Tone production on the piano: the research of Otto Rudolph Ortmann
Amy Elizabeth Gustafson · Texas ScholarWorks (Texas Digital Library) · 2007
The purpose of this treatise is to discuss tone production on the piano, specifically focusing on the research of Otto Rudolph Ortmann, whose work marked a turning point in the history of piano pedagogy and set a new standard for piano-related scholarship.Writing in the early twentieth century, Ortmann, who was both an accomplished pianist and an avid scientist, was one of the first to consciously and meticulously combine the two fields.Today, Ortmann's books are mostly out of print and his research is little known by the average piano student or teacher.However, Ortmann's books greatly affected and influenced many of his contemporaries, and no matter how neglected today, they contain a wealth of information and practical advice highly relevant to any serious pianist.While his research spans a range of topics, including the science of piano acoustics, experiments and scientific explanations of piano technique, and even music education, his work focusing on piano tone production was perhaps the most No language is so difficult to understand as the language of tones.Music, in this respect, differs from all other arts: its transiency keeps its nature obscure and makes its effects subtle.As a result, truth and error, fact and fancy, have long played a game of hide-andseek in musical theory.