Decision 1. The speed (otherwise known as tempo)
The choice of tempo (speed) of a piece of music has a crucial bearing on its feel and the
genre it sits in. There are some styles of music which have specific tempos - e.g. romantic
ballads tend to have a fairly slow tempo, whilst disco music tends to have a fast tempo.
The speed of a piece in traditional notation is given with an Italian word as shown below:
WORD MEANING
Adagio SlowAndante Walking PaceModerato Quite QuickAllegro FastPresto Very FastThese are written above the stave and are called tempo markings. For example, the fol-
lowing music should be played fast....
However, in recent years the tempo of a piece has more commonly been given through an
indication of the BPM. You may see something like this....
= 120bpm.This would mean that the quarter note (crotchet) pulse of the piece is 120 beats per min-
ute. In other words, there are 120 crotchet beats in a minute. This is called a metronome
marking. (The same could be written using a quaver, semiquaver, etc..)
Subtle changes in tempo help inject life into a piece. These are shown by the word accel-
erando (accel.) for speeding up or rallentando (rall.) or ritardando (rit.) for slowing
down. After one of these markings, the phrase a tempo is written to tell the performer to
return to the original tempo.