First Giganti Redux 5: Tempo

Many sport fencers and SCA fencers who’ve inherited the traditions of sport fencing talk about “the tempo of the fight,” meaning the speed of actions and the rhythm of actions and counter-actions. This works for the weapons and style of strip fencing – light, whippy, and able to land valid touches without actually having your sword pointed at your opponent. Rapiers aren’t like that. They’re big and comparatively ponderous swords of limited flexibility and mobility which means that tempo is going to be a different concept for rapier.

Basic Concepts and Terms

In the case of rapier a tempo is the duration of an action. Any action. Since some action take longer than others, tempi (plural of tempo) are spoken of as having size — being smaller (shorter) or larger (longer). Giganti gives a list of examples of tempi, but it boils down to any of the actions if rapier fighting are tempi, including not moving.

An attack that takes a single action is called a single tempo (stesso tempo) attack. A lunge, being a single continuous movement, is the basic stesso tempo attack.

An attack that takes two separate, distinct actions is a two tempo (duo tempi) attack. The most common example of this is the parry-riposte counter-attack, which requires two discrete movements of the sword (one for the parry, moving to one side or the other, the other for the riposte moving towards the opponent).

The size of a tempo expresses how long it takes, which in turn is a function of how large of a motion is required. A movement just of the hand (a tempo of the hand) is small (think about how fast a disengage is). A movement of the whole arm (for instance a parry) is larger. A movement of the foot is the largest tempo. Any motion of any body part takes a certain amount of time and in general the more massive the body part and the more weight that it supports, the larger the tempo of that body part.

An action performed during an opponent’s tempo is called a contratempo action. This usually most commonly encountered in the context of a contratempo attack, delivered during your opponent’s disengage, parry, advance, lunge, or other action.

Contratempo Actions

The whole point of Giganti’s system is to deliver contratempo attacks. Let your opponent perform an action or force them to perform an action and take the tempo to attack. Remember that the reason for taking a counterguard (which all good fencers do instead of just forming a guard) is to require your opponent to move before they can attack you (a disengage or other change of position), giving you a tempo to take. Since the fighter should always be in a counterguard (even when lunging – the properly performed cavazione disengages from the opponent’s counterguard to form a counterguard on the opposite side of the blade) the opponent must always be responding with a larger tempo.

The other side of the coin is to give your opponent no tempi to exploit. If your opponent moves twice, move once. If your opponent moves small, move smaller. Giganti’s stance enables a lunge to be delivered with as little motion as possible, and the Italian lunge itself has no wasted motion. The first play illustrating a contratempo attack in Giganti’s manual, the attack in the tempo of a cavazione, works because the cavazione adds a tempo of the hand to the lunge, whereas the contratempo attack is a lunge with a rotation of the hand to keep the line closed (which is a slightly smaller tempo of the hand than the cavazione).

One of my big disagreements with the Mediema interpretation of Giganti is that he describes a contratempo counterattack as lunging during the opponent’s recovery after a lunge [p35]. In fact what Mediema describes as a contratempo attack is described as a duo tempi action by Giganti. Mediema also describes one of his student’s “jarring habit” of counter-lunging during his opponent’s lunge. He describes this as “somewhat discombobulating” to receive, and says this technique works “just as well”. It works better because it is an attack in the tempo of the opponent’s lunge, not after the tempo of the opponent’s lunge, and therefore an actual defense against the lunge. And it is discombobulating as hell. It’s a pretty big misconception for an interpretation of Giganti to contain and not at all consistent with application in a fight.

Developing the ability to deliver these contratempo attacks leads to people believing you’re fast. Part of that is the fact that you’re moving towards each other simultaneously, so what they’re perceiving as your speed moving toward them is actually the sum of both fighters’ speed. Really, though, fighter’s “being fast” is a myth (past a certain point of neuromuscular training: muscles can only twitch so quickly, nerve signals still take the same amount of time to travel up the brainstem). You’re just moving smaller than your opponent and they’re already committed mentally and physically to the action they’ve begun. It also helps to have limited where they can move so that, when they begin their motion, you already know where they’ll be and can be waiting for them when they get there. Most fencers have received a contratempo attack. When done properly, the victim feels like they could see the events as they unfolded and could do nothing to stop them.

