I have completed and released a 6-hour online video course teaching in great detail how rubato works! It is called The Art of Rubato: The Musical Expression of Tempo. The price is now $19.99 (when the course first premiered, the price was $39.99).
Rubato, in my own words, is the manipulation of tempo and/or timing in music to be expressive. It is by far the most elusive subject in all of musical study when considering its ubiquity in music.
Roughly 15 years ago, I became frustrated by the fact that nobody really had a complete, systematic, comprehensive understanding of rubato. Don’t get me wrong; I used rubato all the time. I was very comfortable using rubato in my own playing, but unlike the vast majority of teachers and performers who are comfortable with their own rubato, I didn’t feel that was nearly good enough. Sometimes I used rubato with little or no deliberate thought. That’s fine for performing, but in the context of teaching, this means nothing. It is no more a virtue for a teacher to brag about being able to just “use rubato” than it is for a student to brag about being able to perform a piece using only autopilot muscle memory, with the mind totally disengaged from the performance. Nor is the ability to merely “use rubato” and “be comfortable with it” a quality of teaching that is unique to any teacher. All teachers, even non-teaching performers, can teach with the “here’s how I do rubato, now you try it” method. If teachers didn’t know how to answer students’ questions about rubato with articulate words, who could?
I looked for answers in journals, at conferences, at local workshops, and in studies. I found nothing substantial. Every year at music teacher conferences, I’d hear attendees ask presenters questions about rubato. The answers were never even remotely satisfying. Various authors of articles seem to understand bits and pieces of rubato. Presenters sometimes had handy tricks up their sleeve or a clever way of looking at certain kinds of rubato. This author mentions the role that surprise plays in rubato. Another author compares it to highlighting. Another author describes it in terms of tension and overcoming difficulty. But, as far as I could tell, nobody had an even remotely robust and organized framework that enabled truly clear and detailed understanding of it. Mostly, teachers just relied on modeling rubato themselves and having students copy it during the lesson.
I started obsessing about rubato, and with me, the word “obsess” is always an understatement. For example, from 2003 to 2005, I had an obsession with The Matrix movie and its sequels, and this website is what resulted. When I encounter certain problems, sometimes I cannot stop until I feel that problem is completely solved. My path to solve the puzzle of rubato was similar to my path in looking at the Matrix movies: I initially had no intention of creating any kind of website, presentation, paper, or course; I just wanted to solve the dang problem! It seemed completely, ludicrously insane to me that the subject of rubato was still so elusive after performance practice had been using today’s modern rubato for the past 200 years. How could we be living in the 21st century and still have no clue how rubato works? Music pedagogy should have progressed to something way beyond merely “being comfortable demonstrating rubato for students.”
After a few months, patterns emerged, a system started to emerge, and I continued to think that surely I couldn’t possibly be the first person to do this. I continued searching, and I finally bought a 450-page textbook called Stolen Time by Richard Hudson, detailing the complete history of rubato, reading this exceptionally long, dry and boring book cover to cover, absolutely certain that somewhere in the book, I’d find out I was reinventing the wheel.
Turns out I wasn’t.
15 years later, I had completed a robust system of analyzing, notating and teaching rubato that is novel within the realm of performance practice, pedagogy, and music theory. I turned it into a 6-hour Udemy course that uses over 140 examples of real performances to demonstrate:
- The purpose of rubato
- The four properties of rubato
- The four qualities of music expressed by rubato
- The five types of rubato and several subcategories of rubato
- The three behaviors of compound rubato
- (Bonus content) History, critique, and pedagogy about rubato
The course is geared toward everyone from the intermediate music student to the seasoned professional. Even college faculty are guaranteed to get a lot out of this course. In fact, here is what one college faculty member (who has had over 175 piano students win various state, national and international prizes) has to say about my rubato system:
“As a concert pianist, college professor and piano teacher myself, the issues surrounding the fluctuation of tempo are paramount and ubiquitous in my work, and I have given the matter a great deal of thought over the years. But until I was introduced to Chad’s work, I had never considered rubato in quite such an organized way or, in fact, that something so subtle and sense-based was capable of being discussed in a thorough, rational, and insightful way.”
Hans Boepple, Santa Clara University
Also:
“Ingenious!”
Joy Morin, piano teacher and author of the Color In My Piano blog
There is reason and logic behind everything we do in music. In The Art of Rubato, I have proven that rubato is not an exception to this rule.
Again, here is a link to the course: The Art of Rubato.
(c) 2021 Read Twedt