2nd Try on Sostenuto Research Resources

[reggaepass at aol.com]

 Israel,

Fascinating.? Thanks for sharing this.? Think I'll quiz my wife about it...after all, shouldn't a doctoral student in piano at USC know such things?? Valuable ammo!

Alan Eder


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Israel Stein <custos3 at comcast.net>
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Sent: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 7:55 am
Subject: 2nd Try on Sostenuto Research Resources









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?
?

?



 


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