“It’s the dancer’s leap on the downbeat that gives the illusion of flight.” (Will Cordeiro on Presto)
Will Cordeiro is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto. His work is published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, and The Threepenny Review. Will is the author of Trap Street, winner of the Able Muse Prize, and the coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
We asked three of our Opus II, Issue I contributors for their personal definitions of presto: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Will Cordeiro’s vision of a sleight of hand, a piano flourish, a beat drop in a crowded bar, a mirrorball-spun hymn to a god of doors and light…
There is a remarkable moment in R. S. Thomas’s poem “A Marriage” where 50 years go by, collapsed in an instant:
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
A succinct blink, mid-kiss, and a lifetime evaporates. We might deem this a technique of narrative presto, representing the impetuosity of time’s passage. Memory joins a first kiss with his wife’s last days for the speaker. Temporality recklessly hastens in retrospect to concatenate an effect of wounded pathos.
While Thomas was a Welsh poet from a bygone generation, it’s narrative smash cuts not unlike this one that David Foster Wallace references in his declaration, “the metronome of literary fashion looks to be set on presto,” speaking about the “conspicuously young” brat pack writers—with whom he identified—that emerged in the late ‘80s. Many of these writers, Wallace claims, used “abrupt transitions in scene, setting, point of view, temporal and causal orders; a surfacy, objective, ‘cinematic’ third-person narrative eye” which could sometimes take place “from an emotional remove of light-years.” In Wallace’s analysis, this narrative predilection for sped-up representational modes resulted from the advent of TV as an inescapable, ubiquitous function of daily life. We see the televisual influence in how such prose can feel icy and undersold in reaction to sentimentalizing commercials and in its borrowings from the montages, splices, cinematic inserts, J-cuts, and overdubbing that saturate, say, MTV music videos.
The dreamwork of popular consciousness, Wallace argues, has been beaten down by media culture until the tempi of its stories are relentlessly upbeat. The brat packers’ postmodern narrative presto marked a shift from the languorous pace of Victorian novels that required a leisurely indulgence among the reading classes, a standard if sedated tempo of scene and movement that was calcified in novelistic discourse far into the twentieth century.
Still, Italo Calvino in Six Memos for the Next Millenium reminds us that the stately trot of the Victorian novel was not always the de rigueur measure for prose. “The secret of” certain fairytales and medieval legends, he writes, is their “economy: the events, however long they last, become punctiform, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion.” We’re only given the barest action and must connect the dots, allowing the stories to jump the shark as well as the gaps, into an enchanted realm of make-believe and miracle. It’s such narrative gaps, large or small, to which Calvino refers in the ancient Sicilian dictum, “time takes no time in a story.” Bang, the universe began—and ended. A cosmos is reduced to an epigram. Narrative allows us to dash through eternity as quick as a quantum leap.
But it’s not only narrative that leaps. Causality itself is a kind of magic too. After all, we only perceive one thing, as Hume reminds us, and then another. The cue ball struck and then the ricochet. Whatever force might link these two events must be inferred. Causality cannot be directly observed; it’s only implicated and extrapolated by the mind. We live, as it were, in a discreet, strobe-lit world. We exist in the stills of a film reel blurring by faster than we can catch the continuity errors. Even science only finds relative correlations between events, stronger or weaker, and fuzzy zones of probability down to the levels of photons and quarks. The power of transformation, of flux, remains as mysterious as it is ineluctable. Presto-change-o! Now you see it, now you don’t.
Dictionaries provide two definitions for presto. The first is a musical tempo in the range of roughly 168-177 beats per minute or, more commonly, up to 200 BPM. This is quick and sparkling, faster than allegro or vivace. Heart-racingly swift. The second definition is a password for something that happens as if by magic—like abracadabra or voilà, signifying a hocus pocus, a sleight-of-hand.
A few canonical examples in presto tempo include the finale of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata,” “Summer” in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and the fast-paced movement in Bach’s “Partita No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002,” played sempre spiccato—that is, with the bow lightly bouncing on the strings. Showy, virtuosic passages are often marked with presto: Paganini’s “Caprice No. 16,” Rachmaninoff’s presto movement from Six moments musicaux, or the jazzy glissandos in Ravel’s “Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major”—written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand in the war. Flashy, riotous, hotblooded, and ravishing, such works pulse with brio and brindle with passion. Here, for example, is “Lobby Music,” a self-described “banger” by contemporary composer Ted Hearne, played by cellist Johannes Moser and accompanied by 8-channel electronics. The piece’s mind-erasing opening passage dissolves into a sound collage of feedback static, zap-gun zings and pongs, muffled shouts, and a dissonant and looping caterwaul, only to reassemble into a bot-like bop before finally resolving with isolated, meditative pizzicato, as if to evoke sparse raindrops falling on a pond.
