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1. Introduction to the unit
2. Touch sensitivity in keyboard
culture
What the unit is ‘about’
Keyboard music’s relationships with the
human*
• Idea of keyboard instruments as second self
(notion of shared sensibility/sensitivity)
• Social aspects of keyboard playing
(female accomplishment; training of composers; public
reputation as a performer and composer)
• Keyboard music as a communicative language
(‘topics’; rhetorical address to audience; ‘character’; conduct;
medium of feeling, rousing sensibility; product of human ingenuity)
The unit offers alternatives to now
conventional conceptualisations of
18C-keyboard music as*:
• Something to play early in a recital to show finger
dexterity, strict tempo and control of articulation -pianist’s ‘repertory’ and part of a history of pianistic
technique.
• Pure music: music to analyse in the abstract that
means nothing but itself.
• Embodying categories of conventional histories of
music based on the development of style and form:
C. P. E. Bach as ‘empfindsamer Styl’; Haydn as ‘father of
sonata form’; Beethoven as introducing manly, sublime
and heroic accents into keyboard music.
Emphasis on ‘human’ significance
reflected in coursework
Is the humour of Haydn’s keyboard music a laughing matter?
‘The fantasia aesthetic [of C. P. E. Bach] is that of the
landscape garden’ (A. Richards, 2000: 72). Explain and
evaluate this claim.
In 18th-century terms, are the slow(est) movements of
Mozart’s keyboard sonatas ‘feminine’ in character?
Does the second volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier suggest
J. S. Bach was influenced by the criticisms of his music
levelled by J. A. Scheibe in 1737-39?
Why does the body matter in understanding eighteenthcentury keyboard music?
Does C. P. E. Bach protest too much in the ‘Farewell To My
Silbermann Clavichord’?
Your title by arrangement with Matthew
... And in the readings
Bonds, Mark Evan, ‘Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins
of Musical Irony’, JAMS 44/1 (Spring, 1991), 57-91.
Denora, Tia, ‘The Beethoven-Woelfl Piano Duel’, in David Wyn
Jones, ed., Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria (Cambridge
UP, 1996), 259–282.
Head, Matthew, ‘“If the Pretty Little Hand Won’t Stretch”:
Music for the Fair Sex in Eighteenth- Century Germany’.
JAMS 52/2 (1999), 203-54. Revised version in Head,
Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in EighteenthCentury Germany (California UP, 2013).
Richards, Annette, The Free Fantasia and the Musical
Picturesque (Cambridge UP, 2000).
Though the exam is more of a
knowledge and skills test:
The 2 hr exam asks students to answer two
questions, by essay, based on the knowledge and
skills developed in the unit. The first question,
which must be answered, involves commentary
on a piece or pieces of music (provided as
score(s) but not played) – the piece may or may
not have been studied or assigned as part of the
unit. The second question may ask you to write
further about the piece(s) in question one, or
address a main theme/issue from the lectures,
seminars and readings.
Contexts for feedback and support*
• Lectures: Monday, 9:05-9:55 & 10:05-10:55,
SWB21
• Small Group Seminars: 29 September; 13
October; 10 November; 24 November.
• Every week when there is not a seminar
(above) Matthew will have a drop in (open
door) in his office, SWB07
• To arrange a tutorial at another time, please
email Matthew
Contexts of/for touch sensitivity
The emergence of the fortepiano and its repertory
is among the most distinctive – and well known –
features of the later 18C. How is that usually
explained?
This has led to research and performance on old,
restored, and reconstructed instruments, largely
under the rubrics of historical performance
practice and authenticity.* What arguments are
usually made in favour of such approaches?
Characteristics of Mozart’s Walther
Fortepiano
K. 618 Andante in F major, for mechanical organ
in a clock, performed by Andras Schiff on
Mozart’s fortepiano at the Salzburg ‘Mozart
Museum’ (Mozart Piano Works, 1991).
Characteristics of the instrument in so far as
they can be distinguished from characteristics
of the performance?*
‘Taste and Feeling/Sensitivity’
(Geschmack und Empfindung)
‘Now for a word about Clementi. ... He has great
facility with his right hand. His star passages are
thirds. Apart from this, he has not a cent’s worth
of taste or feeling/sensitivity; he is a mere
mechanicus’. Letter, 16 January 1782.
Glossed by Katalin Komlos as ‘the observation of
fine nuances, articulation, precision,
differentiation of light and shade’. Kinderman
sees here ‘communication of expressive content
through gestural and rhetorical means [of musical
language and performance]. [1]
A Didactically Specific Score: The
Rondo in A minor, K. 511
Elements of performance highlighted in the score?
Touch-sensitivity in this piece seems not to be a
‘purely’ musical matter but rather to be working
towards a musical modelling of human
feeling/sensation [Empfindung]. An affiliation of
the keyboard and the human body is implied,
both sensitive to stimuli of fluctuating intensity
and pressure.
Touch Sensitivity Linked Music and (a
version of) the Human
The body as an instrument, strung with nervous
fibres: a venerable metaphor of the ‘new science’
of the 17C (Descartes, Locke, Leibniz), even more
popular after Newton. Literary culture of 18C
saturated with notions of ‘nervous sensibility’.*
Crops up in texts of strophic songs addressed ‘to my
clavier’ (see Richards 2000, ch. 5), and in a
‘clavichord cult’ north of Vienna (ibid). Perhaps
Mozart was evoking this in K. 511?
Clavichord as ‘your heart’s
soundbaord’
‘It is true that you cannot play heavy-fisted
concertos, for [the clavichord] cannot hail and
thunder like the fortepiano; nor can you,
surrounded by your numerous audience, rouse
storms with it and use it to drown their cries of
applause ... But if your instrument (I mean the
clavichord) was created by Stein or Fritz,
Silbermann or Spaeth, tender and responsive to
your soul’s every inspiration, it is here that you
will find your heart’s soundboard’.* What words
or concepts are implied in this description about
clavichord performance, and performers?
‘To the clavichord’
‘Oh echo of my laments,/My faithful stringed
instrument,/Now after dismal days comes/The
night, the goal of sorrows’ (Zachariae 1754)
‘Greetings to you, my flattering clavichord!/ What
no language can properly name,/The sickness
deep in me,/Which my mouth never confesses,/I
cry to you’ (Hermes 1769)
‘Dear little clavichord,/ ... The quivering of my
finger/Is translated into the realm of sounds’
(Gerstenberg publ. 1782).
A. Loesser on Bebung (Clavichord
Vibrato)
‘What a potent engine of “feeling” this little
movement could be! The throbbing heart, the
panting breast, the trembling lip, the quivering
voice – all this physiognomy of emotion could
seem to be in the Bebung’.*
Loesser’s word choice – ‘engine’ – signals the close
relationship between the mechanical and feeling,
a relationship that can seem strange today (and
which is arguably thematised in keyboard music’s
‘mechanical’ or ‘clockwork’ passages).
CPEB, ‘Farewell to my Silbermann
Clavichord’ H. 272 (1781)
In 1781 CPEB sold a clavichord to his ex-pupil
Dietrich Ewald von Grotthuss, including with a
covering letter this ‘plaintive rondo’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player
_embedded&v=Km4-Awgtnuc
Discussion Points
Style and form: how recruited to the notion of
‘farewell’?
How does CPEB model sensibility, its
fluctuations of intensity?
Is this piece operatic?
Is it self-indulgent, even false?
Is this sort of stylised, mediated ‘outpouring’
something met also in the Viennese
fortepiano repertory?