The metronome mark
Sometimes, next to the tempo word — or instead of it — there's a tiny equation: a note symbol, an equals sign, a number. That's a metronome mark, and unlike Allegro it is exact.
Reading it
♩ = 92 means: a quarter note, ninety-two times a minute. Set a metronome to 92 and every click is one quarter note of the piece.
- The note on the left is the unit you're counting. ♩ = 60 counts in quarters; ♪ = 120 in eighths; in compound time you'll see ♩. = 50 — a dotted quarter fifty times a minute, one click per big beat of a 6/8 bar.
- Sometimes M.M. sits in front — Maelzel's Metronome, after the man who sold the device.
- A range (♩ = 88–96) means "somewhere in here"; a word plus a mark (Andante, ♩ = 76) gives you the character and the number.
Hear it
Here the mark is printed on the staff, the way you'd meet it. Set the tempo slider to 63 to hear the piece at the speed the mark asks for — then try it at other numbers and notice how much the printed one is telling you.
Read these
Check yourself
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Try it
Try
Open any piece with a metronome mark. Set a metronome (the one in the bar at the bottom of the screen) to that number, listen to four clicks, then play the first bar landing each beat on a click. If you can't hold it, halve the number and play one note every two clicks.
The usual mistake
Trusting an old mark too much. Beethoven's own metronome marks are famously disputed — often faster than seems playable — and the argument (a faulty device, or a different way of reading the scale) is still unsettled. Treat a Romantic-era mark as strong evidence, not law.
And the bigger one: Mozart, Haydn and everything Classical have no metronome marks at all — the machine didn't exist. If you see ♩ = 100 on an edition of the Mozart concerto, that's the editor's suggestion, not Mozart's (Movement H — editions — comes back to this). For that music the tempo word and the metre are the real guide.