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Thus I attempt to show that during the hundred and fifty years since Chopin's death, both pianists' performance practices and musicological discourse have attempted to cleanse Chopin's music from its associations with smallness and, consequently, with femininity.The Impact of Chopin's Music on the Work of 19 th and 20 th Century Composersĭue to the popularity of interdisciplinary studies, "reception" has in the last few decades become a new subject of research, describing not only continuing relationships in the history of music, or of art in general, but also inspiring discussions of a theoretical and aesthetic nature. It is my argument that a veil of suspicion is indispensable when analyzing the language that people have used to describe their experiences with music, because they have used language to express their preferences for certain kinds of experiences. Jeffrey Kallberg has analyzed an array of gender-oriented metaphors in relation to Chopin's possible gender-ambiguity, wishing to remove the veil of suspicion that surrounds The forcefulness and consequent loudness with which Chopin's music was played on these larger pianos might well have caused (and could still be causing) some pianists' physical problems. While the nineteenth-century development of the piano into a powerful concert instrument undoubtedly reflected the changing nature of concert venues and audiences, since recitals moved from the salon to the concert hall, the changes in design could alsoīeen seen as reflecting an ever-increasing desire for largeness. This search appears to be anĪttempt to illustrate that Chopin was intellectually 'heroic' because he could match the organic unification that some musicologists find in the works of other great composers. For example, in 1986, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger analyzed Chopin's compositions in a way that seems to me to reveal Eigeldinger's own search for complex underlying forms.
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Thus, musicians and musicologists have criticized his works for their lack of complexity and length and for the nature of their melodies, characteristics that I show to have been associated with both size and masculinity. Heroism, and it seems that smallness was seen consequently as lacking in heroism. Largeness seems to have been linked in a number of ways to
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It is my thesis that smallness has been, and often still is, associated with femininity and that those pianists and authors who advocated largeness - however defined (be it 'grand,' 'healthy,' 'forte,' or 'masculine') - were afraid that Chopin's refined pianism and the "small" aspects of his compositions might be used as evidence that Chopin was not strictly heterosexual. That the desire of French, Polish, German and Viennese audiences for what he called "aesthetic jumboism" was detrimental to Chopin's popularity. Negative assessments of Chopin's works also appear in later critical and musicological literature. Some of Chopin's contemporaries saw his playing as feminine and contrasted his works with those of Beethoven, whose works seemed to them to express masculinity. Performances were seen as deficient when they were contrasted with those of others, and especially those of Franz Liszt. Although his performances enjoyed support from some members of his society, most contemporary commentators viewed his performances negatively. They commented that his method of playing was light in touch, and that his demeanor on stage contrasted strongly with that of other performers who were outwardly expressive. Frederic Chopin's contemporaries took note of his preference for a piano with a light escapement.