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.