Abstract

Piano performance occupies a distinctive position in modern Chinese cultural history: introduced through missionary and treaty-port channels, institutionalised in twentieth-century conservatories, and popularised on an unprecedented scale during the post-1980 “piano fever” (gangqin re). Less examined is the pedagogical ethos that accompanied this expansion — an ethos in which the Confucian valorisation of chi ku (“eating bitterness”) converges with the imported athletic maxim “no pain, no gain” to frame bodily suffering as evidence of moral seriousness rather than as a clinical warning. This article examines how that cultural script is inscribed on the bodies and minds of contemporary Chinese undergraduate pianists. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 63 piano performance majors at a university in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, the study documents practice behaviour, self-reported playing-related musculoskeletal pain and music performance anxiety. Participants practised a mean of 16.22 hours per week; only 12.7% reported a habitual warm-up routine and 7.9% a habitual stretching routine. Mean peak pain was 6.41 on a 0–10 scale and mean music performance anxiety was 170.48 (K-MPAI, range 153–201), both in the moderate-to-severe band. Weekly practice hours and years of training correlated positively with peak pain (r = .309 and r = .326), and practice hours significantly predicted pain intensity, β = .309, p = .014. Pain severity, but not pain breadth, correlated with performance anxiety (r = .270, p = .032). The article argues that these patterns are best read not as isolated clinical facts but as the somatic residue of a historically constituted pedagogical culture, and that health education in Chinese music institutions therefore requires cultural reinterpretation — reframing endurance as skilled self-regulation — rather than technical instruction alone.

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