#11: The Metronome

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. Not a clock, but a metronome. Ticking the beats away as I practise piano, gradually speeding up as my skill improves.

There’s something quite hypnotising, watching the pendulum rod tick and sway, back and forth, back and forth. My whole body starts to move with it, to feel the beat.

That is what is needed, when you play music. You need the beat inside you, constantly ticking, becoming part of the music and not something that is working against you. You must internalise the beat with that persistent ticking. For many musicians, metronomes are irritating machines, too mechanical, too unrelenting, removing feeling from the music. The metronome doesn’t listen to you — you must listen to the metronome.

Is that intrusive? Controlling? Or do we sometimes need to be forced to listen? Forced to stop focussing on what we are playing, what sounds and rhythms we want to make, and to start listening to an outside force.

A metronome does not simply provide a beat to listen to. No one chooses to listen solely to the monotonous sound of the ticking of the metronome. Its function is not to provide pleasurable listening. It is there as an aid to make us listen to it, and ourselves, and to use it to improve and change and adjust. We listen to a metronome for feedback on our playing, to find out if we’re really playing what our mind thinks, if we really are staying in time.

It is only after we have internalised this beat, have become aware of our own playing in the real world and controlled it, that we can then enter the realm of flexibility in music. To begin playing a piece which holds not only the sounds but the feeling, you must first have a sense of the monotonous, regulated pulse. Only after that can you begin to play with the rhythm, to slow down or speed up, to add a half breath of pause at that crucial, emotional moment: to move from metronome time to musical time. To create a sense of emotion and feeling, you must first have something solid and systematic. When this is established, then the alterations made in performance are clearer, highlighted through their momentary alterations of pace before falling back in line to the musical time, the metronome time always buried beneath the surface.

To listen to a metronome is to listen to a world outside of our minds and playing. It makes us aware of ourselves, and of the noises we make in the world. When we become aware of this, we can start to adjust ourselves accordingly, to fit with the aim, and to make what is in our minds a reality to those around us.

A metronome with its persistent ticking may be irritating, infuriating at times, but it also provides a grounding for the moments when emotions take over, when the musical time and the metronome time must not fight against each other, but dance with each other. Stability and instability combined to reach that emotional height.

Tick. Tock.

It might be time to listen to the metronome, and the beat of the outer world.