A note for the student: contratempo lunges result in the full mass of both fighters moving towards each other until an impact concentrated on a spot roughly half an inch wide. When I was practicing this, it hurt me a lot. Then it hurt my opponents a lot. Then I learned to relax my arm until it was just tense enough to give way after the strike landed. The upside of this was that, since most of my arm wasn’t committed to locking out the extension in the lunge, it was now able to adjust to counter my opponent’s actions.

Obedience

If you’ve set yourself in a good counterguard, not only can your opponent not attack you without taking two actions, you already know what those actions have to be. That means the next time your opponent moves, you have dictated what the movement will be, and in the tempo of their movement you can move to counter this new action so that, again, you have control over where they are and where they can go. The result is maneuvering your opponent through a series of predictable, and counter-able reactions. So long as you continue to take fewer, smaller tempi than them, and your actions result in counterguards against their line of attack, you can act with freedom and they are constrained to what you permit them to do.

Giganti doesn’t name this, though it’s readily observed in some of his more complicated plays, but other masters refer to this as “having your opponent in obedience.” Anytime you act in such a way as to limit your opponent’s responses and make their reactions predictable you have placed your opponent in obedience.

The ways you can let your opponent out of obedience are pretty straight forward:

Break or fail to form your counterguard.

Take a larger tempo than they take giving them a chance to catch back up to a neutral point.

Waste a tempo that they can exploit. This includes failing to move when you should.

Barring any of these you have your opponent in obedience and can proceed to strike at will. Or play with your food.

If you should find that you have been placed in obedience, run away. Retreat to well outside of measure, re-assume a counterguard, and approach to start the fight anew.

Instances of Duo Tempi Actions

Instances where you might need to take two actions do show up in this system. The first is against opponents who charge forward, throwing attacks “without regard to tempo.” Other masters call these fighters “bestial” or “artless”. We find a lot of them in the SCA. Against these he acknowledges you’ll need to beat their sword aside with your forte, and then lunge. He warns they might perform a cavazione, but that you can thwart this by turning your hand to follow it with the true edge during your lunge (which, again, you can do if your arm is not locked into place with all your muscles tensed). Since they disregard tempo, though, you should be safe taking an extra one.

The other example is in his discussion of sword and dagger play when voiding backwards from a lunge: As the opponent thrusts, the fighter leans backward so that it comes up short, at the same time parrying the blade to one side or the other with the dagger. Then he follows with a counter-attack after the opponent’s lunge. Here a movement to take yourself out of measure negates the need for control of tempo (the same as a full retreat would). While he does include this in his instructions, his next plate is how to do the same thing in a single tempo (pulling the body back, parrying with the dagger, and extending a stop-thrust into the opponent’s face) which is inherently preferable.

Complex Stesso Tempo Actions

There are actions and plays which by everything we’ve discussed so far should be considered duo tempi actions. However, Giganti refers to them as stesso tempo. The first example encountered is “If you advance into measure and immediately deliver your attack into his opening, this is a tempo” – an advance followed by a lunge. What makes this a single tempo is the continuous forward motion of the blade. So, too, a cavazione followed by a contra-contra-cavazione (to counter the opponent’s contra-cavazione) keeps the blade in a continuous motion and can therefore be thought of as a single continuous tempo, even though there are smaller tempi contained within it which your opponent could exploit if they were not in obedience.

This starts to resemble Fabris’s instructions on proceeding with resolution. If you keep your opponent in obedience, so long as your sword moves steadily towards them it is a single continuous motion. Keeping your feet moving steadily forward (with natural steps) becomes a long single tempo of the feet the same way that having your feet motionless would also be a single tempo of the feet. The same combinations of the basic actions of the hands that we drill with our feet stationary can be drilled with the feet moving constantly in the same direction. The ability to do this is an essential requirement for pursuing those fleeing opponents I mentioned in the Measure chapter. And it’s really satisfying to have your opponent running before you, completely in obedience, until they die or hit the list fence (which, as mentioned previously, was the same as defeat in Italian Rapier).