Music Psychology of the Piano-Playing Hands in Historical

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Music Psychology of the Piano-Playing Hands in Historical Discourse Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 YOUN KIM

The hand has long been considered a powerful indicator of the human mind. Immanuel Kant, for example, supposedly called the hand “an outer brain of man.”1 Cognitive psychology, mean- while, has regarded hand movements as a window into human perceptual and cognitive processes. Recent studies in evolutionary history and neurophysiology conﬁrm the close interrelationship between hand and brain: bipedality freed the hands for grasping and made tool use possi- 32 ble. The hand thus plays a crucial role in constituting human nature, as the distinctively human “tool-using” capacity shapes “creative, teleologi- cal, and manipulative” intelligence.2

This research was supported by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. 17609517). 1 Merleau-Ponty ascribed this statement to Kant, noting that it was “quoted without reference” in David Katz’s Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (1925). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 368–69. See also Dermot Moran, “Between Vision and Touch: From Husserl to Merleau-Ponty,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham Uni- versity Press, 2015), 214–34, at 363n110. 2 Colin McGinn, Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 68. See also Michael Spivey, Daniel Richardson, and Rick Dale, “The Movement of Eye and Hand as a Window into Language and Cognition,” in Oxford Handbook of Human Action, ed. Ezequiel Morsella, John A. Bargh, and Peter M. Gollwitzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 225–49; Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Alan M. Wing, Patrick Haggard, and J. Randall Flanagan, eds., Hand and Brain: The Neurophysiology and Psychology of Hand Movements (San Diego: Academic Press, 1996); and Go¨ran Lundborg, The Hand and the Brain: From Lucy’s Thumb to the Thought-Controlled Robotic Hand (New York: Springer, 2013). Some animals, particularly some primates, are known to make and use tools. See Crickette M. Sanz, Josep Call, and Christophe Boesch, eds., Tool Use in Animals: Cognition and Ecology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 38, Issue 1, pp. 32–66, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis- sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ JM.2021.38.01.32 kim

In discussions of the hands, music-making hands have featured prominently, from bone-flute-playing hands in paleoanthropology to conducting hands in biomechanical motion-capture studies. Scholars have been drawn in particular to piano-playing hands, enticed by the bimanual coordination required for piano playing, together with the instrument’s easy accessibility and controllability.3 However, pianists’ artistic and practical approaches to piano playing have been documen- ted rather independently from such scientific investigations.4 As Robert Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Winter notes, “much of the lore surrounding the history of piano playing belongs more properly to the realm of anecdote or even myth than to scholarship; much work in this area remains to be done.”5 Yet already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, theories of piano pedagogy were evolving in response not only to changing musical styles but also to scientific conceptualizations of the human body. This era was characterized by developments in human biology and the rise of machines. Accordingly, the piano was often construed as a “mechanistic” device, with piano-playing hands constituting “the human/machine interface.” This formulation prompts two intricate questions that form the basis of this article: How were piano-playing hands conceptualized within this multidisciplinary body discourse? How can piano pedagogy as prac- 33 tical theory be properly understood in the scientific and ideological contexts of the period? Just as the fluctuating notion of the human body in the modern era has affected practical piano pedagogy, conversely, the piano-playing hand has played an illuminating role in the understanding of the body. This article analyzes the historical discourse of the body in piano theories through the conceptual lens of recent cognitive science. In line with current interest in the intersection between instruments and the human body,6 the article interprets piano-playing hands as a platform for human-machine interaction and takes stock of the hitherto scattered,

3 Robert J. Zatorre, Joyce L. Chen, and Virginia B. Penhune, “When the Brain Plays Music: Auditory–Motor Interactions in Music Perception and Production,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 8 (2007): 547–58; and Shinichi Furuya and Eckart Altenmu¨ller, “Flexibility of Movement Organization in Piano Performance,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013) https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00173. For a recent review of biomechanical studies on piano performance, see Werner Goebl, “Movement and Touch in Piano Performance,” in Handbook of Human Motion, ed. Bertram Mu¨ller and Sebastian I. Wolf (Cham, Switz.: Springer International, 2018), 1821–38. 4 For comprehensive reviews of artistic approaches to piano playing, see Reginald R. Gerig, Famous Pianists and Their Technique (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing (London: Kahn & Averill, 2016). 5 Robert Winter, “Pianoforte: II. Piano Playing,” Grove Music Online, accessed March 5, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.21631. 6 Jonathan De Souza, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016). the journal of musicology

insufﬁciently discussed meanings of the music-making body in historical piano pedagogy. In doing so, it demonstrates that piano pedagogy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served not only as a mode of didactic instruction; it also comprised theories of embodied, situated, and distributed music cognition. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The Hands in the Nineteenth Century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the disciplines of human physiology and psychology underwent a revolution, and the human body was completely reconceptualized. The period was also characterized by radical developments in technology and newly invented machines, and is hence often dubbed the “machine age.” The hand presented a complex problem in this rapidly changing landscape. As human labor was gradually being replaced by machines, questions were raised about human limits, in particular of the hand, which appeared inefﬁcient in the face of machines. It is noteworthy that the most comprehensive anatomical and physiological study of the human hand was published as a rejoinder to such 34 questions.7 Anatomist-neurologist Charles Bell, a contemporary of Charles Darwin and Franz Liszt, published The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design in 1833.8 It was one of the Bridgewater Treatises, commissioned by The Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, Earl of Bridgewater, to explore “the Power, Wisdom, and Good- ness of God, as manifested in the Creation.”9 His book includes a discussion of the “machinery of the animal body”:10 “the bones are levers, with their heads most curiously carved and articulated; and joined to the intricate relations of the muscles and tendons, they present on the whole a piece of perfect mechanism.”11 Therefore, the working of the human body striking with a hammer (see ﬁg. 1) is explained in terms of weight, velocity, and force: “In what respect does the mechanism of the arm differ from the engine with which the printer throws off his

7 See Peter J. Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconﬁguration of the Victorian Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 8 Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (London: William Pickering, 1833). For a discussion of the connection between Liszt’s pianism and this treatise, see J. Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 162–65. 9 Bell, The Hand, i. 10 Bell, The Hand, 112. 11 Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design,5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1852), 286. The ﬁfth edition, which appeared posthumously, was substantially expanded by incorporating Bell’s notes on the eighteenth-century cler- gyman William Paley’s Natural Theology and extracts from his own writing on animal mechanics. kim figure 1. The working of the human body striking with a hammer; illustration in Charles Bell, The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1852), 129. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

35 sheet?”12 Nevertheless, this does not mean that Bell simply reduced the body to a mechanism. In comparing the machinery of an engine to that of an animal body, he says, “we may comprehend what is most truly admirable in the latter [i.e., living body].”13 After a detailed description of comparative anatomy on the “hands” of various species, Bell moved to the discussion of the human hand. Highly influenced by natural theology, he considered the human as “the highest” species of all. To Bell, the divinely constructed human hand was anatomical perfection and, thus, the model for all mechanical contrivances. In this respect, Bell attempted to blur the boundaries among animals, humans, and machines, aligning different species and entities on the same dimension. The treatise is significant beyond its contribution to anatomy, physiology, and natural philosophy: it assigns the hand a critical prominence in epistemology. For Bell, the hand is “not a thing appended” but an extension of the body and a link to the external world. It is through the hands that we first become familiar with our own body and acquire the knowledge of external objects.14 Bell elevates the hands to a status equal to, or even higher than, the eyes, which had previously been deemed the

12 Bell, The Hand, 113. 13 Bell, The Hand, 5th ed., 304. 14 Bell, The Hand, 211. the journal of musicology

most critical source of knowledge.15 The hands carry what Bell calls the muscular sense, the “sixth” sense: “the perfect exercise of the sense of touch, motion of the hand and fingers, and consciousness of the action of the muscles in producing such motion, must be combined with the feeling of contact of the object.”16 As will be discussed later, this proprioceptive sense of one’s own body’s position and movement is germane to the present discussion of piano-playing hands. With Bell, the role of the hands is extended to include the muscular sense, involving muscular Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 effort, action, and the will. As Bell explains, “we must not only feel the contact of the object; but we must be sensible of the muscular effort made to reach or grasp it in the fingers.”17 In this regard, Bell’s discussion of hands involves both perception and action, which, again, has implication for the later conceptualization of piano-playing hands. It is important to note that Bell discussed the hand’s significance in the context of pedagogy. He accentuated the connection between manual and cognitive labor in the teaching context. Surgeons need to learn “to be able to ‘see’ with their hands—to see without viewing.”18 Sensation can provide knowledge only when “paired with the exercise of muscles and the force of the will.”19 The “seeing hand” is essential in teaching. 36 Bell’s treatise did not deal with music in any detail, except for one little section entitled “The Pleasures Arising from the Muscular Sense.”20 Here, Bell regards the “disposition of the muscular frame to put itself into motion with an accordance to time” as “the source of much that is pleasing in music.”21 This section only generally underlines the close connection between music and the body, and the performer’s body is not specifically examined. However, an interesting though brief comment is made regarding music-making activity, piano playing in particular, when he explains the working of the human body in mechanical terms: “The fingers of a lady, playing on the pianoforte, or the compos- itor with his types, are instances of the advantage gained by this sacrifice

