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