Conference Agenda

On June 13^th, 1890, the Boston Daily Journal published a special dispatch from New York describing “An Experiment of Interest to Pianists.” Before an audience, a little girl watched as E.S. Bonelli sketched a diagram of her hands, sprayed them with cocaine to numb them, then performed surgery. Bonelli had cut the accessory slips on either side of her ring finger. Once Bonelli finished, the girl demonstrated that her hand, when extended, could reach an inch farther than before and her ring finger could be lifted an inch-and-a-half higher. Another child on whom Bonelli had operated four years prior then performed Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major to demonstrate the surgery’s impact on her musical technique. Bonelli was not a doctor, he was a well-known piano teacher. This surgery was performed not to cure any ailment, but rather to give the ring finger additional flexibility, reach, and strength for piano technique. Called “digital tenotomy in pianists,” the surgery was first described in print in 1884 by its inventor, Philadelphia surgeon Dr. W.S. Forbes. By 1898, Forbes claimed that he had operated on thousands of musicians.

Based on historical accounts drawn from surgical journals, medical texts and encyclopedias, newspapers, the musical press, and analysis of musical works that were performed to demonstrate its effects, this paper offers an overview of digital tenotomy in American pianists in the late nineteenth century. I contextualize the practice within histories of virtuosity and musical technology, as well as perspectives from modern bioethics. Because the sole purpose of the operation was to improve musical technique, digital tenotomy in pianists represents an early example of what philosophers call human enhancement—an intervention that acts directly on the body or brain to improve a capacity or characteristic that ordinary human beings normally have (Buchanan, Better Than Human). Existing musicological accounts productively apply critical frameworks drawn from disability studies (Stras) and cybernetics (Loughridge, Gordon) to explore relationships between technology, human bodies, and musical performance. Frameworks from bioethics reveal new connections between music and medicine as well as relationships between aesthetic values, technological enhancements, and human practices.