Essays

Keir GoGwilt is a violinist and Ph.D. candidate in music at UC San Diego, where he writes on performance pedagogy of the European art music tradition. His work is informed by a background in critical theory, phenomenology and aesthetics, as well as by his ongoing, exploratory practice as a violinist, which encompasses classical, contemporary, jazz, and dance/music-theater.

 

In recent years, musicologists have paid renewed attention to the material considerations of instruments and performance. Trending terms such as ‘ludomusicology’ and ‘carnal musicology’ point to an enthusiasm for the thinking and feeling bodies playing musical instruments, as much as the music being played.[1] Critiques of performance conceived as mere reproduction, and injunctions to move music analysis ‘beyond the score’, emphasize the creative dynamics of music-making that unfold on stage (rather than on the page).[2] And renewed study of historical descriptions of performance has illustrated the interdependence of discourse and material bodies.[3] Studies of all these kinds share a common interest in elevating performance studies within the composer-centric field of historical musicology, re-balancing the field’s well-known neglect of performers’ discourses, bodies, instruments and social dynamics. 

            However, as scholars would likely acknowledge, the exaggerated division between composition and performance in current musical practice and scholarship rests upon foundational fissures in music’s disciplinary identity. As far back as the ancient Greeks, music was regarded as a scientific discipline measuring the natural world, whereas both performance and composition were conceived of as practical (or indeed mechanical) arts. This basic division has played out through to the present day, with musical thinkers from Plato to Tartini and Adorno describing their contemporary musical practices as embodying artful rather than natural structures, in sometimes dissimulative and insidious ways. In any case, we should view differences between performance and composition within the broader and longer context of music as a historical discipline that encompasses both theoretical and practical knowledge; that takes as its object both nature and art; and that can be studied as both a liberal art-science and a vocational craft.

            Violin pedagogy in the Euro-American tradition is directed towards often definable standards of performance and execution. Tuition is generally organized around exercising one’s bodily and interpretative faculties, progressing from the practice of scales and études to complete and extended musical works.

            Against this dominant model of violin pedagogy, however, is a history of violinists whose critical and creative perspectives – to varying degrees – contextualize violin-playing within the broader discipline of music as a liberal art-science. This essay takes a close look at the work of one such violinist, the little-known eighteenth-century Italian professor Francesco Galeazzi, whose ‘Art of Playing the Violin’ forms the second part of his four-part Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, published in 1791/1819).

             By focusing on Galeazzi’s work, I hope to give specific examples of the manner in which, as Emily Dolan and John Tresch put it, ‘instruments [...] have changed their material configuration, their mode of activity, their relations to other objects and people, and their aims’.[4] Within Galeazzi’s treatise, the violin appears as a manipulator of passions, a tool of the trade, and an instrument measuring sound and perception. Violin-playing for Galeazzi is a medium for imaginative expression as well as for empirical observations; it blurs the distinction that Tresch and Dolan make between musical instruments, which move composers’ and performers’ inner states ‘outward from the mind to the world’, and scientific instruments, which ‘bring external states of the world into the consciousness of observers, moving from the world to the mind’.[5] 

            Galeazzi takes an expansive view of the art of the violin, addressing its physical, metaphysical and social components. In each of these domains exists an operative dialectic between disciplinary order and free expression, in one’s body, mind and in the social dynamics of the rehearsal room or the abstract interpretive process. At stake in this dialectic is the violinist’s ability to consciously mediate between the freedom of the individual and the collective understanding of disciplinary identity. While Galeazzi’s eighteenth-century musical praxis is not our own, his perspectives on the theory and practice of violin-playing contain valuable lessons for musicians seeking to make sense of contemporary practice, which is in every case defined by or against historical precedent.

 

Galeazzi and his Elementi teorico-pratici di musica

Francesco Galeazzi (1758-1819) was a violinist, conductor, composer, music theorist, mathematician, botanist and political dissident who lived and worked in Turin, Rome and Ascoli Piceno. Although Galeazzi’s educational background remains unclear, his familiarity with the work of polymath Athansius Kircher, as well as music theorists Giovanni Battista Martini and Gioseffo Zarlino attests to a comprehensive formal education, as does his fluency in mathematics and the sciences.[6] As a result of this knowledge and training, Galeazzi’s Elementi teorico-pratici di musica represents a broad overview of contemporary musical thought as well as a deeply historical account of music as an art-science of the medieval quadrivium (along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy).

