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“…psychologists like Carl Seashore and Edward Wheeler Scripture considered performers’ discrepancies from the metronomic beat an ‘artistic deviation’ and held the ‘successful player’ to be the musician with the fewest rhythmical variations from the precise metronomic tempo. They wrote books and authored studies advocating for this new type of musician” (45).

“The internal pulse upon which Bach relied and the old conventions of music that Mendelssohn defended were quickly disappearing in favor of the precise, objective, mathematically exact metronome as the arbiter of musical truth” (46).

“The click track has further helped to realize the new paradigm of musical time that classical musicians initially rejected upon the birth of the metronome. Now, the inhuman seems natural” (64).

“Our human nature resists the metronome, and our musical tastes do too. It is why performers for centuries have used rubato, opera singers ignore metronome markings, and conductors work overtime to justify why they do not strictly interpret a composer’s intentions as stated by MMs. For the same reason, some recording engineers now run computer-generated music through a ‘humanizing process.’ It delays or rushes the beat by a few milliseconds to introduce near-indiscernible irregularities into music to make it more appealing to the human ear. If there is a natural challenge to perfectly spaced time intervals in music, maybe we can look for the good in metronomes instead of working so hard to resist them” (91)

“If the speeds of everything in the world and in ourselves have changed, our tempo feelings cannot remain unaffected. The metronome marks one wrote forty years ago were contemporary forty years ago. Time is not alone in affecting tempo—circumstances do too, and every performance is a different equation of them” [Igor Stravinsky, italics added] (98).

– Matthew H. Birkhold, Metronome (2025)