New look at the activity of the pianist

Abstract

The study of piano performance has traditionally been approached from the urgency of meeting certain external objectives. On the one hand the assimilation of rules of stylistic purity and aesthetic values ??that determine the pianist's interpretive competence; On the other, the learning of a number of concrete actions, fixed according to the principles of a technique and according to criteria of maximum effectiveness. In this way the pianist is reduced to a kind of black box, able to interpret the score and to respond to it by means of the appropriate actions, but in whose interior we hardly know what happens. Questions about how we give musical meaning to sounds, the relationship between musical expression and motor activity, or how our control mechanisms work during execution, continue to worry very little in a theoretical setting that keeps the pianist apart. The conservatories have prevailed a teaching in code of success-failure, especially concerned with performance, which has proved unable to account for the true needs of the student. A teaching that has created a formalized practice and interpretive precepts that are alien to him, who have put in parentheses the problem of their self-realization and that often end up making him a stranger to himself. This brief work would like to contribute some ideas to the development Of a theoretical framework with sufficient scope to construct a new vision of the pianistic execution, considered in its broadest sense; Which was able to connect theory with practice and give adequate responses to the pianist's behavior, as a guide for observation and research. I do not intend an approach to pianistic execution from supposed truth conditions, but rather from the Own practice, asking questions that are more responsive to what we actually do when we play the piano and not what we should do. Trying, for example, to understand how we have come to adopt a certain behavior and to what we commit ourselves to assume that way of acting.