Elisabeth Caland


Elisabeth Johanna Amelia Caland was a German pianist, piano teacher and theorist of piano technique of Dutch origin.

Life

Calland was born in Rotterdam. She received her first education in Rotterdam. Afterwards she studied piano with Marie Jaëll in Paris and 1884-86 with Ludwig Deppe in Berlin, after which she continued her education with Anna and Horace F. Clark-Steiniger, and 1895-96 with . She first taught piano in Wiesbaden, since 1898 in Berlin and since 1915 in Gehlsdorf and Rostock. She represented Deppe's conception of piano playing by means of coordinated movement of the whole arm instead of an isolated finger movement that emerged from harpsichord playing. She advocated this way of playing, which was in confrontation with the usual way of playing at the time. She was the first to establish the conscious lowering of the shoulder blade as an art movement to develop the back muscles as a source of strength when playing the piano, which she taught practically. She also introduced the shaking movement from the shoulder into the methodology as a systematic basis for the execution of tremolo figures and trills. She wrote several books on piano technique, in which she described the "Deppe's method", as well as articles in the journal Musikpädagogische Blätter.
Caland died in Berlin at the age of 57.

Compositions