            The period in which the two editions of the treatise were published (1791/1819) marked something of a watershed moment for European art music. During this time, the Paris Conservatoire and its violin method were established as lasting models for modern conservatory education (as Galeazzi himself mentions in the preface to his second edition). Along with this formalization of performance pedagogy, the skill-sets of composers and performers drifted apart; improvised ornaments, cadenzas and fantasies were largely replaced with the bravura tradition of instrumental virtuosity; the concept of Werktreue came about with the canonization of the past-oriented ‘museum of musical works’;[7] music theory and practice became further separated; in short, classical music took on the pedagogical, institutional and disciplinary organization that largely prevails today.

            Galeazzi’s treatise illuminates this historical moment through detailed description of contemporary practice, his historical knowledge of music as a foundation of ancient learning, and his lived experience as a teacher, violinist and composer. This is not to mention his structuring of the treatise, split into four parts – ‘Elementary Grammar’, ‘The Art of Playing the Violin’, ‘Theory of the Principles of Ancient and Modern Music’ and ‘The Elements of Counterpoint’ – that clearly distinguish between theory and practice or, at base, thinking and doing. To Galeazzi, theoretical study ‘forms part of a much broader science called acoustics’ and ‘concerns the generation and relationship of pitches; that which is usually demonstrated with musical-mathematical calculation’. Practical music, on the other hand, ‘is subdivided into composition and performance’, of which performance is ‘the operative and mechanical part’.[8]

            Taking Galeazzi at his word here, we could understand violin-playing – the subject of this essay – as an entirely illiberal art, the knowledge and practice of which belong to the crafts of musical production and reproduction. Violin-playing, we might say, is more a vocational endeavour, tied explicitly to pre-determined ability, dexterity and technique. Perhaps as a result of this conventional wisdom, musicological attention to Galeazzi’s treatise has focused on parts 3 and 4, including his early descriptions of sonata form (though he does not use the term himself), melodic form and harmonic connection.[9] Besides Angelo Frascarelli’s preface to his translation, there is relatively little extant scholarship on part 2, ‘Art of Playing the Violin’.

            But this understanding – violin-playing as some sort of light-weight limbic pursuit – may lead a false trail, for it obscures the careful nuance of Galeazzi’s critical thought. Throughout the treatise’s four parts, the musician continually integrates theoretical and mathematical observation with practical knowledge. More specifically, in his commentary on violin-playing, Galeazzi uses both the instrument and the techne of playing as a lens onto topics including psychoacoustic perception, the anatomy of hearing, the nature of dissonance, and the spiritual and affective powers of intonation. To put this in other words, Galeazzi uses the practical art of violin-playing to pose fundamental questions about human nature and culture.

            In the paragraphs below, I describe Galeazzi’s liberal art of the violin as a networked circuit between the instrument, the violinist’s body and mind, and the composing, playing and listening subjects. This broadly conceieved art of the violin mediates between practical and theoretical knowledge, between disciplined control and expressive freedom, and between formalism and flux. These mediations play out in the physical organization of bodily position and movement; the mindful balance of understanding and imagination; and the negotiation of social relationships between musicians and listeners.

 

Galeazzi’s Physics

One of Galeazzi’s primary concerns throughout his treatise is to facilitate the free movement of the body around the violin. This requires a disciplined understanding of different forms and positions of the hands, and the relation between these forms and the movements they should facilitate. For example, Galeazzi suggests that ‘by keeping the [left] hand turned as directed [parallel to the fingerboard] one can easily shift, with only one action as quick as a flash, from one end of the fingerboard to the other without meeting an obstacle which would retard the movement for even a second’.[10] In other words, he suggests that players avoid unnecessary adjustments of the left-hand position in order to facilitate a shifting movement along the neck of the violin. An effortless and accurate shift involves balancing a disciplined understanding of the left-hand position with the free movement of the same hand across the instrument.

            Here, a dialectic between discipline and freedom plays out on the corporeal level. This left-hand shift involves simultaneously attending to position and to motion – an embodied mediation of music’s formalism (the hand position) and flux (the fluid motion of the shifting hand).

