KMBB Lecture 1

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 eighteenth-century 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 Eighteenth-Century 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.

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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

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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?