Slowing Down
The Experience of Ritardando
Some music needs to be played with a rock-steady beat; some music (such as music for meditation) needs only a rather loose sense of time and often without any perceptible beat; some musical traditions use music that can change the tempo and even the meter and quality of its flow in time. So, similar to the varied scale types used by musical traditions from different times and places, their attitude towards time-flow and specific ways it is employed can vary wildly, corresponding to the varied applications of their musics. And this variability of exists in the folk traditional folk musics as well as in the music played by highly trained artists and academics.
Hindustani music, from north India, generally has a slightly less rigorous sense of the ongoing beat than music from Carnatic music, from the south.
Thoughts on the notion of steady tempo.
Not all music is needs to be performed with a rock-steady beat. Music for dancing (such as Latin dance, most social dancing, and most folk music from around the world) does demand a steady beat, as does music for marching, music for exercise classes (HIT, cardio, etc.), and most traditions of spiritual music do require a steady sense of time in order to support the movement.
It can be hard enough just to keep the time steady when playing music. When we try to intentionally slow down there are still more difficulties. Sometimes we drop the tempo suddenly instead of gradually and then we may not have a very accurate way to tell how much we have slowed down. We may not be able to tell if we have reached the desired slower tempo. This is a problem rarely addressed (in my observation) by music teachers. Part of the problem is finding the best proprioceptive analogue to guide the process. That is, while we instinctively sense that one’s own body can be the best guide, we’re not sure how to make confident and intelligent use of it.
When a musician lacks a natural, organic sense of flow, small adjustments to make appropriate and tasteful shifts in the ongoing procession of the beat (rubato, for example) may cause their playing may sound hesitant, awkward, or mechanical and unyielding. The changes in tempo may lack responsiveness to the changes in the texture, the melodic line, the harmonic progression, etc. Among the resulting losses may be a failure to understand how to bring a phrase or a piece to a natural conclusion.
It seems just about impossible to transmit (teach) the sensation of ritardando through verbal explanation or by counting aloud to your students. The experience must be in their body—in the player’s own body. In a young player, ritardando is quite often conflated with fatigue, as if the music or musician were getting tired and slowing down, becoming almost sluggish in consequence of that. My own impression is that the ‘slowing down’—the expansion of time, that is the essence of ritardando—actually requires a heightening of energy, a compression of sorts—as if each beat was getting thicker or increasingly viscous.
If you played something like one of these, without the presence of an audible beat, it might simulate the impression of a ritardando. But even so, if it were always the same, it could not account for the resonance of the space nor of the character of the preceding performance.
The following suggestions are based on my attempts regulate or alter the ongoing tempo by creating an intentional, visceral encounter with space or with the natural resistance of materials. A prime practical outcome of this is to be able to produce a natural and artistic sensation of slowing the forward momentum of the music. Below, there are three general approaches to creating this sensation, and these can later be ‘transferred’ to musical performance.
Ritardando by the resistance of fluid (viscosity)
For some students, it has been useful to try clapping their hands under water—in a full bathtub or swimming pool. Start by clapping your hands out of the water at a moderate tempo (60 b.p.m.) and then, while maintaining the same tempo, lower the hands into the water. As the hands descend the player will experience increasing resistance and it will be difficult to maintain the tempo. They will have to invest more energy. But if they can follow the instruction to keep the energy the same as when the hands were above the water—to really focus on maintaining the same energy expenditure—then they may observe that the tempo naturally slows down. If this experience can be repeated and internalized, it can serve as a reference for the experience of ritardando. This is an example of learning by analogy.
So a slowing of tempo should not feel like the result of fatigue but simply of encountering greater resistance, or expanding space, . The viscosity or ‘thickness’ of the water is a sensory image that can be recalled and used to initiate an experience the result of which is an organic slowing down of the tempo. It is as if the flow of time is getting thicker. For instance, they might then imagine clapping hands in a large bowl of jello or honey.
Ritardando by the resistance of friction (gravity)
This next idea relies on the effects of gravity and friction. It has always been an effective, direct experience of ritardando.
Have the students, one at a time, push a large table across a wide space. The floor must be relatively uniform for this to work well so that there are no bumps, i.e., no sudden changes of resistance. I usually did this in a studio space that was about 40 feet across but it could be done in a smaller space. The suggestion is to put their focus not on the speed at which they move across the space but on their expended energy. They are asked to try to maintain the same energy throughout the exercise.
When they get to the far wall, they are asked to come around to the other side of the table and push it back to where they started—each time experiencing the same expenditure of energy. After another couple of laps—when it’s clear that they have stabilized the degree of effort, I ask the rest of the class to line up parallel to the path of the table and, one by one, to put their backpacks or books gently on the table. As the table gets heavier, there is more friction and greater resistance against the floor. If the one pushing can maintain the identical effort, their speed will naturally slow down. They have to exert more energy simply to maintain their speed. So their experience of slowing down is not associated with expending less effort; that has remained the same. So they experience an organic retardation of their forward motion. It’s as if the space itself has become more dense.
Ritardando by the sense of expanding space
For some people a visual analogy can create an impression as powerful as a physical experience. I bring to class a small balloon and blow it up just enough to draw on it. I make five dots with a marker, all in line and equidistant from one another. Then I ask the class to imagine a very small insect traversing from the first dot to the last. I love watching those tiny orange summer spiders, no bigger than a lower case ‘o’. The dots represent, for example, the final five chords of a classical sonata, meant to be played with a grand, expansive ending.
Imagine that each of the final quarter-note chords are symbolized by one of the dots on the balloon. The spider is running at top speed with its legs moving too fast to follow, but it is so tiny (do you know those orange summer spiders?), that it moves past the dots at about the adagio suggested by the composer. Upon reaching each dot, the next chord is sounded. But while the spider maintains a constant speed, the balloon is being blown up slowly and gradually and, in consequence, the balloon skin stretches and expands, the dots grow further from one another, and so the duration of the spider’s progress to each subsequent dot is increasing.
(This is not unlike the image of an expanding universe. While it seems that galaxies are flying apart from one another, we are told that it is actually the space between them that is expanding. Some physicists have offered the helpful image of the ‘expansion’ of the raisins in a cake which is baking in the oven. The raising are not so travelling away from each other; rather, the cake is expanding.)
Obviously there are many other images besides spiders and raisins and you just have to find one that is convincing for you and your students.
The three images above, of resistance and expansion, can also be useful when simply trying to maintain a constant tempo, especially while experiencing the heightened intensity and natural anxiety aroused by public performance.
Ritardando in non-musical life experiences
Changes of tempo are a constant presence in our daily lives, and I find that students often respond very strongly to these common experiences which paralleled the demands that are often encountered in music performance. All improv students kept a practice journal their entries also included a thematized journal which invited them to observe and listen to their day in a different way. You can read many of those in the link to student journals but, just for some examples regarding change of tempo and specifically ritardando … (deleted while being edited ….)
In your musical journal, try to observe and describe:
How you bring a visit or a phone call to a close
How you bring a party to a close
How you bring a relationship to a close
How you can bring the car you’re driving to a full stop without creating any rebound effect at all.
There are hundreds of examples but this last one is an excellent practice and is great for pianists interested in acquiring a more sensitive foot for pedalling. While seemingly unrelated to musical exercise, practicing this technique of bringing a car to a full stop without any final rebound is a useful analogue of dissipating forward momentum.
And it can give some insight into the process of dissipating musical momentum as well. How to do it? My dad showed me, and I practiced it because I was interested. Figuring it out for yourself is very satisfying. Try for a totally graduated stop with no more than the barest hint of a rebound!