On Piano Performance – Technology and Technique

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Notes

Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 90.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Philip Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, The Drama Review, 50.1 (Spring 2006), 100–19 (p. 102).

Philip Auslander, ‘Performance Analysis and Popular Music’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14.1 (2004), 1–13 (p. 11, Figure 1).

In a diagram provided by Auslander, the sidelining is quite literal. ‘Song, Music, or Other Narrative’ is an input into ‘Performance Persona’ on a footing equal to the input labelled ‘Music Industry Input (from managers, producers, etc.)’ (Auslander, ‘Performance Analysis’, p. 11, Figure 1). Auslander consistently privileges persona as something ‘serve[d]’ by ‘the musical work and its execution’ (Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 102).

Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, pp. 104–07. Auslander's reading of music performance may be profitably compared to Henry Kingsbury's ethnographic study of the music conservatory system in Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Kingsbury also draws on Goffman's work, notably in Chapter 5.

I do not wish to imply that music is fully synonymous with sound; sound is music's medium. As Thomas Clifton puts it, ‘the musically behaving person experiences musical significance by means of, or through, the sounds’ (Music as Heard [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983], p. 2 [emphasis added]).

Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), p. 155. Ihde helpfully contrasts giving a speech or acting in a play, during which ‘the sounding of word does not call attention to the sounding as music does. […] [T]he sounding withdraws as the context and setting in which what is said emerges as foreground’ (p. 157). Thus, sound as such is more ‘actively present’ in music than in speech; music's meaning is in the sound itself and not denotative. See also Clifton, Music as Heard, pp. 1–2, and Theodore Gracyk, ‘Listening to Music: Performances and Recordings’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55.2 (Spring 1997), 139–50 (p. 139).

Auslander, ‘Musical Personae’, p. 104.

Joseph R. Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), p. 11.

This phrase, from composer Igor Stravinsky, is one way of labelling ‘absolute music’, regarding which, see the following paragraph. See Richard Taruskin, ‘A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of Spring, the Tradition of the New, and “The Music Itself”‘, Modernism/Modernity 2.1 (1995), 1–26, for a discussion of Stravinsky's use of the phrase.

By focusing on instrumental music, I sidestep the issue of vocal musical performance. Though such performances are not mediated by external instruments, the non-isomorphic relationship between the performer's body and the ‘art object’, the music, still obtains. See also note 38, below.

Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, trans. by Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), p. 29.

The history of the term ‘absolute music’ and its association (both as terminology and as philosophy) with Hanslick and Wagner is more complicated than I have allowed here. Hanslick was originally more Idealist than his later reputation suggests, while Wagner's own position evolved significantly during his career. For an introduction to the ‘absolute music’ debate, see Mark Evan Bonds, ‘Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50.2 (1997), 387–420; Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. by Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Sanna Pederson, ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters, 90.2 (2009), 240–62.

A Hanslickian analysis is concerned with things like musical structure, chord progressions, etc. Perhaps the finest exemplar of musical formalism is Heinrich Schenker, the late-nineteenth-century musicologist whose analytic system emphasized the omnipresence of tonic-dominant-tonic relationships at the micro and macro levels of a work.

Philip Auslander, ‘Lucille Meets GuitarBot: Instrumentality, Agency, and Technology in Musical Performance’, Theatre Journal, 61.4 (December 2009), 603–16 (pp. 603–05).

Edwin M. Good, Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 2.

Ihde, Listening, p. 254.

New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edn., s.v. ‘technology’.

The piano's action is called le mécanisme in French and die Mechanik in German, words which more clearly associate the piano with machinery than the English ‘action’. Good, Giraffes, p. 17.

Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 97.

Ibid. I include the pianist's assessment because an instrument that sounds fine but is extremely difficult to play (e.g. the keys stick) does not perform well, even though its output (the sound it produces) may be satisfactory.

Ibid., p. 96.

Alfred Brendel, ‘Coping with Pianos’, in Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2001), pp. 335–44 (p. 336). The circumstances that affect a piano's sound include the concert hall, which itself performs technologically (i.e. the effectiveness of its acoustics can be judged by professionals).

Ibid., p. 340.

Good, Giraffes, p. 21.

Ibid.

Charles Rosen, Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (New York: The Free Press, 2002), p. 76.

Ibid., p. 86.

Max Matthias, Steinway Service Manual: Guide to the Care and Maintenance of a Steinway (Frankfurt am Main: Bochinsky, 1990), pp. 79–94. See also Anders Askenfelt (Ed.), Five Lectures on the Acoustics of the Piano (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 1990), for scientifically minded explanations of how a piano's design affects its sound.

Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 70.

