Take a look at the four voice fugues in the Well Tempered.
Out of curiosity, how else would you know where to start that half note? I guess, since it’s not aligned with the dotted one, it must start later and must go to the end of the measure, but you could start it after an eighth note rest and leave and eighth note rest at the end as well. If there is another way to write this, the way this composer did it seem to be the clearest.
I’m not a piano player and this may be a silly question. I just finished this thread and then the wikipedia page on piano pedals and thought I understood what was going on.
Doesn’t the middle, sostenuto, pedal just apply sustain to the notes that are currently fingered? I thought the intention of this piece was to use the middle pedal to apply sustain to the lowest-bass notes (only the dotted-halves). And that was the composer’s motivation for splitting the bass part into two parts – the sustained and the un-sustained parts? The sustained part is fingered for a quarter note, but sounds for the entire measure.
Or am I off in the weeds?
The pedal markings are for the damper pedal (far right on a piano’s pedal board.) That middle pedal, the sostenuto, doesn’t even exist on a lot of pianos, or sometimes even has a different function (on my spinet piano, it was tied to the soft pedal; on my aunt’s upright, it functioned like a damper pedal, but only for the bass notes – I can’t remember where the cut-off was.)
If the composer intended the sostenuto pedal to be used, it might be marked as “Sost. Ped.”
The other way would be to write it as I said before: bass note marked with a quarter note. Next pulse where the half-note chord comes in is marked as currently, and bass noted tied from the previous beat as a half note.
Ah, thanks! I like this way better.
Yes, I think the way as written in this score is the most common and accepted way of doing it. And it’s clean and understandable. No reason to muss up the staff with tons of tie marks. Everything I’m finding online with independent parts is written that way.
Yeah, like here’s a Chopin nocturne:
Perhaps the alternate notation I suggested doesn’t exist or is not used. There’s nothing technically wrong with it that I see, just a pain to read. You do see the mess of ties in something like a broken chord, say, G-B-D-F where each is an eight note, and you play the notes successively while holding on to the last note.
In such notation, the vertical alignment has no time value with respect to when a note is played. It is used just to make it easier for the performer to conveniently know what to do at a glance. This piece is typical for ones that have voice leading and multiple voices, whether they represent separate instruments or not.
If this piece were arranged for 4 instruments, the most logical way to separate them would be according to the stem direction. In a theoretical sense, here each clef has 2 voice lines, even if the same instrument is playing all of them.
When I was doing lead sheets in Hollywood, I used this 2-voice notation often, typically where a vocal melody was accompanied by another important line. Although since the second line could be considered subordinate, I usually used cue notes (smaller heads and stems) for an additional separation factor, especially if the lines crossed. Without that indication, it could be very confusing.
I agree that the equivalence at the start makes no sense if this is a standalone piece.
Yeah, that one’s the real mystery here.
Got it – thanks. I’ve run into the partial damper pedal. It is one of the reasons, as a non-piano player, I’ve always been confused exactly what the pedals do.
And with that context I understand what the composer meant when he said he could have used quarter notes, but that wouldn’t be exactly right since they are still sounding.
One last question, the melody notes all have sustain from the pedal, right? Is it less noticeable in the melody because each new eighth note is much louder than the sustain?
You mean like
?
That’s what I was imagining. I don’t see anything wrong with that, and I could see it being written that way in some contexts, but I’m not sure if it’s entirely common or not. Like if there’s otherwise no indication of the piece having a separate voice there, I think I’d write it like that. I’ll have to look through some piano literature in the basement and see if I’m just imagining that or not.
@pulykamell 's got it! Though there are other options. Consider:
Look at this left hand part. Instead of an initial 8th note rest (which would have been perfectly cromulent), they placed an 8th note F simultaneously with the whole note F. In this as in the example in the OP, the stem direction is vital in understanding how these two concurrent rhythms fit together.
I also agree with what @Musicat says, vertical alignment has no time value (though I might soften that a bit and say that while that is true, consistent rhythmic vertical alignment is an essential part of legible/playable music).
@CaveMike , it’s worth noting that “partial damper” is probably a confusing way to refer to the sostenuto pedal, as “half damper” is often used to describe the effect of pushing the sustain pedal only part way down, so that the felts are only partially lifted from the strings.
Less noticeable? Less than what? It is true that, when holding down the pedal, as you strike each key it is likely to be a more prominent sound than the sustained decaying sound of all the notes you had hit before. That said, misuse of the pedal can lead to some ugly sounds if you keep it down across harmonies that don’t naturally blend. This section we’re looking at uses the pedal across whole measures and every note played is from the same tonal palate (key/mode/scale), so it likely sounds good. Add in some chromatic movement and accidentals in there, and you have to start being more careful about how open you leave the damper. Either complete closing of it, or careful use of ‘half dampering’ to diminish the sustain in key momen
I did not think about it, but you are right: Gould says that ties should curve away from added or released notes, to draw attention to the change.
There is that, sure. Holding down the pedal gives everything a nice, legato sound to it, as each note connects together, and it does become a bit of a wash of sound. Typically, you may repedal, say, every time a chord changes to avoid the held notes from clashing with each other too much, or from the sound just turning into mud. Pedaling you will see more in later piano literature, like romantic era onward, and less in earlier pieces.
There is a tendency for newer-to-intermediate pianists to overuse the damper pedal, as it does cover up a bit of technique imperfections (like, say, how long you hold down a note when you transition from one to next doesn’t matter so much) and also leads to fairly “big” sound. To me, this type of overuse just makes everything eventually sound like mush and kills some of the expressive options you have with piano. But there are lots of situations where heavy pedaling is completely appropriate.
Ah – were you replying to a note I made about which way the tie was that I edited out a while ago? Just putting this note in for context to other readers.
So, do we all agree that we can’t figure out what that initial parenthetical is for?
If nobody can understand it, then it is pretty bad notation!
Maybe some sort of mistake or typo when it came time to enter the score into the computer?
I’m also wondering whether the “legato” notation there is necessary, as you’re playing with the pedal. I mean, the finger motion will be a little different, but it shouldn’t make much of a difference in the sound of the piece. I would have thought legato is also implied by the slurs, too. Am I missing something?
IIRC, there was a way to use the pedals on a piano (probably not as intended) to make every note on the instrument faintly sound at once. Releasing it too suddenly, maybe? Or something with multiple pedals at once?
If you push the damper pedal too quickly, to sudden release may cause the strings to vibrate. This is usually not desirable.