Thoughts on Rubato in Debussy's Arabesque No. 1

In arranging Debussy’s Arabesque No.1 for guitar, I became absorbed by the idea of what rubato really means. Often it is assumed that a musician’s task, behind the imitation and embodiment of the patterns reflected in nature, is to create ‘balance’. Thus rubato is typically thought of in one of two ways: an ornament or an indulgence. The idea itself belongs in a world where tempo is fixed and rubato is, by definition, a deviation from measured time, ‘stealing’ from the normal segmentation of time into equal units. 

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, viewed this segmentation of time into measurable, countable units as a distortion of the lived experience of time. He wrote that time is not divided into equal parts, but that it flows continuously; time is lived and experienced personally rather than something that can be evenly divided into a series of measurable moments.  When we start to think of time like this, we start to realise that the actions of a performer who stretches a phrase, lingers on a few notes, rushes through an intense passage, are not temporary violations of time, they are revelations of its true nature.

I am drawn to an idea of rubato that feels radical when constrained by the traditional framework. I find myself drawn to the thought that if time is entirely fluid and our experience of time is time, then chronometric, metronomic time barely matters. Music becomes less about adhering to fixed units and more about shaping the perception of duration and motion, just as how the experience of accelerating from 0mph to 40 mph in a car feels fast, while slowing down from 100mph to 40mph feels impossibly slow. The numerical speed per distance is identical, but the subjective experiences of the speeds are complete opposites. Similarly, a note, a phrase, or a gesture in music gains its velocity, weight and intensity from the context of what precedes and follows it, from the living perception of time. Time is elastic and malleable and our perception stretches or contracts under the influence of the unfolding of music.

To perform with this understanding of rubato is not to indulge or decorate, but to reveal the life within time. Each gesture, each pause, each acceleration becomes a way of making audible the flow of experience rather than imposing an external, mechanical measure upon it. The performer becomes a guide through the landscape of time as it is felt, not as it is counted.

This understanding of time and musical flow finds a natural home in Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1. From the opening to the very last note the piece floats, effortlessly suspended between resolution of what has just been and the driving forward motion of what is to come. The melodies spiral gently in all directions, creating an intertwining, overlapping tableau of musical phrases. Time, in this work, begs to be freed from its metric constraints, the bar-lines barely exist, the ends of phrases barely begin to come rest before another has taken shape.

This isn’t to say that I set out to make a particular impression, or to ‘use’ a certain amount of rubato, or to bend time in any kind of way on purpose. It is far too late for that; I am sat now with a coffee in hand on this beautiful crisp morning exactly one week since the release of this Debussy single, which we recorded back in August. The track is already recorded, it is out. It is more something that occurs to me in the aftermath, to me all the notes were played in the time they asked for, with the phrasing they demanded. The music revealed itself and all I did was follow it. I say this because time and rhythm are contested mediums in our musical world, something that we use to negate the ‘validity’ of a performance or interpretation. It is so funny that we’re constantly searching for what is good and right, but that we so rarely trust our own musical intuitions and are so absorbed in following the score that we forget our goal of reflecting nature in our music. For nature, which itself is constantly in flux, only becomes balanced and divided into measurable chunks insofar as we make it such.

It is in that flux, that constant unfolding, that Debussy’s Arabesques live. The music does not ask to be tamed, it asks to be experienced, to be felt in the surges of its energy and in its breath. Each phrase invites us to inhabit time as it is experientially, not as we wish it to be numerically. In the end, performance is a practice of listening, not just to the notes of the music, but to the life within it—the subtle currents of time that pass through our fingers and our consciousness, never static, always in motion.