Selecting The Right Tempo
Tempo is everything when you are writing dramatic music to picture. It paces a scene, indicates emotional energy, and helps the audience process dramatic beats. John Williams even (purportedly) has a concept he calles" “the 3 T’s” — tempo, tessitura, tune. And he says this is the order of importance:
Tempo — how fast the pulse of the music moves (not just BPM, but the actual pulse)
Tessitura — how high or low the music is
Tune — the musical materials: themes/motifs, instrumentation, etc
If you get the right tempo, then all other musical information can flow from that. Getting the right tempo can also set up the structure of your music, so that phrases magically align with cuts/shots and the music can gently flow around dialogue.
How to pick a tempo?
I have a set of go-to tempos that I know I can go to for a type of scene. I might make small adjustments, but amazingly enough, these will typically line up to an edit in place. Picture editors have an amazing sense of timing and rhythm, and if we composers can decode what tempo they were thinking when they edit, we can unlock our whole cue.
These are my standard tempos that I go to, all figures are beats per minute (BPM)
46 or 48 — thriller/horror/evocative adagio (46 is half of 92, moderato); an emotive Mahler.
54 or 56 — Adagio — tender music, sad music (56 is half of 112 "montage moderato"); pensive music -- most of my slow television music is at this pace
60 — a heartbeat, almost Andante — usually not slow enough for television, very rarely used
68 — a funeral march — if we know a character is fighting but the music is telegraph that the character will lose the battle
72 — slow moderato (half of 144, fast/allegro), maybe a plan is getting off the ground, or someone has an idea
80 — medium moderato (half of 160, fast/action); mobiliizing
92 — medium moderato
(93 to 111 should be avoided, it's a no-man's-land of tempo for dramatic music, though a lot of songs work well in this range)
112 — fast moderato, works well for a feeling of "montage"
120 — double heartbeat — not used very often. (The pneumonic here is a Sousa march to conjure this tempo internally)
132 — escalating, figuring something out
144 — fast music —this is true allegro; there's something really brewing at this tempo. (I think of the 1st movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto 21 to conjure this speed)
160 — standard action-music tempo
180 or 184 — frenetic, hyper action music (double speed of 92)
I have other thoughts on tempo changes, accelerando, and ritardano, but I will come back to these topics in another post.