When it comes to genres such as rap, electronica, house, dubstep, and disco, music tends to be demarcated by beats per minute rather than tempi. Everything rides upon the rhythm. Besides beat matching, where they align measures to transition between two different songs so the party never has to stop, DJs can also nudge, pitch ride, and throw their records to slow down or speed up a track. The passive act of playing a record becomes an active one of manipulating the equipment as an instrument in its own right. Audience and performer switch roles; consumer becomes producer. Other DJ skills include pitch bending, sampling, stuttering, scratching, and juggling. Turntablism—as opposed to merely curating records on the radio—transforms the ready-made musical artifact; it is perhaps the most advanced and precise art of reappropriation, an improvisational form of sonic détournement.
Tempo is different from both dynamics and time signature. It’s somewhat hard—and rare—to play a piece marked presto in muted pianissimo, but it’s technically possible. Faster does not necessarily mean louder. Likewise, a waltz, for instance, has a 3/4 time signature; older waltzes tended to be marked andante con moto, at a walking pace with motion, since the music accommodates a dance with a rolling lilt. The lumbering measure of the waltz—óhm-pa-pa, óhm-pa-pa—supposedly arises from its origins at country balls for bigger-boned peasants, in contrast to the sprightlier minuet, which was danced by the lither, more delicate upper class. Someone who works in the fields all day doesn’t need to dance all night for their exercise. When aristocrats adopted the waltz in Vienna, they sped it up. The fashionable set wanted more up-tempo whirling and twirling. Similarly, today’s country music retains its roots in the ballad: it maintains a slower tempo than most pop tunes, designed as they are for horny, hyperactive teenagers to dance to.
However, a piece in any time signature can be played in any tempo. “The Blue Danube,” Strauss’s famous Viennese waltz with a BPM of roughly 84, would be 168 BPM played in presto—twice as fast. Things might get confusing with the idea of “cut time,” which changes a piece in 4/4 common time to a 2/2 time signature. Essentially, you can either double the clip of the tempo or cut the time signature in half, with practically the same results. (I say “practically” because the placement of the downbeat is altered slightly when certain time signatures are halved or doubled.) A further complication is that the expression “double time” in jazz—and most other musical genres—refers to doubling the tempo, making the piece twice as fast, whereas in classical music theory, “double time” means doubling the value of the notes, thus slowing the piece to half its original pace.
The alteration of tempo, in music and elsewhere, can have potent comic effects. A scene in slow-motion might exaggerate, for instance, the inevitability of some chain reaction such as a klutzy stumble leading to dishes crashing from a dinner party table. We watch each one fall and shatter like a stacked row of dominoes. Alternatively, slapstick and farce often depend on a snowballing accelerando. Imagine the high-pitched chipmunk singing from a sped-up record, which lends an air of parody to a song. Henri Bergson’s idea that comedy arises when organic actions are made to appear mechanical can have few better exemplars than the jitterbugging Keystone Cops. And the routines of The Three Stooges succeed largely for their comic timing—the knuckle sandwich lands with a syncopation that disrupts the baseline tempo. Bungling, misdirection, and delay lull the viewer into a rhythm before the off-beat poke in the eye.
Such whiplashing ricochets and wait-for-it pauses are harder, but not impossible, to produce in prose narrative. Horace Walpole’s hilarious The Castle of Otranto, often cited as the first Gothic novel, moves at a breakneck pace that punctures the graceful façade of the court. It begins with Manfred impatient to marry off his eldest son who, before we’re even finished with the first page, lies dead under an enormous helmet that has fallen on him. The novel’s topsy-turvy reversals sprint off the starting block, a series of hijinks and make-haste with everyone running frantically through the shifty corridors of a haunted castle. Anyone familiar with an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! has Walpole to thank for a whole handbag of Gothic contrivances (including everything from watchful eyes glaring out of paintings to secret trap doors) which hotfoot a plot with ghoulish tomfoolery.
Nevertheless, rushed passages of rash judgment and the eruption of old grudges can also lead to turning points of tragedy. In Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, the gently flowing narrative—with its protracted rhythms of swaying wheatfield panoramas, as in a Terrance Malick film—comes to a head when the lovers abscond to a secluded pasture, only to be spotted by the young woman’s jealous husband with shotgun in hand. Without any cooling time to find his better reason, he snaps the mousetrap of the plot to its precipitous conclusion. Cather’s novel relies on a symphonic control of pacing that juxtaposes slow tectonic shifts over decades with sudden ruptures that alter a family for generations. Nested time scales, from seconds to sagas, modulate throughout the work. As one character recounts, “it was something one felt in the air, as you feel the spring coming, a storm in summer … I felt my blood go quicker, I felt—how shall I say it?—an acceleration of life.” The tragic turn ferments in the air gradually, the way seasons blend into seasons, until the lightning strike, a spark both life-giving and life-taking.
