers have much to learn from a Josquin or Palestrina, Montevere, Lully, Purcell, Carissimi, Vivaldi, Scarlattibut 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. Henry Prunieres, The Younger Composers of France; Esthetic Tendencies of Generation, New York Times, Aug. 29, 1926, X7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
69

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have been labeled neo-classicistsStravinsky, Hindemith, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Antheil among themstrongly 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 mcanique temporal aesthetic. In contrast to Prunires 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 postchaise built when Bach was cantor at Leipsic.70 The anonymous critic, in other words, believed that Stravinskys modern, automatic engine of rhythm revamped the very structure of baroque formnow 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 Stravinskys 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: [Stravinskys] 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

Looking Ahead In Composing, New York Times, Apr. 15, 1928, 122. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
71

70

Leonid Sabaneev and S. W. Pring, The Stravinsky Legends, The Musical Times 69 (Sept. 1, 504

When listening to other composers inspired by Baroque-music traditions, critic Paul Rosenfeld too occasionally envisioned historical musical meters and rhythms through the mechanical precisionsand valuesof 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 Hindemiths 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 Hindemiths 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. Ibid. 505

73

Rosenfeld clearly expressed the rhythmical tendencies of his age, yet he transferred to them an imaginary classical musical past, in which Hindemiths anachronistically objective and precise rhythma seemingly neo-classical chronographic aestheticreigned 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-Dalcrozes 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.

Hindemith, 18. He also occasionally expressed his desiresimilarly to Stravinsky, Bartk, Ravel, and Antheilto 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.

75

506

considered objective music76perhaps more accurately described by current science historians as mechanically objective musicoften 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 trendwhich, 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 nothinginsofar 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 Stravinskys automatical neo-classical music of the 1920s, Antheil reconsidered his own heartless and metronomic Ballet mcanique with the admonition: I am a classist at heart, and the Ballet mcanique is essentially a Romantic work, breaking all the barriers, the rules and thriving upon it.78 In recalling his musicalmechanical indiscretions later in life, Antheil recast himselfas Stravinsky did likewiseas a classicist at heart, who followed classicist compositional ideals, albeit with often-unacknowledged values of modern mechanical precision. Antheil took this

See for instance Bartk, Mechanical Music (1937) in Bla Bartk, Essays (New York: St. Martins Press, 1976), 291.
77

76

Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, 356. Ibid., 140.

78

507

stance as early as 1927 when he wrote to the traditionalist Joseph Hofmann, claiming the Ballet mcanique represented the composers 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 practicesfrom the so-called Baroque, Classical, and Romantic agesseemed 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, Athelings iconoclastic alter ego, further promoted George Antheils musical-mechanical aesthetics as being connected, by mere degrees, to past compositional and performance practices. Pound claimed in 1927 that Antheils new quasi-sculptural solidity is something different from the magnificent stiffness or rigidity

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

79

One can hear Antheils performance practices from the time of his autobiography in the sound recording Antheil Plays Antheil (San Francisco: Other Minds, 2000).

Ezra Pound, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (Reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 132.

81

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of Bach's multilinear mechanism.82 What may have seemed hyperbole or literary flourish in Pounds descriptionthat J. S. Bach composed stiff, rigid musical machineswas becoming the prevailing belief for many: Bachs 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 distantand as scientific aesthetics of objectivity came to the forethe twentiethcentury view of baroque music seemed coolly inhuman, strictly calculable, rigid, pure, absolute, and fundamentally chronographic. It was Bla Bartk who perhaps best articulated this aesthetical trend, the modern mechanization of historical music, around 1930. Bartk, 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 attributeswith 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, Bartk 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, Bartk defines a prevailing mechanistic value of his modern culture:

82

Ibid., 49. [Music Review,] The Times, Thursday, Sept. 6, 1934, 10. 509

83

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 individuals 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 Bartk 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 Bartk 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-Sens, who recognized that music notation traditionally failed to relate the sensory, subjective feelings for living rhythm, and that artistic performers must supply this want. Bachs 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 Bartk and Stravinsky the any
84

Desider Kosztolanyi, Bla Bartok, Hungarian Composer, The Living Age, Aug. 1931, 565. American Periodicals Series Online.