            A similar mediation plays out in the relationship between instrument and instrumentalist. Galeazzi advocates against other pedagogues’ ‘conviction that the greater the pressure with which the strings are stopped, the greater the quantity of [...] sound which will come from the instrument’. The pressure of the fingertips upon the string dampens the strings’ vibration, sometimes ‘to such an extent that it totally intercepts every communication of the sounding vibrations between the two parts of the string divided by the finger’.[11] The violinist’s finger stops the natural vibrations of the string to artificially sound a different pitch, but if the finger pressure is too intense, it dampens the string’s vibration and thus the resulting sound. According to Galeazzi, the string should be stopped lightly to maintain the ‘communication’ of the string across the finger. The vibrancy of the string – its ability to resonate with itself – thus relies on the sensitive touch of the violinist.

            This description posits a relationship between the instrument and the instrumentalist: the freedom of the string’s vibration is only maintained through a disciplined attention to the violinist’s touch. Galeazzi combines his theoretical knowledge of acoustics with his embodied knowledge of violin-playing in order to describe a responsive, communicative relationship between different parts of the violinist and the violin.

 

Galeazzi’s Metaphysics 

Galeazzi’s physics brings together the instrument’s resonant properties and the instrumentalist’s bodily technique in responsive relation to one another. The role of the violinist’s mind in mediating between the body, instrument and sounding music is another crucial link in his art of the violin. 

            The relationship between the violinist’s mind and body arises in Galeazzi’s remarks on counting time. The location of time-keeping in the body or the mind is still debated by musicians and psychologists;[12] it was already an involved debate for eighteenth-century violinists including Galeazzi and Leopold Mozart.[13] On the surface, Galeazzi appears to prefer a mental time-keeping model, asserting that time-keeping should occur in the mind independent of the body: ‘Be far removed from us then, any mechanical time beating by physical means, and let us endeavor only to make it enter into the head of our student, so that when he has it firmly in his head, he can with his head control his hands and his feet, if necessary’.[14] However, having advocated for the mind-over-body principle, Galeazzi’s pedagogical strategy involves training the student ‘to count the values from the very first with his voice and then in his mind’.[15] The voice thus acts as a mediator between mind and body, initially grounding the mind, before ceding way as the mind takes over control. Time-keeping, according to this methodology, takes place as a mediating function between body and mind, between the mechanism or discipline of the count and the expressive freedom it facilitates. 

            The question of how thought and matter interact was (and remains) a motivating one for thinkers after Descartes, who in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) articulated the distinction between matter as spatial, un-thinking and extensive, and mind, the essence of which he conceived as thought. Cartesian dualism – or the separation of these two components – opens up the question of how thought affects matter, and conversely, how matter affects the mind. Bundled into the problem of Cartesian dualism is the question of the relationship between the mind and the body – a question that Galeazzi metaphorically extends into questions of socio-political organization (as we will see in the next section). Galeazzi’s meditations on time-keeping illustrate the ways in which violinists operated within the paradigmatic understanding of Cartesian dualism, with practical and theoretical consequences for pedagogy and performance. 

            Beyond this specific matter of keeping time, Galeazzi’s remarks on violin-playing address a related set of bigger, broader questions: what is the relationship between scientific or mathematical (i.e. theoretical) knowledge, and the tacit or embodied (i.e. practical) knowledge of violin-playing? How does theoretical knowledge affect or guide the bodily calculus of the trained violinist? Alternatively, how does our lived, empirical practice confirm or aid the discovery of scientific knowledge? 

            These questions come to the fore within Galeazzi’s meditation on intonation: specifically, on the threshold of discernible difference between pitches; and on the relation between what he calls ‘theoretical speculations’ and the ‘mathematical exactness’[16] of a masterful violinist’s intonation. Interestingly, and in a manner that would foresee Hermann von Helmholtz (about fifty years later),[17] Galeazzi conceptualizes his musical instrument as a scientific device, utilizing his craftsmanship as a violinist as part of an empirical and experimental scholarly agenda. 

            Galeazzi’s discussion centres on a series of diagrams which, with mathematical precision, map different scales onto graphic representations of the violin fingerboard: Figure 1 provides an example, showing the finger positions of the scales as ratios on the string.

Scale diagrams on the violin fingerboard; rpt in Frascarelli, 210.

