Department of Music Lecture: Roger Moseley, Assistant Professor of Music, Cornell University
In 1852, the exiled German composer, author, and pedagogue Johanna Kinkel heard Chopin’s piano music to herald the “emancipation of quarter tones” by “rattling the gate” that both barred and disclosed “Nature’s eternal sounds.” Condemned to “slink reluctantly by way of semitones,” Chopin’s melodies “grope for finer spiritual nuances than current intentions can realize.” Kinkel’s dissatisfaction was framed as both symptom and diagnosis of the piano’s crude partitioning of frequency, but its ramifications extend further, infiltrating the foundations of the keyboard’s digital epistemology. Like their paving-stone counterparts, the cracks between the piano’s keys present ludomusical obstacles, successful navigation of which entails simultaneously acknowledging and circumventing them. As Adolf Weissmann noted in 1926, “the obstacles [the piano] put into the way of the fingers’ capacity to grip and the hand’s span” served only to intensify “the performer’s ambition to inspirit this machine.” At Chopin’s bidding, “the machine was endowed with a soul and made eloquent by a unique personality. . . . For the first time, the keyed machinery was redeemed.”
From Kinkel’s day to our own, images of Chopin at the keyboard have consistently mediated Romantic fantasies that at once admit and deny the mechanisms that bring them to spiritual life. The ensoulment of the piano was made audible by the digital activity it purported to transcend. On the one hand, the piano “seemed to yield its secrets with comparative readiness,” as Weissmann put it; on the other, it stubbornly resisted the efforts of all but “the exceptionally gifted” to animate it. Drawing on work by James Q. Davies and Bernhard Siegert, among others, this paper approaches the interfaces at which Chopin’s music was (re)created in terms of their compliance and intransigence. Moving across the discursive registers of pedagogy, physiology, philosophy, and cultural techniques, it pursues Weissmann’s implication that rather than constituting a transparent means by which Chopin and those who followed in his fingerprints could assert their musical will, the keyboard’s pliability risked engendering automatism; conversely, the creative spirit could be spurred as well as hindered by its mechanical resistance.
BIOGRAPHY:
As scholar, teacher, and pianist, Roger Moseley focuses on intersections between the musical disciplines of history, theory, and performance. His interests range from the music of Brahms, on which he wrote his PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, to music-based video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and from eighteenth-century keyboard improvisation to technologies of musical (re)production.
In his current book project, Between Work and Play: Technologies of Musical Recreation from Mozart to Nintendo, Moseley examines how a diverse array of musical phenomena can be understood as (pre)texts and practices that manifest and enable musical playfulness. His research aims to help establish an agenda for ludomusicology—the study of music as play—that complements and challenges the work-based approach characteristic of much scholarly treatment of Western art music. At the same time, the geographical and chronological scope of his investigations enables him to forge new connections between historical musicology, ethnomusicology, media studies, and other disciplines.
Prior to his arrival at Cornell in 2010, Moseley lectured in music history and theory at the University of Chicago. From 2004-2007 he was a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, and in 2007 he was awarded an MMus with Distinction in Collaborative Piano from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. At Cornell, he teaches undergraduate courses in music history and theory, and recently held a graduate seminar on virtuosity in nineteenth-century music.
In 2011-12, Moseley will be a Faculty Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, where he will offer a seminar on ludo-sonic technologies from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. More information on Moseley’s activities and recordings of his performances and improvisations are available at www.rogermoseley.com.