Brigitte Bouthinon-Dumas (born in 1947) is a French pianist and music educator, the author of numerous educational reference works including Mémoire d'Empreintes.[1]
Bouthinon-Dumas began her career as a child prodigy, starting at the age of 3 with her first scales. She was solicited for solo concerts at the age of 5, then at 9 with orchestra. Noticed by the illustrious French pianist Yvonne Lefébure, she entered the Conservatoire de Paris at 14, benefiting from her advice as well as those of Yvonne Loriod and Germaine Mounier.
Since then, she has taught piano at several French institutions, as a teacher holding the Certificat d'Aptitude, notably at the, where French pianist Claire Désert says she remembers "a natural, sensitive and generous musical education and instrumental approach",[2] then at the where she worked as a teacher until her retirement in 2012. The young French pianist Romain Descharmes was appointed to succeed her.
Many summer academies and masterclasses invite Bouthinon-Dumas to provide courses to motivated young learners: in France, at the Nancy Academies, at the International György Sebők Academy in Barèges, but also throughout Europe and the world: Poland, Belarus (Minsk) on the occasion of the release of the Russian translation of Mémoire d'empreintes, China (Shanghai, Conservatoire)...
The French embassies underline the importance of her interventions as in Minsk or Brasilia where Bouthinon-Dumas was invited for a post-graduate training of piano teachers of the Conservatory of Brasilia.
The conservatories regularly call on Bouthinon-Dumas as a teacher for tutoring students in pedagogy, as well as the juries for obtaining the Certificate of Aptitude. The CNSM of Paris and Lyon also invite the pedagogue and pianist to express her opinion as a member of the jury of competitions and exams, and finally the recruitment of new piano teachers also makes use of her presence.
Bouthinon-Dumas gives numerous lecture-concerts, articulated around the presentation of the musical and technical difficulties of a great work of the classical repertoire, at the end of which she plays the work she has just described to the public. This original way of transmitting her vision of musical learning was performed in Nancy,[3] and Barèges.[4]
Bouthinon-Dumas' educational works were published in the 1990s and 2000s. The French pedagogue and musician will develop these tools in reaction to her own early childhood path in order to avoid her students to suffer the shortcomings of a certain more academic, less natural way of teaching music.
Bouthinon-Dumas summarizes part of her vision of pedagogy in an essay that can reincarnate in the 21st century what interpretative treatises dear to the virtuosos and pedagogues of the 18th and 19th centuries represented (notably François Couperin's L'art de toucher le clavecin and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Essai sur la manière véridique de jouer d'un instrument à clavier[5]). Bouthinon-Dumas' work has an evocative title: Mémoire d'empreintes. The back cover sets out the main lines of thought:
"Why this book? Because few instrumentalists understand why the piano so often betrays their thinking. All the elements - stability and fingerprint, true relaxation, tactile and cerebral awareness - give the means for a real and not only intentional sound requirement."
We understand here that the ultimate end does not lay so much in perfecting technical keys for piano performance, as in putting these tools to use in a sound ideal, whose author leaves the reader totally free.
The author insists on the importance of analysis, of culture, musical or not, and of all the means to enrich the imagination and artistic vision of the pianists who will read her work.
Bouthinon-Dumas has also focused a lot on sound, seeking to obtain the most natural and open sound possible by relaxing at all times. It is very difficult to transmit to teenagers a real perception of one's own body in order to relax it or to solicit the right muscles, and the convincing results obtained at the CRR in Paris have enabled a good part of the students who have passed through her hands to enter the conservatories of Paris and Lyon, or to win international competitions.
Some students trained by B. Bouthinon-Dumas before entering regional conservatories and pursuing a career:
Direction of the Brigitte Bouthinon-Dumas Series published by Gérard Billaudot, in which many works of didactic contemporary music are published, notably those of Nicolas Bacri,[7] Karol Beffa, Thierry Escaich...