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Understanding Clementi's Fingerings

This research project proposes a complete methodology concerning the treatment of 18th and 19th century keyboard methods, aiming to enrich our understanding and perspectives of historically informed performance based on an analyses of Clementi’s didactical opuses from the point of view of fingerings.
49 C4105 D3 D424 CE5936 A476 C44326 CB0

Anastasios Zafeiropoulos

toetsen

This project is a case study of Clementi’s early didactic works (Six Sonatinas Op. 36, Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte Op. 42 with its Appendix Op. 43) focusing on fingerings – a subject that has been either taken for granted or overlooked in today’s scholarship, performance, and education, despite its vital contribution to the composer’s great renown in his time. Through practice-based analysis and contextualisation of this corpus in relation to other didactic works accessible in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England, I reconstruct a possible learning setting of Clementi’s time as the general framework of my research processes, implementing a hands-on approach for the scholarly treatment of early keyboard methods. By applying fingerings to a relevant repertoire I re-evaluate novelty in Clementi’s pedagogy on period instruments, thereby enriching historically informed performance with historically informed education.
The following questions best summarise my research:

  • Which are the rules underlying Clementi's fingerings and how do they relate to or differ from other composers' fingering systems?
  • How do these work on different piano actions?
  • How to integrate fingering in a modern edition?
  • How to perform fingerings