Tempo bookmark

noun

The speed at which a musician can currently play a measure or chunk of music.

I make the conscious decision to use commonly-used, concrete vocabulary whenever possible. Whimsical names have their utility, most notably in early elementary music education. However, the musician is wise to begin learning the precise vocabulary used across the global music community as soon as is developmentally possible. It is with great reverence for this need to learn a shared vocabulary that I offer a term that to the best of my knowledge, I created. The term tempo bookmark, as defined above, is a note that the musician takes during the process of practicing a piece. Here is my line of reasoning for the utility of this term:

1. A musician almost always benefits from practicing with a metronome

2. A musician benefits from beginning to practice a passage slower than full tempo.

3. Once accurate, smooth, and comfortable at a slow tempo, a musician should incrementally increase the speed.

Now, the realities of typical practice sessions:

4. Practice sessions often get interrupted. Notating the tempo bookmark allows the musician to pick up exactly where they left off during the last practice session.

5. A musician often hits a resistance point, at which they are unable to increase the tempo further without sacrificing accuracy, smoothness, or comfort.

6. The odds of sustaining practice on the scale of months and years are greatly increased by using some tricks to sidestep our emotional biases. When we make our progress tangible and obvious by notating increasingly higher tempo bookmarks, we remind ourselves that our practice is leading to improvement.

When considering this logic, I was unable to find a word or term that conveyed this fundamentally important part of practice. I attempted to use several terms: current tempo, working tempo, fastest comfortable tempo, but found that none proved ‘sticky’ enough to slide into my vocabulary, and thus the vocabulary of my students. Tempo bookmark stuck out to me for its ease of speaking and its shared terminology with reading.

When we finish reading a book for the moment, most readers are used to the habit of placing a bookmark to mark their page. Noticeably absent is any lament of having not finished the book. When reading for leisure, most readers would agree that the enjoyment comes from the journey, not the completion. Placing a bookmark inside of a book is a non-emotional action. I believe the same should be true of recording a tempo bookmark. While the feeling of arriving at full tempo is certainly enjoyable, the musician who has grown to enjoy the process of practice will realize that writing a tempo bookmark in any given practice session is just a part of learning and mastering a piece.