This education blog shares various horizons of music in order to promote sustainable development of music education. Being devoted to music education for 19 years, Carol Ng has established her private studio at Adelaide, South Australia with an examination-standard Yamaha grand piano. In addition, Carol is keen on enlightening the next generation and advocating continuous advancement of music industry.
NOTE: When I simply refer to 'the pedal' I mean the right or damper pedal.
Pedalling has an effect on the whole sound picture, rather in the manner of vibrato or bow technique on a stringed instrument or the use of various kinds of resonance in singing. It should not be thought of as something tacked on after you have learned the notes, nor simply a way of sustaining sounds when you can no longer hold them with your hands. Too often the pedal is used merely as a tool for holding sounds on (which is the only way the pedal functions on an electronic keyboard) and there is no attention paid to the differences in timbre that are possible. I know of a teacher who would not allow his pupils to use the sustaining pedal until they had ‘done’ Grade 6. Sadly, this is perhaps too late to learn the skill in a way that can become truly subconscious and intuitive.
The movements of the foot should be in response to a need for a particular quality of sound, and all truly reliable technique (if we are talking about a technique for making music) is formed in response to such a ‘need for sound’ (to paraphrase the title of Patsy Rodenburg’s book about acting, “The Need For Words”), just as reliable walking is developed by a need to move from A to B. To take a specific example: When practising overlap pedal (see below), you first have to experience the desire or ‘need’ for a note, then the need to make the sound richer by raising the dampers - thus adding sympathetic resonance, next the need to hear two notes sounding together in the same pedal and finally the desire to hear the first note cease and the second note continue on its own. No amount of mechanical counting and up-and-downing of the pedal can produce such certainty and control, because it is not based on musical needs.
Ernest Empson used to say “Pedal with your ear!” — A lovely Dumbo-esque image comes to mind!
Good pedalling should be almost impossible to notate. It often has more to do with subtle changes of pressure of the foot on the pedal in response to qualities of sound required by the player’s musical imagination — often just changing the weight of the dampers on the strings, rather than simply moving the pedal up and down at predetermined points.
So, how do we develop this integrated response to imagination?
First we need to acquire a palette of tone colours in our imagination, make this as large as possible and constantly build on it. This should be started as soon as possible with young children in their first lessons and added to frequently, so that we are talking with them about the real stuff of sound. Children give up music lessons because they are taught about crotchets and quavers, fingerings and dynamics. They need to have a chance to fall in love with sound and to be asked what they themselves feel about it or have discovered in their own listening (and their own listening doesn't necessarily have to mean musical instruments — it can be the sounds of water, wind, wine glasses, trains and speech).
Having acquired this mental library of sounds, we need to practice creating them ourselves or finding approximations to them on the piano — or on whatever instrument we happen to play. This should be done without being told how to by the teacher, although subtle guidance, suggestion or demonstration could help. A good look at the workings of the piano and its acoustical properties can be a stimulus to the imagination. Open the piano right up, pluck the strings, sing into it — with and without the pedal down — lightly touch the nodal points of the harmonic series etc. Henry Cowell’s auto harp effects, as well as tricks with the sostenuto pedal (e.g. holding a silent chord in the sostenuto pedal, putting down the sustaining pedal, playing wild glissandi and chromatic scales and then gradually lifting the sustaining pedal so that the chord emerges like a musical ghost — as happens in Berio’s Sequenza IV for Piano) usually inspire pupils to go away and experiment). Show pupils the bell under the Steinway Grand (yes, every Steinway grand has one) and show them how it takes the vibrations from the top strings, amplifies them and shoots them into the 7 ply frame so that they travel right round the piano. Could this invention have been a result of Heinrich Steinweg’s acquaintance with Helmholtz?
Show them how, and why, the una corda pedal works — and show them how to adjust the screw at the right end of the keyboard to change its sound.
Show them the differences in playing a note without pedal, putting the pedal down after playing a note (what do they hear), and putting the pedal down with or before a note (discuss white noise, the sound of a stream or a forest, how sympathetic vibration works, the harmonic series, why even though the top notes don’t have dampers you can still tell when the pedal is down).
Next — certainly not first — we learn the technical skills to help us use the pedal effectively; but always with reference to the sounds we are trying to find.
