M.M.
The clockwork metronome was invented by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in 1814 but was made famous by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who enclosed Winkel’s design in an iconic wooden obelisk, added tempo markings along the pendulum, and mass-produced it under the name Maelzel’s Metronome. Beethoven and other prominent European composers championed Maelzel’s device, gradually replacing embodied tempo indications like moderato (“moderately”) or andante (“walking pace”) with precise numerical indications abbreviated in scores with the marking “M.M.”
Cultural theorist Jonathan Sterne writes that “technologies are crystallized bits of practical art and practical reason—they are techniques externalized and delegated to machines.” The mechanization of musical time that began with Maelzel’s metronome has continued to crystallize in the intervening centuries: nearly all rhythm-based technologies today assume a fixed, measurable temporal grid. When electronics are involved, “playing in the pocket” no longer means fitting within a negotiated rhythmic feel but conforming to an unyielding beats-per-minute framework. The metronome, once a tool for internalizing and communicating tempo, has become an external authority that shapes the very conception of musical time.
M.M. stages this power struggle between musician and machine by imagining a cabal of omnipotent metronomes looming above the pianist. Yet these metronomes behave in curious, almost human ways by skipping beats, accelerating, slowing down, and interjecting when the pulse falters. They vie for control over rhythm itself. The pianist alternates between resistance and submission: sometimes ignoring the machines’ relentless ticking, sometimes emphasizing the polyrhythmic tension between competing timekeepers. M.M. is a musical daydream in which mechanical time becomes briefly fluid before re-crystallizing into the measured precision of reality.