The physiological mechanics of piano technique

Published in 1929, at a time when pedagogic understanding of the mechanical requirements of piano playing and of the pianist's apparatus for meeting them was founded upon barely more than intuitively appealing hunches, *The Physiological Mechanics of Piano Technique*, together with his preceding *Physical Basis of Touch and Tone*, constitutes the culmination of Ortmann's single-handed mission to establish a strictly objective and verifiable corpus of knowledge from which thinking in piano methodology should necessarily proceed.

Bulky (378 pp) and uncompromisingly scientific in its content and manner of presentation, the book's chapters cover basic principles of mechanics, skeletal and muscular anatomy, physiology of the muscles and nervous system; general aspects and characteristics of voluntary movements; and the application of the foregoing in the context of piano-playing, as various efficient touch-forms which constitute the physical basis of technique.

Taken together with Arnold Schultz's *The Riddle of the Pianist's Finger* (1936), which proceeds from them, *Physiological Mechanics* remains a unique and unrivaled analysis of efficient physical technique, and no other works in the history of piano-teaching have exerted a comparable impact upon the general level of attainment among professional performers. Readers should be aware, however, that collosal advances in scientific knowledge of the physiological areas treated by Ortmann have taken place since the book's publication; while the effectiveness of its content is no less today than then, it would be all the more so if, like many key scientific textbooks, it were subject to repeated, ongoing revision and republication in the light of those advances. - *Richard Traub*