15 On sight as the principal source of knowledge, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 1, 980a; ed. and trans. John Warrington (London: J. M. Dent, 1961), 51: “Above all, we value sight ...because sight ...reveals many differences between one object and another.” 16 Bell, The Hand, 5th ed., 235. 17 Bell, The Hand, 5th ed., 190–91. 18 Carin Berkowitz, “Charles Bell’s Seeing Hand: Teaching Anatomy to the Senses in Britain, 1750–1840,” History of Science 52 (2014): 377–400, at 389. 19 Berkowitz, “Charles Bell’s Seeing Hand,” 393. 20 Bell, The Hand, 203–5. 21 Bell, The Hand, 205. In the fourth (1837) and fifth (1852) editions of Bell’s treatise, a reference to a published study on a case of chorea appeared (Bell, The Hand, 5th ed., 250– 51). Chorea is a neurological disorder symptomized, as its etymology suggests (woreia, “dance” in Greek), by abnormal involuntary bodily movements. The cited study reported that a patient with chorea was cured when a drum and a fife were played to the patient in the “right” rhythm. Kinder Wood, “History of a Case of Chorea Sancti Viti, Occurring in an Adult, and Cured in an Unusual Manner,” Medico-Chirurgical Transactions 7 (1816): 237–56. kim of force for velocity of movement.”22 Bell referred to music only briefly, but the implication of his discussion of the hands reverberates in the later conception of piano-playing hands in both science and pedagogy.

Piano-Playing Hands at the Human/Machine Interface Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The belief that the hands reflect the human mind was popular among the general public in the nineteenth century. Texts on the “psychonomy of the hand” or “the hand phrenologically considered” were widely read.23 However, the epistemological implications of the hand discussed above point not so much to the shape of the hands as to their function as an extension of the body. The interests in perception–action coupling, pedagogical significance, and music as activity converged on musicians’ hands, and led to the contemporary fascination with Liszt’s and Niccolo` Paganini’s hands.24 The musician’s hand becomes even more fascinating when considered in relation to the musical instrument, that is, in view of the embodied relationship between human body and instrument. The 37 nineteenth-century philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp, for example, asserted that “musical instruments are, after all—like the craftsman’s tool, only to a higher degree—a continuation of the organ, a continuation of the whole human being.” We praise a violinist “for being, as it were, one with his instrument—in the suppleness of his arm and wrist, the touch of his fingers to the strings, indeed the grace of his posture itself gives one the impression that these too resound.”25 In the present discussion of the historical discourse of piano playing, the notion of “[human]/instrument interface,” proposed by John Baily in his study of the Herati dutar, an Afghan lute, is useful to theoretically model the interrelationships among instrument morphology, human movement,

22 Bell, The Hand, 115. 23 Peter Capuano, Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconﬁguration of the Victorian Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 127. 24 Musicians’ hands continue to draw both public and scholarly attention today, for example, from medical doctors interested in their peculiar anatomy and physiology. Alessio Pedrazzini, Alessandra Martelli, and Silvio Tocco, “Niccolo` Paganini: The Hands of a Genius,” Acta bio-medica: Atenei Parmensis 86 (2015): 27–31; and Manoj Ramachandran and Jeffrey K. Aronson, “The Diagnosis of Art: Rachmaninov’s Hand Span,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (2006): 529–30. 25 Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby, trans. Lauren K. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 187. the journal of musicology

and musical structure.26 In Western classical instrumental music—unlike in electronic music—it is easy to bypass the recognition that the music- making human body is technology dependent.27 Lawrence Kramer writes that the “bodily dimensions of classical music-making have tradi- tionally been neglected in favor of an ideal conception of the music as a rare possession that transcends its bodily basis.”28 In taking instruments as machines, Kramer proposes to “restore the sense of embodiment” of classical music in the era of posthuman bodies.29 Traditional musical Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 instruments can be deemed machines, and the use of technology in music making is not a novel phenomenon. Perceptions of the piano in the late eighteenth century are particularly telling in this regard. The ascendance of the piano in favor of the harpsichord was viewed with suspicion from some quarters, a fact that Tia DeNora ascribes to the class associations of the two instruments.Shenotesthatthepiano,in contrast to the harpsichord, was perceived by the London public as “the instrument of the middle and upper middle class” and “decidedly not aris- tocratic.”30 Other scholars, however, trace the tensions that surrounded the two instruments to differences in their sounding mechanisms. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, for instance, remark that the advent of the piano in 38 “a musical culture that revered the harpsichord was for some an unwarranted intrusion by a mechanical device.”31 The piano was similarly regarded as more mechanical than the clavichord. The latter also has struck strings, but contact between tangent and string endures while the key is depressed. As long as this contact lasts, the performer’s “touch” can inﬂuence the sound. With the piano, in contrast, the performer’s inﬂuence ends once the key is struck. This mechanical aspect was perceived to dissociate the link via the hands between the performer’s “soul” and the instrument that was possible for the piano’s predecessors.“Pure”handplaying,DonIhdeargues,wasviewedashaving been “degraded” into “mechanical” playing with the piano. Ihde calls this disapproval of the mechanistic instrument a “Heidegger-like response” in music history in reference to the philosopher’s antipathy toward typewriters

26 John Baily, “Music and the Body,” World of Music 37, no. 2 (1995): 11–30, at 12. 27 For a discussion of the body as instrument in the context of music and technology, see Atau Tanaka and Marco Donnarumma, “The Body as Musical Instrument,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, ed. Youn Kim and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 79–96. 28 Lawrence Kramer, “Classical Music for the Posthuman Condition,” in The New York Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39–52, at 49. 29 Kramer, “Classical Music for the Posthuman Condition,” 50. 30 Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792– 1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 173. 31 Trevor J. Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, “‘Should One Applaud?’: Breaches and Boundaries in the Reception of New Technology in Music,” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 536–59, at 537, emphasis added. kim over pens.32 Considering the hands as “an integral part of our thinking and being rather than mere tools for grasping,”33 Heidegger pointed out that the introduction of typewriters changed our relation to writing, words, thinking, and ultimately our Being: “When writing was withdrawn from the origin of its essence, i.e., from the hand, and was transferred to the machine, a transfor- mation occurred in the relation of Being to man.”34 Thequestionhereisnot about the machine per se butthewayofbeing.Typewritersbroughta“modern relation” between the body and words or thinking. Given the piano’s recep- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 tion as a mechanized instrument in the nineteenth century, similar to the typewriter’s reception in the early twentieth century, how were piano-playing hands seen to function at this interface between the human body and the mechanized instrument?35 To answer this question, the following section discusses the historical discourse on piano playing, considering discussions of the hand in physiology, psychology, and epistemology, which had a bearing on piano pedagogy.36

Expansion of the Interface

The prescriptions in early keyboard treatises such as C. P. E. Bach’s Der 39 Versuch u¨ber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753, 1762) were not

32 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 255. 33 Santanu Das, “The Theatre of Hands: Writing the First World War,” in Late Victorian into Modern, ed. Laura Marcus, Miche`le Mendelssohn, and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 379–97, at 380. In Heidegger’s own words, “The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and wel- comes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign.... All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.” Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 16. 34 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andr´e Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 85. 35 Inﬂuenced by Heidegger, Victor Zuckerkandl proposed the idea of the musician’s “thinking hand”: “There is something quite special about the hand.... Handwork is richer than is usually believed. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works is carried out in the medium of thought; every one of its gestures presupposes thought. All handwork is grounded in thought.... In a Chopin, a Domenico Scarlatti—masters of the highest rank who composed almost exclusively for the keyboard—hand and instrument are as insepa- rable as hand and brush in a painter. A Chopin melody seems to be traced by the playing hand, as a visible line is traced by the painting hand. A composer must not sit at the keyboard to do this; he always has the keyboard in the spirit of his hands.” Sound and Symbol, Vol. 2, Man the Musician (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 275, 280. 36 For one of few studies that explores the topic of piano exercise in relation to the nineteenth-century discourse of sensation and association, see Leslie David Blasius, “The Mechanics of Sensation and the Construction of the Romantic Musical Experience,” in Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–24. the journal of musicology

intended for the piano only but for all keyboard instruments. The then new piano required a harder action than that called for by the shallow key descent of the harpsichord. Nevertheless, early piano pedagogy continued the principles of older keyboard instruments and did not take difference of mechanism into serious consideration. The “finger school” of piano pedagogy, as the name implies, focused on finger action only. It advocated making finger action stronger, emphasizing the independent workings of isolated fingers and prohibiting the use of other parts of the Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 upper body. According to Muzio Clementi, for example, “the hand and arm should be held in a horizontal position.... All unnecessary motion must be avoided. Let every note be played ...with equal strength.”37 In his 1828 treatise, Johann Nepomuk Hummel emphasized too the “quiet position” of hands and the importance of “training all the fingers of both hands to an equal degree of power and independence of action.”38 Carl Czerny’s most substantial work, the Pianoforte-Schule (1839), specifies that “the chief aim of this School is: To ensure to every Pupil ...,inthe shortest possible time, great and well regulated volubility of finger.”39 Even in the late nineteenth century, Louis Ko¨hler recommended “exercises for the hand at rest” (U¨bungen mit stillstehender Hand) to ensure that all 40 the fingers of both hands were of equal strength and independence.40 To promote the independent working of fingers, mechanical devices were invented, and some pedagogues devised “gymnastics for fingers” that could be done without a piano.41 Many musicians even underwent controversial, risky hand surgeries to stretch and isolate fingers: one doctor reported that he had performed the surgery 2,500 times in 1898.42