Brendel, ‘Coping with Pianos’, p. 338.

Alfred Brendel, ‘Werktreue – An Afterthought’, in Alfred Brendel on Music, pp. 30–41 (p. 35).

Skilled pianists can create the effect of a single-note crescendo by the careful manipulation of subsequent harmonies. But a mechanical intervention is always necessary to create the effect (in this case, striking other keys), and between the original note's sounding and that of the subsequent harmony, the original note weakens. The sound of a piano string, once struck, always decays until another mechanical event occurs.

Rosen, Piano Notes, pp. 76–7.

Pitch is the effect of a string's vibrational frequency. To be perfectly in tune, two different pitches must vibrate at frequencies that are discrete multipliers of each other. Due to mathematical exigencies (into which I shall not delve here), a fixed-pitch instrument such as a piano contains at least some notes that are out of tune. See Ross W. Duffin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), for a lively introduction to the topic of tuning.

Again, without venturing too far into the question of vocal music, there are styles of vocal performance (e.g. operatic singing) in which the singer consciously treats the body as an instrument (often referring to it as such). To be a trained singer is to have trained one's instrument, one's body to produce a desired sound.

Stan Godlovitch, Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 55.

David Burrows, ‘Instrumentalities’, Journal of Musicology, 5.1 (Winter 1987), 117–25 (p. 119).

Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 87.

Auslander discusses instruments with more clearly defined personae than an average concert piano, such as B. B. King's guitar, which King named ‘Lucille’ and of which King speaks, occasionally, as though Lucille were a living woman. Auslander, ‘Lucille Meets GuitarBot’, pp. 605–06.

Technical data on the Steinway Model D is from the company's website. See Steinway & Sons, http://www. steinway.com/technical/ sizes.shtml [accessed 12 March 2009].

Even player pianos, or more advanced pre-programmed instruments such as GuitarBot, which Auslander discusses, require human intervention at some point in the process, even if only as encoders of information.

People have a similarly embodied knowledge of language: speaking rarely entails attention to the act of speaking (e.g. how do I make my lips make a given sound?), but rather it requires attention to the point being communicated.

Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 37. Rosen's embodiment is so thorough that he observes ‘a special effort’ required ‘to change a fingering that I adopted when I first learned a piece as a child’ (p. 91).

‘Embodiment relation’ defines a mutually constitutive dynamic between a body and a technology. See Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 72–80 and 94–7.

Of course, any change in the player's body has the potential to impact technique, and thus alter the soundscape, but ancillary gestures do so indirectly, and perhaps unintentionally, compared with the direct action of depressing a key.

Rosen reports one occasion on which the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, in a passage that repeats three times, threw his hands high in the air twice, only to land both times on ‘a formidably disturbing wrong note’. The third time, ‘Serkin placed his hands carefully and solidly on the right notes, and they stayed momentarily in place on the keyboard’. Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 132.

Manfred Nusseck and Marcelo M. Wanderley, ‘Music and Motion: How Music-Related Ancillary Body Movements Contribute to the Experience of Music’, Music Perception, 26.4 (April 2009), 335–53 (p. 335).

Ibid., p. 351.

Auslander emphasizes that musicians also dramatize their skill as musicians, often making perceptible aspects of their technique that an untrained audience might not recognize as virtuosic (e.g. ‘To be an accomplished guitarist in the eyes of [an] audience therefore is to appear to be able to subdue the guitar’ [Auslander, ‘Lucille Meets Guitarbot’, p. 604]). Rosen offers a variation on this idea, observing that Brahms' arrangements of his Hungarian Dances for piano solo (they were originally published for four hands) are ‘considerably harder to play than they sound’ and thus ‘are almost never attempted in recital, as pianists like to get full credit for their efforts’ (Rosen, Piano Notes, p. 183). In other words, when the technical difficulty of the piece can neither be dramatized (because the technical demands make dramatization a threat to proper technique) nor heard, the work is not worth performing.

See Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), Chapter 4, for an excellent discussion of the tension between actor and character.

An orchestra conductor offers a close comparison: the conductor's body may act as a sort of visual guide to the music for the audience, yet the conductor makes no actual sounds. Thus, the conductor's mediation between conceptual and physical soundscape occurs entirely through ancillary gestures that the audience and the orchestra members interpret. For the former, such gestures may guide their listening, while the eyes of the latter treat the conductor's ancillary gestures as instructions for their own technical production of a soundscape.

Barenboim on Beethoven: Masterclasses, vol. 1, dir. by Allan Miller (EMI Classics, 2006) [DVD].

Daniel Barenboim, A Life in Music (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2002), p. 6.

Ibid.

