Different pianists with different bodies: Does body matter? (Constructing material interconnections concerning piano playing)
Johanna Tiensuu, University of Turku, Department of Musicology
Abstract: In recent years many piano pedagogues have tried to bring the body to the center of piano pedagogy; they have done this in the field of inquiry as well. Partly, this is a question of turning so-called tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The musician-centered approach inevitably changes the focus for required bodily actions needed in order to realize notational script. Traditional musicology focuses on composers and their works and neglects the musician, who represents corporeality. My paper, which is based on my forthcoming interdisciplinary dissertation, intertwines music scholarship (performance studies) with feminist theories. The main concepts upon which my argumentation rests are corporeality/body, difference, and gender/sex. The secondary and more precise concepts are machines, corporeal specificity and disciplinary technology. The concepts link together and are interconnected with the surrounding institutional reality. My paper explores the possibilities of combining discursivity and materiality as they relate to corporeality within the context of piano pedagogy. I focus on the questions of corporeal materiality and corporeal differences, which produce ability or inability/disability within the context of institutional piano pedagogy. The differences include gender/sex: the former is socially constrained, while the latter is constrained by biology. The case under investigation is a common piano lesson situation in which one pedagogue teaches one piano student. The research approach combines ethnographic methodology and a theoretical framework. The fieldwork material consists of observational notes and a transcription of the recordings for the piano lessons given in one music-school. I ask which corporeal differences matter, how and why? What is pianistic-corporeality and how does it develop? What are the conditions and possible constraints which construct playing bodies?
Pianistic body in discursive-material (institutional) machine
Gilles Deleuze´s and Felix Guattari´s (1987) concept of "machine" is one useful tool when I am trying to figure out the different combinations of relational forces and actions which make up bodies, especially pianistic bodies. According to Deleuze and Guattari, each machine is connected to another machine. There are multiple machines: social, technical, organic or abstract. In this article the idea of "machine" and "machinic" music-education is based on Australian music education researcher David Lines´s (2007) application of that concept.
The philosopher Elisabeth Grosz (1994), in her work Volatile Bodies, talks about corporeal specificity. Another central concept, that of "corporeal specificity," has been defined as actions, abilities, capacities and areas where bodies of individuals are constructed capable of specific activities. Grosz emphasizes the multiplicity and the instability of the bodies. The third more precise concept in this paper is Michel Foucault´s (1977) notion of "disciplinary technology." Instrument-pedagogy within the institutional context also consists of modern disciplinary technologies with disciplinary power that construct subjects. Michel Foucault thinks that both linguistic discourse and corporeal forces construct individuals. So Foucault´s idea of different disciplinary technologies can be understood as an abstract machine-kind of force.
Because of my personal and professional background, the conservatory system is quite familiar to me. A pedagogical context gives an opportunity to reach procedural aspects of pianistic-corporeality. A music education within conservatory system, including all stages from childhood to the professional level, could be understood as "machines" in a Deleuzian way. Music education "machines" shape bodies which have different capacities, potentials and constraints for playing a specific musical instrument. Music education’s wider abstract "machine" consists of the Western art music tradition with standard repertoires, institutionalized instrumental pedagogy with more or less formalized teaching and learning, curriculums, structured learning systems and instructional pedagogies, entrance exams, degree requirements, annual assessment, and so forth. Learning and teaching have levels and standards. Instrumental pedagogy has less ”industrial” elements than, for example, comprehensive school. The conservatory system has largely centered on the individual performer-teachers (s. Kingsbury 1988). However, I think, industrial characteristics exist. Students have been qualified to fit into a "machine," and teaching and learning may be repetitive and rather behaviorist regardless of the differences between students. The assessment systems are areas of control and power and they shape and control the playing bodies and minds in a disciplinary way. I agree with David Lines (2007) that dominant machinery functions can obscure other or different kinds of teaching and learning possibilities and ignore knowledge that emerges from marginal (or hierarchically less-valued) perspectives. Standardized learning outcomes are one of the controlling areas. They can diminish the possibility to explore alternative, critical and conflicting ways and perspectives within the institutional reality. One of my hypotheses is that the disciplinary system of music also constructs self-discipline within the subject and approved ways of thinking and talking about musicality and musical practices. Fortunately, it is also possible to explore alternative and critical perspectives theoretically.
