Tempo rubato
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Tempo rubato (Italian stolen time) is a musical term for slightly speeding up or slowing down the tempo of a piece at the discretion of the soloist or the conductor. It was used frequently in music of the Romantic Period, and is especially common in piano music. It also requires the use of altering the relationships among the written note values, and the played ones. For instance, if a piece of music had a quarter note followed by an eighth note, and the tempo was slowed down so the quarter note was as a sixteenth note tied to a quarter note, the eighth note would have to be sped up to a sixteenth note so as to make up for the lost time. Rubato, even when not denoted, is often used liberally by many singers for added musical effect by singing at a slightly different tempo than that of the accompaniment.
Frédéric Chopin used a strict form of rubato in some of his pieces: the left hand was to be played at the exact tempo of the piece, while the right hand was to be played freely, with rubato. Franz Schubert and Alexander Scriabin also used rubato to bring emotion to their pieces. While Schubert was performing at the Burgtheater in 1825, he was applauded by Salieri who complimented him on his good use of rubato.[citation needed]
The direct measurement of tempo in music performance has been critizised in the paper named tempo curves considered harmful and falsified in a recent empirical study
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