About this lineage

This is a teacher–student graph of pianists, composers and teachers, converging on Rebecca Hardy (1989–). It began as a hand-drawn chart in October 2010 — one person's attempt to see the whole line of teaching behind her — and has been researched outwards, correction by correction, ever since.

What the 2010 drawing is, and is not

The original chart is the sole authority for what was drawn: the names, the connections and the visual layout all come from it. It is not, however, a citation. Several of the names as drawn were wrong and have been corrected since, so each person appears here under their conventional name rather than the drawn label.

What the research added

The 2026 passes reconciled the drawing against external sources, resolved identities (Wikidata), pruned people who had drifted off the line, and added relationships the chart had missed. Of the 202 people, 182 now carry at least one cited source; 20 do not. Of the 264 relationships, 234 are either graded high or carry no grade at all, and 30 are graded medium.

A missing citation means undocumented, not doubtful. A relationship without sources was on the 2010 chart and has been neither confirmed nor refuted since. It is drawn at full weight, because rendering two-thirds of the graph as the weakest possible line would be a factual claim the evidence does not support. Undocumented status is carried separately, by a small notch at the bottom-left of a person's card.

How a generation is counted

generation is longest-path depth, not a step counter. A person with no recorded teacher is generation 0; everyone else is one more than their deepest teacher. It is therefore a property of the whole chain above a person, which is why 101 of the 264 edges span more than one generation. Rebecca Hardy is at generation 17, the deepest in the lineage.

Because 62 people have no recorded teacher, all of them sit at generation 0 — including some who were born in the twentieth century. Age and generation are not the same thing here, and the graph is not a chronology.

What this does not claim

• It is not a history of piano pedagogy. It is one line, plus the few famous names reachable from it.
• It does not claim these were anyone's only teachers, or their most important ones. It records what is documented.
• Three people (Bartók, Glinka, Balakirev) are marked as a side branch: reached from the lineage, but not on Rebecca Hardy's line. They are labelled so the graph cannot mislead on that point.
• Dates and nationalities are omitted where unknown — 27 people have no birth year and 32 no nationality — rather than guessed.

Reading it without sight of the canvas

The whole graph is also available as a generation-grouped list of all 202 people with their teachers and students written out, reachable from the skip links on either view. Both drawings are keyboard navigable: tab in, then use the arrow keys along the spine and within a generation on the ladder, around and between the rings on the orbit.

Colophon

Typeset in Newsreader and Inter, both self-hosted.