A History of Rhythm, Metronomes, and the Mechanization of Musicality
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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 candidate for the ______________________Doctor of Philosophy degree *. Dr. Mary Davis (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) 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 II. MAELZEL’S MACHINES: A RECEPTION HISTORY OF MAELZEL, HIS MECHANICAL CULTURE, AND THE METRONOME . .112 III. THE SCIENTIFIC METRONOME . 180 IV. METRONOMIC RHYTHM, THE CHRONOGRAPHIC BIAS, AND THE SCIENTIFIC REDEFINITION OF MUSICIANS AND MUSICAL ACTION . 223 V. THE METRONOMIC INFLUENCE . 334 VI. THE METRONOMIC EDUCATION . 360 VII. THE ORIGINS OF A CHRONOGRAPHIC MUSICAL CULTURE . 463 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 539 i FIGURES Figure page 1.1. Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s pulse-sense diagram, 1828 23 1.2. John Wall Callcott’s weighted-accent notation, 1810 & 1817 24 1.3. Köhler’s rhythmical genealogy 25 1.4. Riemann’s graphical-rhythmical notations, 1884 26 1.5. Grove’s “Accent” in music of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, 1879 27 1.6. Gottfried Weber’s “revulsive sensation” of rhythm 28 1.7. Joshua Steele’s accents, 1779 29 1.8. Liszt’s “a-rhythmical” melody in Christus 32 1.9. Tempo d’imbroglio examples from Haydn and Beethoven 35 1.10. Detail of the autograph manuscript, Beethoven’s Op. 111 39 1.11. Steele’s invisible accents in duple and triple meters 41 1.12. Caccini’s 1602 instructions on gestural, rhythmical embellishment 52 1.13. Christiani’s non-metronomic, “falling” rhythmical gesture 53 1.14. Mattheson’s poetical notation, 1735 & 1874 56 1.15. Christiani’s correlation between and musical rhythm 57 1.16. Poetical-musical gestures interpreted in Beethoven’s and Mozart’s music 58 1.17. Czerny’s bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time 60 1.18. Caccini’s bar-by-bar analysis of rhetorical-musical time 61 1.19. Interpretations of eighteenth-century rubato from Türk’s Klavierschule 65 1.20. Czerny’s “four different ways of interpretation” for his “Andante” 68 1.21. An example of Hauptmann’s rhythmical schemas 71 1.22. Christiani’s example of “confused” music notation 74 1.23. Christiani’s example of improved rhythmical notation 78 3.1. The Greenwich Chronograph 187 3.2. Mercury contact metronome, 1884 202 ii Figure page 3.3. Mercury contact metronome, 1888 202 3.4. MIT observatory chronograph, 1900 206 3.5. Wilhelm Wundt’s electro-magnetic metronome 215 3.6. “Apparatus for the Serial Exposure of Nonsense Syllables” 219 4.1. Ebhardt’s chronographic piano-apparatus, 1898 268 4.2. Ebhardt’s chronographic record of rhythmic passages 270 4.3. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a gymnast-subject 274 4.4. Scripture’s chronographic testing of a conductor-subject 275 4.5. Scripture’s “Measuring the Simultaneity in Actions of a Piano-player” 279 4.6. Scripture’s chronographic record of a pianist’s performance 280 4.7. Scripture’s interpretation of a non-metronomic performance practice 281 4.8. Sears’ chronographic data underneath a notated Hymn, 1902 301 4.9. Seashore’s metronomic, musical-memory test, 1919 319 5.1. Liddell’s soundproof “Animal Room,” 1926 349 6.1. “Landing of Metronome and Sub-division” in Shedlock’s Music-land 368 6.2. General Metronome, King Harmony, and the Court of Music-land 370 6.3. Watson’s gymnastics studio performs “The Indian Club Race,” 1864 375 6.4. Example of Albert Ross Parsons’ musical-gymnastic exercises, 1886 384 6.5. “Teacher’s Pocket Metronome,” advertisement in Etude, c1890s 402 6.6. Detail, “Tests and Measurements in Child Study,” 1901 411 6.7. “Zeckwer Metronome,” U.S. Patent #360,550 416 6.8. U.S. metronome patent #923,094 by C. A. White & E. R. Hunter, 1908 422 6.9. Standard ergograph for endurance tests, 1914 434 6.10. Jaques-Dalcroze’s reinvented time-signature notation 445 6.11. Example of Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics exercises 446 6.12. Jules Amar’s chronographic work-fatigue experiment, 1918 452 iii Figure page 6.13. “Apparatus for Testing the Aptitude of Keyboard Operators,” 1926 453 6.14. U.S. Patent #1,496,258, “Music Time Indicator,” 1923 461 7.1. Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics students perform an exercise, 1913 472 7.2. Two of Bartók’s folk-music transcriptions in manuscript, 1906 478 7.3. Historical reconstruction of Bartók’s music room, c1940 480 7.4. Walt Disney’s apparatus for recording movie soundtracks, 1931 524 7.5. Two scenes from Walt Disney’s Music Land, 1935 526 7.6. Man Ray’s “Object Indestructible,” 1923-1975 537 iv TABLES Table page 4.1 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 294 4.2 Charles H. Sears, musical-chronographic data, 1902 294 v Preface: Convergences In Time Temporality and the elements intrinsic to temporality—which include duration, instant, movement, speed, pulse, and rhythm—are not under the purview of any lone academic discipline. Nor is temporality a subject strictly contained within academia itself. Everyday, people recognize and function with their own senses of temporality, perhaps unaware of the science of time telling, the multiplicity of clock technologies, or the history of time-telling machines. One does not need to be a scientist, engineer, or scholar of time to perceive and live with a sense of time. The same holds true for musical time. Across the world, musicians from non-Western cultures have been performing highly complex rhythms and rhythmical patterns for centuries—without ever reading a single treatise on the subject or referencing a metronome. The reasons are obvious: temporality, along with musical temporality, is not fully contained within text. Temporality transcends text. Thus the present document takes this phenomenon as its basis: musical temporality is first and foremost a manifestation of individual beliefs and actions that, due to the variability of individual beliefs and actions, changes over time. In the field of musicology as it concerns performance practices, all-encompassing histories of rhythm are few and far between. Any detailed history of musical time requires an epic scope, not only chronologically but also conceptually. For this reason, I do not lay claim to a definitive realization of what musical time is for all places and ages, for conceptions of time and musicality, as I argue in this preface and following chapters, continues to change. I offer “a history of rhythm” in contrast to some previous studies implicitly presenting “the history of rhythm.” The most significant models for a musical- vi time history remain Curt Sachs’ Rhythm and Tempo (1953),1 and George Houle’s more recent Meter in Music 1600-1800, published in 1987, but certainly the culmination of decades of scholarship.2 The current study does not intend to overthrow the importance of these works; indeed, they hold much primary-source evidence and commentary that remain relevant today and will remain relevant into the future. But the current project takes a different tack, recognizing that even these musical-time histories are tempered by their authors’ own beliefs about “rhythm” and “tempo,” beliefs born out of a twentieth- century bias for clockwork reference and regulation. This cultural-mechanical bias, how it came about and why, forms the major narrative arc of the present history of musical time. In order to answer a seemingly simple question—“What does the clockwork metronome and beats-per-minute indications have to do with musical education, performance practices, and research at all?”—this dissertation seeks to offer a history of musical-time and mechanical tempo references that crosses centuries, nations, and most importantly schools of thought. For the subject of “time,” as numerous histories of time culture and technology have argued,3 is a vital aspect of human civilization that is gleaned from the beliefs in “time” before all else. 1 See Curt Sachs, Rhythm and Tempo (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1953). 2 See George Houle, Meter in Music 1600-1800 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Stephen Hefling’s Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Music (New York: Schirmer, 1993) and Richard Hudson’s Stolen Time: The History of Tempo Rubato (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) are also essential source-studies dealing with more specific aspects of “musical time” that this dissertation does not tackle in such great detail. 3 For two of the most prominent histories of time culture, see Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Orders (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992) and David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Second Edition, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2000). For a more critical history with a sociological perspective, see Lawrence Wright, Clockwork Man, the Story of Time, its Origins, its Uses, its Tyranny (Reprint, New York: Marboro Books Corp., 1992). vii 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.