In MHO, absolutely not! Why? Because a metronome clicking is not a pulse. What is a pulse anyway? The sound of your heart beating. It produces a throbbing, pumping kind of feeling as opposed to the monotonous, soulless clicking of a metronome. All of the great jazz musicians of the past such as Dizzy, Charlie Parker, Cannonball, John Coltrane, Erroll Garner, etc., display this kind of sound in their time keeping.
One of my former students, Adam Rafferty, who refers to me as his “mentor”, created quite a controversy on many of the internet jazz chat rooms with an article he wrote advising people not to use a metronome when they practice. He, of course, learned that concept from me when he was my student.
There is a practice among some of the jazz educators to encourage musicians to practice with the metronome clicking on 2 and 4. In my estimation this is probably one of the worst things a musician can do and practically destroys the ability to ever swing. I’m sure there is no malicious attempt on the part of the educators, and they sincerely believe they are “helping” students by having them do this. The sad thing is there is a type of playing and a kind of “music” that can result from this. The question becomes…does it swing? Does it produce a positive reaction in the listener? In other words, does it make people who listen to it feel good? In my opinion, ABSOLUTELY NOT!
Since this is a common practice being used in many jazz education environments and since the popularity of jazz has diminished in alarming proportions, I suggest that educators might want to question if there might be a connection.
I recall an incident that occurred during the sixties. At that time a huge controversy started to develop along racial lines with jazz musicians. A polarization between African American and Caucasian musicians began emerging in which the African American players were complaining that the “white cats” were getting all the gigs and they couldn’t swing. The incident I recall was an interview in Downbeat Magazine in which the great alto saxophonist, Cannonball Adderley, was asked to comment on this topic. What he said in essence was that the “black musicians play with a pulse and the whites do not.” He went on to clarify that “there are exceptions of course. No one in their right mind would claim that Zoot Simms does not swing.” Since I was a young aspiring jazz pianist at the time and since my path as a jazz musician actually started with playing with Cannonball in South Florida when I was in high school, I was “crushed” when I read it. It caused me great anguish and feelings of insecurity at the time, which I eventually got over. In retrospect I think he had a point to a certain extent, although at the present I believe it has little to do with a person’s race and more to do with keeping time to a “pulse” rather than to a “clock.” I also believe this is something that anyone from any race is capable of doing.
It appears to me that educators who are proponents of the 2 and 4 metronome practice have little or no regard for the role that “body rhythm” plays in this music. There are many film clips available on the Internet of jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie performing. Dizzy was fond of dancing along with the music while his group was performing. Even while he was playing his own solos one could perceive the way he was patting his foot and moving his body as he played. All one has to do is try to move that way while a metronome is clicking and see if it works. I think anyone who attempts this exercise will discover that IT DEFINITELY DOES NOT!
If one observes the way Count Basie pats his foot while playing they will discover this discrepancy even further.
I had a young guitar student who was studying privately with me while attending a university jazz department trying to get a degree in jazz performance. He was proclaiming how much his playing was improving from the things I was teaching him and how it was producing gigs and income for him. Then one day he came to a lesson very upset and perplexed. He claimed the guitar teacher at the university was telling him to do things that ran contrary to what I was teaching him. He reported that the guitar teacher showed him a clip on You Tube of a guitarist playing a solo while placing the microphone on the floor next to a metronome clicking on 2 and 4. I observed this clip and found that the playing displayed a tremendous amount of technique with speed and velocity as well as a ton of notes. But it was not producing anything I wanted to listen to, nor did it swing. The student proclaimed that the teacher told him, “This is why you should practice with the metronome on 2 and 4” to which I responded by sending the teacher a clip of Wes Montgomery and his group playing “Impressions” with the drummers high hat popping on 2 and 4 in a manner that started your foot tapping involuntarily from the first bar on. I sent a note along stating, “This is why you shouldn’t practice that way.”
Further evidence that supports that there is a ring of truth to my theory is the following. Try taking any classic jazz recording that has withstood the test of time and has everyone agreeing on the fact that it swings and see if you can get a metronome to stay with the music on that recording. Obviously you cannot, and obviously the musicians were keeping time differently than the way a metronome clicks.
Another observation one must consider is that the metronome was never invented as a tool for practicing. Its primary purpose was a means of indicating the approximate rate of speed or tempo at which a piece of music should begin. It was invented during Beethoven’s lifetime and since most proponents of the use of a metronome believe it produces “good time” in musicians who practice to it, one would have to ask does that mean that musicians who preceded Beethoven, such as Mozart, Haydn, Handel, and Bach had “bad time?’
