Unveiling another hidden life of an everyday thing, the latest in the Object Lesson series Metronome explores the development of this tempo keeping devices, its contentious history, role in psychology and production and how the change in its usage and format over the years.

Through 5 chapters, Birkhold organizes the book around metronome themes. The first 'Authority' traces the development and standardization of the Metronome. A key question of this chapter, and is some to degree the focus of the book, is the tensions between the metronome being an essential part of learning to play an instrument to the push back for this very mechanical, robotic tool inhibiting the natural expression of performance.

Readers will be both informed and amused as Birkhold discusses different major composer and their take on the tool as well as sillier or more creative uses of the metronome in art circles. I found the psychological aspects the most interesting as a small percentage of people can be driven mad just by hearing that steady beat.

Recommended to readers of Object Lessons, music performance or micro histories.

Thanks so much to NetGalley for the free Kindle book. My review is voluntary given, and my opinions are my own.

I have to confess, the whole time I was reading this (maybe not the whole time), the song "Ain't Got Rhythm" from Phineas and Ferb kept playing in my head. If you don't know it, the one member of the band lost his rhythm because he fell asleep in a metronome factory. Cartoon logic.

This is a great book if you are interested in music history or even just a history buff in general. The book is very interesting and well-researched. Would definitely recommend!

When I was a music student, I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d one day read a book on the history of metronomes. I had never given much consideration to its history or to its uses by others. My biggest surprise in reading this is that it seems to be so widely used. The author, an amateur violinist, practises with it all the time and advises us that many musicians at the top of the profession still do. Times must have changed. My memory may be hazy but I don’t remember anyone, far less me, practising anything other than studies with a metronome in college. Not once do I remember a conductor at any level producing one during rehearsal. As students, we all had them but they were for guidance, to advise us of the composer’s intentions. To play with it would have been seen to stifle expression.

All this aside, for clarity I’m not saying I’m right and others are wrong, this is an interesting book. I admire the extensive research that has gone into it. I’ll admit to skimming through much of it once I had the gist but I’m sure those who are slaves to the metronome, or who enjoy working with one, will enjoy this history.

With thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Academic for a review copy.

This is a short non-fiction exploration of the Metronome. Readers get a good overview of the introduction of the metronome, and how it changed music, and affected other areas such as science, sports, the law and more. It was fascinating to realize how this one object affected so many things in subtle and not- so -subtle ways.
I think this is a great read as we enter into the debate about the use of AI. In it's day the metronome was a tool that some felt was going to ruin artistic endeavors, much like generative AI is seen today. While the metronome itself seems much less impactful than generative AI, I could not help but compare the two technological introductions. Understanding how the metronome shaped, but did not destroy artistic expression, I've begun to wonder how artists can integrate AI without losing the human aspects of art that make it valuable for us in community!
This book would make a great gift for any musician or music teacher.
Thank you to Net Galley and Bloomsbury Academic for the Advanced copy! I'm so happy to discover this series and I suspect I'll be purchasing more of the series for certain folks this holiday season!

Tick-tock, goes the clock...or the metronome, as the case may be.

Here's one for the musicians (not me), but also one for the nerds who like really specific books about really specific things (very much me). Just after I read the part of "Metronome" that talks about the ways in which metronomes are used in movies and books and so on to create drama or make a point, I switched over to my place halfway through River Selby's "Hotshot"...and turned the page to find Selby describing her Pulaski (a firefighting tool) keeping time just like a...you guessed it. If this is a sign, I don't know what kind it is, but it was a delightful reading coincidence.

Where Selby describes the Pulaski's metronome-like rhythm as something soothing, Birkhold paints a more complicated picture. I can honestly say that I have never given more than ten seconds of thought at a time to the metronome (again: not a musician), but as it turns out, the metronome is not without its controversy.

"Across eras, to control the variations and potential temporal chaos that comes with subjective sensibilities, composers and performers sought to measure tempi and to define note lengths. They used a variety of methods, including mean pulse rate, the pace of hand strokes, walking speeds, and the fastest articulate counting possible. In sixteenth-century Germany, musicians thought the duration of a half note was the pace of a normal weed-cutter's whack." (loc. 202*)

It is safe to say that a metronome is...mostly...more consistent than that. But it turns out that not everyone *wants* that level of precision, especially in music.

This is one of the better Object Lessons I've read of late, just because it made me think so much about, well, something that I generally don't think about. I'd recommend it in particular to musicians, of course, but also just for readers who want to learn about something random and specific.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

This book was a nice, quick little history of the metronome. It was informative without getting bogged down in distracting or boring minutiae. I appreciated that it went beyond just the metronome's impact on music and brought in psychology, philosophy, visual arts, and dance applications. Overall, a very interesting read on a topic I never gave much thought to.

This is the first Object Lessons book I’ve read. Though not a perfect endeavor, it was an interesting and quick deep-dive into a world-breaking object. At times, I had wished there was more of a consistent narrative thread, because the book seems to hop around time a lot, but, most of the information was compelling.

If you are into random trivia about mundane objects or niche topics, look into this book series.