Marie Jaëll

“Artists are, in a sense, neurologists who unknowingly study the brain with techniques unique to them.” This unusual view sums up Marie Jaell’s approach to piano teaching. She unearthed deep links among tactile, visual and auditive sensations in piano playing. Her discovery led her to build a piano pedagogy, called “the touch”, based on the creation of “right body images” of fingerings in the brain. She argued that “the dissociated finger movements become artistic only if their image pre-exists in the brain. She believed that the pianist’s entire being must first vibrate with the intentionality of the music he is going to play on the piano.

“It is something of a scandal that contemporary discussions in philosophy and psychology have so little of interest to tell us about consciousness.6 In contrast, Marie Jaell put consciousness at the core of her pedagogy, first by highlighting the intentionality that underlies all music, and secondly, by insisting that only what is consciously acquired can be transmitted. She led the battle against the kind of piano teaching characterised by an obsession on mechanical and thoughtless skills. She believed that the brain images of fingerings must have a content that must first be consciously understood and internalized.

As a Romantic, Marie Jaell lived the mysterious bond between emotion and music. Naturally, emotion held a central place in her piano pedagogy. Unfortunately, “emotion has been ignored in music research until recently because it is very hard to study.7 Indeed, “it is a source of sadness that one can search the pages of most harmony text-books in vain for any mention of emotional effect that is the magical and mysterious element in music.8 Wonder overtakes us as piano sounds waft us to an inner universe where the clutter of industrial machines cannot follow us. Yet, the “mystery remains why melody, harmony and rhythm are so important to us,9 though they have no obvious biological or survival value to the humans.

“With the rise of harmony, a piece of music becomes a symbolic re-creation of the relationship that exists in a single musical sound among the consonances of its harmonics.”lO According to Marie Jaell, such a web of harmonic relations, driven by goal-oriented movements with forward surges and continuous returns, is the core of melody and rhythm. The harmony-centered piano music truly brings into being a musical paradise that recalls “the heaven of the great Buddhist God Indra, consisting of an infinite net of pearl strings where in each pearl all the others are reflected, and in each reflection the infinite number of pearls is seen again.”  Marie Jaell was convinced that her touch method was the pathway that would lead a pianist to that paradise by guiding him to master the increasing delicacy of sensations of his entire being and to refine indefinitely the thought that governs the musical movement.

Marie Jaell viewed music as a goal-oriented movement. She analyzed tactile, visual and auditive sensations involved in piano playing in neural terms where a millisecond is a long time. She came to the conclusion that the pianist’s brain refines rhythms down to their infinitesimal level and then synthesizes them following the idea embedded in them. The consciousness that is at the core of her pedagogy is the outcome of “such micro-consciousnesses.”

Marie Jaell was above all a born pianist. She embraced science to uncover the links that join music, emotion and the touch. She believed that a true pianist lives “an altered state of being” as he creates a “soundscape” suffused with the intellectual, sensual and emotional intentions of music. This web-site is written by a lover of piano music to share Marie Jaell’s passion for the piano with other lovers of music.

by Catherine Guichard, from Marie Jaëll. The Magic Touch, Piano Music by Mind Training, Algora, New-York, 2004, 216 p

5. Jaell, M. Les Rythmes du Regard et la Dissociation des Doigts, Association M. Jaell, Paris

1998, p.l

6. Seatle J., Minds, Brains and Science, Harvard University Press, 1984, p.l6.

7. Benzon W., Beethoven Anvil : Music in Mind and Culture, Basic Books, 2001.

8. Hopkins, A., Understanding Music, p.32

9. Nature, March 7, 2002, pp.12-14. 10. Schenker