Re: By Gaslight - tempo ?


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Posted by K on October 15, 2003 at 17:49:35:

In Reply to: By Gaslight - tempo ? posted by curious on October 15, 2003 at 17:00:03:

Weight of sound has a massive effect on the perception of tempo.

A pianist and a quintet my students and myself once took turns in accompanying a song with a lot of verses. I wondered why the pianist played so much slower, than we did. Afterwards I was told, that the quintet had been the slower part, but with our intense sound, i had perceived the situation differently.

Ballet dancers are accompanied by pianists for most of the rehearsals for good reasons of economics. They then have to accommodate considerably, when the orchestra enters the sequence of rehearsals. Fortunately the sound of the orchestra is very helpful for the dancers.

And now to a possible reason for your observation:

Many composers and arrangers work with computers these days. Computer play-back has immense advantages over working with a piano. But it also has drawbacks:

The tin-can quality of many soundcards may tend to have composers/arrangers set tempos high to compensate for the lack of intensity in sound.

Steven Mead certainly has no tin can quality to his euphonium sound. So he may find the right intensity level to be found at a considerably slower pace, than the one the composer put on the page.

Within my more humble framework I recently had a comparable situation:

I worked on the arrangement for brass quintet of a 5 part Divertimento by J. B. Vanhal. The last movement, an Allegro, sounded best through my not too bad sound module, when I set the playback to quarternote=160.

I did not write my suggestion into the score. The tuba part is quite demanding physically, and I didn't want to provoke too many fellow tubists call eloquent curses over my sinful head. Curses not diminishing, did they know, that I would take my YEP641/Yeo combo or alternatively my KingVIIB/Yeo combo for that part.

Klaus Bjerre of Denmark
Retired teacher

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