Piano four-hands,

Alessandra Di Gennaro

About this exposition

This work arises from the long and passionate research the author has been conducting as member of a professional piano duo in order to understand why the piano four-hands repertoire has always been stigmatized as an “inferior genre” despite its unquestionable beauty, and to shed light on the contemporary repertoire for this medium, which is at present almost unknown, unperformed and undiscussed, despite it embodies masterpieces of undoubted artistic value. To do so, the work focuses at first upon the technical challenges, the distinctive features, the possibilities of expression as well as the limitations that characterize the piano four-hands repertoire, explaining why they are of a completely unique order and why they make the medium itself so distinctive and so controversial at the same time. The script then explores the medium also from a more historical point of view, setting it into its social-cultural-musical context and deeply investigating that process that has brought it from being considered one of the most fascinating socio-cultural phenomenas of the 19th century to its almost complete extinction at the beginning of the 20th century, with the ultimate scope of analyzing what’s left of it nowadays and its role in the current musical scene. The results of the investigation point out that once the historical and sociological factors that have allowed the extreme popularity of the medium fell short, it could finally assume a completely new value and be a site of compositional and performance innovation which absolutely deserves to be discovered, performed and analyzed. The outputs of this dissertation have also inspired the young Chinese composer Ching-Fang Teng to write “Entanglement”, a proper homage to the medium and to its endless compositional potential.

type	research exposition
keywords	Instruments & Techniques, quatre-mains, four-hands, piano, repertoire
date	07/03/2021
published	13/07/2021
last modified	13/07/2021
status	published
share status	private
copyright	Alessandra Di Gennaro
license	All rights reserved
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1183802/1183803
published in	KC Research Portal
portal issue	1. Master Research Projects

id	name	copyright	license
1183808	researchpaper	copyright holder	CC BY-NC-ND
1183811	media1	copyright holder	CC BY-NC-ND
1183818	digit2	Mayke Nas	CC BY-NC-ND
1183825	night	Fazil Say	CC BY-NC-ND
1183830	letsplayaduet	copyright holder	CC BY-NC-ND
1183891	media2	copyright holder	CC BY-NC-ND
1183897	entanglement	Ching-Fang Teng	All rights reserved
1309284	researchpaperfinal	copyright holder	CC BY-NC-ND

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Piano four-hands, "once again" (2021)

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