37 Muzio Clementi, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte (London: Clementi, Banger, Hyde, Collard & Davies, 1801), 14–15. 38 Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ausfu¨hrlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano- Forte-Spiel (Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1828). Translated as A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instructions on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte: Commencing with the Simplest Elementary Principles and Including Every Information Requisite to the Most Finished Style of Performance (London: T. Boosey, 1829), 4, 34. 39 Carl Czerny, Vollsta¨ndige theoretisch-practische Pianoforte-Schule, Op. 500 (Vienna: Diabelli, 1839). Translated by James A. Hamilton as Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School: From the First Rudiments of Playing to the Highest and Most Reﬁned State of Cultivation with the Requisite Numerous Examples Newly and Expressly Composed for the Occasion, Opera 500 (London: R. Cocks, 1839), 3:129, emphasis in the original. 40 Louis Ko¨hler, Praktischer Lehrgang des Klavierspiels (Braunscheweig: Litolff, n.d.); Practical Method for the Pianoforte (Boston: B. F. Wood, 1894), 4. 41 Edwin Ward Jackson, Gymnastics for the Fingers and Wrist (London: N. Tru¨bner, 1865). 42 Jennifer Dunning, “When a Pianist’s Fingers Fail to Obey,” New York Times, June 14, 1981. The method of the surgery was developed in the mid-nineteenth century by William S. Forbes and is described in his article, “The Liberating of the Ring Finger in Musicians by Dividing the Accessory Tendons of the Extensor Communis Digitorum Muscle,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 111 (1884): 601–2. kim

At the turn of the twentieth century, a different perspective entered piano pedagogy and scholarship. Such a shift was noted by many but described variously. Some characterized the divergence as “still hands” versus “free hands,” focusing on the rigid or fluid posture of the hands; others recounted the old methods as “technical studies” and the new teaching as based on “the philosophy of the beautiful” and “musico- poetic imagination.” Still others noted the new pedagogy’s (often mis- informed) appeal to contemporaneous sciences including anatomy, Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 physiology, and psychology.43 This juncture in the history of piano teaching can also be considered through the notion of human/instrument interface. Broadly, the “human/instrument interface” was confined to the fingers and hands in earlier piano pedagogy, and the fingers and hands were viewed as not fully connected but merely appended to the rest of the body. Hummel emphasized that “the hands should be held perfectly still, the fingers moved with freedom and facility,” and Czerny likewise asserted that “when the hand is at rest, each for itself may freely and independently make the necessary movement upwards or downwards; for it is by this motion that the keys are to be struck.”44 The influence of the finger school method of playing continued to appear in the late nineteenth century. Ehrlich wrote in 41 1884 that “the chief aim in developing mechanical skill in piano-playing must be ...to reduce to a minimum the motions of the upper and forearm, and to concentrate activity in the fingers, hand and wrist.”45 Subscri- bers to this method considered it best if “only the force of fingers [were] exerted,” isolated from the rest of the mechanism.46 The new perspective emerging in the early twentieth-century piano pedagogy presented a different conceptualization of performers’ movements: in response to both the sounding mechanism of the instrument and the more expansive musical styles that had evolved in the nineteenth century, finger action alone came to be seen as insufficient and requiring supplement. Forearms, upper arms, and even shoulders began to feature significantly in piano treatises of the so-called “arm weight” school represented by Tobias

43 Hugo Riemann, “Ruhige Hand oder bewegliche Hand,” Der Klavier-Lehrer 13 (1890): 8–9; Riemann, Handbuch des Klavierspiels, 5th ed. (Berlin: Max Hesse, 1916); E. E. Wentworth Layton, “The New Piano Psychology,” The Musician 16 (1911): 302; and Christian A. Ruckmich, “The Psychology of Piano Instruction,” Journal of Educational Psy- chology 5 (1914): 185–98. 44 Hummel, A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course, 34; and Czerny, Complete Theo- retical and Practical Piano Forte School,2. 45 Heinrich Ehrlich, Wie u¨bt man am Klavier?: Betrachtungen und Rathschla¨ge nebst gen- auer Anweisung fu¨r den richtigen Gebrauch der Tausig-Ehrlich’schen “Ta¨glichen Studien,” 2nd ed. (Berlin: Bahn, 1884). Translation from Heinrich Ehrlich, How to Practice on the Piano: Re- ﬂections and Suggestions, 4th ed., ed. Theodore Baker, trans. J. H. Cornell (New York: G. Schirmer, 1901), 5. 46 Ehrlich, Wie u¨bt man am Klavier?, 12. the journal of musicology

Matthay (1903, 1908, 1913) and Rudolf Breithaupt (1905).47 Their teaching was radically different from the finger school in that the arms, not the fingers, were the origin of the impetus. They criticized the old isolation training as useless finger acrobatics and considered “any set-down special fingering superfluous.”48 Finger movement, they argued, was a passive result of natural arm movements involving the rolling and shaking of the lower and upper arms using “weight.” To support their claims, these pedagogues applied a more scientific anatomical and physiological under- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 standing of the body to piano playing. In addition to containing photographs of the hands of many contemporary leading pianists, including Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Anton Rubinstein, Teresa Carrenõ, Moriz Rosenthal, and Leopold Godowsky, Breithaupt’s book includes x-ray images of Ferruccio Busoni’s and Moriz Rosenthal’s hands, and a photograph of Josef Hofmann’s arms and entire upper body. In contrast to the earlier focus on finger positions and hand postures, this newer theory accounted for how the arm, wrist, fingers, and the entire body work together as an expanded interface in performance. Figure 2 shows Breithaupt’s representation of the piano-playing body in terms of weight, force, and velocity. Of note is the diagram marked “b)” in the 42 figure, which represents the oscillating movement from shoulder (S) through elbow (E) to wrist (H). Breithaupt explains that “the arm must feel as if a weight suspended at the elbow were weighing it down.”49 Instead of isolating the hand, such a teaching involved the entire upper body as an interface. By the turn of the twentieth century, the conceptualization of piano performance as pure “finger techniques” was outdated. Physician Frie- drich Adolf Steinhausen wrote significant works on violin and piano playing, which were well received by both musicians and scientists.50 He criticized the finger school—particularly its “technique of little hammers,” comprising mere finger movement, completely centered in knuckle exercise.51 Its view of the root joints of the fingers as hinges was

47 Tobias Matthay, The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity: An Analysis and Synthesis of Pianoforte Tone-Production (London: Longmans, Green, 1903); Matthay, Relaxation Studies in the Muscular Discriminations Required for Touch, Agility and Expression in Pianoforte Playing (Leipzig: Bosworth, 1908); Matthay, Musical Interpretation: Its Laws and Principles, and Their Application in Teaching and Performing (Boston: Boston Music, 1913); and Rudolf Maria Breithaupt, Die natu¨rliche Klaviertechnik (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1905). 48 Rudolf Maria Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, trans. John Bernhoff (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1909), 2:89. 49 Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, 2:33. 50 Friedrich Adolf Steinhausen, Die physiologischen Fehler und die Umgestaltung der Kla- viertechnik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Ha¨rtel, 1913); translated in Donald Vern Rupert, “The Physiological Errors and the Reshaping of Piano Technique by F. A. Steinhausen: A Translation and Study” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1963). 51 Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 89. kim figure 2. Breithaupt’s representation of the piano-playing body in terms of weight, force, and velocity. “S” indicates shoulder, “E”elbow,and“H”wrist.Infigurea),theline“S-D-H” represents “direct transmission, straightened arm,” “E-D” the “diameter of the forearm-extension,” and “E-X” the “dynamic direction of the weight of the shoulder and upper arm.” Figure b) shows the “free oscillation of the

arm, hanging loose and yet weighted (swinging rope).” Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

anatomically wrong; ﬁngerfall was not a physical but “a physiological occurrence and a swinging movement.”52 Quoting Oskar Bie’s 1898 observation that “piano technique has proceeded slowly from tapping ﬁngertips to the present suppleness, which involves the arm up to the elbow,” Steinhausen extrapolated: “Why not further? On what account should the boundary of the ‘present suppleness’ be drawn precisely at the elbow?” Often the new piano pedagogy was explained in terms of weight or relaxation, but Steinhausen pointed out that the extension of the piano-playing body involved “more than the forearm.”53