Of course, literature not only has a narrative tempo, but also a rhythmic tempo in the pulsing beat of words. The heroic couplets in John Gay’s Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, an urban pastoral, clip along at the brisk strolling pace one would use to take in a city. Most ottava rima, with its enjambments unspooling down the page—as in Don Juan or Kenneth Koch’s Ko—feels a step quicker still, a light jog or cardio workout. Both Trivia and Don Juan employ iambic pentameter for their underlying metric structure: bare meter, like music’s time signature, is independent of any implied tempo. Whereas Wallace Stevens decelerates blank verse to a lugubrious and meditative focus, for example, Hart Crane spurs it into a breathlessly erotic intensity. Hudibrastics suggest a farcically quick rate of delivery, since the verse form can be seen as a distortion of heroic couplets—anti-heroic couplets, so to speak. The use of jangly feminine rhymes and the reduction of a foot of the standard pentameter in each line makes the verse careen around hairpin turns. Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, like the eponymous verse form it showcases, gallops along, a clunky knight errant on his steadfast if clodhopping steed.
Many free verse poets, too, sizzle and swerve with a rocketing and rhythmic propulsion. The furious drumbeats of war can be heard behind Christopher Okigbo’s poetry with its muscular punctilio, as in this stanza:
BUT at the window
Outside
at the window,
A shadow—
Repetition gives the lines a swing, which recoils back with the off-rhyme between “window” and “shadow.” Listen to the presto in a few examples of poets reading from their own work: here’s “Arieto” by Jay Wright (at the 1 hour and 13 minute mark). The pep-pepper of certain lines leaps out with a bite, especially in that opening.
And lend an ear, too, to “Runaway Tongue” by Douglas Kearney (starting at the 30 second mark). It’s no coincidence, I suppose, that both Wright and Kearney are afficionados of music, ranging from bebop to hip-hop, opera to blues. Their musical influences manifest in the vibrancy and verve of their sonic textures, their technical sondering, their far-gone, restless flexing of new acoustic architectures.
Can prose rhythms inhabit presto? It’s rare. However, essays by Koestenbaum and De Quincey, the agita of James Agee, grand swooping cascades of clauses in John Barthes, the gorgeous and garrulous rodomontades of William H. Gass, or certain jazzed-up, jivey stories from Barthelme come to mind: the words must be lickety-split or sidesplittingly lyrical, all assonance and sonic asterisms, almost clipped or rendered trippingly on the tongue. A rip-roaring, rapacious tour de force that—half a shade from convulsively shuddering apart—does everything but tip head-over-asswise, loping frabjously wayward as forward.
Much English Renaissance prose into the 17th century—say, Lyly’s Euphues, most everything by Thomas Browne, passages in The Anatomy of Melancholy or The Complete Angler, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler—has a gusto and giddy-up which bristles along. Few prose works in the last couple of centuries, besides a lone Woolf or a rare Self, capture the crackling and rumbling, the swashbuckling and braggadocio of such sportive works of yore. There are, however, a handful of extravagant novels by queer Cubans such as José Lezama Lema, Severo Sarduy, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who all possess a hurrying and scurrilous, a florid churrigueresco rarely imitated in English.
How do you capture the pace of delivery on the page? One can read a script faster or slower—though indeed, most contemporary prose isn’t meant to be heard at all, but glossed over silently, glanced at and tossed off. Much prose these days has been bulwark’d into the mumble and muddle of mere awkward talk. Bored down and boarded up. Little chance for any sportive cadence or hopped-up moxie, pop or panache.
Readers, we assume, want things to the point. Yet, a discourse that is all point becomes a dimensionless abstraction, a phantasmatic intersection; it’s a porthole to immediacy rather than anything portioned out and mediated, perhaps only conceivable through a Neuralink download straight into one’s cerebral cortex. When it comes to literature that is scripturally textual, duration is an intrinsic part of pleasure. It’s what allows us to get carried away. Racey and headfast, risky and heart-swift, presto puts the aura in aurality. It’s the dancer’s leap on the downbeat that gives the illusion of flight. Presto enables a quickening down the quanta of existence. Ultimately, time itself is a kind of magic.
Will Cordeiro’s “Electronica” is featured alongside twenty other pieces in Half Mystic Journal’s Opus II, Issue I: Presto, a constellation of contemporary art, lyrics, poetry, and prose dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. The presto issue sings of man-made magick, blurred vision, glitter in the shadows, an aria half-lucid and bewitched by the myth of movement. The music is real, the body electric and imaginary. Issue XI lives on the currency of old dreams and new speed, and right at the moment when you think you’ve learned its dance, it dares you to circle back and look again. It is out now.