Conference Agenda

By the 1950s, mainstream Western canonical pianism had shed many idiosyncratic performance practices that had once been widespread in the nineteenth century. One feature that developed from this shift was an austere, standardizing modernism that intensified amid moral panics surrounding Black-associated jazz, which began to find common ground with classical music. This presentation examines the transnational case of Don Shirley, a Jamaican American mid-century pianist who was classically oriented but systematically pushed into nightclubs due to racial barriers. This paper argues that seemingly extinct features of non-textualist, nineteenth-century Romantic pianism persisted in spaces normally coded as entertainment rather than art, particularly among certain Black performers. Among such co-creative features were improvisation, transcription, and re-composition.

Shirley’s upper-middle-class, British-colonial-era Jamaican habitus shaped his musicianship in Jim Crow America. His artistry opens the case for a historiographical frame of Romanticism representative of a subset of Black performers otherwise misunderstood or illegible. This variety of Romanticism also operated within Afro-diasporic traditions of dexterous subversion, the resourceful outmaneuvering of oppressive forces (see Gates Jr. 1988). Ironically, Shirley would find himself repositioned as a “master” concert pianist reclaiming authentic Romantic performance practices and ethos while pushing against dominant Black sincerity politics (cf. Trilling 1972).

I conceptually apply Carl Czerny’s Systematic Introduction to Improvisation on the Pianoforte (1829) to Shirley’s improvised album, Orpheus in the Underworld (1956), which he references in accompanying liner notes. I also consider Shirley’s 1959 transcription of “This Nearly Was Mine” (from Rodgers’ South Pacific), using the Liszt-Wagner transcription of “Isolde’s Liebestod” (1867) as an analytic reference point. Close listening, selected transcription, and piano emulation ground my analyses. By examining such Romantic performance practices in Shirley’s pianism, manifested through his mediation between art and popular/vernacular music spheres, this study opens lines of inquiry that reveal less frequently explored Romantic analogies in relation to Black performers. These include idealist and programmatic aesthetics, exile, Innerlichkeit as cultivated inwardness, and interiority as a personal, inner sanctuary, all of which dialogue with Black musical studies scholarship (Hartman, Brooks, Moten, et al.). This study challenges narrow conceptions of what has counted as “Black” musical expression in mid-century America.

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.

Ananda Sukarlan is among the most prominent contemporary Indonesian pianist-composers to engage art music as a medium of national musical representation. Born in Jakarta in 1968, Sukarlan has spent some of his professional life in Spain and now lives in Jakarta, Indonesia, a transnational trajectory that has shaped his compositional voice. Sukarlan’s oeuvre encompasses a wide range of genres, including opera, vocal music, and chamber works, among other compositions. Scholars have analyzed Sukarlan’s work, such as the integration of Indonesian folk materials into Western pianistic idioms (Kristianto 2012); an in-depth analytical interpretation of Rapsodia Nusantara No. 4 (Panjaitan 2020); and examined the archipelagic musical elements across Sukarlan’s piano and vocal works (Manalu et al. 2021).

Drawing on folk songs from all 38 provinces of Indonesia, Sukarlan’s compositions transform local musical identities into a unified yet diverse concert repertoire. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sukarlan presented Rapsodia Nusantara through livestreamed and recorded online performances that reached audiences across Indonesia and worldwide. Uniquely paired with cinematic imagery of landscapes, heritage sites, and regional cultures, these performances offered virtual encounters with place at a moment when physical travel was impossible. I argue that Sukarlan’s works on a digital circulation reframed the piano performance as a cultural conduit, showcasing Indonesia’s musical richness while functioning simultaneously as a work of pianistic nationalism and as a form of music-induced tourism.

By analyzing the selected works from Rapsodia Nusantara in streamed performances and audience reception documented by the Ministry of Culture and Education during the pandemic. I demonstrate how Sukarlan’s compositional strategies—folk-song transformation, stylistic composition, and virtuosic pianism—produce a coherent aesthetic framework that guides listeners sonically across the Indonesian archipelago. This paper reveals how contemporary art music can participate in broader cultural and economic ecosystems, particularly in relation to tourism and national representation. By situating Rapsodia Nusantara within conversations on music, media, cultural, and tourism economic values, this study reframes nationalist piano repertoire as an active agent in shaping cultural visibility and mobility in the digital age. More broadly, the paper offers a model for understanding how streamed musical performance can generate value and place-based imagination beyond the concert hall.