Déchiffreuses

While sight-reading remains one of the most fundamental skills for a keyboardist to cultivate, its emergence as a form of musical literacy remains underexplored in musicology. Its outsized coverage in the Parisian press, particularly around the annual concours publics du Conservatoire, reveals a critical discourse of sight-reading as a metric for award-worthy pianism. This article recounts the pedagogical and critical history of sight-reading at the Paris Conservatoire, bringing together curricular records, pedagogical texts, press reviews, and morceaux de déchiffrage composed by Luigi Cherubini, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Nadia Boulanger, and Jeanne Leleu. Sight-reading’s critical press reception, while gendered, also created avenues for female Conservatoire graduates—such as Boulanger, Leleu, Eugénie Carjat, Hortense Parent, and many others—to build careers out of the ability to decipher music at first sight. While the sight-reading portion of the concours publics remained controversial through the end of the nineteenth century, the unique imbrication of spontaneous and premeditated modes of performance provided a platform on which women could recast fluent reading as a marketable facet of a modernizing pianistic economy.