2026 Theses Doctoral

Gender, Mechanization, and the Étude: Discourses of Pedagogy in the Nineteenth Century

Cordery, Gareth J.

This dissertation reevaluates the nineteenth-century étude, positioning the genre as a crucial nexus where debates about gender, labor, bodily discipline, and class converged. By proposing a new model of genre history that prioritizes reception and use over canon formation, it treats the étude’s instability—as both an instructional tool and performance work—as a defining feature. Bringing British, French, and German music criticism and autobiographical writings into dialogue with each other, this study argues that contemporaries understood, debated, and shaped the genre with a primary focus on amateur women. It reconstructs how women, primarily at the piano, encountered études in domestic music education and how critics publicly interpreted and regulated those experiences, challenging the erasure of these accounts in favor of masculine, virtuosic narratives. Through the analysis of memoirs, diaries, and music journals, a recurring anxiety emerges: that the repetitive, technical focus of the étude caused women to look and sound like machines.

Each of the four chapters investigates how broader discourses influenced critics and, in turn, how critics’ writings affected women’s experiences and educations. The first chapter uncovers the popularity of the étude across instrumental music instruction and provides an overview of the primary gendered debates surrounding mechanical musical training. It also contextualizes the genre within conversations around childhood and gender in educational thought. Chapter 2 turns to the gendered body. Diving into two case studies concerning finger independence, it outlines how nineteenth-century medical science viewed the gendered body and how such concerns had an impact upon the étude’s reception.

The third chapter continues this bodily narrative by focusing on the automaton, a frequent metaphor for women practicing études. It examines the primary reference-points for this strain of critique before using the tools of feminist cyborg theory to understand what breaking the woman-machine dualism meant for contemporary music students. Chapter 4 picks up a thread running throughout the previous chapters: the intersection of the étude and class-based expectations. It begins with contemporary arguments about the permeability of class positions, before contextualizing the étude in other middle-class activities that, in the minds of their practitioners, could preserve or destroy women’s class status. Every chapter is followed by brief analytical excursus that shows how the preceding material can be read directly in compositional decisions.

Together, this dissertation demonstrates how gendered discourses of mechanization shaped the étude. Pedagogical, physiological, automaton-related, and class-based concerns delineated the genre from its peers and ensured its centrality in nineteenth-century music instruction. By tracing how gendered discourses of mechanization shaped pedagogy, criticism, and composition, this dissertation challenges the marginalization of the étude in musicological scholarship and demonstrates its significance for understanding nineteenth-century women’s musical lives and educations.