Alright, so far we have our beat,
we have rhythm. We have melody. We have harmony.
We have a lot of things put together but what makes music
really interesting for you, as an audience member, is the things that we
call the expressive
elements - the things that make the music speak to you. I could do twinkle
twinkle here for you
forever and bore you to pieces. We don't want to do that.
Now, you're going to listen to Mozart do twinkle twinkle later and you won't be
bored with his because he'll do a lot of interesting things to it.
One of the things we can do, even with a simple piece,
is to manipulate the tempo of the piece.
What is a tempo? Tempo is the speed
of the beat. The speed of the beat, that's really important. It's not the speed of
the rhythm, it's not how many notes are happening,
it's how fast the beat goes. So, I can do the same piece
at multiple tempos, or if we want to be really fancy and use our Italian properly
we would say tempi
but we can do it at lots of different speeds. We'll take
jingle bells to give you a break from twinkle twinkle.
(plays piano)
That's sort of a moderate tempo- not too fast not too slow.
I could do it
(plays piano slower)
The same melody - did miss a note but other than that-
the same melody, very slow tempo.
(plays piano faster) I can do it really fast.
Nothing changes about the basic structure of the piece. It still has all the same
melodic notes,
has the same rhythmic relationships- the longs and the shorts are still the same
to each other.
It's just the beat that changes. So,
tempo is one of the things that can be very variable.
As we start looking at composers, particularly in the Baroque period and
the classical period,
we'll see that they would put tempo markings
on a piece of music. That tells the performer how fast or slow this piece is
supposed to be
but the terminology is very
loose. These are all Italian words that we use
and there are terms in other languages but Italian is sort of the standard.
We'll start with terms that mean fast. Lots of different words to tell us it's
a fast piece.
Allegro, presto,
that's a word you know 'Presto Chango' magicians use that -
fast, happens fast.
We have a lot, we have allegro, we have pesto,
we could have vivace which means lively.
There are are multiple terms that mean fast.
So, you're the performer, you get this piece of music
and it says Allegro. Well, how fast is that? It's as fast as you think it's
supposed to be as a performer
using what you know about the style of the period, the type of composer that we're
talking about,
and lots of different things that we look at when we make those decisions as
performers.
So those are sort of 'fast' terms
We have some 'sort of fast' terms like allegretto.
You take Allegro you put an -etto on the end of it - that makes it a little less of
whatever it used to be.
We can have medium speed terms
like moderato or
andante. If you've taken a Spanish class, andante
has the same route as 'andar' which means to walk, so it's sort of a walking speed.
But you're walking speed and my walking speed might be very different so
even that's not very helpful but you can sort of figure that andante, moderato,
those are
medium sort of normal paces of things.
Then we have a whole lot of terms for things that are slow.
We have largo, lento,
adagio,
grave. Grave is spelled like grave but is pronounced grä'vā. If you think
if you're in the grave you're pretty slow up so that should be an easy one
to remember.
There are lots and lots of terms like that that you will see
as we look at titles of pieces because
for about 300 years a title of an instrumental piece is probably
going to have
that tempo term in the title. So, if you're at a concert
and the title says allegro you can say okay, I know that's going to be fast,
and you'll know to listen for that. If you're confused about what movement
you're on, whether you
fell asleep during one and missed it and you wake up and it's something slow
you can look at your program and say
oh, this says it's a largo so I'll know that that's a slow movement.
This must be where we on the program. It's useful to know those terms in terms
of listening at concerts
and thinking about as you listen to music every day.
What would you call the tempo of that piece? Would you say it's allegro? Would you
say it's
Allegretto? Is it moderato? Is it
lento or one of the many other terms that we have to choose from?
We talked about tempos. There are fast tempos there are slow tempos
there are things in the middle but we also like to change the tempo of
a piece. Especially once we get into the 1800s and 1900s, we really
like to have a lot of variety in our tempo.
We could just go along at one tempo tempo tempo
stop and change tempos but that's not very
musically satisfying for the most part,
so we have some things that we can do to change the tempo within the piece as
it's going along.
One of the things we can do is to speed up
so instead of going from slow to suddenly fast, which we can also do, but
many times we will just speed up and then all of a sudden you're at the fast speed.
The term for that is accelerando. Accelerando.
It looks like accel-a-rondo and so you can remember that because to accelerate
means to speed up.
That's it easy one to remember accelarando - to speed-up.
In the music it would just say ACCEL
usually, and tells the performer hey, start getting faster
here. The other thing we can do is to slow down.
There are actually two sets words for that. One is ritard
which is a already an abbreviation for ritardando - which just means to slow
down
or you might also see rallentando
as a term to tell us to slow down the tempo. So, we can speed it up,
we can slow it down. Sometimes what a composer wants us to do
is - so we're going along. Say we're going along at moderato
they want us to slow down a little bit at the end of this section
for a dramatic affect but once we've done with that they want to go back to the
original tempo.
We could slow down and then speed back up
like we came to a yellow yield sign and we just look back to see if anybody was
coming and speed back up and go through traffic,
but usually what happens is you'll have the ritard or the rallentando
and then it will say a tempo.
It looks like a tempo in English but it's pronounced ah tempo and it just means
to go back to the tempo you were doing before you speeded up or slowed down.
So ritard, rallentando, accelarando,
and a tempo, those are things that we can do
to the tempo to give us even a little more variety
in our musical production.