Moderately

I wrote recently about one of my pet peeves in piano-vocal scores: the ubiquitous “Repeat and Fade.”

Here’s another frequent frustration in piano-vocal scores of pop tunes.

Moderately.

I have seen tempos ranging from around 90 to around 160 labeled as moderately, and in the 30+ piano-vocal scores I’m working with this week, only two or three have actual tempo markings.

This is fine in jazz, where a more routine term might be “Medium.” Because tempo is largely at the discretion of the interpreter. But in pop/rock tunes, it is overwhelmingly the case that the artist wants to sing it in the style of the original recording. (If you’re singing Last Christmas, is there really any question that you’re doing it in the style of Wham!?)

This is all easily solved with a metronome and 2 minutes of tapping; that works fine in practice situations, but when you hand the music to an accompanist with no prior knowledge of the song, you want them to know more about the song than “Moderately.”

It would not take much work by the publisher for the score to include the original tempo. (it can even be marked “Original Tempo”!) This specificity would lead to more successful performances more quickly.