Israel: You're not interested in the question. I am. Thanks for the input. Paul "If you want to know the truth, stop having opinions" (Chinese fortune cookie) In a message dated 07/22/07 10:02:24 Central Daylight Time, custos3 at comcast.net writes: At 11:00 AM 7/21/2007, pianotech-request at ptg.org wrote: >All: > >Surely there must be some resources out there that you might refer >me to--people, textual, research threads--on the development of the >sostenuto and its impact on piano composition. Any ideas would be >helpful. Thanks, > >Paul Revenko-Jones Paul, I can't help but note that you will most likely not find the import of the sostenuto if you confine your research to its "impact on piano composition". You will find that impact to be negligible, obscure and peripheral. The only time I ever used it was in a piece by Francis Poulenc - and later I found out that his handspan was so great that he did not need the sostenuto to play those passages... The evidence is staring you right in the face: if most piano students can manage to get a degree in the field without ever learning its function, if European piano manufacturers did not find it necessary to add a sostenuto pedal to their products until export to the US became a reality, if most vertical pianos are still sold without it, if the only time I get a complaint about the sostenuto from the faculty here at SFSU is when it interferes with damping - how much impact could it have had? If you want to delve into the real impact of the sostenuto you need to look into piano marketing practices, economic and sociological trends, the development of the music publishing industry and the use of the piano in the home - and not on the concert stage. If you think about it, the advent of the sostenuto was contemporaneous with the spread of the piano as a consumer product among the middle classes - and its establishment as the "home entertainment unit." It is throughout the latter 19th century and early 20th that the practice of singing around the piano or playing popular tunes and latest hits on the piano in the evenings by family groups was a standard form of passing the time among the emerging middle classes. Music publishers fed this pastime by rushing into print a piano transcription of every latest musical "hit" - be it vaudeville, opera, musical theater show, symphony or concerto. In fact, the success of a composer's having music published hinged on its suitability for such piano transcriptions - that's where the money was... It is in the playing of these transcriptions of orchestral works that the sostenuto pedal would be most useful - grab a chord representing the bass parts in the sostenuto, and free both hands to play the upper orchestral parts... This is why in cheaper pianos the function could very easily be fulfilled by a bass sustain pedal (the so-called "poor man's sostenuto")... After the advent of the radio and the gramophone, the piano lost its importance in the middle-class home, except for the most part as a status symbol or a symbol of cultural pretensions which we all try very hard to cultivate in order to stay in business... And the sostenuto pedal became a pretty much vestigial mechanism - for the most part ignored by composers and pianists alike. Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20070722/c797c691/attachment.html
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