TEMPO IS NOT A NUMBER: THE CONDUCTOR'S INTERPRETATION THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Abstract

When considering the collective performance of works from earlier eras, one cannot ignore the conductor’s crucial role in creating the interpretation. In addition to understanding the nuances and performance traditions of the relevant period, the conductor faces a new challenge: finding the “ideal” tempo. To objectively interpret a musical work and convey that interpretation to the performers, the leader of a musical ensemble must take into account the cultural and historical context. It is a mistake to limit oneself to merely studying the history of the work’s composition and the composer’s biography. This is comparable to a small piece of a large puzzle. Nevertheless, scores conceal schematic “clues” to the composer’s intent, encoded through musical notation – specifically, terms, time signatures, and rhythmic density, as well as subtle nuances of instrumentation – which, when analyzed with insight, help determine the performance tempo. Today's conductors, when studying works from earlier eras, lack the ability to communicate with the composer to coordinate the performance interpretation and, especially, the precise determination of tempo. Thus, the advent of the metronome, which was intended to facilitate composers’ ability to set the desired performance speed, created additional problems in interpreting these markings during its early years. Despite the musical community’s acceptance of this innovation, the tempo specified in the score was interpreted by 19th-century conductors-interpreters as an objective, absolute speed, subjecting the musical material to a series of agogic deviations. Moreover, it has been noted that a large number of works were notated using terms more relevant to defining character than to performance speed. In this regard, the article examines the specifics of determining the tempo component based on aspects reflected by the composer in the score, as well as performance traditions. The study aims to identify the characteristics of tempo interpretation by conductors of previous eras through the analysis of contemporary research, reconstructions of events, historical sources, and the memoirs of contemporaries. Given the impossibility of an objective assessment of the performance due to the absence of audio or video recordings, a historical modeling of the ways in which conductors (early conductors) sought and interpreted tempo in music was carried out.