Rushing and Dragging
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When performers unintentionally speed up, they are said to rush. The similar term for unintentionally slowing down is drag.
Musicians generally consider unintentional tempo drift undesirable, and these terms thus carry a negative connotation.
Therefore neither rush nor drag (nor their equivalents in other languages) are often used as tempo indications in scores. Mahler is a notable exception. For example, he used schleppend (dragging) as part of a tempo indication in the first movement of his Symphony No. 1.
Read more about this topic: Tempo
Famous quotes containing the words rushing and/or dragging:
“I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)