“In Music Nothing Is Worse Than Playing Wrong Notes”

Abstract

The literature of pedagogical music for the piano was the center of unparalleled critical dialogue and scholarly discourse in nineteenth-century Europe. Focusing on the theory of piano pedagogy and the merit of pedagogical music, this discourse was unique not only because of its subject matter but also because it was shared, shaped, and constructed by a wide diversity of contributors, including renowned composers, performers, pedagogues, and music critics of the period. Despite contemporary musicologists’ explicit interest in music within the fabric of sociocultural life, their research has mostly overlooked the important educational processes and practices for training the musician-performer, as well as the existing repertoire dedicated to initiating young children into the world of music.

Looking back at pedagogical traditions developed in the first half of the 1800s, I contend that piano pedagogy was governed by a conceptual framework consisting of two paradigms—mechanistic and holistic—which emerged, respectively, from the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies. In this study I reviewed mechanistic piano pedagogy and its critique, as it evolved in the first half of nineteenth-century Europe, and offered a conceptual framework (based on the mechanistic paradigm and the contrasting principles underlying the holistic paradigm) that may be used to map current theories and practices, thereby enabling a continuous, unfragmented perspective of piano pedagogy from its inception.