Chopin's Musical Education and Influences

It’s my pleasure to introduce my guest today, pianist, composer, educator, and researcher, Philipp Teriete. Today we will explore the improvisation and partimento in the 19th century, the great French music teacher Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman, Frederic Chopin's music education, the influence of German music theory in early ragtime and jazz composers and so much more!

0:38 What is your background and how did you come to your present areas of research? 4:40 Who was Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmerman? 5:55 Did he have any famous pupils? 7:27 What was Zimmerman’s training? 9:17 Was he a victim of the cult of genius? 10:41 Was Zimmerman consigned to historical oblivion before your research? 12:55 Partimento and Zimmerman 14:21 Zimmerman’s holistic approach to teaching music 17:00 How was Zimmerman different from someone like Fenaroli? 18:10 Zimmerman’s recommendation of solfege 19:23 Needing to read 7 clefs right at the beginning with Zimmerman 20:33 How long does it take to be acquainted with 7 clefs? 21:23 Zimmerman calling pianists who have no knowledge of harmony, “schoolboys” 22:37 Cherubini giving Liszt and Berlioz a hard time 23:05 Zimmerman rejecting Louis Moreau Gottschalk from entering the Paris Conservatory 24:09 Did Zimmerman teach the Rule of the Octave and Moti del basso? 24:35 Were these 19th century versions of these things? 26:23 Zimmerman’s method leading to free composition and counterpoint 29:00 Are Zimmerman’s technical piano teachings comparable to someone like Hanon? 30:56 Frederic Chopin, how did he learn music? 32:19 What’s the evidence for the claim that Josef Elsner’s curriculum was modeled after the Paris Conservatory? 33:27 Chopin studying 6 hours a week of counterpoint with Elsner 34:06 Chopin and the cult of the genius 34:51 Could he be considered a formally trained musician instead of self-taught? 35:47 Were these all treatises that Elsner used to teach Chopin? 36:14 Did Chopin know the Rule of the Octave? 36:43 What about Chopin and Partimento? 39:05 What was Henri Reber’s lineage of teaching music theory? 39:46 Were Henri Reber and Chopin good friends? 40:27 Chopin’s plan to write his own piano method 41:35 Why would Chopin ask a music theorist/composer to help him with his piano method 42:33 Was Chopin 100% focused on completing his method? 43:14 Chopin being very musically opinionated and yet asking several friends to finish his piano method 44:42 Friedrich Kalkbrenner’s negative image 47:33 People dismissing great composers as “inferior” 48:57 How would Chopin analyze his own music? 52:10 Francis Plante’s video recordings of Chopin Etudes at age 90 53:26 Ragtime - Do we have any evidence that Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin had any formal music training? 55:06 Do we know for sure that Scott Joplin had a counterpoint treatise in his possession? 58:32 The Leipzig Conservatory and Generalbass 59:13 Roman Numerals, Harmonic Function Theory, Generalbass and Counterpoint - a Nuanced take 1:01:34 Were Leipzig Conservatory students learning Stufentheorie and Generalbass at the same time? 1:02:45 Joplin’s counterpoint treatise containing many notes and annotations 1:03:56 On counterpoint being something that takes years to study 1:05:34 If you study counterpoint already, what’s the need for Stufentheorie or Roman Numerals? 1:07:30 Is Wagner influenced by the German theories of music? 1:10:33 Counterpoint vs chord invertibility 1:14:17 Wrapping Up