The whimsical music of metronomes

The metronome is a humble device. Musicians have been using them since Galileo introduced the concept in 17th century England. Beethoven was the first composer to write the precise number of beats per minute for his music into the score, only possible thanks to the handy musician's tool. But metronome as instrument? One 20th-century composer decided to bring the metronome out of the practice room and into the concert hall. KALW's Seth Samuel has more.

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SETH SAMUEL: If you listen closely to the Beatles's "Blackbird," you'll hear something quietly tapping, keeping time, in the background under Paul McCartney's voice and guitar. That ticking you'll hear is a metronome--something unusual for most professional recordings. Usually, metronomes stay in the practice room, helping a musician learn to maintain a consistent tempo or speed. It was sort of a gutsy, provocative move on Paul McCartney's part to include the metronome in "Blackbird". In fact, many musicians don't like the idea of practicing or performing with a metronome because they are against the idea of playing music so mechanically and inhumanly in-time. But not György Ligeti.

SARAH CAHILL: György Ligeti (Hungarian composer), best known for the choral music, the strange choral music in the film 2001.

Meet writer, pianist, and museum curator Sarah Cahill.

CAHILL: That's what he's best known for, but he's just an extraordinary 20th century composer; very influential. And he wrote this piece called "Poème Symphonique" in 1962 . . . it's for 100 metronomes.

That's right--It’s for 100 metronomes.

CAHILL: But they have to be the old-fashioned pendulum metronomes -- the kind that swing back and forth rather than electronic metronomes that a lot of people use now.

Cahill knows this because she is organizing a performance of Ligeti's piece at the Berkeley Art Museum tomorrow night. The performance is part of a concert series she hosts there once a month. "Poème Symphonique" is a peculiar one, to say the least. Cahill explains that Ligeti was inspired by both the visual and musical potential of the metronome. 

CAHILL: It was partly the visual element; the strangeness of having all these exact same-shaped little objects all in rows. It's partly that Ligeti was very interested in music that combined different meters, different rhythms, polyrhythmic music. He studied African music and music from non-Western countries that explored rhythms in interesting ways so this was one way to do that. I actually haven't performed this piece or presented this piece before, so it'll be a first for me. We tried to collect metronomes from the community, so I sent out a call for metronomes, you know, I thought, "Everybody has an old-fashioned metronome at home." But then I collected about a dozen and thought, "Oh my god, we have so many more to go!"

Cahill managed to borrow the rest of the metronomes she needed from an organization in Houston that had performed the piece before. But how does one operate so many metronomes at once?

CAHILL: Usually, I think, they're arranged ten metronomes each on ten tables, which are then handled by ten different people. So: ten tables, ten people, ten sets of metronomes. Adds up to a hundred. And I think that's how we'll do it. We haven't quite figured it out.

The metronomes start out at the same time, but Cahill explains that they wind down at different rates. I thought it sounded something like popcorn and asked Cahill what she thought.

CAHILL: Yeah! I can see the popcorn resemblance because the way the kernels kind of pop one by one at the very end, and that's a very pleasurable thing, that there's the whole thickness of all of them at once, and then you start hearing individual lines and cross-rhythms in interesting ways, yeah. I think it will fill the museum. It's a pretty resonant space; it's great for all kinds of music.

"Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes" is only one of the many experimental works on the bill for tomorrow night. Percussionist William Winant will be performing pieces by:

WINANT: ...Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Fred Frith, and Lou Harrison. The Steve Reich piece we're performing is called "Pendulum Music." Basically it's a piece where you hang microphones over loudspeakers, and then you let them swing over the loudspeakers. Every time they go over the loudspeaker, they create a feedback, and eventually they'll come to rest all together at one point, and you have one tone when they're all stationary.

"Pendulum Music" by Steve Reich sounds kind of funny, but Winant says that's okay.

WINANT: Yeah, there's nothing wrong with- I'd rather have people laughing than crying. Yeah, laughing is good.

There is a playful nature to this kind of music, and composers like Ligeti rejoiced in this fact. He saw the potential for music in a little time-keeping device and created one of the 20th century's most whimsical works of art.

I'm Seth Samuel, for Crosscurrents.

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Tomorrow night's concert is at the Berkeley Art Museum. You can explore more music with Sarah Cahill on her weekly program "Then and Now," airing every Sunday from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on KALW 91.7 FM.