I read where one proponent of the use of the metronome claimed it produces an evenness of notes and perfect timing and technique in music students. It also produces music that hardly anyone wants to listen to in my estimation. Especially jazz music. I have been playing since the age of three and began formal study at the age of four. I can recall that my first teacher had me practicing scales to a metronome, and I must admit that I couldn’t stay with the metronome at first. At the point that I was able to, however, I knew instinctively as a four year old that I didn’t need that thing any more. But I do admit that it served a purpose up to that point. I believe the purpose was muscular coordination however and admit that the metronome was of some value in that regard. Most jazz musicians attending jazz education facilities have already passed the point of being a four year old without muscular coordination on a musical instrument however. I strongly believe that practicing jazz to a metronome clicking is tantamount to “swing suicide”. I know there are those who proclaim that they have “gone way beyond swinging” and that what they are doing is the “new thing.” I must say, however, that musicians who can’t swing have been around for a long time – way before I was born as a matter of fact and not swinging can hardly be considered “something new.” Some of what has resulted from this “new thing” has been publicists no longer wanting to take on jazz projects because many publications no longer want to write about today’s jazz due to lack of interest from the public. Also “jazz festivals” are now featuring artists that are more related to hip hop and R & B than jazz as we used to know it. And jazz clubs are closing world wide due to a lack of an audience, and the list goes on and on.
As far as producing evenness of notes and great technique I must relate a story concerning Adam Rafferty mentioned earlier. At one point in his studies with me he asked my advice about how to improve his chops. I recommended that he practice Hanon exercises and scales and arpeggios while putting a pulse on every note by tapping his foot to every note he played. The result was a virtuosic technique, which is evident in his playing and attested by any of his many fans and fellow guitarists. He has a book out on this very subject, which I would highly recommend to all guitarists regardless of the style of music you are playing.
The following is a list of quotes from prominent people in the music world who share many of the same opinions I have stated here:
- Duke Ellington disdained the “soulless” quality and “continual churning” of certain rhythm sections. Uninspired metronomic time-keeping caused “apathy in the section[s],” he wrote in 1931, and a loss of interest among the musicians whose “performance becomes stodgy and mechanical.”
- — Joel Dinerstein; Swinging the machine (2003)..
- this series of even, perfectly quantized, 16th notes, is no more evocative of samba, than a metronome would be. In fact, this representation neglects what makes up the samba essence in the first place — the swing![1]
- — Pedro Batista; Understanding the Samba Groove
- Another thing that becomes clear …, is how much the listener’s perception of rhythm differs from the reality of the metronome. While Feuermann’s performances seemed to provide the clearest “feel” of the beat — meaning that to a listener, the rhythm and tempo seemed the most clear and compelling — when trying to set a metronome, one found a slightly changing tempo throughout almost every measure — a constant rhythmic “push and pull” — making metronome indications sometimes recordable only as a range between two or three adjacent markings or as an average. At the same time, other performers … whose performances did not yield to the ear as strong a sense of tempo or rhythm, fit more easily within a specific metronome marking. From this, it is clear that the feeling and perception of rhythm are conveyed much more by the performers choice of emphasis or “pulse” than by strict adherence to any absolute metronomic rhythm.[31]
— Brinton Smith; Thesis about Emanuel Feuermann
- And many recent recordings of pop music demonstrate how music is killed by a metronome for they are as square as a draftsman’s T. For the convenience of recording engineers, each player has to record their part on a separate track while listening to a click track — a metronome — and the clicks are then used to synchronize the tracks while the technicians adjust them to their taste and mix them. I know talented young musicians who can’t do it; we can understand why. Nothing compares with a recording of a live performance in which the players provide each other with the time-framework.[…] if you want to kill a musical performance, give the player a click track! [33]
— James Beament; How we hear music: the relationship between music and the hearing mechanism
- Hence, also, you realize the folly of imagining that a Metronome can serve as a Time-teacher. You see, the pupil has to learn to play to a pulse-throb of his own making all the while, it is therefore of very little use indeed learning to pay obedience to an outside, machine-made Pulse-throb. And in any case, a Metronome is apt to kill the finer Time-sense implied by Rubato.[28]
— Tobias Matthay (1858-1945); Musical interpretation : its laws and principles, and their application in teaching and performing (c1913)
- […] early nineteenth century […]. There was little interest in using the metronome to tick all the way through a piece of music. But this is how the device is used by conservatory students today.
