Roger Mathew Grant
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199367283
- eISBN:
- 9780199367306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367283.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Chapter 7 provides an extended study of the celebrated machine Maelzel patented and its reception in the music theory of the era. If, as Beethoven and others complained, the meter signatures and ...
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Chapter 7 provides an extended study of the celebrated machine Maelzel patented and its reception in the music theory of the era. If, as Beethoven and others complained, the meter signatures and Italian tempo terms no longer did the work of prescribing tempo, how were composers to communicate it? Maelzel's metronome was a technological response to the increasing anxieties surrounding tempo giusto, marking an important threshold in the history of meter theory. Unlike its predecessors, pendulum devices calibrated with local and inexact measures of length, this machine used units per minute. Those who wrote on the metronome focused on issues of standardization and quantification, anxiously attempting to avoid disparity in systems of measurement across Europe. With distant and future destinations in mind, their writings reveal as much concern about the communication of numeric standards as they do about tempo.Less
Chapter 7 provides an extended study of the celebrated machine Maelzel patented and its reception in the music theory of the era. If, as Beethoven and others complained, the meter signatures and Italian tempo terms no longer did the work of prescribing tempo, how were composers to communicate it? Maelzel's metronome was a technological response to the increasing anxieties surrounding tempo giusto, marking an important threshold in the history of meter theory. Unlike its predecessors, pendulum devices calibrated with local and inexact measures of length, this machine used units per minute. Those who wrote on the metronome focused on issues of standardization and quantification, anxiously attempting to avoid disparity in systems of measurement across Europe. With distant and future destinations in mind, their writings reveal as much concern about the communication of numeric standards as they do about tempo.