AbstractsHistory

Although substantial research has been conducted on piano pedaling as it relates to certain works or composers, the sudden appearance of piano pedaling literature as a widespread pedagogical phenomenon has been given little consideration by scholars. During a relatively short period of time around the turn of the twentieth century, a significant amount of new literature on piano pedaling was written. This thesis focuses on pedaling treatises, articles, and exercises written from the 1890s to the 1930s and considers several important questions, including: what changes in the piano led to the sudden appearance of these sources, what the intended audience for this new literature was, what pedal techniques were being taught, and the forms of pedal notation that emerged from this literature. The appearance of technical literature for piano pedaling corresponds with what is now termed the “golden age” of the piano (because of the increasingly affordable mass produced piano) that reached its peak in 1909. As part of an exploration of the possible impetuses behind the appearance of this literature, the large-scale standardization of pedal mechanisms on modern grand pianos is detailed. I will examine four major treatises on piano pedaling. The first two, representing the beginning of this new pedagogical field in the late nineteenth century, are Hans Schmitt’s The Pedals of the Piano-forte and Alexander Bukhovstev’s Guide to the Proper Use of the Pianoforte Pedals. The other two twentieth-century treatises, representing the end of the corresponding “golden age” in piano pedaling literature, are Teresa Carreño’s Possibilities of Tone Color By Artistic Use of Pedals and York Bowen’s Pedalling the Modern Pianoforte. Articles on pedaling published from 1910 to 1930 in The Etude, the first music journal to focus on piano technique, are also considered, along with collections of piano literature created specifically for the purpose of teaching proper pedaling techniques. A larger issue regarding performance practice emerges through the study of these sources, with earlier authors attempting to codify a set of pedaling “rules,” while twentieth-century authors increasingly emphasized the use of the pedal as a matter of individual taste and judgment.