The two musical styles share six different tempos, including manban (a slow tempo), yuanban (a standard, medium-fast tempo), kuai sanyan ("leading beat"), daoban ("leading beat"), sanban ("rubato beat"), and yaoban ("shaking beat").
There were songs that started out in different keys and different tempos with completely different styles, and all the sudden we'd get in the studio, and we made a lot of revelations and discoveries when we were recording, and especially when we were mixing.
The work involves letting the metronomes (set to different tempos) tick until they all run down, a process that took about 25 minutes and yielded constantly changing rhythms and textures.
"Today and yesterday — different tempos, different styles," he intoned.
I'd also say: try different keys and different tempos.
The young and the old seemed to be living at very different tempos.
Multiple overlapping elements still jostle and engage one another, at different tempos and seemingly in different dimensions.
Like all great musicians he had an inherent sense of pulse and pace, of how a larger span of music can flow across different tempos.
"Basically," Mr. Dutton said of the octet sessions, "we recorded lots of different versions -- different tempos, different kinds of rubato, different ritards.
The first was almost comically fast and frenetic, with layers of different tempos for piano and drums.
