Onset asynchrony in Western art music

Fingers, hammers, and music theory's ears

Abstract

Melodic onset asynchrony, whereby the upper or some component of a musical simultaneity may strike the ear ahead of other sounds, is a common feature in the performance of Western art music. It seems to be of high aesthetic value in the history of pianism, often harnessed to the seemingly contradictory “bass lead” that prevailed in the early 20^th century, though in fact the two are far from exclusive. Departing from an application of Brent Yorgason’s taxonomy of “hand-breaking” (2009) to canonical, composed examples of onset asynchrony from Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt, we examine timbral, organological, and aesthetic continuities that underly distinct practices of asynchrony. We consider the physical nature of such normally non-notated “microtiming”, ranging in performance from a few ms of melodic onset asynchrony to about 100ms, above which it is generally agreed that even the casual listener may perceive it. A piano-roll recording by Claude Debussy, of “The Little Shepherd”, illustrates the mix of melodic onset asynchrony, bass lead, and apparent simultaneity that may be applied in a single interpretation. We then discuss the concept of “audibility” and the question of to what extent, and in what ways, the combined transients of piano attacks may interact. We consider with reference to 20^th century Russian piano pedagogy why onset asynchrony seems to have been a little documented, rather than an explicit playing technique, even though certain sources, such as a 1973 treatise by Nadezhda Golubovskaya, show it to be ubiquitous and well theorised. Finally, regarding the thinking that has predominated in musical performance studies in recent decades, with its emphasis on average practices and “ordinary” listeners, we suggest that a new emphasis will be fruitful, that is, research on what is particular about the embodied creativity of expert musicians.