Galeazzi anticipates the ‘many objections’ that readers might have to his diagrams, the first of which ‘will be made by those who believe that the smallest intervals such as the comma or schisma, etc., are not usable in practice.’[18] Countering this claim, Galeazzi cites a theoretical precedent as well as a practical experiment: 

I beg them [the critics] to consider that the very distinguished Padre Giambattista Martini in his immortal Storia della Musica, page 267, Volume I, along with Padre Mersenne, is of the opinion that a 1/20^th part of the comma is quite discernible to the ear. Moreover, I propose the following experiment for them, which is extremely easy to repeat on any mediocre violin. Place any finger perpendicularly anywhere on a string of the violin and listen attentively to the pitch which ensues; without moving the finger from the spot, bend it slightly either towards the bridge or the pegs. In the first case the pitch will be heard to rise discernibly and in the second, fall, although the bending of the finger produces an infinitesimally slight rise and one certainly much less than 1/20 of a comma. One may consider that, the comma being 1/91 part of the length of the entire string, one such part, put on the usual scale, will very quickly be seen to be divisible into more discernible parts than that which was expressed by the above-mentioned celebrated author, and each such part will create for the ear a different, distinguishable sensation (II-II, 222-223).[19] 

In the simplest terms, Galeazzi is here explaining how moving the finger even slightly will create discernible fluctuations in pitch. He employs the tacit knowledge of a violin-playing body to confirm theoretical knowledge of acoustics and mathematics. Elsewhere in his treatise, Galeazzi attempts the reverse, using theoretical knowledge to direct practical musicianship. For example, he is bothered by scalar chord progressions, which according to him vibrate hairs in the inner ear in a dissonant and unpleasant manner. Following this theoretical explanation of dissonance allows him to engineer an ‘agreeable sensation’[20] through his practical knowledge of contrapuntal inversions, which smooth the disagreeable sensation of these chord progressions. 

            Galeazzi goes on to laud the ‘greatest advantage’ that theory has ‘over mere practice’, even as his treatise continually points to the cross-fertilization between the two. He writes: ‘Beyond taking into account the origins and establishing the certainty of the […] smallest intervals’, theoretical and mathematical knowledge about intonation ‘can considerably shorten the time to acquire precise intonation’.[21] Galeazzi here suggests that theoretical knowledge paves the way for practice. Of course, theoretical knowledge is also premised on practice: like the mediating voice, which provides a necessary groundwork for the mental mastery of time-keeping, the skilled practice of the body – its attunement to minute qualities of sensation and difference – is what allows the violinist to empirically confirm theoretical knowledge. 

            For Galeazzi, mastery of the art of the violin involves considered mediations between the mind and body, and between theoretical and practical knowledge. He utilizes his full and varied skillset to teach and play the instrument; as such, the instrument holds together fissures in music’s disciplinary identity between theory and practice, between its status as a liberal art and as a vocational training. Yet still missing in these considerations is the free expression of the individual: how does one master music’s disciplinary structures without falling into their merely mechanistic reproduction? How does the spirit find pleasure and freedom within disciplinary coordinates? 

            Comparing ‘two excellent singers or [...] instrumentalists’, only one of whom ‘reaches our heart, insinuates himself into our soul [...] and pervades us with the most vivid pleasure’,[22] Galeazzi determines that it is the ‘almost mathematical precision of intonation’ of one that touches ‘the soul of their listeners’ and ‘alone consists all the power and strength of music’.[23] Disciplinary mechanisms – mathematical knowledge of intonation and the bodily calculus of the practiced musician – allow the musician to access the affective potential of intonation, which undergirds the cosmic and spiritual ‘power’ of music. 

            It might seem, then, that Galeazzi’s understanding of the human spirit is predominately mechanistic, insofar as he envisages the spirit expressed and animated solely by the ‘mathematical precision of intonation’. Yet while he does reach back to this Pythagorean conception of the human spirit as linked to cosmic proportion and order, his thought also draws upon notions of Romantic individualism and subjectivity. 