52 Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 8. 53 Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 8. Steinhausen quotes from Oskar Bie, Das Klavier und seine Meister (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1898), 20. the journal of musicology

Body Schema, Human Motor, and Piano Pedagogy

These new perspectives seem to have been received positively by the youn- ger generation of musicians, as testified by the multiple reprints of Breithaupt’s books. The Haydn scholar Anthony van Hoboken, for instance, enthusiastically recounted in a letter to his teacher Heinrich Schenker his experience of consulting and taking lessons from Breithaupt 54 after an arm injury. Scientists’ reception was different. Nikolai Aleksan- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 drovich Bernstein, a pioneer in motor control science, and his collaborator Tatiana Popova, for example, viewed those promoting the arm-weight school as “physiologists who are dilettantes in music or ...musicians who know nothing about physiology.”55 They criticized studies “written by pianists, virtuosi, and instructors,” Breithaupt in particular, for offering “an appealing scheme ...[that] is always understocked with objective, factual proofs, and is commonly in contradiction not only with facts but also with certain aspects of its own theoretical position.”56 Such works can “do much harm” as they can be used as “sources of scientific support for an idiosyn- cratic theory of a pianist-theoretician.”57 Deeply interested in music throughout his life, Bernstein constantly invoked the musician’s perform- 44 ing body in his works on motor control, and he worked with Popova on the biodynamics of the piano key strike, as illustrated in figure 3. From the investigation of fourteen professional pianists playing octave passages with varying force and tempo, they concluded that “falling of the arm under its own weight,” as Breithaupt suggested, “definitely does not occur.”58 Octave striking was produced not by the passive hands falling onto the keys. Rather, active muscle forces were involved at different parts of limbs. Figure 3 shows their representation of the “moments of resultant muscle forces at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints.”59

54 Schenker himself seemed to share the same interest. Anthony van Hoboken, “Typewritten letter (carbon copy) from Hoboken to Schenker, dated March 19, 1930,” transcr. John Rothgeb and Ian Bent, trans. John Rothgeb and Heribert Esser, Schenker Documents Online, OJ 89/4, [2], https://schenkerdocuments.org/documents/ correspondence/OJ-89-4_2.html 55 Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein and Tatiana Popova, “Studies on the Biody- namics of the Piano Strike,” Proceedings of the Piano-Methodological Section of the State Institute of Music Science 1 (1930): 5–47. This article uses the translation included in Bruce A. Kay, Michael T. Turvey, and Onno G. Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model: Studies on the Bio- dynamics of the Piano Strike (Bernstein & Popova, 1930),” Motor Control 7 (2003): 1–45, at 5. Bernstein and Popova published a largely similar paper in German as well: “Untersuchung u¨ber die Biodynamik des Klavieranschlags,” Arbeitsphysiologie 1 (1929): 396– 432. Figure 3 is cited from the 1929 paper. 56 Kay, Turvey, and Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model,” 4. 57 Kay, Turvey, and Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model,” 4–5. 58 Kay, Turvey, and Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model,” 39. 59 Kay, Turvey, and Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model,” 38. kim figure 3. Bernstein and Popova’s schematic representation of the “kinematics and forces” of piano playing. The pianist’s performing body is represented as a dynamic mechanism. The shaded “muscles” and their locations and thickness in the figure are “symbolic representations of resultant muscle moments” and do not represent the actual anatomical units (Nicholai Bernstein and Tatiana Popowa, “Untersuchung u¨ber die

Biodynamik des Klavieranschlags,” Arbeitsphysiologie 1 [1929]: Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 396–432, at 420). Reprinted by permission of Springer Nature.

Bernstein and Popova’s study on the biodynamics of the piano strike did not present an alternative practical piano pedagogy in place of the arm-weight school. Although these scientiﬁc works seem to discredit the contemporaneous pedagogical works, all these pioneers of movement sciences in the early twentieth century contributed to the emergence of a signiﬁcant conceptual shift on the performing body. These scholars viewed human movements as obeying the laws of classical mechanics; as Steinhausen asserted: “the motion in piano attack is a motion like any other and obeys the same laws.”60 However, this does not mean that the

60 Steinhausen, Die physiologischen Fehler, 3; translated in Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 4. the journal of musicology

performing body was completely subject to the same physics that governed inanimate objects. This view stood in contrast to other contemporaneous materialistic conceptions of motor control in the 1930s, such as Bernstein’s older contemporary Ivan P. Pavlov’s notion of motor movement as “responses to external environmental contingencies.”61 Whereas this materialistic notion denies “any soul or intention” in biological movements,62 the early twentieth-century scientists who investigated piano playing concluded not only, as Bernstein and Popova explained, Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 that “live movement is a ball of entangled interactions,”63 but also that actions were “initiated from within the organism.”64 Similarly, piano pedagogues in the arm-weight school tradition proposed the involve- ment of the whole organism of the performing body in their piano teaching. Breithaupt, for instance, announced that his aim was “to trace back to their real and natural sources the action of our playing members and the effect produced by them.”65 Human movements are subject to mechanics but they are also pro- ducts of the brain. Such notions point to an important shift regarding the human/instrument interface at this juncture in the conceptual history of piano playing. While inheriting the previous generation’s con- 46 ception of the body as machine, the arm-weight school further expanded the interface to incorporate the pianist’s arms and even shoulders. Whereas in the ﬁnger school the boundary between operator and instrument was reasonably clear, the body itself now became part of the instrument. As more of the operator’s body was devoted to producing sound, the border between operator and instrument was blurred and became an interface, “the place of interaction between two systems.”66 Such discussion of piano playing implicitly refers to a “body schema,” a concept coined by the neurologists Henry Head and Gordon Holmes in the early twentieth century.67 A body schema is “a system of sensory- motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of

61 George Windholz, “Pavlov’s Conceptualization of Voluntary Movements within the Framework of the Theory of Higher Nervous Activity,” American Journal of Psychology 111 (1998): 435–43, at 435. 62 Mark Latash, Synergy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26. 63 Kay, Turvey, and Meijer, “An Early Oscillator Model,” 12. 64 Latash, Synergy, 27. 65 Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, 2:5. 66 Oxford English Dictionary, “interface.” For an eloquent historical account of keyboard instruments from the early nineteenth century through to the Makey Makey of the twenty-ﬁrst century from the perspective of interface and instrumentality, see Emily I. Dolan, “Toward a Musicology of Interfaces,” Keyboard Perspectives 5 (2012): 1–13. 67 Henry Head and Gordon Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,” Brain 34 (1911): 102–254. kim perceptual monitoring.”68 This system registers one’s body parts in space and is automatically, unconsciously updated through bodily movements. As arms and shoulders were brought into consideration, the concept of “body awareness” or the proprioceptive sense became critical in piano-pedagogy theory.69 This shift led to an understanding of piano playing that revolved around a body schema extending into the shoulder, the trunk, and the whole body of the pianist, but also in the other direction, to assimilate the piano. Figure 4 is an attempt to Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 represent the expansion of body schema in piano playing. Here, the interface represents, as the cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris puts it, “the gray zone of material engagement, i.e., the zone in which brains, bodies, and things conﬂate, mutually catalyzing and constituting one another.”70 Our body schema expands by incorporating tools, as is the case with the blind person’s stick in Merleau-Ponty’s analogy.71 As Ihde notes, “instruments are the ‘body’ that extends and transforms the perceptions of the users of the instruments.”72 Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience demonstrate that under the condition of sensory feedback, tools can be incorporated into the body schema fairly quickly even without extensive training.73 This feedback can be visual, aural, propriocep- 47 tive, and tactile.74 In his study on improvisation, Jeff Pressing notes that the design of some instruments such as the piano “allows more precise visual feedback and more categorical kinaesthetic feedback than

68 Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 2005), 24. Notably, Bernstein’s “degrees of freedom problem” in motor control science is closely associated with the notion of the body schema. According to him, the same movement goal can be achieved in numerous ways, as there are numerous movement control variables involved, such as joints and muscles. However, the motor system uses only a limited set of solutions. In order to reduce the inﬁnite degrees of freedom, Bernstein’s theory poses that control parameters are hierarchically organized, and that “the motor system possesses accurate information about the relevant bodily parameters.” This idea assumes the presence of body schema; actions cannot be studied without reference to the surrounding environment. See Yann Coello and Martin H. Fischer, Perceptual and Emotional Embodiment: Foundations of Embodied Cognition (London: Routledge, 2015), 1:139. 69 Elgin Roth, Klavierspiel und Ko¨rperbewusstsein: Eine kommentierte Auswahl historischer klaviermethodischer Zitate (Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, 2013). 70 Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 5, emphasis in the original. 71 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 165. 72 Ihde, Listening and Voice,5. 73 See Thomas A. Carlson et al., “Rapid Assimilation of External Objects into the Body Schema,” Psychological Science 21 (2010): 1000–1005; and Anna Berti and Francesca Frassi- netti, “When Far Becomes Near: Remapping of Space by Tool Use,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12 (2000): 415–20. 74 For the discussion of musical instruments, feedback, and incorporation, see De Souza, Music at Hand, 45–48. the journal of musicology

figure 4. Expansion of body schema in piano playing.

