A performance control apparatus that prevents erroneous key depressions from disturbing musical performance and allow an inexperience player to play at ease. A performance operator is adapted to generate performance operation information in response to performance operations by a user, the performance operation information including information indicative of performing timing in automatic performance. A storage device is adapted to store data of a music piece comprising sequence data of note information for individual musical tones. A performance control device is adapted to, each time the performance operation information is generated, calculate tempo of automatic performance on the basis of the difference in generation time between the present performance operation information and the previous performance operation information, and to read out the data of the music piece from the storage device with the tempo; wherein the performance control device is adapted to exclude currently the present performance operation information from calculation of the tempo if the difference in generation time is less than a predetermined threshold.