Music is something to do concretely with body
For a musician and for instrument-pedagogue music is something people concretely do with their bodies. So a musician-centered approach gives one an opportunity to focus on the corporeality of music, which has traditionally been at a lower rank in the mind/body dichotomy, while musician has been the excluded third in the composer-work-musician triangle. The focus, instead, has been on composers and their works (s. Kontturi and Tiainen 2007). Questions of corporeality at times confuse some pedagogues, especially in the pedagogical context, even though, within the field of academic discussions, it is nowadays not a very radical issue. Also, questions about musical pleasure are sometimes difficult to handle with informants. One possible reason could be that musicality and sexuality have (in metaphorical discourse), many surprisingly similar features in common. Among others, Suzanne G. Cusick (1994 and 1999), Henry Kingsbury (1988), Taru Leppänen (2000) and Fred Everett Maus (1993) have written about these features. The dangerous corporeal power of music must be captured with the mind. When I listened to a couple of lessons, it was the cognitive approach that was dominant (s. Clarke and Davidson 1998). The cognitive approach is easier and ”morally” more proper than is a more sensual approach. Corporeality was present in the actual playing and manner of teaching. When I was recording lessons, concrete playing the piano was the dominant factor that the teacher (patiently) explained, demonstrated and tried to justify also metaphorically (“Think of an acrobat who practices tightrope walking”).
Discursivity is almost at hand during the piano-lessons and under the hand, literally speaking. For example, an historically authentic performance ideal focuses on works, and the purpose is to realize the composer’s intentions. An historically authentic performance ideal is one of the disciplines and machines which informs teaching. According to Peter Kivy (1993), it could be described as an ”almost missionary zeal” or as a ”moral imperative to honor the composer's intentions.” One of my informants described his approach as one in which the score is the starting point and the performance-ideal is his idea of how the specific work should be played and what he thinks the composer’s intentions were.
When I was observing piano lessons, I saw an amazingly relaxed 10-year-old girl. I asked her teacher: ”What have you done? Probably nothing wrong!” The repertoire included a piece from Kurtag´s Játekok and I will ask him/her later if that had something to do with the relaxed body posture that I saw (s. Junttu 2008). A girl who was more musical than the average piano student was also rewarded in the competition. I have not yet reached the process of teaching and learning by observing because the short pilot-fieldwork period was at the end of the spring term. So I could only see and hear the final results after a period of hard work. My purpose is to do interviews later and to then observe the lessons a little more. Children who have passed the entrance exam are usually musical and tend to easily imitate the teacher and play by ear. During the lessons, the teacher would often say: ”Think first and then play!” For some musical children, thinking is a challenging part of playing, because consciously thinking about every movement in a step-by-step fashion is slowly, but at times needed. It is quite common that the student always stops playing at the same bar, making the same mistakes every time, plays the same false notes and plays the easy parts quickly and the difficult parts slowly.
At the professional level, most of the required technical skills are automatized and mind/body problems are not so obvious. In the early stages of learning, the body is problem; it is a problem which must be resolved: how to sit, what to do with the hands and fingers and, for adolescents, what to do with the other parts of the body. Children’s hands are different than those of adults, and they are usually smaller than those of adults, so they must use their bodies in a different way. This should be self-evident. However, the situation is usually such that the pedagogue demonstrates with his or her own hands how a piece should be played according to what is easiest for her or him. The so-called pedagogical repertoire usually aims at developing musicality, knowledge of the classical music tradition and pianistic corporeality, in other words, the ability to use the body appropriately.
C. P. E. Bach emphasized already in 1787 the importance of relaxed muscles when playing and recommended that children open their hands as much as possible. The institutionalized piano pedagogy also constructs pianistic bodies in other ways. As a strict discipline, it can increase, for example, fear of performance (s. Valentine 2002), because there are countless details which must be controlled during rehearsals and performances. Little by little playing the instrument, control and agency become one, as Suzanne G. Cusick (1994) has described and reflected her own playing in explicitly sensual way. However, living musicians’s voice (with living bodies) has been quite often minority position in the “imaginary museum of musical works” (s. Goehr 1992). I can give here one example of instrument pedagogy as an historical traditional discipline: Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach’s opinion was that for playing the clavichord in touching way, it is necessary that individuals be healthy and able to submit to specific, reasonable rules and perform a work by obeying them.
I have tried to shed light on some aspects of that complex discursive-material network of actions and practices which construct the bodies of the subjects within the context of institutionalized piano pedagogy. During playing the piano, both discourse and material are present in unique way in the art music tradition, art music institutions, disciplinary technologies and the whole abstract machine. A question that still bothers me is, what is the place of individuality in terms of corporeal specificity within this machine? I think that it does matter what kind of person sits behind the piano and it does have an effect on the sounds we hear and that there are individual corporeal restrictions which must be overcome.
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