Bartk admits howevereven while he defined musical time through automatical machinery: Every art is necessarily humanIf it were not so, music would become much too mechanical. Even Bach expressed something, certain moments in life Bartk alluded to Bachs compositional technique of text painting, not the potential for rhythmical or rhetorical expression in baroque performance practices.

85

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musician preceding the modern age. Modernist conductor Herman Scherchen made this mechanization of historic musicand the sublimation of historical rhythmic expressionobvious in 1946 when he provided his interpretation of Bachs 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 ruleas the now prevailing rhythmical epistemology throughout musical historywhen he states: The metronome marking which suites both forms of [Bachs chorale melody] is: q/e=72 (Maelzels metronome). This allows listeners to think in terms of two quavers togetherthis 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 Bachs 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 modernmusical 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 Bachs B minor Mass, each

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 Bachs 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 Bachs final composition was not composed with Maelzels metronome in the Baroque composers mind, ear, or vicinity. See Scherchen, 108 511

86

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, Sachswho expressed great interest in the work of Seashore88 and who could not bring himself to question the historical relevance behind his own metronomic methodologyimplied throughout Rhythm and Tempo that musical form, now far from the primacy of human

87

Sachs, 33. Ibid., 18-19.

88

512

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 rhythmonce an a priori rule of musical timehad 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 timewhich calls forth alternate visions of Maelzels automata, Wundts chronographic laboratory, Jaques-Dalcrozes rhythmical prodigies, and the ballet of modern industrial machineryapplied to other premetronomic 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 Straussa composer straddling a neo-classical aesthetic of temporal objectivity. The critic described that when Strauss directed a certain Mozart symphony:

89

Ibid., 168.

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.

90

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His style was rigourously, perfectly classicala metronome beat, a set balanced colour-scheme. But the effect was dull. Perhaps this was because one was unable to follow a great mans 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 musicians will to change or even feel. Not limited to a Baroque ideal, modernist performance practices seemed to present Mozart through evergreater 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 timeor maybe objectively minded towards the mechanical timeas 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 nineteenthcentury music with greater chronographic precisions. In 1930, a Times critic heard the modern metronomic world exhibited in a performance of Schuberts 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).

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Symphony conducted by Felix Weingartner, whose interpretation was following the fashion for speed. The critic reports: D. Weingartners 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 guidesfor gauging the modern musical motor unitin 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 composers 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).

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interpretive tool for getting at their imagined mechanical truth driving nineteenthcentury 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 Seargents interpretation of Mendelssohns Elijah, the writer considers the long-deceased, yet absolutely definite composers intention intricately intertwined with the modern clockwork metronome: Behind Mendelssohns metronomic markings there is a definite interpretive idea, and it is incumbent on every conductor to bring out that ideaThe metronomic marks are frequently disregarded because in so many older works they are not authoritative but merely the suggestions of an editor. Mendelssohns 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 necessaryit 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.

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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 musicalautomatical 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, Eugne Borrel was perhaps the first conservatory-based musicologist and instrumentalist to revise past musical practices with modernist precisions. In the article Les indications metronomiquesdu XVIIIe siecle (1928), Loulis chronomtre, 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 machineoriginally intended to reflect the motion of the human tactuswith more regulative, automatical actions common to the educational, compositional, and performance practices of Borrels culture.97 In 1938, Rosamund Harding, following Borrels 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 Loulis chronomtre became the most celebrated attempt to quantify musical time before Maelzels metronome.98 Some

96

Karl Wilson Gehrkens, Essentials in Conducting (Philadelphia: Oliver Ditson Co., 1919), 35.

See Eugne Borrel, Les indications metronomiquesdu XVIIIe sicle, Revue de musicology T.9c (1928): 149-153. See R. E. M. Harding, Origins of Musical Time and Expression (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). 517
98

97

musicologists and historically informed musicians, well after Seashore, Borrel, Harding, and Sachs, continued to further their beats-per-minute methodology for earlymusic performance practices, perhaps guided by scientific aesthetics and modern Werktreue philosophies. Yet, by indicating that minuets, gigues, marches, and even vocal airsalongside markings such as allegro, tendrement, adagio, vite, or vivacefell 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 Borrels 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 precisiona 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, Scherchennot conceptually far from many twentieth-century performance-practice musicologistsmodernizes the precision of past musical time for modern culture thusly:

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That Sauveur was correct in his attempt to create a means of measuring music and acoustics as precisely as possible, is proved by modern practicehis [simplependulum] metronome might have served Bartk, Stravinsky, and others for a minutely precise indication of tempi and duration of movements, had it only been currently available [to these modern composers...] Loulis chronometer of 1686 and Sauveurs more precise echometre of 1701 were greeted with equal enthusiasm, just as a hundred years later Maelzels 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 Scherchens, 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 technologyequated the [un-rhythmical] tactus beat with a pulse beatbut 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 Maelzels 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. Sachs, 34. Ibid., 273.

100

101

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It then comes as no surprise that other esteemed musicians and pedagogues including violinist Rudolf Kolisch would completely disregard Beethovens comments, his life, and the history of technology in favor of a modern mechanical aesthetic of musicality and musical time when performing Beethovens 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 Beethovens. (My answer: That could be true only if the speed of the earths rotation had changed in the meantime.)102 Kolsich seemed not to consider that beyond technological developments, it was Western musical culturewith its scientific faith in chronographic rules and regulationsthat had changed in the meantime. Perhaps implicitly guided by this disciplinary-wide devaluing of the personal equation in favor of mechanical objectivitypromoted 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 Engramelles machinebuilding 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 expressioncontinued 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. Houle, 110.

103

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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 Toscaninis 1932 concert rendition of Bachs 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 nineteenthcentury Wagnerian opera. In his book The Man with the Baton (1936), Ewen supports Toscaninis modern, mechanically oriented interpretations: In Bayreuth in 1930the perfect Wagnerites felt that in the prelude to Tannhuser, 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 Ewens anecdote suggests, might have paid little heed to Wagners more detailed verbal indications, and the composers ultimate rejection of metronomic action as it relates to meaningful interpretations of his operasand that no single metronomic tempo was consistently applicable to any of his music. As Wagner explained in ber 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 Wagners 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.

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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 Maelzels automaton trumpeter or the household pianola, later mechanical forms of music presentationheard notably through wax cylinders, phonographs, radio transmissions, and moving picturesfurther 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-watchbecause 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 metronomea machine he seemed largely familiar with throughout his lifetime. See Sachs, 380.

Frank S. Nugent, Sound and Fury in Remote Astoria, New York Times, Dec. 30, 1934, X5; ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

107

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conveyed when mechanical media constricted the overall duration of any given musical performanceand compositionto a start and stop time. None other than George Antheil experienced this mechanical imposition in his role as film-score composerand the New York Times reporter Frank Nugent did not let the irony escape his readers: Mr. Antheil, whose Ballet Mcaniqueused 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 Antheilonce 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 notationeventually 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 expressionsas 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. Ibid. 523

109

agents of musical performancethe living performers themselvesand 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 timeand the increasing objectification of an absolutely correct timein music performances of the Western tradition. In an early example from 1931, Walt Disney filed a patent for a filmscore recording system that better regulated living musicians through constant metronome clicksa precursor to the ubiquitous click-track recording technologies employed presently. Disneys 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 Disneys 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).

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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 timeshe 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 Disneys 1935 Silly Symphony entitled Music Land. Guards from The Land of Symphony, left, hurled the saxophone from the Isle of Jazz into their physicaltemporal 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 Maelzels 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

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title of Man Rays uncanny Metronome-Cyclops: Object to be Destroyed. Indeed, in the first third of the modern century, Maelzels mere automaton, which a century later became Browers tireless little policeman, seemed more like Man Rays 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 rhythmsall 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 turnwhich hearkened back to Wundts experimental laboratoryactively 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 Martins assertion cannot be taken lightly, since evidence suggests that scientific rhythmobjectified chronographic timeincreasingly 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 DIndy 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. DIndy tells us, attribute to the more 527

appearing in the musical academy, the concert hall, and the classroomWilliam Athelings 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 DIndy, Jaques-Dalcroze, Seashore, Pound, Antheil, Stravinsky, Sachs, and many others, had long since discounted the pre-metronomic rhythm expressed by A. B. Marxs 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 impressionsthese 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 numbersor 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-Sans, trans. Fred Rothwell, The Ideas of M. Vincent DIndy, The Musical Times 61 (Apr. 1, 1920), 244.
113

