On the domestic music practice context, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the piano has become the representative instrument, given its abilities and easiness to produce sound.
The piano and the domestic piano performance are objects of a textual and discursive reading. It implies not only the sound aspects but also, as Richard Leppert (1993) argues, the involving of the instrument on the environment where it is put (as representative and as formation), having the ability to shape this same environment. Leppert refers that the piano creates meaning, including what he call the sight (vision, look), that contains practices to produce sound and visual components (images). Given this idea, the piano becomes an object with different readings, for you look, you hear and you play, enabling, many times, associations to the iconographic analysis. Consequently, the musical thinking study is fundamental to the analysis of the music implications in culture, for we are looking to music as a social activity, considering what surrounds it.
The piano has been the instrument, by excellence, of the virtuous and the amateur, and also, as Cyril Erlich says on his book The Piano, a History, a “potential symbol of the social progress” (1993:1). In this logic, Arthur Loesser mentions that “the piano is the object that has fulfilled the needs of time, for it is expressive, to play it demands to adapt to its capacity and it is expensive enough to be socially wanted” (1954:218).
The nineteenth-century piano is signed by the improvements and technical innovations and by a consequent extension of its musical repertoire. Already during the last three decades of the eighteenth century, when the fast technological and productive development begins, there was a growth of the amount and diversity of music published for this instrument, with a specification of genres for keyboard, on an ascending market, containing professional and amateur interpreters. Besides, writing styles emerge, to answer to the differences of the mechanisms and sound of the Viennese and English instruments. In the eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century, the classical genres Concerto and Sonata were linked, respectively, to virtuosity and domestic practice. The latter arose to the public spaces and consequent virtuosity with the contributions of Haydn and Beethoven, among others. (Wheelock, 2000: 109-131). During the first decades of the nineteenth century, a large collection of piano scores was published, that contained transcriptions for two or four hands of excerpts of the most popular operas (arias, ouvertures, duetti, tercetti, etc.), dance music – quadrilles, waltzes – and symphonies. To David Wainright, this is a “brilliant but not difficult [repertoire], that could be played by the daughters of the house (…) to impress relatives and potential suitors” (1975: 84). We understand now, clearly, the importance of the domestic practice in the eighteenth century context, for it gives growth to a specific type of repertoire thought to the executants.
Richard Leppert (1992) describes the connections established between the woman and the piano that, on the Nineteenth century, were multiple and complexes. This musical instrument is involved with gender issues that lead it to an extra-musical function on the house environment, that is revealed on the attachment of the instrument to the woman at three levels, given the continuous time bond to the environment that involves the house: family, wife and mother. The piano, or another keyboard instrument on a domestic context, establishes some ideas that should be studied to understand the feminine role. Sometimes, on the nineteenth century, the keyboard instruments were offered to women, by their husbands, as a wedding gift, being, most likely, the only house furniture on this situation. Leppert suggests, on this case, that it is a reflection of the wife’s imprisoning. The husband wishes her submission and focuses her on an object that he offered her, being under his domain. On the other hand, the representation of hunting scenes on the decoration of the keyboard instruments between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries implied an aesthetics of violence. The woman’s musical interpretation, on the private sphere, on instruments with this decoration, could torment the feminine atmosphere.
The changes impelled by the “revolution” suffered by the piano are associated to the market growth, and so, it is unquestionable that the creators gave value to public taste of their costumers, for it is a domestic pianos capitalist market. The idea of the adaptation of the instrument to the environment where it exists emerges. The conquest of the instrument by the bourgeoisie created the need for adjustment to the bourgeois houses, in an attempt to economize the space. It implies also practical and utilitarian needs.
The idea of the piano as furniture becomes essential in the context of the domestic music practice, because the place where it fits and the conditioners that surround it are very relevant. There are cases where the instrument adopts more than one use: an instrument placed on a vertical position, of the English builder Broadwood and Sons (1815) has two uses: musical and storage. When the doors are closed, it all seems normal (the doors stayed normally closed), but when they are opened, we can understand the utility of the shelves that exist in the instrument. To Richard Leppert, this double function also has a double meaning, for it shows the piano as a medium-class instrument and, at the same time, as a feminine instrument. The fact that is has space to store things associates, once more, the performance of the piano to the woman’s role, as a wife and as a mother. On the other hand, the space that it contains could be used to organize the family’s music library. The piano builders were aware of the feminine role during the nineteenth century, where the patriarchal domain subjugated the woman and her functions, restricting her to the private sphere. Another example is the table piano shaped as a sewing table, which once again links to the feminine, on an instrument thought to the domestic sphere. So, Leppert observes that the bourgeois utilitism, having the piano as a feminine object, is also a masculine claim to music, made by schemes and decorative designs.
The study about the existence of pianos on Graciosa Island certifies the existence, in our days, of practices similar to those who were described above on this island. Certainly, these practices occurred, and may still occur, on the rest of the country. Even though there is not a domestic piano practice, the instruments remain on those houses, suffering adaptations to the local physical transformations. The respect and reverence to the instrument make it subsist as furniture, storage case, closet, bottle shelves, as furniture of the physical environment of the house.
