ABSTRACT
In 1771, a manual for learning to play the harpsichord was published in Paris by a virtually unknown music pedagogue and composer newly arrived from Alsace: the Lecons de clavecin by Anton Bemetzrieder. Yet the reason for Diderots attraction to Bemetzrieders theory may not be obvious at first glance given its dry and pedantic tone. Tactile sensibility—the "irritability of our nerve fibers"—becomes the quality to which all the senses can be reduced. In one sense, the Lecons de clavecin presents the most visceral, corporeal pedagogy of keyboard performance imaginable. The performance is set up by Denis Diderot as a kind of dream sequence in which the student is a vessel for the notes somnambulistically controlled by the fingers. In Bemetzrieders world of binary tonality, every note has one of only two possible meanings: one of stability and rest on the tonic triad, or one of instability and tension on all other scale degrees.
