Conference Agenda

“Mechanical pianists esteem the notes before music, the letter before sense,” wrote Henry Lemoine and Charles Chaulieu, the two authors of the early nineteenth-century French periodical Le Pianiste. Their critique of “mechanical pianists” suggests that musical performance should transcend the notated score to communicate something more. The opposite of “mechanical” performance would seem to be “human” performance, yet the description in Le Pianiste says very little about what it means to “play humanly,” beyond deviating from the score. Moreover, the authors’ notion of mechanization raises crucial aesthetic questions: Given that pianists at that time were actively experimenting with instruments featuring new technologies, what was the relationship between these new technologies and the “human” condition?

I reconsider these notions of “human” and “mechanical” performance by investigating Fryderyk Chopin’s Projet de Méthode and contemporary written descriptions of Chopin’s performance practice. In response to the resistance of early nineteenth-century Parisian performers and critics to the newly emerging German concept of Werktreue (Weitz, 2018), I argue that the mimetic vocal quality of Chopin’s piano music formed an immediate sign of his “human presence.” For Chopin and his listeners, it was sound, rather than text, that signaled musical expression; this understanding contrasted sharply with the text-centeredness embedded in the notion of Werktreue. Chopin’s piano music was understood as a product of both the technology of the piano and the human body, including the hands and even the voice. It therefore reflects an anthropomorphic understanding of the interaction between nature and technology. Jacques Derrida’s notion of “phonocentrism,” which prioritizes the voice over the written language, illuminates how Chopin’s piano music made his human qualities manifest to his listeners, thus prompting a reconsideration of the value of musical performance and the tension between the work and practice in the nineteenth century.

Among the unprecedented numbers of people seeking to play the classical violin in late-Victorian Britain were hundreds of thousands of newcomer violinists from the lower tranches of society, including swathes of working-class men and children. Their experiences, activities, and contributions to musical life have remained largely unprocessed, in part because documentation is sparse, fragmentary, and absent from conventional sources for violin history. In addition, most of these “grass roots” activities were in the amateur sphere and at an elementary level, attributes that were once deemed of marginal significance to a musicology of classical music performance.

This paper unravels the texture of these hidden musicians’ activities, with findings that resonate, perhaps unexpectedly, with Ruth Finnegan’s ethnography of music-making communities in a 1980s English town. Pieced together from multiple sources, including mechanics’ institute archives, an oral history of family life before 1918, and a magazine for child violinists, and building on music education research (Adams, 1960; Deverich, 1983), my discussion both un-silences voices among the culture’s participants and evaluates the social structures and moral, pedagogic, and economic impetuses that drove it. At the core was inexpensive group teaching for adults, as well as the “Maidstone” project (1897-c.1928), which opened violin-playing to children in state elementary schools and seeded a massive annual competitive festival in London. While initiatives were inevitably underpinned by paternalistic views about the improving value of “good music”—something often interpreted as the imposition of bourgeois values on the masses—I suggest that cross-cutting evidence reveals learners who actively sought an energizing inner life through their violin-playing, similarly to how British working-class people, in Jonathan Rose’s analysis (2001), found intellectual freedoms through reading. Moreover, I argue that beyond their contribution to the growth and dynamism of string-playing in early twentieth-century Britain, this proletarian base of players and the systems behind their learning had far-reaching impacts on British musical culture midcentury, both on the growth of a listening audience for middlebrow classical music, and through the model that the Maidstone project provided for the eventual implementation of free instrumental instruction in UK state schools.

On August 9, 1662, Catholic Church inspectors arrived in Mangas, a highland town in Peru, to investigate claims of idolatry among the Andean Natives. There, they encountered fascinating testimony: a community reportedly singing and dancing with an idol named Coya Huarmi—a ceramic jar believed to be their first ancestor. During their inquiries, the priests heard witnesses singing a Quechua song honoring the jar and learned that the vessel was able to speak.
In this talk, I present two groundbreaking revelations: First, I analyze paleographic remnants and leverage music theory and semantics to reconstruct the Quechua song overheard by the priests, elucidating its lyrics, meter, and rhythm. I present the song's profound significance to those who sang it, waiving a vivid tapestry of intergenerational travels, sacred natural entities, worship sites, and agrarian customs.

Second, by delving into reports that the jar was able to speak, I unravel the first known historical documentation of the ritual functionality of whistling jars—a query that has captivated archaeologists for decades.

To substantiate these findings, I personally crafted a functional replica of such a jar, made from clay and designed to emit sound when activated with water. I conclude with a contemplative exploration of water's role as a communicative conduit between the living and the deceased in Andean culture. I underscore how sound studies can enhance our understanding of historical materiality, opening new avenues to disciplines like archaeology and history.

Increased professional specialization in the nineteenth century linked many musicians’ identities more strongly to their instruments. For double bassists, this trend created a paradox: the most distinguished instrumentalists were those considered virtuosos, and virtuosos played solos, but the double bass was considered an inherently ‘asoloistic’ instrument––one that King George IV reportedly once called “a bad instrument although well played” (Cazalet 1854). Tensions arose between some double bassists’ efforts to participate in the virtuoso tradition and widespread opposition to their solo performance endeavors, and this disparity made a significant impact on the evolving identities of the double bass as an instrument and double bassist as a musical profession. This paper investigates how nineteenth-century double bassists responded to and shaped attitudes about their instrument as they pursued virtuoso status.

Common themes in nineteenth-century music criticism and fictional portrayals of the double bass and its practitioners include a focus on the instrument’s conspicuous physicality, unsuitability for solo playing, and more general undesirableness; tacit associations with masculinity; and the depiction of double bassists as tragicomic figures. Case studies on August Müller (1808–1867) and Giovanni Bottesini (1821–1889) reveal contrasting strategies for engaging with these ideas and elevating the double bass’s standing. Müller played on the instrument’s comedic associations in the self-deprecating obbligato aria “Der Contrabass” (1848), in which he described his instrument as “a gruff companion” that “often grumbles in our ears” and “gives tones so sharp and garish / that all feeling seems to be lost.” Meanwhile, he strove to increase appreciation for orchestral double bassists through his journalistic output in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Bottesini separated the profile of the solo double bass from that of the orchestral foundation through his notational practices, use of scordatura, and development of a novel virtuosic idiom. By inviting comparison to the voice, violin, and other instruments, Bottesini cultivated a trope amongst critics that he was able to transform the double bass into a different instrument altogether: the new solo double bass. The two virtuosos thus each redefined in their own way what it meant to be a double bassist in the nineteenth century.