Slowing Down
The Experience of Ritardando
The relationship between music and time is just as culturally specific and functionally adapted as other musical elements. The metronomic precision demanded by certain dance music or minimalist compositions, starkly contrasts the elasticity of a Carnatic raga's alap or the rubato freedom in a Chopin nocturne. This isn't just a "classical versus popular" divide; for example, punk demands strict tempo while a folk ballad singer might stretch phrases to match the story's emotional weight.
What's particularly interesting is how these temporal approaches reflect the music's purpose. The loose temporality of much meditation music may facilitate the goal of releasing the listener from mundane time-consciousness. The steady pulse that drives music for social dancing or exercise classes is intended to facilitate the synchronous the movement of bodies. The shifting meters in Balkan folk music or the accelerating/decelerating patterns in much Middle Eastern music create a unique engagement and excitement. And then there is also stylistic variance. Hindustani music generally has a slightly less rigorous sense of the ongoing periodicity than music from the Carnatic music of the south.
It can be hard enough just to keep steady time when playing music. However, when we try to intentionally slow down the tempo, there are additional difficulties. We may inadvertently drop the tempo suddenly instead of gradually, and then we may not have a very accurate way to assess how much we have slowed down. And it may even be difficult to determine if we have reached the desired tempo. This is a problem difficult for music teachers to address. Part of the problem is finding the best words or the most appropriate proprioceptive analogues to guide the student. So, while we may instinctively sense that our own body is the best guide, we’re not sure how to make confident and intelligent use of it.
If a musician lacks a natural, organic sense of time-flow, small adjustments made in order to execute appropriate and tasteful shifts (rubato, for example) may cause their playing to sound hesitant, awkward, or mechanical and unyielding. Their changes in tempo may not correspond to the changes in the musical texture, the melodic line, cadences, or the harmonic progression. 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 clapping or counting aloud to your students. The experience must reside in their body—that is, 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. My own impression is that ‘slowing down’ is closer to a sense of increasing resistance or expanding time. Such expansion seems much closer to the essence of ritardando, and it actually requires not a diminishment but rather a heightening of energy, and a compression of sorts—as if each beat was getting thicker or increasingly viscous.
If you played something like one of these examples, without the presence of an audible beat, it might at best simulate the impression of a ritardando. But even so, if it were always the same, it could not account for the resonance of the performance space nor of the general character of the ongoing performance.
The following three suggestions are based on my attempts to slow down the ongoing tempo by creating an intentional, visceral encounter with space or with the natural resistance of materials. A practical outcome of these exercises is to be able to produce a natural and artistic sensation of diminishing 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 arms 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 an instruction to maintain the same effort as when the hands were out of 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 one example of learning by analogy.
So, a slowing of tempo should not feel like the result of fatigue but it could more directly feel like encountering greater resistance. The viscosity or ‘thickness’ of the water is a sensory experience that can be recalled and used to initiate an experience of 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 also been an effective, way of encountering a 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. They have to exert more energy simply to maintain their speed. But if the one pushing can try to maintain the identical effort, their speed will naturally slow down. So their experience of slowing down is not associated with expending less effort, because their effort 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 visually sensitive students, an analogy can create a powerful impression, which can then be internalized 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 —one of those tiny orange summer spiders—traversing from the first dot to the last. 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. Imagine that 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 current image of our expanding universe. While it appears that galaxies are flying apart from one another, we are given to understand 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 actually 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, resulting from 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 parallel demands that are often encountered in music performance. All improv students keep a practice journal, and their entries also included a thematized journal which invited them to observe and listen to their day in different ways. You can read many of those in the link to student journals but, just for some examples regarding change of tempo and specifically ritardando …
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 have brought a relationship to a close.
Can you 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 experimental task and is great for pianists interested in acquiring a more sensitive foot for ‘half-’ and ‘quarter-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.
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!