— James R. Heintze; Reflections on American music: the twentieth century and the new millennium : a collection of essays presented in honor of the College Music Society by (Pendragon Press, 2000)
- In general, we think it a great mistake to attempt any metrical adaption of the plain-chant; it shows that the adapter scarcely recognises the difference between the rhythm of oratory and the rhythm of music. Declamation cannot be measured by the beats of a metronome, or by the sequences of accents in a bar; it depends on the sense or the articulate sound of the words or syllables. The plain-chant seems intended to preserve this declamatory rhythm; and therefore any metrical arrangement goes far to destroy its distinctive character.[29]
— The Rambler, Volumes 3-4, 1860
- 100 according to Maelzel, but this must be held applicable to only the first measures, for feeling also has its tempo and this cannot entirely be expressed in this figure.[25]
- I do not mean to say that it is necessary to imitate the mathematical regularity of the metronome, which would give the music thus executed an icy frigidity; I even doubt whether it would be possible to maintain this rigid uniformity for more than a few bars.[26]
— Hector Berlioz; A treatise upon modern instrumentation and orchestration
- A metronomical performance is certainly tiresome and nonsensical; time and rhythm must be adapted to and identified with the melody, the harmony, the accent and the poetry…[22]
- — Franz Liszt; Letter to Siegmund Lebert (10 Jan. 1870)
- The musician who relies on metronomic markings has divorced himself from the inner life (which is a rhythmic life) of the music. He is no longer living out the drama from within, or singing the melody with his heart; he is immune to the ‘sortilège’. […] rhythm as something organic and unpredictable […]. But there is no doubt that it persists. It lies behind the notorious complaint, heard even from very skillful players, that the metronome ‘sounds wrong’.
- — Louis Wirth Marvick; Waking the face that no one is (page 12)
- To be emotional in musical interpretation, yet obedient to the initial tempo and true to the metronome, means about as much as being sentimental in engineering. Mechanical execution and emotion are incompatible. To play Chopin’s G major Nocturne with rhythmic rigidity and pious respect for the indicated rate of movement would be as intolerably monotonous, as absurdly pedantic, as to recite Gray’s famous Elegy to the beating of a metronome.[20]
- — Ignacy Jan Paderewski; There is an immense amount of metrical playing and singing in the world […] : there is too little rhythmic reality. And if you habitually play or sing thousands of metrical phrases without transmuting them into your own rhythms, you will become a metronomical musician[11].
- — Walford Daviesm, Harvery Grace; Music Worship (1935)
- How any musician could ever play with a metronome, passes my humble understanding. It is not only an inartistic, but a downright antiartistic instrument.[10]
- — Constantin von Sternberg; Ethics and aesthetics of piano playing
- Paderewski plays the rhapsodies like improvisations — inspirations of the moment. It is the negation of the mechanical in music, the assassination of the metronome. When ordinary pianists play a Liszt rhapsody, there is nothing in their performance that a musical stenographer could not note down just as it is played. But what Paderewski plays could not be put down on paper by any system of notation ever invented. For such subtle nuances of tempo and expression there are no signs in our musical alphabet. But it is precisely these unwritten and unwritable things that constitute the soul of music and the instinctive command of which distinguishes a genius from a mere musician. [7]
— Henry T. Finck; Paderewski and his art (1895)
- The metronome […] a lifeless, soulless machine, cannot express the meaning, the object of inspiration, it cannot be used as a means to develop emotion – guided by a machine the performance is wholly mechanical.[6]
- As a seasoned clubgoer raised on a healthy diet of DJs who reveled in variations (think mood, tempo, emotion, and rhythm) in the course of one evening, I find most nights out now numbingly boring. I’ve never been fond of DJs whose sets rely on relentless, dare I say monotonous beats. […] metronome-like tracks.[34]
- — Michael Paoletta; Billboard Sep 22, 2001
- — Robert Challoner; History of the science and art of music: Its origin, development, and progress(1880)
- […] using the metronome as a constant guide to ramp up the speed or to keep the rhythm. This is one of the worst abuses of the metronome. […] If over used, it can lead to loss of your internal rhythm, loss of musicality, and bio-physical difficulties from over-exposure to rigid repetition[3]
— Chuan C. Chang; Fundamentals of Piano Practice
- “Never play with a metronome […] the keeping of absolutely strict time is thoroughly unmusical and deadlike”[36]
— Josef Hofmann; Piano playing : with Piano questions answered