            Expression and style are important operative terms for Galeazzi, and, in his analysis, they have to do with bowing and ornamentation, rather than intonation. Style, for example, separates the ‘mechanical performer’ from the ‘virtuoso’, a status that ‘belongs only to him who possesses the inventive genius and style which form the very character of the fine arts’.[24] Galeazzi’s Romantic focus on the cultivated individual is clear in his description of the concerto genre. The concerto serves as a measure of the individual performer in mind, body and spirit:

In this way the virtuoso performer will display a majestic, expansive and serious statement in the first allegro, will unfold the espressione, fine style, and excellent bow control in the adagio, and will finally release the imagination in the rondo; with a brilliant flourish he will seek to insinuate joy in the soul of the listeners so that they may leave joyfully, and contentedly, applauding the one who knew so well how to satisfy them.[25]

The three-movement structure of the concerto highlights various strengths of the performer: their ability to make an expansive musical statement (navigating large-scale compositional form), to display style through the bow arm and to ‘release the imagination in the rondo’. As such, the movements of concerto form alternately present the performer’s musical understanding, bodily expression and imaginative spirit; a measured exposition of the mind, body and spirit of the performing subject. As such, it is the very disciplinary standards of musical forms and bodily technique that provide the armature for the imaginative genius of the violinist.

            As we will see in the next section, the negotiation of bodily and musical discipline is manifest in the social relations of composers, performers and listeners. The liberal art of violin-playing again plays out vividly on the social and political level, as the negotiation of freedoms between individuals.

 

Galeazzi’s Social Contracts

The art of violin-playing involves numerous interpersonal relationships: between the violinist and the composer, the violinist and other performers, and the violinist and the listener (to name a few). Each of these interactions affords different kinds of power structures: some of which model liberal dialogue and communication; others of which default to more authoritarian modes of organization. Each of these social orders involves mediations between people – their minds, bodies and spirits.

            The relationship between composer and performer is of primary concern for Galeazzi. As musicologist Mary Hunter has pointed out, the Romantic conception of musical performance in the nineteenth-century is often described as a kind of Hegelian mind-meld, which, in many cases, subordinates the performer as spiritual vessel for the genius of the composer. [26] Galeazzi’s description of this relationship is more tempered than some of his contemporaries and predecessors, who both celebrate and fret over the diminishing creative domain of the performer.[27] However, his principal ideal is indeed a unity of expression, in which the performer and the composer express themselves as ‘one mind’.[28]

            Galeazzi suggests that the composer ‘must necessarily leave much to the discretion of the performer, so it is the latter’s task to supply to the manuscripts from his own fancy that which the composer has not expressed’.[29] This comes down to the performer’s style, which is divided into two parts: ornamentation and expression. Ornamentation displays the taste and imaginative genius of the performer, but too much of it destroys the composer’s ‘principal thought’.[30] Expression has primarily to do with bowing, which ‘impregnates into the soul of the audience hate, love, desire, sadness, fear, joy, and all the dynamism that modern music has’.[31] In contrast to intonation, which draws from principles of nature, bowing draws from principles of art, ‘which nature alone cannot determine’ and ‘which can only be acquired after the most mature reflection’.[32]

            The basics of ornamentation can be taught as a set of rules: Galeazzi joins violinists including Geminiani, Tartini and Leopold Mozart in providing examples of ornamentations (including vibrato, diminuzione, trills and so forth) and their appropriate usage. The disciplinary guidelines around ornamentation again facilitate the imaginative freedom of the performer. The diminuzione in particular – which refers to the ways in which series of notes can be imaginatively re-combined – depends largely upon ‘the talent and style of the performer’, rather than their understanding of rules. Still, this liberal element of style can be aided by theoretical knowledge. The combinatorial possibilities of even a few sounds, opens ‘an immense multiplicity of cantilena [...] from a very few pitches’.[33]

            When it comes to the ability to enter the mind and thought of the composer, however, ‘Nature more than anything else must be the teacher’.[34] The ability to moderate between one’s own imaginative genius and another’s thoughts cannot be dictated or regulated. It does, however, involve the intention of the performer, to add ornaments ‘with taste and discernment always aiming not to cover nor conceal the principal melody but rather to animate and reinforce it’. It should be done discerningly, but also in a spirit of willingness and solidarity: ‘to concur, in a word, with the composer in achieving the proposed effect’.[35]

            Chamber music provides another example of the liberal moderation between people and minds. The transparency of chamber music – in which ‘everything is discernible from the most wretched and frail sound to the most robust and loud’[36] – allows for the widest range of expressions. This is ‘where the virtuoso can immerse himself in the affections expressed by the composer and enter perfectly into the latter’s imagination’;[37] it is also where the performers themselves can reasonably negotiate between their own imaginations and styles. This is manifest in the trading of principal melodies and accompaniment; when ‘one accompanies, he does not make diminutions, but, rather, reduces the volume of sound and lets the one who must ornament the part be the one to ornament’.[38]