Marx, The Music of the Nineteenth Century and Its Culture, 33. 528

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 stipulationsthat 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 measurethen 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 agefor 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 consistencywhich increase over the decades as metronome technology doesobscure 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 actionsagain reflecting the profound metronomic turn in musical time that perhaps incited Debussy to exclaim upon experiencing Nijinskys 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 Scribners 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. Reprinted in Albright, 85. Despite Boulezs claims to Debussys 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 530

115

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 automatonsuch as this one published in 2007:

one measure, as roses last the length of a morning. This quote from Debussys correspondence is reprinted numerous times in James R. Briscoe, ed., Debussy in Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 83-4, 99, 276, etc. 531

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 playingthe metronome will do it for youWhen using the metronome to improve your sense of timing and rhythmlisten to the metronome tick for a while. Move your body to the rhythm of the ticks. Once youve internalized the rhythm, youre ready to start playing. Some students complain that they have a hard time playing while the metronome is tickingthats precisely why they need to use it. Its paramount that they get their body and the metronome moving together to develop their sense of rhythmOnce 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 Maelzels 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 concertsclick by click, in quarters, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, and beyondwith 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. 532

playing to the modern metronome is not simply an acceptable standard practiceit is a necessary and paramount ability to acquire. It is only since the modern agewhich for some constitutes a daily chronarchy of precise mechanical time constraints, moving to ever increasing mechanical rhythmsthat 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 Axwho 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 pianistsmyself at the head of the list, dont necessarily have such good rhythm. Were always thinking about line and harmony but we dont necessarily have a good feel for the inexorable pulse. This is why with pieces like the Pulcinella reduction [for piano and cello] of Stravinskywhich I worked on with Yo-Yo [Ma] this weekI had a hard time just being accurate, not rushing, not slowing down. Its incredible discipline that really helps you with everything. Theres 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 Ive been doing ever since. Im realizing that you need to put rhythm into the hierarchy that youre 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 agesfor the

Thomas Robert May, The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer (Pompton Plains, NJ: Amadeus Press, 2006), 273.

117

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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 performersfor 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 Bartks playing as automatical,118 since Philip himself heard Bartk, 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, Bartks playing, which could not be deduced from his scoressounds 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. Ibid., 173.

119

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metronomic control. For many decades, the printed New Grove Dictionary noted through 2001, the popularity of [Joseph Hofmanns]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 Hofmanns 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 freedomsin which any rushing or slowing down from an implicit and continual tick-tock time is an audible anomalythe musical tempo of Bach often sounds like the tempo of Bartk; the rhythms of Vivaldi often are indistinguishable from those of Steve Reich; the subjective and variable pulse-sense underling Beethovens concertos and symphonies often approaches the pianola-like, Dalcrozian rigidity of Stravinskys Les Noces or Antheils Ballet mcanique; in orchestra concerts today, Debussys 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 culturewhich

120

Gregor Benko, "Hofmann, Josef," in The New Grove Dictionary, Second edition, Vol. 11: 603-

4. Gregor Benko, "Hofmann, Josef," in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/13172 (accessed December 3, 2009).
121

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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 rhythmthat Adornos 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] experienceThe dying out of subjective time in music seems totally unavoidable in the midst of a humanity which has made itself into a thinginto an object of its own organization.122

Man Rays 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 livedwhere chronographic measurement and regulation became a prevailing practice for many cultural, industrial, and educational performancepracticesMan 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 Rays 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. 536

Figure 7.6. One of Man Rays series of nearly identical clockwork metronomes entitled Object Indestructible, 1923-1975.

Long after Beethoven and Bessel, the Western world grew to embrace Maelzels machine as the regulator of objective time for once personal, subjective performance. Considering his brief, fleeting, and inconsistent interest in mechanically aided tempodescription, Beethoven could never have imagined the machines 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 1920the year that Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, diedit seems that the metronome was the common temporal denominator of the modern world.
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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.

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): 81120; and Sidney M. Newhall, The Control of Eyelid Movements in Visual Experiments, The American Journal of Psychology 44 (Jul., 1932): 555-570. 538

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