Preliminary exercises
Place the foot on the pedal. Move the foot up and down smoothly and easily, keeping the heel on the floor and not letting the foot come off the pedal when it is lifted. If this is difficult, adjust the sitting position so that the angles of foot and leg are more comfortable. See if you can move the pedal up and down fairly quickly and smoothly without any noise — except a slight whispering from the dampers. There should be no ‘clunk’ as the pedal reaches the top of its movement.
Put the pedal down and play a single note. Lift your finger off the keyboard and listen to the note sounding — right until it dies away completely. You might time the durations of notes in different parts of the keyboard with a stopwatch.
Put the pedal down, play a note and lift your finger off as before. Listen to the note and let the pedal come up very gradually. See if you can tell the moment when the dampers just lightly touch the strings — and then notice how far you have to lift the pedal before the sound stops completely. Was it when the pedal was right up, or was it just before that? Try stopping the note with quicker and slower movements of the pedal. Notice the differences in the way the note ends.
Main exercises
1. Legato pedal
The aim is to play a succession of chords or a scale with one finger without a break in the sound and without any overlaps in the sounds.
Play the first note or chord.
Put down the pedal whilst holding the note.
Remove your hand from the keyboard and enjoy the fact that the note is still sounding.
Prepare to play the next note.
Play the next note whilst letting the pedal come up gently and smoothly (no quick jerks!). Time this movement so that the previous notes ceases at exactly the same time as the new note begins.
Practice this exercise a lot, until it becomes really fluent and natural. Remember, this is an exercise for the ears even more than for the foot.
2. Overlap pedal
The aim is to merge the end of one chord or note with the beginning of the next, so that they, as it were, ‘rub shoulders’ with each other. This merging can be very transitory or more prolonged, depending on the effect you want.
Play the first note or chord.
Put down the pedal whilst holding the note.
Remove your hand from the keyboard and hear the note is still sounding.
Prepare to play the next note.
Play the next note and leave the pedal down. Hear the two notes sounding together.
Whilst holding the new note, let the pedal come up until the first note stops.
Check that the new note is pure.
3. Articulation pedal
The aim is to separate each note, whilst adding resonance by using pedal. The gap between the notes can be anything from barely discernible — like a very smooth bow change — to more widely spaced, and the ends of the notes can be gently tapered or more sharply cut off as required. The use of the pedal not only adds resonance to each note, but also enables a better preparation of the next sound together with a more controlled finish to the notes, with all the sympathetic strings coming off together.
Play the first note or chord.
Put down the pedal whilst holding the note.
Remove your hand from the keyboard and hear the note is still sounding.
Prepare to play the next note.
Move towards the new note to play it, but, just before it sounds, let the damper cut off the previous note. Practise making the smallest gap possible (imagine a sheet of rice paper between the notes) and experiment with the gentlest cut off from the dampers. This works beautifully in Mozart slow movements, where many pianists don’t even try to make the articulations as marked. Properly managed, they can make the music ‘speak’ like a well played violin or oboe.
4. Joining pedal
The aim is to join notes which can not be joined with the hands — or because they need to sound as legato slurs without breaks between them — whilst adding as little sympathetic resonance as possible. The pedal is used only to join the notes, but not to add any extra colour to the sounds.
Play a chord or note.
Put the pedal down as close as possible to the intended end of the chord and lift your hand off the chord as soon as the dampers are lifted.
Play the next chord immediately and simultaneously let the pedal up.
It is useful to practise this technique with two note slurs, fingered e.g. 3-2, 3-2, 3-2 etc.
Play the first note of the slur, using no pedal.
Play the second note and put the pedal down after you have played it.
Lift your hand to prepare for the next slur.
Play the first note of the next slur and simultaneously let the pedal up.
Practise this until you can do it quickly and smoothly, with no pedal noise.
5. Half pedal effects
The aim is to produce a limited amount of resonance. This can add fluidity to part of a phrase, take away dryness without sounding 'pedalled', or produce a sustained pizzicato effect, such as a plucked double base or cello.