Godlovitch, Musical Performance, p. 54.

This is comparable to how a painter might sketch an individual's face using only five lines. The artist uses the tools she has (the five lines) to create for the observer the sensation of more elements than she has actually drawn.

Brendel, ‘Werktreue’, pp. 35–6.

This sketch is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfKqzN5 MZYU [accessed 4 November 2009].

Barenboim on Beethoven: Masterclasses, vol. 2, dir. by Allan Miller (EMI Classics, 2006) [DVD].

E. T. A. Hoffman, ‘Beethoven's Instrumental Music’, from Kreisleriana, in E. T. A. Hoffman's Musical Writings, trans. by Martyn Clarke, ed. by David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 100–01.

Ibid. String and wind instruments are, of course, also technologies, posing their own specific technical challenges for the performer.

Ihde, Listening, p. 255. Christian Ahrens discusses some of the debates over wind-instrument technologies (such as the Boehm key system) that altered not only an instrument's capabilities, but also a performer's control over the instrument. For example, Ahrens points to the enlargement of sound holes as a change that eliminated the possibility of creating fingered vibrato (a regulated fluctuation in pitch), thus requiring players to use a less nuanced lip vibrato. Christian Ahrens, ‘Technological Innovations in Nineteenth-Century Instrument Making and Their Consequences’, trans. by Irene Zedlacher, Musical Quarterly, 80.2 (Summer 1996), 332–40 (p. 332).

Auslander, ‘Lucille Meets GuitarBot’, p. 605 (emphasis added).

Ibid., p. 608.

Cf. the poor performance of a piano with sticky keys, in note 23 above. Stories abound about the famous violinist Paganini, who is said to have completed playing concerts even after one or more of his four violin strings broke. This is an extreme example of a musician's adapting his technique to the instrument's technological performance, but such adjustments, on a smaller scale, are essential aspects of a musician's skill, adjustments that require the musician to react, technically, to the instrument's performance as a technology.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 81.

Introducing an experiment that attempted to measure the vibrations of a cello sensible to a player, Chris Chafe notes that ‘the feel of crafting a sound […] is an important secondary sense and is learned early on in training. Resistances and “give” are felt kinesthetically and vibration arrives directly through the tactile sense.’ Such sensations contribute ‘to the player's sense of the instrument's response to controlling gestures’. Chris Chafe, ‘Tactile Audio Feedback’, Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (Tokyo: International Computer Music Association, 1993), 76–9 (p. 76).

My Heideggerian vocabulary draws on Ihde's work. See especially Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, pp. 31–4 and 72–8.

This is clear if one considers the question of a musical work's identity. Any wrong notes executed by the player, while clearly part of the performance of the work, are not part of the work itself and almost assuredly are not part of the player's own conceptual soundscape. Such wrong notes, even if they go unnoticed or forgiven by the audience, are still wrong in that they point to a malfunctioning medium – namely, the pianist. The same can be said of an out-of-tune key, in which the malfunction is technological.

David Burrows hints that musical history and political history share deeper connections: ‘The modern European history of instruments realizes a program of sonic imperialism crudely analogous to, and synchronous with, the geopolitical one’ (Burrows, ‘Instrumentalities’, p. 124).

The violinist and composer Mari Kimura, whose work with the digital instrument GuitarBot Auslander discusses at length, is best known in the music world not for her work with digital technology, but for her promotion of and skill in the new technique of ‘subharmonic’ violin playing on a traditional instrument (i.e. the ability to produce sounds below the lowest fundamental tone on a string). As Kimura explained to James Reel, making a violin produce subharmonics requires small alterations to the violin as a technology (‘You need [looser bow hair than normal so] that you can really grab the string’; ‘Old strings are better than new […]. If you must use a new string, try taking it at the tailpiece end and giving it one counterclockwise twist’), as well as adjustments in how the performer uses that technology, in technique (‘When advancing from the open G, the higher the finger position, the closer the bow should be to the bridge to keep a correct subharmonic octave position’). See James Reel, ‘Mari Kimura on Subharmonics’, Strings Magazine, http://www.stringsmagazine.com/article/default.aspx?articleid=24421 [accessed 2 July 2010].

Geoffrey Hindley, ‘Keyboards, Crankshafts and Communication: The Musical Mindset of Western Technology’, in ‘I Sing the Body Electric’: Music and Technology in the 20th Century, ed. by Hans-Jochim Braun (Hofheim: Wolke, 2000), p. 33.

My thanks to George Barth, Thomas S. Grey, Branislav Jakovljevic, Alice Rayner, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Contemporary Theatre Review, whose comments and advice improved this article.