Thanks, Israel. I'll let you know where this goes. Paul "If you want to know the truth, stop having opinions" (Chinese fortune cookie) In a message dated 07/22/07 16:27:35 Central Daylight Time, custos3 at comcast.net writes: At 11:00 AM 7/22/2007, Paul Revenko-Jones wrote: >Israel: > >You're not interested in the question. I am. Thanks for the input. > >Paul Au contraire, Paul. I have been interested in the question for over twenty years now. It seems that nobody I approached has any light to shed on it. So I'll continue with some more hypotheses for you to check out - if you can. While - as some have written - the sostenuto is a convenience for some pianists who use it quite frequently, it does not open any great vistas for composers to explore. This is due to the inherent property of the piano as a percussive instrument - it simply is not capable of sustaining a note or a chord for any significant length of time, regardless of any mechanical contraption that makes "look ma no hands" sustaining possible. The sound decays pretty rapidly regardless, and so the musical effects achievable with the sostenuto are quite limited and not even innovative - playing moving lines while sustaining a note or a chord is hardly revolutionary, musically. And composers have for a couple of centuries before the sostenuto was invented employed four-hand composition and composition for multiple keyboards for thicker-textured pieces - which the sostenuto can't even approach, since it does nothing to enable the playing of an additional moving line (as, for example, the organ pedalboard). In pianistic writing a long trill is typically used in place of a long-sustained note where such an effect is called for - the trill does not decay and can be blended into a long melodic line at any dynamic level - unlike a held note whose rapid decay makes only a piano or pianissimo continuation possible... For a good example of this compositional technique, check out Beethoven's transcription of his own violin concerto for the piano. Even on the modern piano - with much more sustain capability than Beethoven's instrument - trying to substitute held notes for the sustained trills will yield pretty anemic results. The sostenuto pedal is not capable of delivering a true pedal point, or fitting a note into a moving line or of too many other musical effects. Other than grabbing an occasional extra note or chord, it can do little to open great new compositional vistas... It's rather - as some have written - pretty much a "convenience device". Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20070722/aea6a9bc/attachment.html
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