Pianist as action executer and observer: Fingering in musical communication

Abstract

Fingering, the technique of selecting which fingers to use for given notes, poses a challenge to the transmission model of musical communication, in particular, to the role of performers. Whereas the matter of fingering tends to be considered individualistic, autonomous, and contextual nowadays, a body of historical discourse exist, which sheds a different light on fingering. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, piano pedagogical treatises codified and standardized fingerings and performing editions indicated fingering for nearly every single phrase. Such approaches to fingering as collective knowledge blur the boundary between composer as the information source and performer as transmitter. Fingering rules and indications were not intervening “noise” in musical communication; they mediated the paths between performers. Pianists embodied, shared, and distributed their musical knowledge in fingers through these clusters of discourse (see Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 1991; Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 1995). This nature of fingering as distributed cognition also leads us to reflect on the identity of performer in musical communication. Pianists not only execute actions and but also observe actions of others. Mimesis or motor modeling, i.e., learning by observing others’ actions, was the key pedagogical strategy in historical piano discourse and still works for today’s popular medium of concert film, where camera often zooms in to show pianists’ fingerings. Given that fingering is executed in accordance with a motor syntax that is learned, pianists would respond to others’ adoption of different or motorsyntactically “wrong” fingerings. How are the perception of others’ fingering and the pianist’s own action related to each other? The present paper examines historical discourse and empirical studies on piano fingering and looks into the bidirectional relationship between perception and action through “motor resonance” and “perceptual resonance”(“Perceptual resonance”, Schütz-Bosbach & Prinz, 2007). Pianists’ cognitive and performing identity emerges in this interface between action and perception.