            The liberal model of chamber music is strikingly absent in larger, orchestral forms. Here, Galeazzi draws attention to the militant aspects of orchestral discipline: ‘Nothing is more beautiful than the sound of the perfect ensemble that is observed there and the sight of the regularity with which all the bows are moved which seems exactly like seeing military drills with well-commanded and disciplined troops’.[39] Everyone must be ‘perfectly united as if [...] one performer’.[40] The quest for unity here does not leave room for multiple imaginations, and expediency ‘does not permit one to consult and deliberate with his colleagues’.[41]

            Galeazzi extends the military analogy to civil governance. Here, he characterizes the mind/body relationship in an explicitly political way:

There has never been any body that was not governed by a head nor has there ever been a body well-governed by many heads where these were not so intimately united that they formed only one. This axiom, very true in politics, both military and civil, is even more evident in music [....][42]

It is primarily up to the concertmaster to interpret the ‘espressione according to the idea of the composer’,[43] and to communicate this to the orchestra. The orchestra, in turn, is obligated to unite with the concertmaster, regardless of what they think of his or her judgment.

            As such, orchestral playing seems to be the arena in which violin-playing is incompatible with the project of liberalism, and in which the need for discipline entirely dominates the free disposition of the players. Even the concertmaster, in a position of command, is bound to this illiberal contract: ‘he must communicate to the others in a clear and distinct manner, without equivocation’.[44] Beyond this, the concertmaster has several duties, including orchestrating and arranging the ensemble based on the site and occasion of the performance.

            Galeazzi’s attunement to the site of performance is matched by his attunement to the listener. Rather than defaulting to the kind of absolutist or universalist assumptions of musical expression characteristic of much nineteenth-century thought, he pays close attention to the differing tastes and characters of audiences. In addition to knowing the music he or she plays, the ‘virtuoso who wishes to succeed reasonably with the public must know: 1. his own instrument, 2. the public to which he [performs], 3. the orchestra that must accompany him, 4. the site where he is to play [...]’.[45] Like Tartini before him, who considers good taste to be as particular as affects and the melodies that express them,[46] Galeazzi understands the relative nature of musical expression: ‘In summary, every little town, every nation has its own character which is very, very important to know and to favor by one who wishes to be esteemed by the public’.[47]

 

Conclusion: Can the Violin Be Taught as a Liberal Art?

Against a more mundane or commonsense understanding of violin-playing as a predominately practical craft, this essay has worked through Francesco Galeazzi’s writing to explicate the interwoven nature of theory and practice in physical, metaphysical and social terms. In this account of instrumental pedagogy, the violin becomes a central object networking musical bodies, minds and subjects, as they navigate between collective, disciplinary identity and more imaginative, fluid expressions. This dialectic between discipline and freedom is characteristic of the project of the ars liberalis (liberal arts), which names a central ambiguity between disciplined craft (ars) and freedom of thought (liberalis).[48]

            It would of course be a mistake to present Galeazzi’s liberal art of the violin as a model for instrumental pedagogy today, given that he is describing a particular historical moment in musical practice and thought. Positing Galeazzi as the central model would be a regressive move, denying the inescapable heterogeneity and hybridization of musical practices today (even as institutions of classical music performance and education continue to self-police their disciplinary identity). This being said, there are a number of ways in which Galeazzi’s treatise remains relevant. For one, his fine-grained descriptions of templates for performance are still relevant for contemporary practitioners. These templates include his mapping of mathematical pitch relations on the fingerboard, close descriptions of the left hand’s shifting motion, remarks on the combinatorial practice of extemporization, characterizations of the responsibilities of musicians towards each other, and his three-part description of concerto form. All of these discursive representations of practice are informed not only by Galeazzi’s own experience as a violinist, but by centuries of experimentation – they may be read as his attempt to distill some of the corporeal and epistemological frameworks guiding the art of playing the violin. Given the manner in which contemporary violin pedagogy has successively built upon historical precedent, these templates linger in our bodies and minds, even as they are altered and adapted. A detailed understanding of the templates grounding classical performance allows us to more consciously reflect upon what practices, sounds and understandings hold together this disciplinary identity. This, in turn, might allow us to conscientiously open up the channels of musical imagination and understanding that have been prescribed by historical precedent, as opposed to blindly following or entirely eschewing them.

