Don’t Hurry your Tempo

admin — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:51:23 +0000

Hurrying the tempo is nearly as bad, and is sometimes caused by nervousness, though indifference, want of confidence, and the very general mistake of looking upon a crescendo as an accellerando also give rise to it. People who are inclined to be nervous when playing before others often get a queer kind of defiant sensation when technically difficult passages hover in sight ; the ” let’s get it over and be done with it ” sort of feeling, which makes them hurry in an extraordinary manner.

Of course, hurrying may just as well arise from a lack of instinct for rhythm in the student. Where this is the case, it is rather a hopeless look-out, as it is so hard to inculcate a real feeling for rhythm into someone who is not naturally endowed with it. But it has often been my experience to listen to students who were gifted with a most highly-developed sense of rhythm, and yet who hurried, especially over their technically difficult passages, until I began to get positively breathless. This kind of increasing the speed was, of course, due to want of nervous control.

One of the Most Common Fault

admin — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:45:29 +0000

Now comes along the temperamental student, burning with ardour for the beauty of the music, longing to make the noble chords of some fine melody speak out its message! What special pitfall lies ready to entrap his zealous endeavours? Why, in his enthusiasm that the melody in both hands should be properly brought out, he gets one hand playing after the other! Only a fraction of a second after the left hand does the right hand strike, but in that loss of simultaneousness of sound the whole grandeur after which the performer is striving will be dispelled in the irritating effect of one part of the harmony always reaching the ear at a slight interval after the other. This is a most frequent failing amongst very musical people who enjoy tremendously what they are playing; and especially does it occur with them in slow movements, when they will arpeggio the chords between the two hands so much that it sounds to me like drawling in speech, or even like stuttering. These enthusiasts lose their sense of the symmetry of the sound in their intense pleasure over its component parts, and it is hard that the very virtue that lies in their love of the music can thus lead them into danger.

Dragging the time, another tiresome error of judgment, proceeds generally from the same cause of over-fervour. The player who suffers from this blemish mostly owes it to a lack of sense of proportion and taste, and to a certain want 01 artistic perception of the guiding line between true sentiment and sentimentality.

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Don’t Hurry your Tempo

One of the Most Common Fault