PERFORMER INSTRUMENT

ACCOMMODATION EXTENSION OF BODY SCHEMA

ASSIMILATION Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 BODY AS INSTRUMENT

others,”75 but even without seeing hands, incorporation of the instrument into one’s own body schema is possible as the different sensory feedback are integrated and reinforce each other.76 The use of tools allows incorporation of the representation of the peripersonal space into the neural representation of the body in the brain. Violinists’ bows or drummers’ sticks are often discussed as part of the body schema, “as if our own effector (e.g., the hand) were elon- 48 gated to the tip of ” these tools.77 Pianist Claudio Arrau similarly states that you have to “feel the unity of the instrument with your body.”78 Elements like size, physical distance/separation, and the piano’s mechanism, however, obviously still complicate the view of the piano as simply an extension of the pianist’s body or vice versa. Interesting in this regard is Matthay’s conception of the piano proper as comprising the sounding board and frame, with the keyboard constituting the “tool” for exciting the instrument into sound.79 This view further blurs the boundary between the body and the instrument; like the violinist’s bow, the keyboard as a tool is an extension of the body schema. This extension of the concept of “instrument” has deep historical roots. Don Bates argues that the notion of the body as instrument in

75 Jeff Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John A. Sloboda (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 129–78, at 135. 76 Visually impaired pianist Nobu Tsujii’s comment on playing the leaps in Beetho- ven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata can be understood in this context. “People always ask me about leaps, but they are not difficult. For me the piano is an extension of my own body, so I know exactly where everything is.” Ivan Hewett, “Nobuyuki Tsujii: ‘The Piano Is an Extension of My Own Body,’” The Telegraph, July 16, 2013, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/ music/proms/10182751/Nobuyuki-Tsujii-The-piano-is-an-extension-of-my-own-body.html 77 Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki, “Tools for the Body (Schema),” Trends in Cog- nitive Sciences 8 (2004): 79–86, at 79. 78 Cited in Victoria A. von Arx, Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau: A Guide to His Phi- losophy and Techniques (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77. 79 Matthay, The Act of Touch, 48. kim modern physiology derives from Aristotelian instrumentalism. Aristotle used the term organon for “instrument,” a term which served as “a label for whatever mediated between the doer and the deed, a label intended not so much to draw attention to the characteristics of that mediation as to make the existential point that it was ‘that with which one works.’”80 In De anima, discussing the sense of touch, Aristotle again blurred the distinction between body and instrument. Observing that in the act of touch we are both touching and being touched at the same time, he concluded that Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 “flesh is a medium.”81 Hence, the modern physiological study of the human body was a study of instruments or organs, machina ex deo.82 The change in piano pedagogy from finger to arm and shoulder, and the blurring of the boundaries between the body and the instrument, can be discussed in the context of a more comprehensive conceptual shift in the understanding of the human body in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The finger school reflected the view of the body as a machine that had prevailed in the eighteenth century. From the mid- nineteenth century, a slight yet significant modification—the idea of the “human motor”—came to be predominant.83 Informed by thermody- namics, this school of thought interpreted all human activities in terms of the modern conception of energy—that is, not just the bone and mus- 49 cle structures of the performer’s body but the action or labor they produced.84 The pianist’s body was thus rendered into a “human motor” governed by the principle of efficiency. From this perspective, the most important consideration in playing an instrument was what Breithaupt called the “economization of energy.” He argued that the pianist should strive “to produce the greatest tonal effect with the least expenditure of energy.”85 Steinhausen similarly explained that “the motion in piano attack is a motion like any other and obeys the same laws,” and can be

80 Don Bates, “Machina ex Deo: William Harvey and the Meaning of Instrument,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 577–93, at 579. The entry for “instrument” in OED also lists as one meaning: “An organ or other part of the body that performs a special function; esp. asense organ.” “instrument, n.,” OED Online,OxfordUniversityPress,https://oed.com/view/Entry/ 97158 (accessed September 19, 2020). 81 Aristotle, De anima 2, 423b; cited in Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 15–56, at 19. 82 Bates, “Machina ex Deo,” 593. 83 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 84 See, for example, Hermann von Helmholtz, “Ueber Die Erhaltung Der Kraft [1847],” in Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Barth, 1882), 1:12–75, translated as “The Application of the Law of the Conservation of Force to Organic Nature,” in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 109–21. The “science of labor” was further developed in the early twentieth century by Frank Gilbreth and Etienne Marey, among others. 85 Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, 2:91, emphasis in the original. the journal of musicology

understood in terms of “the body’s expenditure of energy.”86 As in other human movements, the conservation of force in order to prevent fatigue emerges as the central issue. This stood in stark contrast to the earlier understanding of the “detached” hand. The notion of economizing bodily movement was developed in association with the idea of body schema as a whole body. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Auditory–Motor Coupling in Piano Pedagogy

The extended body schema goes beyond the kinematic incorporation of further body parts. As the notion of the performing body with an extended body schema came to infiltrate the discourse on piano playing, multimodal perception in piano playing also became a more prominent element of the discourse. Music psychologists today understand piano pedagogy in terms of auditory–motor coupling: by definition, musicians execute particular bodily commands to produce particular auditory stimuli, constantly coordinating and comparing motor output with produced output to achieve intended auditory goals.87 Recent neuroscien- 50 tific studies show tight links between movement and auditory perception in pianists’ brain activation, in both passive listening (with no action involved) and action only (with no sound).88 The notion of mirror-neu- rons also supports the hypothesis of a “hearing-doing” system in musicians’ brains: premotor areas are involved when listening to action- related sounds. The common-coding theory, the postulation of a repre- sentational overlap (a common code) between perception and action, serves as an important theoretical framework to many studies with the embodied view of music cognition.89

86 Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 4, 117. 87 Floris Tijmen Van Vugt, Hans-Christian Jabusch, and Eckart Altenmu¨ller, “Fingers Phrase Music Differently: Trial-to-Trial Variability in Piano Scale Playing and Auditory Perception Reveal Motor Chunking,” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012), https://doi.org/10. 3389/fpsyg.2012.00495; and Lutz Ja¨ncke, “The Dynamic Audio–Motor System in Pianists,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1252 (2012): 246–52. 88 Amir Lahav, Elliot Saltzman, and Gottfried Schlaug, “Action Representation of Sound: Audiomotor Recognition Network While Listening to Newly Acquired Actions,” Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2007): 308–14; Marc Bangert et al., “Shared Networks for Audi- tory and Motor Processing in Professional Pianists: Evidence from fMRI Conjunction,” NeuroImage 30 (2006): 917–26; Ulrich C. Drost et al., “When Hearing Turns into Playing: Movement Induction by Auditory Stimuli in Pianists,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psy- chology: Section A 58 (2005): 1376–89; and Jens Haueisen and Thomas R. Kno¨sche, “Involuntary Motor Activity in Pianists Evoked by Music Perception,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 13 (2001): 786–92. 89 Pieter-Jan Maes et al., “The Coupling of Action and Perception in Musical Meaning Formation,” Music Perception 32 (2014): 67–84; and Pieter-Jan Maes et al., “Action-Based Effects on Music Perception,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2014), https://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2013.01008 kim

In earlier piano pedagogy, however, the connection between perception and action was not taken for granted. In Daniel Gottlob Tu¨rk’s Klavierschule oder Anweisung zum Klavierspielen fu¨r Lehrer und Lernende mit kritischen Anmerkungen (School of Clavier Playing, or, Instructions in Playing the Clavier for Teachers & Students, 1789), for example, fingering prescriptions are aimed at producing “a well-rounded and free-flowing manner” and “a large measure of agility.”90 The focus was placed only on action. The notion of action–perception coupling began to appear Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 explicitly in the early twentieth century. In The Act of Touch, Matthay writes: “When we sit down to play a piece of music ...we must not try to play a note until we are ready to ‘listen’ ...; we must to try to perceive, or see Music.... ‘Seeing’ music in this sense, is a supremely vital experience; it is something absolutely vivid....Inaword,theactofVolition in performance.”91 Imagining the intended sound precedes bodily action. Throughout the book, “guiding our muscles by our Ear” is emphasized, as is mnemonic effort.92 Matthay expands on the latter elsewhere, explaining that mnenomic effort should be “directed towards remembering the sensations accompanying the poising and sub- sequent letting go of the limb practiced.”93 Some piano pedagogues even conducted empirical studies and 51 concluded that the issue was one not of fingers but of brains. Oskar Raif argued that “the point of departure for dexterity” lies not in individual fingers “but in the central parts of our nervous system.”94 Raif described an experiment he undertook in 1888 in which eigh- teen of his piano students trained the right hand only for a period of two months. During this time, he claimed, the dexterity of the left hand also increased significantly such that when a scale was played from top to bottom, “the order of the fingers became the same as the right hand and the rhythmic accents fell on the same fingers.”95 He concluded: “We place too much emphasis ...on dexterity and take too little account of the interaction of fingers, ears, and eyes. It is not finger skill, but thinking skills that we have to teach our piano students.”96

