Ph.D. candidate Theodora Serbanescu-Martin gives a talk based on her dissertation titled, “Fashionable Concealments: Myth, Material, and Method in Nineteenth-Century Pianism ”

This dissertation reimagines nineteenth-century pianism as a system of fashionable concealment—where bodies, gestures, and techniques were shaped by the material codes of dress, literary fantasy, and technological display. Through five case studies, I explore how the aesthetics of virtuosity mediated gender, sexuality, artistic identity, and authority in ways often overlooked in traditional scholarship.

I focus on figures whose techniques and aesthetics have marked the outer limits of what the piano can do—Herz’s finger-strengthening devices, Clara Schumann’s corseted pedagogy, Liszt’s theatrical cloaking, Chopin’s queer epistolary grace, and Brahms’s bearded dialectics. Paradoxically, these most extreme and idiosyncratic examples of pianism have also served as normative anchors within institutional musical culture, their transgressive or expressive potential absorbed into disciplinary ideals and historical mythologies. My readings recover the performative tension between self-fashioning and standardization—between spectacle and suppression.

Drawing on underexplored literary and epistolary archives—such as George Sand’s Le Contrebandier and women’s performance-centered correspondence—I argue that pianism was not only a medium of discipline, but also a space of imaginative revolt. As both scholar and performer, I use what I call “extended techniques” of historically informed performance, critically interrogating the meaning and marked materiality of reconstructed devices and period clothing to access the gestural and sensorial atmosphere of Romantic technique.