Thomas Young and Eighteenth-Century Tempi

The physician, natural philosopher, and linguist Thomas Young in 1800 provided a table of tempi gauged by a pendulum. Calibrated against Quantz’s pulse-based system (1752), Young’s observations quantitatively corroborate the generally faster contemporary tempi, while also indicating cases in which they should be moderated. His statement about the relative order of very slow and fast tempo markings contradict several contemporary English sources; as a natural philosopher, he brought special skill in observation to these controversies