Not in my opinion. Chris quotes von Bulow saying, "In the beginning there was rhythm." This is good but not fundamental enough. The closer truth IMO is that In The Begining There Was METER. The first is the flow of music, but the second is how we demonstrate the flow of time. When players can't do the first, we understand that they don't understand the particular rhythm or math of the musical passage, but if they don't show steady meter, then we say "they can't keep time." This brings me WAY back to my posts about ... the metronome.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4690&hilit=+metronome

Nor mine. In this argument, we're on the same side. In this context I intended "it must be OK" to mean that many people accept this practice as OK, I didn't mean I'm one of them.
In fairness, though, in the specific case of metric unsteadiness at major phrase boundaries, it's less likely to be a case of "can't" than of "won't"; the "freezing" (as I called it) is often done deliberately.

I knew that Rainer ... sorry I didn't make that clear.

Hi Eddy,



I agree. Rhythm can exist, no doubt, but for it to be able to be played the same way by people over time there has to be the standard of the meter. Maybe Mr. von Bulow was thinking instead of the big bang as "rhythm" and that's what he meant (though I wonder if this was an accepted hypothesis for the birth of the earth at the time of the romantic era? If it was even suggested up until that time?) I'm getting a bit OT, but hopefully this adds to the discussion