90 Daniel Gottlob Tu¨rk, School of Clavier Playing, or, Instructions in Playing the Clavier for Teachers & Students, trans. Raymond H. Haggh (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 129. 91 Matthay, The Act of Touch, 35–36. 92 Matthay, The Act of Touch, 111. 93 Matthay, Relaxation Studies, 58, emphasis in the original. 94 Oskar Raif, “Ueber Fingerfertigkeit beim Clavierspiel,” Beitra¨ge zur Akustik und Musikwissenschaft 3 (1901): 65–68, at 67. 95 Raif, “Ueber Fingerfertigkeit,” 67, 68. 96 Raif, “Ueber Fingerfertigkeit,” 68, emphasis added. the journal of musicology

figure 5. A photographic representation of how the arm is pulled out of the shoulder at the turning points of scales, arpeggios, and passages. Breithaupt, Die natu¨rliche Klaviertechnik, 221. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

Mimesis in the Discourse on Piano Playing

The shift at the turn of the twentieth century from an understanding of music as a purely acoustic sequence to that of music as an audiomotor sequence was reflected in the increasing prominence of mimetic skill in piano pedagogy. Whereas writings by adherents of the finger school, such as Czerny and Hummel, included musical exercises and instructed readers on how to move their hands via numeric fingering symbols, later treatises provided drawings and photographs of hands to illustrate correct postures. Figure 5 shows one of such photographic representations in Breithaupt’s work. The rise in such illustrations is related to technical developments and economic issues in publishing, but also points to a new focus on mimetic skills as the main strategy in piano pedagogy. “Mimesis” here means motor modeling, the foundation of human cognition according to recent studies in neuroanthropology. According to Merlin Donald, mimetic culture comprises the first stage in the development of human cognitive capacity. Mimetic skills evolved ahead of speech and symbols. Donald’s discussion of preverbal mimetic skills revolves around examples drawn from dance and ritual, but the idea of attributing significance to motor modeling can be readily applied to the origin and meaning of kim music.97 As Elizabeth Tolbert proposes, music is “grounded in a capacity for [preverbal] ‘mimesis,’ or motor modelling.”98 Hence, mimesis is also central in music pedagogy as much of learning music concerns seeing (visuo-) and imitating bodily actions (motor) to produce the intended sonic outcome. This mimetic dimension of musical training and the significance of action had not been so overtly manifested in classical piano teaching. It is useful to consider the images in a relatively recent discussion of jazz Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 piano improvisation. In a review of David Sudnow’s phenomenological description of his experience learning jazz keyboard skills, Elaine King acutely observes: “It is refreshing to see plenty of diagrams of hand positions on keyboards, which are used primarily to illustrate the different hand postures.... Interestingly, there is only one notated musical example, for essentially Sudnow’s learning experience does not depend on an ability to read music notation.”99 In these photographs, music is considered primarily in terms of bodily or, more precisely, manual actions. For instance, chords are represented by photographs of hands on the keyboard and explained in terms of the actions producing them—one chord can entail “a tightly compressed hand” and another “an openly extended spread” hand. The former “involves coming at the keyboard 53 straight ahead,” whereas the latter engages “a shift in the axis of the hand relative to the keyboard, the little finger moving much farther from the body’s center than the thumb.”100 Unlike nonmusicians, pianists can “hear the hands”—a normative, default-position hand and a stretched hand—in these two chords. Early twentieth-century writings on classical piano pedagogy, too, used illustrations to reveal an embodied conceptualization of music. Breithaupt, for instance, offered a visual representation of the routes taken by arms and hands in the production of octave passages. In line with the notion of the human motor discussed above, he explains the arm trajectory in octave playing in terms of efficiency: it “costs us just one movement in arch swing [Bogenschwung].”101 Such explanations promote motor modeling as the main pedagogical tool and tie the intended sonic outcome to sound-producing bodily activities. Breithaupt’s depiction of the arm/hand trajectory for octave playing in Schubert’s Op. 51, D. 733 is shown in figure 6. Here, the sound–motor relation is so tight that the

97 Elizabeth Tolbert, “Music and Meaning: An Evolutionary Story,” Psychology of Music 29 (2001): 84–94. 98 Tolbert, “Music and Meaning,” 88. 99 Elaine King, review of Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account, by David Sudnow, Music Analysis 22 (2003): 367–74, at 368. 100 David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 14. 101 Breithaupt, Die natu¨rliche Klaviertechnik, 1:272. the journal of musicology

figure 6. Breithaupt’s depiction of the arm/hand trajectory for octave playing in Schubert’s Op. 51, D. 733, E-flat major, m. 107 ff. Die natu¨rliche Klaviertechnik, 273. The curves with arrows represent hand movements falling from E and B to A and back to E and B . f f f f f Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

music itself is conceptualized in terms of sonic and bodily gestures. Note that in order to conceptualize this musical passage in terms of the hand/ arm gestures, one has to imagine one’s own performing body in relation to the instrument. The centrality of mimesis to piano teaching/learning is closely related to the multimodality of piano playing. In conceptualizing a passage of music, the performer is prompted to observe their own bodily movements in relation to the instrument, in other words, to engage their own kinetic, aural, visual, and proprioceptive senses. This condition of being able to see the sound-producing mechanism (one’s own moving hands) during performance distinguishes piano playing from other types of musical performances such as singing. In improvising, for instance, the vocalist only has access to hearing and proprioceptive feedback, whereas the pianist generally has aural, proprioceptive, touch, and visual feedback reinforcing each other: the design of the instrument allows more detailed visual feedback. It helps the spatial encoding and conﬁg- uration of the performing body in relation to the instrument, that is, the formation of the body schema, which in turn facilitates the motor modeling in piano playing.102

102 Jeff Pressing, “Cognitive Processes in Improvisation,” in Advances in Psychology, vol. 19, ed. W. Ray. Crozier and Antony J. Chapman (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1984), 345– 63; and Pressing, “Improvisation: Methods and Models,” in Generative Processes in Music: The kim

Fingering and the Grammar of Action

Figure 6 above introduces bodily movements in sequence rather than as static postures. Probably most representative of action sequencing in piano playing is ﬁngering: the matter of which ﬁngers to use for given notes/ combinations in given contexts is closely related to the embodied relationship between performer and instrument. In the eighteenth century, the

thumb and little finger were hardly used in piano pedagogy and the three Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 middle fingers frequently crossed over each other, a practice that died away as keyfall deepened with the new piano mechanism. Also, the use of fingers was somewhat contextual; on the fingering of scalar passages, Tu¨rk listed three different possible fingerings, noting that the most preferable option would depend on “the exigencies of the situation.”103 In the nineteenth century, this approach gave way to systematic fingering and controlling of hand actions, with the aim at first of improving physical agility and performance efficiency. Yet fingering soon came to reflect a specific mode of musical interpretation. Prescribed fingering indications in performing editions served to communicate editors’ inter- pretative decisions. Although many studies of fingering focus on such editions, treatises on keyboard playing from the period also contain 55 statements relating fingering to interpretation. Hugo Riemann emphasized that “changes in hand position should conform, as much as possible, with the natural organization of musical ideas (that is, with phrasing).”104 Where a motive is repeated, for example, the same fingering should be retained to emphasize the repetition. Fingering in keyboard-playing treatises, however, did more than reflect certain musical interpretations. In systemizing fingering, many treatises after the nineteenth century also cultivated specific modes of fingering. Some modern fingering principles, such as the division of a scale into two groups of notes that correspond to two finger sets with the thumb as pivot, were established. Other principles coined include: “1ˆ and 4ˆ of C, G, D, A, E, and B-major/minor scales must be played by the thumb,” or, “when the same note is repeated, one finger should be substituted for another on that note.”105 Such standardized routes of finger action began to be taught.

- Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (New York: Clar- endon Press, 1988), 129–78. 103 Tu¨rk, School of Clavier Playing, 144. 104 Riemann, Handbuch des Klavierspiels, 45. 105 Examples of such principles can be found in Clementi, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte, 17; and J. B. Cramer, Instructions for the Piano Forte (New York: W. Dubois, 1821), 15 and 11. the journal of musicology

Here, Baily’s notion of “motor grammar” is useful.106 Assigning the “spatio-motor” component of musical cognition equal emphasis to the auditory component, Baily discusses a succession of movements that are ordered to produce the intended sonic outcome. Musical performance is “organized through the sequential retrieval from memory of motor program.”107 This succession of movements may constitute, more than a convenient or familiar pattern, a syntax of actions that can be “correct” or “incorrect.” The term “grammar” is used not in the linguistic sense but Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 to refer to a logical connection.108 Music is perceived in terms of not only pure music-structural syntax but also sequential motor syntax; in this light, fingering is conceptualized as a syntactic motor structure that concerns an internalized course of movements, sequencing actions correctly.109 Just as harmonic syntax can generate expectation and meaning, motor syntax can engender predictions and expectancy about upcoming motor acts. Especially in musicians’ experience, auditory and action contexts work together to induce expectancy. Long-term training results in internalization of sequential motor syntax. Fingering is one such grammar of action and is particularly important for classical piano playing: a recent neuroscientific study reveals that classical pianists pay much 56 more attention to the question of “how to play” (i.e., fingering), and jazz pianists more to “what to play.”110 In conjunction with the importance of interpretation, the learning of motor grammar plays a significant role in classical piano playing. The fingering on the score is not a purely private choice made by the editor alone but also reflects wider historical trends in the collective semantic knowledge of fingering. One such example is the rule of alternating fingers to repeat the same note, which emerged in nineteenth-century piano pedagogy and replaced the practice of linking specific keys with specific fingers. Fingering indications can disclose the complex dynamics among musical interpretation, instrument design, kinematic considerations, and the general grammar of fingering, which changes over time, as noted.

106 John Baily, “Movement Patterns in Playing the Herati Dutar,” in The Anthropology of the Body, ed. John Blacking (London: Academic Press, 1977), 275–330; and Baily, “Music Performance, Motor Structure, and Cognitive Models,” in European Studies in Ethnomusi- cology: Historical Developments and Recent Trends, ed. Max Peter Baumann, Artur Simon, and Ulrich Wegner (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag, 1992), 142–58. 107 Baily, “Music Performance, Motor Structure, and Cognitive Models,” 153. 108 Giacomo Novembre and Peter E. Keller, “A Grammar of Action Generates Pre- dictions in Skilled Musicians,” Consciousness and Cognition 20 (2011): 1232–43, at 1233. 109 David A. Rosenbaum, Human Motor Control, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam/Boston: Aca- demic Press, 2010). 110 Roberta Bianco, Giacomo Novembre, Peter E. Keller, Arno Villringer, and Da- niela Sammler, “Musical Genre-Dependent Behavioural and EEG Signatures of Action Planning: A Comparison between Classical and Jazz Pianists,” NeuroImage 169 (2018): 383– 94. kim

Beethoven’s fingering notation is often considered to reveal his musical interpretations and thus deemed an essential “part of the composition itself.”111 Comparing his fingering and the fingering indications in the performing editions that deviate from the composer’s own can reveal an interesting and complex dynamics between various factors influencing fingering. Example 1 illustrates various fingerings for m. 174 of the “Arietta” from his Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, including Beetho- Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 ven’s own (a), Heinrich Schenker’s (b), Hans von Bu¨low’s (c), and Arthur Schnabel’s indications (d).112 Putting aside which is the “authentic” or “correct” fingering, we find here an interesting inter- change of possible motor gestures. Beethoven’s indication of 123 in the left hand (a) and the three-note grouping in the preceding measure may prompt a continuation of the same three-note grouping in the descending scales. In Schenker’s (b) and Schnabel’s editions (d), the fingering instructions support this three-note grouping with 432132132 and 321321321 in the right hand, respectively. On the other hand, if not for Beethoven’s marking, a “motor grammar” approach to the descending scale would elicit different fingering, prompting the player to start the scale with 5 in the right hand and 1 in the left hand as in (c). This 57 principle constitutes semantic knowledge, the long-term, generalized abstract knowledge distinguished from episodic knowledge, derived from particular events in a specific context.113 Pianist Heinrich Neuhaus’s discussion of a passage in Op. 106 is enlightening in this regard. He first considers the fingering of 54543 that was suggested by Bu¨low (ex. 2a). This he refers to as “a` la Chopin,” due to its using the top fingers (3, 4, and 5) as in Chopin’s E´tude, Op. 10/2 (ex. 2c): “Anyone looking at this passage ...will immediately think of Chopin’s passages.” On the other

111 William S. Newman, “Beethoven’s Fingerings as Interpretive Clues,” Journal of Musicology 1 (1982): 171–97; and Jeanne Bamberger, “The Musical Signiﬁcance of Bee- thoven’s Fingerings in the Piano Sonatas,” Music Forum 4 (1976): 237–80. 112 See also Bamberger, “The Musical Signiﬁcance of Beethoven’s Fingerings,” 258. 113 On the other hand, Bu¨low’s choice of dividing the scale into 6þ3 seems to have a structural reason of evoking motivic unity. In his characteristic way, he added a lengthy commentary to this passage: “To this ‘scale of sixths’ the player must try to ‘hear mentally’ the two initial notes of the principal motive.” Hans von Bu¨low, Beethoven’s works for Pianoforte solo in a critical and instructive edition with explanatory remarks for teachers and pupils, second part (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1875; repr., New York: Edward Schuberth, 1891), 143. the journal of musicology

example 1. Different fingerings for Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, “Arietta,” m. 174. (a) Fingering indications in Beethoven’s autograph manuscript; (b) Heinrich Schenker, Ludwig van Beethoven Complete Piano Sonatas (Vienna Universal Edition, 1918–21; repr., New York: Dover, 1975); (c) Hans von Bu¨low, Beethoven’s Works for Pianoforte Solo in a Critical and Instructive Edition with Explanatory Remarks for Teachers and Pupils, Second Part (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1875; repr., Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 New York: Edward Schuberth, 1891) (d) Arthur Schnabel, Tonmeister-Ausgabe, Nr. 153 (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1927; repr., Milan Curci, 1949). (a)

(b)

(c) kim example 1. (Continued) (d) Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

hand, “it is perfectly possible and reasonable to use” another fingering 54313 (ex. 2b). Neuhaus calls this fingering “pre-Chopin” fingering, probably simply meaning this style of fingering might have been preva- lent before Chopin’s time. However, it can also refer to whether or not the pianist’s fingers have the relevant episodic knowledge. To a pianist 59 such as Neuhaus, who is familiar with Chopin’s passages performed by the top fingers only, the Chopin fingering would feel more “convenient, natural, and beautiful.”114 Hence, fingering can be influenced by episodic knowledge (of Chopin’s passages), which may differ from semantic knowledge of general rules. Also, the two fingerings present different degrees of technical challenges. It is perhaps these dynamics between different motor gestures that makes interpreting the passage compelling.

Piano Playing in the “Body Culture”

The role of piano-playing hands is particularly noteworthy in the context of the early twentieth-century “body culture,” which engaged disparate practices in physiology, psychology, gymnastics, economics, and dance. The body featured prominently in musical discourse as well: the German music magazine Die Musik published two special issues on “music and movement” in July 1931 and June 1932.115 Some body culture scholars even wrote on piano playing; an example is Rudolf Bode’s booklet

114 Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing, 97. 115 Contributors included E´mile Jaques-Dalcroze, Carl Orff, and Igor Stravinsky. the journal of musicology

example 2. Two different fingerings for Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 29, Op. 106, first movement, mm. 74–5: a) Bu¨ low’s “Chopin fingering”; b) alternative “pre-Chopin” fingering; and c) the beginning of Chopin’s E´ tude Op. 10/2. (a) Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

(b)

(c)

60 Rhythmus und Anschlag (Rhythm and stroke, 1933), subtitled Die Lehre des Klavierspiels auf der Grundlage der natu¨rlichen Bewegung (The teaching of piano playing on the basis of natural movement).116 Bode viewed piano playing as a means to restore the humanistic dimension of music making in the age of machines: piano playing might appear “outdated” in the age of radio and gramophones, but this made it more important than ever, as only physical engagement, not mere passive reception through technology, can achieve a true experience of the arts.117 Music needed to be “reincorporated” and the body resuscitated through music; Bode called for a proper pedagogy to enable this.118 The body here was understood as the antithesis of a machine, making genuinely human, organic, natural movements rather than “intentionally ‘made’ movements” with “artiﬁcial unnecessary tension”; unlike the mechanical movements of civilization, Bode deemed uninhib- ited inner movements to be continuous and natural.119 He introduced

