{"id":366,"date":"2009-09-14T06:18:25","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T06:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp\/2009\/09\/beat_it\/"},"modified":"2012-01-18T14:52:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-18T19:52:47","slug":"beat_it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/2009\/09\/beat_it.html","title":{"rendered":"Beat It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Walking across the campus of a big Midwestern university, I hear drumming. The drumline from the school&#8217;s marching band is practicing outdoors, with a very loud metronome. Big speakers blast out the regular electric beats &#8212; quite a lot louder than twenty drummers drumming. These beats sound like gunshots.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"ObjectdestroyedAJ.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/ObjectdestroyedAJ.jpg\" width=\"184\" height=\"313\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px;\" \/><\/span>The music is intricate with a lot of syncopation, and these kids fit it all in, around the clicks. This kind of practicing is not so unusual in college and high school bands. Technology has allowed <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Johann_Nepomuk_Maelzel\">Maelzel<\/a>&#8216;s metronome to roar.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nPreviously, I&#8217;ve been aware of string quartets that practiced with amplified metronomes, souped-up clickers loud enough to be heard in a full-volume rehearsal. Old metronomes required quieter playing.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI don&#8217;t believe we know just when musicians started to play through whole passages, or whole pieces, with the metronome running. A few, like Arthur Schnabel, lined up the metronome&#8217;s ticking with off-beats, or inner parts of beats, in the music being practiced.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=K9lMP5oqKEgC&#038;dq=style+and+idea&#038;printsec=frontcover&#038;source=bl&#038;ots=GzoXRDTMqv&#038;sig=Lo8mM2emHqAhtUvNR8exa3mzvbM&#038;hl=en&#038;ei=fJygSrGLH5G0lAfJkezkDA&#038;sa=X&#038;oi=book_result&#038;ct=result&#038;resnum=3#v=onepage&#038;q=freely%20measured&#038;f=false\">In a 1948 essay, Arnold Schoenberg complains<\/a> of the current style of performing &#8220;suppressing all &#8230; unnotated changes of tempo.&#8221; He writes: &#8220;Almost everywhere in Europe music is played in a stiff, inflexible metre &#8212; not in a tempo, i.e. according to a yardstick of freely measured quantities.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nDo we turn ourselves into machines: running on a treadmill at the gym, our hands gripping a game-controller, or practicing over and over with a metronome?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Walking across the campus of a big Midwestern university, I hear drumming. The drumline from the school&#8217;s marching band is practicing outdoors, with a very loud metronome. Big speakers blast out the regular electric beats &#8212; quite a lot louder than twenty drummers drumming. These beats sound like gunshots. The music is intricate with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[125,126,365,364,363,306,66,133,128,1321,129,291],"class_list":{"0":"post-366","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-beat","9":"tag-beating","10":"tag-drumline","11":"tag-maelzel","12":"tag-metronome","13":"tag-performance-practice","14":"tag-practicing","15":"tag-regular-beat","16":"tag-regular-beating","17":"tag-rhythm","18":"tag-schoenberg","19":"tag-technology","20":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}