Review: "Metronome" by Matthew H. Birkhold

Metronome by Matthew H. Birkhold
Published November 2025 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

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.