BEATING TIME

Based on a talk by Coull Quartet cellist Nick Roberts, given at A Symposium on Time

Time is an important consideration for musicians, who must develop a keen sense of tempo to be able to interpret music, and to transform it for the listener into a fluid work of art. In this lecture, Nick Roberts, who is a member of the University's Quartet-in-Residence, takes a close look at how our perception of time influences both performer and listener, and how composers sometimes play tricks on us by apparently suspending time.

Time has many meanings in music – the tempo of the music and the time taken to play a piece being just two. In his spirited talk, Nick Roberts, cellist in the Coull Quartet based at the University of Warwick, explored a musician’s subjective response to time and how this is resolved when playing together in an ensemble. Accompanied by music clips and himself playing the cello, Roberts demonstrated how musicians must both strictly follow and also subvert time to let the music ‘breathe’.

“I believe a musician’s relationship with time is predominately a practical one,” Roberts began by saying as he discussed the importance of time, not for the listener, but for the ensemble. In a contemporary global context music is organised sound with a beginning and an end. As a performer his experience is in the Western classical tradition. In this tradition there are four elements: melody, harmony, rhythm and time. Time is the duration of a piece determined by its tempo or speed.

Tempo is crucial to our perception of music. The average number of times a human heart beats per minute is 72. In Roberts’ experience 90 per cent of popular music fits this tempo. Take the traditional popular music Three Blind Mice and Frère Jacques for example. This is walking pace, a “natural human tempo” that we all have an inherited good sense of.

“For a performing musician a keen sense of tempo is a vital skill,” explains Roberts. “We have to be able to visualise tempo and develop it as an acute sense.” Music can transcend tempo to create an illusion of timelessness. Successful composers can create an effect of suspending time for their listeners. Time acts as basis for transformation for performer and listener.

Roberts then played two clips of music on CD. The first was the ‘Molto Adagio’ movement of Beethoven’s Quartet in A Minor Op.132, played by the Quartetto Italiano (Philips 464 684-2), to encourage the audience to experience the suspension of time. The second extract, Morton Feldman’s ‘Coptic Light’, played by the New World Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas (Argo 448513-2 DDD), was a very different sound. Although it is not harmonious and sounds random, the piece is strictly notated and plays to a pulse.

Metronomes are a necessary evil but can be the death of music if rigidly stuck to.

Players of music have to count furiously and internalise tempo. Roberts himself sees it as an arch. “As performers we often have a sense of the overall bulk of the piece before we start out.” Subdivision has to be flexible so musicians can follow the shapes and contours of the music. They rely heavily on the beat of the music but also try to subvert it.

To demonstrate this Roberts played a section of Bach himself on his cello: Allemande of the Cello Suite No.1 in G Major. Attendees could see his head moving in time and his eyes opening wider to emphasise points of the music. Roberts then put on a metronome and played the piece again to see how constrained it became rigidly following the tempo. He described the performer’s aim to subvert time and pulse as letting the music “breathe”. Composers, he said, are notorious for giving impossible metronome marks.

Musicians have to take into account practicality and mood. Players never set out to perform a piece of music in exactly the same way. Metronomes are a necessary evil but can be the death of music if rigidly stuck to. In the Coull Quartet the four musicians work hard to create a common sense of pulse. Roberts has noticed that younger people tend to naturally play faster whilst older people have a slower internal tempo. What is important, Roberts concludes, is creating a shared tempo and if they agree on a musical direction they will be unanimous.

Listen to Nick Roberts' full talk below.

A summary of the aims of the Symposium on Time event is now available.

By Penelope Jenkins