Forum: music.stackexchange.com
Tags: <tempo>
Title: Is it good practice to speed up and slow down where not written in a song?
Question: When a accelerando and ritardando is not written, is it bad to speed up and slow down where you think it “sounds better?”This seems like against practicing with a steady beat, because it makes a metronome useless.

Answers:
sents: text: I think it depends very much on the genre, style, and period of the music.
text: For some styles, heavy use of rubato is normal and suits the way the music is written, while for others it would spoil the piece.
text: (Think how bad a rock song would sound if the drummer kept varying the tempo!)
text: Even within Western classical music, rubato is much more common (and expected) in, say, Romantic pieces than in earlier Baroque.
text: There are always exceptions, of course, but you must be sensitive to the composer's intentions.
text: For example, there's a recording of Bach's French suites that I find unlistenable due to the inappropriately-high levels of rubato employed.
text: The performance style would probably work well for, say, Beethoven, but to me it just sounds terribly out-of-place and vulgar for Bach.
text: There have been times over the last couple of centuries when people seemed to think that every piece of music should be played the same way!
text: Thankfully, historically-informed performance has become more popular, and people are at least aware of alternatives.
text: So it partly comes down to understanding the style of the piece, understanding what the composer intended and how people of the time expected it to be played.
text: However, it's also down to your judgement and personal taste!
text: Ultimately, if you're performing the piece, you have the final say, and shouldn't be playing anything you're really not happy with.
text: Finally, you should certainly be able to play a piece well at a steady pace, without any rubato at all , adding expression in other ways.
text: Then you can judge how much (if any) is justified.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/56549/gidds
score: 21
sents: text: It's not bad per se , but it's dangerous.
text: Making this a habit will impair your ability to play with others.
text: As an expressive device, varying the tempo can be distracting.
text: (That's why it's notated more rarely than varying the dynamics.)
text: The exception that proves the rule here is instruments that can't vary dynamics.
text: When one famous harpsichordist "held on to a fermata, worlds tottered and the sun stopped until she went on to the next phrase."
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/8794/Camille Goudeseune
score: 16
sents: text: Depends.
text: Some people use 'expressive rubato' as an excuse for bad time-keeping.
text: In particular an excuse for playing the tricky bits slower than the easy bits!
text: Flexible time is probably a bad idea in a rhythmic groove-based song.
text: It's almost required in an operatic aria though.
text: The fact that sometimes a metronome isn't appropriate doesn't make metronomes useless!
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/17003/Laurence Payne
score: 13
sents: text: As Lawrence said, you are describing "Rubato".
text: My professor in college recommended playing the piece first at a more "rigid" tempo and then using your own discretion.
text: You want rubato to feel tasteful enough so that a professional listening in the audience could dictate the rhythm you played without seeing it.
text: In general, a solo will have more rubato and adding more instruments will tend to make the tempo more rigid.
text: That being said, conductors with good vision and execution can train a group to perform rubato together.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/62853/William Marrin
score: 11
sents: text: Some metric flexibility in certain pieces can make them heartstoppingly effective.
text: The best way for you to convince yourself of this is to listen to some recordings.
text: I will suggest two: Brahms Sonata for Cello and Piano in E minor, 2nd Movement.
text: Contrast the Rostropovich & Serkin recording , which has quite has a quite subtle give and take with the meter, and the Maisky & Gililov recording , which shows greater flexibility.
text: Both are perfectly valid interpretations.
text: Listen to the whole movement of each.
text: A prelude of a Bach cello suite.
text: I will let you listen to several different interpretations yourself to identify one with more flexibility and one with less.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/19678/aparente001
score: 4
sents: text: This is an actually precarious question since wanting to hear a particular answer makes it likely that you are in danger of overusing that answer.
text: Timing is a very strong part of how music is interpreted .
text: To actually work in that manner, every change must be recognizable as deliberate without acting as a distraction or mask.
text: So the way to employ timing variations as an expressive ability is a very, very good control over the precision of timing.
text: This is complicated by your sense of timing getting distracted by actual playing , something that the listeners are not exposed to.
text: So it usually requires a lot of metronome (or drum computer) work and recording and listening and discipline and good control of the piece (basically, you should be able to play everything 20% faster than at performance speed without falling apart) to effectively employ timing as an expressive device in a tasteful while unambiguous manner.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/None/
score: 1
sents: text: Changing tempi is part of good performance practice, in my opinion.
text: As noted above, we do it less in earlier than in more recent music.
text: But I can't imagine that a player or singer in Bach's day would have resisted imparting a bit of give and take on notes
text: he or she found particularly engaging.
text: No one disputes a certain "allowable" range of base tempi for a piece, even for early music, and discreet rubato here
text: and there is not that different.
text: Where I do have a major problem with rubato is if one or more notes are held so long that the listener might sense metric change where there is none, as, say, if 3 triplet eighth notes were played or sung such that the last of the three was extended to twice its written length, making the whole sound more like a 2 eighths and a quarter.
answer_details: author: music.stackexchange.com/users/56904/Don
score: 0

Summary of the answers:
 Using rubato usually requires a lot of metronome (or drum computer) work and recording and listening and discipline  and  good control of the piece (basically, you should be able to play  everything  20% faster than at performance speed without falling apart) to effectively employ timing as an expressive device in a tasteful while unambiguous manner. Moreover, use of the technique depends on the genre, style and period of the music.
It usually requires a lot of metronome (or drum computer) work and recording and listening and discipline  and  good control of the piece