I am currently studying Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and I thought it would be interesting to post my discoveries regarding the tempos that this piece has been recorded at. For those not “in-the-know”, the tempos in Symphonies have metronome markings that all relate to one another. There are three tempos:

Tempo 1: eighth note = 144

Tempo 2: eighth note = 216

Tempo 3: eighth note = 288

You will notice that Tempo 3 is twice the speed of Tempo 1. In Tempo 2, 2 eighth notes are equal to 3 eighth notes in Tempo 1 (3:2). The same goes for Tempo 3 to Tempo 2 (3:2). Because of this obvious interrelationship, and my upcoming performance of the piece, I wanted to get these burned into my brain! I currently have seven different recordings of Symphonies of Wind Instruments, so I set out to discover if any of these conductors were close to the written tempos. I used a “tap-tempo” feature on my iPhone “Tempo” app from Frozen Ape and began to track all three tempos in each recording. I soon realized that many of the conductors were taking a different (often more indulgent) tempo in the final chorale of the piece, so I added a 4th Tempo to see if that proved interesting. The recordings I studied were as follows:



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Detroit Chamber Winds and Friends – H. Robert Reynolds, conductor

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Nash Ensemble – Sir Simon Rattle, conductor

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Netherlands Wind Ensemble – Thierry Fischer, conductor

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United States Marine Band – Col. Timothy Foley, conductor

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Prague Chamber Harmony – Libor Pesek, conductor

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Berliner Philharmoniker – Pierre Boulez, conductor

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Columbia Symphony Winds & Brass – Robert Craft, conductor

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There are also 2 versions of Symphonies of Wind Instruments – the original 1920 publication and the revised 1947 edition. I included both in this study since the tempo indications are the same in both revisions. I also included information on how much each tempo deviated from Stravinsky’s markings in order to come up with a “total deviation” score. Considering the fact that the tempo does fluctuate occasionally and the metronome “tap-method” is not exactly 100% proof positive, I included a “handicap” of about +/- 5 clicks per tempo, which brought the total deviation score down by 20.

Well without further ado here are the results…

(This is BY NO MEANS a commentary on which recording is “better” or even which one I prefer, but merely a quasi-statistical look at tempo in Symphonies)