Keyboard Technique – Sustaining Pedal in Romantic Period Music

June 9, 2023

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The Romantic interval may also be dubbed the Period of the Sustaining Pedal. Nearly each piece by a Romantic composer relies upon at one level or one other, and typically all through, on using the sustaining pedal.

The fundamental cause for this modification from Traditional interval music was the step by step growing sonority of the piano itself. With drastically enriched harmonics of the brand new devices, close-position chords within the bass, whether or not damaged or unbroken, now not sounded tolerable. Composers due to this fact opened out the chords, taking part in their notes successively as an alternative of concurrently, and used the pedal to maintain what couldn’t be stretched by a single hand.

This was actually solely a growth of an present machine: Damaged chords had lengthy been used to offer each rhythmic curiosity and a sustaining impact in keyboard music. What was new was the epiphany that the pedal now permitted spacings which weren’t solely past the attain of a single hand, but additionally noticeably suited to the fleeting tones of the piano. New and delightful keyboard textures developed, whose immense potentialities have been developed repeatedly as much as the time of Debussy and past.

Two fundamental sorts of chords developed to accompany pedaling. Within the first, the chord is unfold out in single notes. Within the second, the chord is split into smaller chords, or a mixture of smaller chords and single notes. Pianists ought to be looking out for such structure, and their combos, as a result of whereas they rely fully on the proper hand pedal for his or her impact, they don’t seem to be all the time marked by the composer within the rating. When there are not any marks, the easiest way to find out the pedaling is to scale back the open-textured chords to their closed place. The pedaling will then normally coincide with the modifications in concord. Moreover, harmonic elements ought to be considered in order to not create an over-thick sound and lose the true bass.

Another excuse for modifying the harmonic pedaling is the complexity of the proper hand half. The lesser sustaining energy of the treble as in contrast with the bass will usually care for this. However at instances the sound should be thinned out via a sort of half-pedaling that leaves the extra resonant bass notes nonetheless celebration audible, and in excessive circumstances the bass ought to be deserted altogether and left to the listener’s ear so the music shouldn’t be muddied.

One instance is Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, the place all the first motion is performed senzi sordini (with out dampers); i.e. with the proper hand pedal held down unchanged from starting to finish. On the fashionable piano, the outcomes are hopelessly muddied. However with a 3rd pedal, we will approximate the results Beethoven meant pretty intently by miserable the bottom notes within the piece with the center pedal saved down by the left foot all through the motion. The precise hand pedal is utilized in a traditional method, and altered as concord dictates. This permits the undampened lowest strings to behave as sympathetic resonators, in order that they vibrate repeatedly and produce a faint however perceptible haze of sound from starting to finish, via which the singing of the proper hand can sound, as Beethoven himself reported, “like a voice from a vault.” (Learn extra about piano history and the evolution of pianos.)

Numerous pedaling strategies can embrace these:

Depress the pedal instantly after a notice has been struck, and launched concurrently with the assault on a notice, with the consequence that the second notice is joined to the primary in an ideal legato, and with out the slightest hint of fuzz or carry-over in sound from one to the opposite.
An earlier methodology, now used much less typically, is called rhythmic-pedaling. The pedal is depressed concurrently with the assault, and launched simply earlier than a notice is struck. The legato could also be barely much less good, however the notes have a kind of growth because of the sympathetic vibration of the opposite undampened strings. This may be extraordinarily stunning in a sluggish cantabile.
A 3rd kind of pedaling can solely be used after a silence. In it, the pedal is depressed earlier than the notice is struck, with outcomes similar to these achieved by rhythmic-pedaling.

Composers typically use staccato marks together with pedal indicators. At first this may increasingly appear to be a contradiction in phrases. What is supposed shouldn’t be that the pianist ought to try an unattainable shortening of the notes, however that they need to be performed with the identical contact and assault as used for a staccato. This produces a barely totally different tone from taking part in the identical notes legato and with pedal.

Pedal marks in Romantic music ought to be interpreted with discretion relatively than adopted blindly. The pianist ought to attempt to divine what impact the composer was aiming at and create that have an effect on as intently as doable with the fashionable piano.

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