Tick Tock
On self-delusion and metronomes
The French baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully famously used a long staff to keep the beat while conducting, pummeling the ground in time to the music. I say famously because it famously killed him — one day he drove it into his foot, and the resulting gangrene spread to his brain. It was more than a century before the mechanical metronome was patented as an alternative way to keep musicians in time. As a young piano student I had a metronome not unlike the design patented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in 1814: the weighted baton swings back and forth, clicking audibly on each side. Move the little weight closer to the base and its movements are faster and tighter; push it up to the top and the arm reaches its full range of motion, where the clicks are more leisurely but still perfectly even.
The classic way for a musician to train with a metronome is this: start by moving the weight to a place where the beat is much slower than performance tempo, slow enough to comfortably play the piece or passage exactly in time with no mistakes. Then, bring the weight down by a tiny amount to speed up the beat, and try playing it again. If you can still play it comfortably at the faster speed, move the weight down a little more. But if you make mistakes, or feel anything less than perfect control, raise it to the previous (slower) setting and try again. By speeding up a little at a time and refusing to sacrifice control, eventually you will be playing without error at concert tempo and can finally silence the metronome.
My confession: Though I frequently practice with a metronome (now an app instead of a baton in a pyramid-shaped box), I have never had the patience to stick to this regime without cheating and playing faster, just to see how it feels, just to see if I can.
A musician’s use of a metronome can serve as a symbol for a whole set of now-unfashionable beliefs about how to best develop skill: that getting better at something involves drills, repetitions, controlled and incremental improvement, holding oneself to a standard of perfection. People with an optimizing mindset are usually happy to be able to put a number on progress — improving your speed from 60 to 108 beats per minute is measurable, quantifiable, plottable on a graph. And yet it’s funny that the metronome, exemplifying rigidity, is primarily a tool for musicians. Isn’t music supposed to be free, expressive, surprising? Don’t we love the moments in a virtuoso performance where the artist draws a beautiful phrase out just a little longer, lingering on a particular note, before charging into the finale like a racehorse? No great classical pianist sounds like they’re playing to a metronome (except maybe — maybe — in Bach or Scarlatti). So why use one?
Before this year, I never liked practicing with a metronome. My guess is that the vast majority of students don’t like it either. But over the last months it’s been perhaps the single best tool for improving my playing. I’ve noticed that during lessons, my teacher will say, “I can tell you’ve been practicing!” if, and only if, I’ve done metronome practice in the days before. So what good is the metronome doing me?
It turns out that even if you think you have a good sense of rhythm, sticking to a beat is difficult. It’s almost impossible for me not to cheat, primarily by slowing down in the places where it’s a little tricky, and speeding up when I’m back on familiar ground. And because I can’t always perceive that I’m doing it, it doesn’t even out on its own. Another cheat is getting carried away in the “fast” parts, pushing harder and faster until I’m past the point of musical control. But the smallest, most difficult flaws to correct are the tiny hesitations — those split-second wait-where’s-the-note-oh-there-it-is moments that can entirely ruin the flow of the musical line — that become so ingrained in my muscle memory that the little wobble at the end of a leap while I try to find the key stars to feel correct to me, just part of the piece.
My little faults, it turns out, can be stamped out only with cruelty and precision, only with the tick-tocking voice telling me you’re late, you’re early, you’re wrong. And it’s these faults, more than any danger from excessive rigidity, that spoils the artistry, the timing, the flow of my playing.
A while ago I read a book about how to be a better public speaker. Very early in the book, the author took this somewhat defeatist position: The single best thing you can do to really improve your speaking, he wrote, is to record a video of yourself giving your talk and then watching it with a critical eye — something that ninety percent of people, even people who claim to be sincere about getting better, find almost impossible to do. I know most of you will refuse to do this, he wrote. And sadly, if you don’t do this, you’ll find it very difficult to improve. The hardest thing for us, it turns out, isn’t getting criticism from someone else. It’s being forced to see and hear ourselves in a setting that doesn’t flatter, finding out exactly how we look and sound.
I sometimes think that people crave to be told what’s wrong with them — particularly to be told by a person whose opinion they esteem. People will pay for coaching, advice, will beg their friends to please give it to me straight, will even seek out situations where they know they will be mocked. The pain of discovering one’s faults from other people is at least mixed with the pleasure of being seen and understood. But to truly find out what’s wrong, in the plainest and most impersonal terms, from the video playback or the implacable metronome? Most of us find it to be near-unendurable.
As a form of self-confrontation, the metronome is a lot easier than watching video of myself talking or hearing myself speak, or even reading old diary entries. But, it illustrates more clearly than anything that the tiny ways we cheat ourselves can be maddeningly imperceptible to us — and that the straightest path to artistic growth must include a willingness to see and hear them, with our own eyes and ears.