Piano Mecanique and Piano Biologique: Nikolai Bernstein's Neurophysiological Study of Piano Touch

摘要

The noise in the laboratory resembled a Futurist concert: now and again a siren would howl, while a pianist, interrupted by shouted commands, hammered on the same two keys of a piano. What the neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein was studying in his experiments at the State Institute for Musicology in Moscow was the "work movements during instrumental performance and the scientific organization of musical labor." Or that at least was how a 1926 report on the institute's work described the research program of the section on the methodology of piano performance, where Bernstein and his colleague Tatyana Popova conducted their experiments on the "bio-dynamics of piano touch."