What this partly fictitious story (the characters
are fictitious, but the examples and arguments are real!) shows is
that we have to be aware of the Tempo Curve. Of course one should be
encouraged to measure tempo curves and use them for the study of
expressive timing. But it is a dangerous notion, despite its
widespread use and comfortable description, because it lulls its
users into the false impression that it has a musical and
psychological reality. There is no abstract tempo curve in the music
nor is there a mental tempo curve in the head of a performer or
listener. And any transformation or manipulation based on the implied
characteristics of such a notion is doomed to fail.
That does not mean that generic models that represent timing in terms
of some sort of structure, even when they describe just a fraction of
the many aspects of expressive timing, do not constitute a valuable
contribution to the field. They only have to be seen in a proper
perspective in which their limitations are understood as well. It
also does not mean that certain features in computer music software
and commercial sequencers should be forbidden. Their mere existence
at least makes the realisation of their limited worth evident.
It should be noted here that the views expressed in this article
comply more or less with the British school of expressive timing
research (E.F. Clarke, H.C. Longuet-Higgins, L. Shaffer, J. Sloboda
and N. Todd), in which the link between structure and timing is
paramount. There are alternative views developing at the moment,
denying such a strong link (Kendall & Carterette, 1991). We hope
this controversy will eventually lead to more understanding of this
wonderfully complex aspect of music performance.
In reality the experiments were done using POCO, an environment for
analysing, manipulating and generating musical expression
(Honing,
1990), which took a bit longer to build
than one Christmas.
The holiday was almost over now and we felt that we had not found out many useful things. Our musical friend announced that he would go back to his own piano. He thanked us for the interesting sessions, from which he had learned a lot. But underneath these friendly remarks we could hear the cynicism. He advised us in a fatherly way to get rid of our research papers and start reading biographies of famous composers, in which the true facts about music and its performance could be found. This made the feeling of disappointment even more pronounced. But in a last irrational attack of bravery, we decided not to give in yet and we invited him to come back next Christmas, and to bring his biographies if he wished.
To be continued ...
Thanks to Boy Honing and Mariken Zandvliet for their performances of Beethoven. Thanks to Bruno Repp for information on Clynes' model and to Shaun Stevens for his help with the English language. We would like to thank also all the researchers mentioned, for their contribution to the field of timing in music. We are very grateful to Eric Clarke who made it possible for us to work for two years on research in expressive timing which allowed us to gain an insight into timing through our numerous discussions, and the British ESRC for their financial support throughout these two years (grant A413254004).