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Moderate or slow, not hurried.
Printed above the first staff as the tempo heading, sometimes with a full stop (Not fast.). It governs the whole piece unless a new tempo appears.
A negative tempo marking: it sets a ceiling rather than a target. Scott Joplin headed rags such as The Entertainer with it, and in his School of Ragtime he warned that ragtime should never be played fast. Use a negative marking when you are guarding against a likely misreading; otherwise a positive word or a metronome mark tells the performer more.
Joplin, The Entertainer (1902), piano, m. 1: “Not fast.”, the rag’s tempo heading, at f.
Not fast is one of 1755 terms in the Gradus musical dictionary: the words, abbreviations and instrument names that appear in printed scores, plus the vocabulary composers use to talk about them.
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