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Posts Tagged ‘playing piano in a hurry’

Hurrying the tempo is nearly as bad, and is
sometimes caused by nervousness, though
indifference, want of confidence, and the
very general mistake of looking upon a
crescendo as an accellerando also give
rise to it. People who are inclined to be
nervous when playing before others often get a queer kind of defiant sensation
when technically difficult passages hover in sight ; the " let's get it over and be
done with it "sort of feeling, which makes them hurry in an extraordinary manner. 

Of course, hurrying may just as well arise from a lack of instinct for rhythm in the
student. Where this is the case, it is rather a hopeless look-out, as it is so hard to
inculcate a real feeling for rhythm into someone who is not naturally endowed with it.
But it has often been my experience to listen to students who were gifted with a
most highly-developed sense of rhythm, and yet who hurried, especially over their
technically difficult passages, until I began to get positively breathless. This kind of
increasing the speed was, of course, due to want of nervous control.