            Galeazzi’s integration of theory and practice also leaves tantalizing clues about a current pedagogy that would teach the violin not merely as an instrument of performance, but also as an instrument yielding insights into cultural history and the peculiarities of human cognition and perception. In recent decades, experimental musicians including Alvin Lucier, Eliane Radigue and George Lewis (to name only a few of the most well-known examples) have made music around psychoacoustic phenomena and the social/cultural dynamics of improvisation. What might a broader pedagogical project of violin-playing, infused by both experimental and historical traditions, look like?

            While answering this question would move well beyond not only Galeazzi but classical music at large, I have attempted to illustrate the part that historical research might play in reflecting upon the state of current violin performance and pedagogy. Galeazzi’s treatise provides helpful coordinates for describing the liberal art of the violin as a responsive negotiation between disciplinary identity and imaginative experimentation. In contrast to the more restrictive, vocational model of violin pedagogy as a means of musical reproduction, a liberal art of the violin might reflect upon the historical contest of discipline and freedom through the physical, metaphysical and social dynamics of performance.

 

[1] Roger Moseley, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016); Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).

[2] Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score (Oxford University Press, 2013).

[3] James Q Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014).

[4] John Tresch and Emily Dolan, ‘Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science’, Osiris, 8/1 (2013), 283.

[5] Ibid., 281.

[6] See Francesco Galeazzi, Elementi teorico-pratici di musica (1791/1817); trans. Deborah Burton and Gregory W. Harwood, The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

[7] Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

[8] Galeazzi; trans. Burton and Harwood, The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV, 26-27.

[9] See Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980); Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988); James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford University Press, 2007); and Richard Cohn, Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature (Oxford University Press, 2012).

[10] Quoted in Angelo Frascarelli ‘Elementi teorico-pratici di musica by Francesco Galeazzi: An Annotated English Translation and Study of Volume I’, DMA Dissertation (University of Rochester, 1968), 150.

[11] Ibid., 193.

[12] Caroline Palmer, ‘Music Performance’, Annual Review of Psychology, 48/1 (1997), 115–38.

[13] On teaching the violin, Leopold Mozart writes: ‘One must […] instill the crotchets thoroughly into his [the student’s] mind’; see his well-known and influential violin treatise of 1756 Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, or A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, trans. Editha Knocker (Oxford University Press, 1948), 34.

[14] Frascarelli, ‘Elementi Teorico-Pratici di Musica’, 157.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., 226.

[17] Hermann Von Helmoltz, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863); trans. Alexander J. Ellis, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (New York: Dover, 1954).

[18] Frascarelli, ‘Elementi Teorico-Pratici di Musica’, 222. 

[19] Ibid. 

[20] Galeazzi, trans. Burton and Harwood, The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV, 176. 

[21] Frascarelli, ‘Elementi Teorico-Pratici di Musica’, 226. 

[22] Ibid., 227. 

[23] Ibid. 

[24] Ibid., 160. 

[25] Ibid., 408–9. 

[26] Mary Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 58/2 (2005), 357–98. 

[27] Both Pierre Baillot and Carl Flesch express concerns about how the over-determination of notation might limit the creativity of the performer: see Baillot, L’Art du violon (1834); trans. Louise Goldberg (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999); and Flesch, Die Kunst des Violinspiels, 2 vols (Berlin: Ries & Erler, 1923, 1928).

[28] Frascarelli, ‘Elementi Teorico-Pratici di Musica’, 346. 

[29] Ibid., 345.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Ibid., 282. 

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid., 357.

[34] Ibid., 346.

[35] Ibid., 362.

[36] Ibid., 402.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ibid., 403.

[39] Ibid., 375.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Ibid., 376.

[42] Ibid.

[43] Ibid., 379.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid., 403.

[46] Fredric Johnson, ‘Tartini’s Trattato di musica seconda la vera scienza dell’armonia: An Annotated Translation with Commentary’, PhD dissertation (Indiana University, 1985).

[47] Frascarelli, ‘Elementi Teorico-Pratici di Musica’, 404.

[48] This is an observation made by philosopher Nigel Tubbs; see his Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education: Freedom is to Learn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

 

 

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