116 Rudolf Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag. Die Lehre des Klavierspiels auf der Grundlage der natu¨rlichen Bewegung (Mu¨nchen: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1933). 117 Rudolf Bode, “Ko¨rper und Seele in der Musik,” Die Musik 23 (1931): 717–25, at 725. Interestingly, the front matter of the 1931 special issue included an advertisement for the new gramophone (Gramola), toward which Bode took a critical stance because he expected this technology would passivize the reception of music. 118 “die Wiedereinverleibung der Musik und die Wiederbeseelung des Ko¨rpers durch Musik.” Bode, “Ko¨rper und Seele in der Musik,” 725. 119 Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, 10, 18. kim figure 7. Photographic illustrations of bodily exercises in Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, Bildtafeln II, VIII, IX: (a) Final position of an exercise while standing; (b) An exercise at the piano lid, dropping the arm with resilient impact and further dropping it down; (c) Only after these drills do exercises with fingers touching the keyboard begin. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

61 the journal of musicology

figure 8. Durational pattern conceptualized as bodily gestures. Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, 34. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

exercises to relax the body that involved throwing, swinging, and resting while standing and sitting, with or without the keyboard (see ﬁg. 7). These photographs of the pianist’s body serve a new function; instead of illustrating an anatomical understanding of the human body, as in previous treatises, they capture a set of postures for readers to imitate while undertaking exercises to restore the “natural” movements of the body. Piano playing is the realization of musical rhythm through natural bodily movement. The durational pattern in ﬁgure 8 can be understood in terms of bodily movement as a motor pattern of “throw-attack-relapse-rest” (Wurf-Anschlag-Ru¨ckfall-Ruhe). Such a concep- 62 tion resonates with what Andrew Mead describes as “bodily hearing”: “If we know sound ...as a translation of our own bodily efforts, then it is not hard for us to understand a rhythm in terms of the effort it took to make it.... Much music is indeed produced through physical gesture. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that we might index those physical gestures through the music they produce, and then imitate them.”120 Unlike previous treatises on piano playing, Bode intentionally includes only a few musical examples, as the dynamic process he is con- cerned with cannot be represented on a score. According to Bode, many, even E´mile Jaques-Dalcroze, a pioneer of the new dynamicism, made this mistake of clinging to musical notation instead of placing the dynamic process itself at the center of his eurhythmics, which Bode saw as a kind of gymnastics.121 The main text of Bode’s Rhythmus und Anschlag (1933) on piano playing does not include any musical examples, but a list of “some important elements of musical form” (Einige wichtige Formelemente) is attached to the booklet. In this list, he represented diatonic/chromatic scales, chords, octaves, etc., in an interesting way (see ex. 3).

120 Andrew Mead, “Bodily Hearing: Physiological Metaphors and Musical Under- standing,” Journal of Music Theory 43 (1999): 1–19, at 11. 121 Bode, Musik und Bewegung, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Chr. Friedrich Vieweg, 1942), 25; original edition published in 1930. kim example 3. Scales and arpeggiations appearing as “some important elements of form” (Einige wichtige Formelemente) in Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, Notentafeln 1, 2, and 4. (a) Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

(b)

Fingering is indicated in this list of formal elements. It is notable that Bode marks the same fingering for C major and D-flat major scales (ex. 3a), disregarding the traditional rule against using the thumb for the black keys. While this recommendation neglects the morphology of the instrument and its relationship to the performer’s body, it joins a specific musical gesture (a scale) with a specific bodily gesture (fingering). The fact that the notated scale opens with an anacrusis also supports the conception of musical elements as bodily gestures. Bode constantly refers to the significance of Auftakt (anacrusis, upbeat) in piano playing. It does not mean Bode endorsed the nineteenth-century Auftakttheorie represented by Hugo Riemann and his disciples. He criticized it for the journal of musicology

being grounded only in scores, without reference to the true process of movement.122 To Bode, Auftakt was the precondition of artistic performance: it was not only a psychological principle but should also be reflected in the process of bodily movements.123 There are “sounding and non-sounding (but still strongly experienced) upbeat[s].”124 Unfortu- nately, he said, contemporaneous piano-playing methods failed to incorporate the essence of such natural bodily movements. They emphasized falling rather than swinging movements of the arms and become Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 “uneconomic” and “arrhythmic.”125 Bodily movements involved in piano playing should form wave-shapes, like other fundamental motions in nature. From the perspective of the tone-generating process, each note comprises a wave on the fluctuating arc of the dynamics. The increase in bodily illustrations in these treatises does not imply that piano playing is a purely physical activity dealing with an objectified instrument. Bode opposed both the conception of music making as purely psychological and the overemphasis on physicality in music training.126 Piano playing involves “rhythmicizing” (rhythmizieren) the score through natural continuous, flowing movement, both psychological and corporeal.127

64 Concluding Remarks

In 1911 E. E. Wentworth Layton used the expression “the new piano psychology” to refer to the newly emerging paradigm in piano pedagogy, though only in passing, without concrete clariﬁcation.128 At the multidisciplinary intersection of music pedagogy, organology, physiology, psychology, kinematics, and aesthetics, these piano theories reveal new aspects of the development of our understanding of technology and human agency. How does this new psychology of piano address the interface between human and machine? In terms of physical shape and design, the piano has been compared to other non-musical instruments. In modern textbooks on biomechanics, for instance, piano playing is discussed under “keyboarding,” along with text messaging, button pressing, and typewriting.129 In discussing the “discourse networks” of around 1800 and 1900, media theorist Frie- drich Kittler remarked that the invention of the typewriter “unlinks

122 Bode, Musik und Bewegung, 32. 123 Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, 20. 124 Bode, Musik und Bewegung, 60. 125 Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, 21. 126 Bode, “Ko¨rper und Seele in der Musik,” 718. 127 Bode, Rhythmus und Anschlag, 20–21. 128 Layton, “The New Piano Psychology.” 129 See Rosenbaum, Human Motor Control, chap. 9, 279–323. kim hand, eye, and letter.”130 In a later writing, he also noted that with the typewriter, “paper and body, writing and soul fall apart.”131 Similarly, focusing on the role of hands in separating the body and the instrument in the wider sense, Aura Satz observes the resemblance among the typewriter, the piano, and nineteenth-century spiritualist machines.132 With those apparatuses, the hands were distanced from the bodies and the will of the owners, a detachment and separation that invoked an appearance of scientiﬁc, objective instruments, which ironically worked well to assert Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the truthfulness of the spiritual communication. In piano playing, however, the hands do not separate the will of the body and the apparatus. The preceding examination of the historical discourse on piano playing shows growing consideration of the pianist’s bodily agency. Piano playing was conceptualized as an intentional act of music making. “Integration and fusion of body and technology,”133 which is more often discussed in relation to electronic music, is also apropos for piano playing. The hands are media, and these media “extend ourselves,” in McLuhan’s sense: they affect some physical, cognitive, and expressive functions of humans.134 In this regard, piano-playing hands deserve more serious consideration in both music psychology and broader music theory, especially in 65 light of the recent “4E” approach to mind (embodied, embedded, en- acted, and extended).135 Historical writings on piano playing comprise theories of music cognition that extend beyond the body and are situated in activity. Here, music cognition arises from the enactive interaction between the performer and the instrument, in the manner that Gibson would describe as “active touch.”136 These piano theories also represent music cognition that is not bound to an individual but is distributed across individuals and across artifacts and objects through

130 Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 195. 131 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 14. 132 Aura Satz, “Typewriter, Pianola, Slate, Phonograph: Recording Technologies and Automisation,” in The Machine and the Ghost: Technology and Spiritualism in Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Art and Culture, ed. Sas Mays and Neil Matheson (Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 2013), 37–56. 133 Tanaka and Donnarumma, “The Body as Musical Instrument,” 95. 134 “all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems”; “any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 1994), 90 and 4. 135 See Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher, eds., The Oxford Hand- book of 4E Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 136 James J. Gibson, “Observations on Active Touch,” Psychological Review 69 (1962): 477–91. the journal of musicology

time.137 In this manner, the historical discourse of practical piano pedagogy emerges as an important realm of music psychology, in which music represents a continuous, dynamic performative activity.

ABSTRACT Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/jm/article-pdf/38/1/32/456047/jm.2021.38.1.32.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Music-making hands have drawn considerable scholarly attention, featuring prominently in recent investigations in biomechanics, paleoanthropology, and cognitive sciences. Yet already in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, piano pedagogy theories were evolving not only in response to changing musical styles but also to scientific conceptualizations of the human body. Taking piano-playing hands as a platform for human/machine interaction, this article analyzes the historical discourse on piano-playing hands in relation to the contemporary scientific context and via the framework of cognitive science. In this process, these scientific and pedagogical writings, which have been previously discussed only dispersedly and marginally, emerge as more 66 than didactic instruction. This historical discourse on music psychology of piano-playing hands points to music cognition that is extended beyond the body, situated in activity, and distributed beyond the individual.

Keywords: piano pedagogy, human/machine interface, extended cognition, performance theory

137 For the notions of extended, situated, and distributed cognition, see Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 7–19; John Seely Brown, Allan Collins, and Paul Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning,” Edu- cational Researcher 18 (1989): 32–42; and Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).