Play staccato notes in the middle to tenor register of the keyboard and, while doing so, gradually put weight on the sustaining pedal. You should not lift the dampers off the strings, but only take some of the weight off them. Experiment with different degrees of weight to produce various proportions of sustain to staccato. Try to play an arpeggio which sounds plucked but sustained. Try the opening of Bartok’s Bulgarian Dance No 2 from Mikrokosmos Vol 6, which can sound like a kind of drum with a ‘ring.’
6. Half damping
The aim is to partially damp notes. This is particularly useful when trying to keep bass notes going whilst clearing chords higher up in pitch — and possible because lower notes take longer to damp fully. Often this effect is preferable to using the sostenuto pedal to hold bass notes while changing chords with the sustaining pedal, as that can sound strangely artificial (and I'm not sure why, but I suspect it maybe because we are used to hearing sympathetic strings relating to the bass notes).
This can be done in two different ways: either by a very quick full damping, or by a very light and short touching of the strings by the dampers. Practice by playing staccato notes with the pedal fully down and see how many times you can lightly, or quickly (or both) change the pedal without losing the note altogether.
Pedalling, balance and clarity
Longer pedallings are possible if chords are well balanced and phrases are well graded dynamically. If the last note you play is the loudest, it will come through the ‘halo’ of sound created by a long pedal — often to very good effect. Likewise, if you wait longer before playing a note after a long pedal, it will also come through, because the other notes will have died away. It is an illuminating exercise to play a whole piece through in one pedal using balance and timing to make it sound clear.
In composers such as Debussy, the textures are often built up from the bass and ‘float’ above it. It is usually a worse crime to clear the upper parts by changing the pedal and losing the bass than it is to put up with some blurring (or a beautiful halo of sound, as I prefer to think of it!). If the effect is bad, it is usually because the balance and dynamic grading are poor.
In Baroque music, pedalling style should be consistent. Using the pedal changes the colour — or ‘instrumentation’ so should not be used simply to make a legato you can’t manage otherwise. Perhaps the intended effect was non-legato in any case — if one takes the view that composers like Bach knew what their music sounded like on an instrument which did not have a sustaining pedal!
Sometimes lines — especially in the bass (such as some of the entries in the second movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet) need to have more ‘focus’ and therefore less or no pedal. Using pedal in these cases can make the sound more diffused. There are hundreds of many specific cases of uses of the pedal which could be discussed at length, but it is best left to individual pianists to listen to many performances and to develop their own sense of musical taste.
Thirty years ago, Derek Paravicini was within a heartbeat of death. No other baby born in the Royal Berkshire Hospital 14 weeks prematurely had ever survived. His twin sister was dead at birth.
When Derek came along a few minutes later, the doctor presumed that he, too, could not possibly live. And yet, and yet... just when his mother Mary Ann had given up hope, she heard the faintest of whimpers, the tiniest of muffled squeaks. He had made it.
Three decades on, Derek no longer makes muffled squeaks. Instead, he brings a rapt audience in St George’s concert theatre, Bristol, to their feet again and again, with a dazzling range of music — an Oscar Peterson arrangement of Greensleeves, his own version of Bach’s Air in the key of G, a jaunty ragtime taste of Debussy.
Piano virtuouso: Derek Paravicini, playing at the St George's concert hall in Bristol, was born blind and autistic
You’ll have heard of perfect pitch. Well, Derek has absolute pitch — a rare gift, meaning that, when he hears a chord with ten notes in it, he can identify every one. Most professional musicians can get about five.
He can master any melody on earth, has a databank of thousands of songs in his head and can play any one of them at will, improvising as he goes.
One member of the audience asks him to play Ain’t No Sunshine. Another suggests that he play it in B major. And another, that it’s done in ragtime. No problem — without a pause, his fingers flutter across the keyboard in a hummingbird blur of staggering virtuosity.
‘Goodnight Sweetheart,’ shouts out someone from the back row. In C sharp, in the style of theatre composer Jerome Kern. And so it goes on, for two hours of riotous shared joy, the latest chapter in an uplifting tale of rare talent locked in a damaged brain.
Because he was born so early, Derek is blind. The oxygen used to revive him at birth caused certain vessels in his eyes to grow abnormally, damaging his retinas, in a condition called retinopathy of prematurity.
As he is blind, he cannot read music — he can’t even read Braille. The whole of tonight’s performance — his and the orchestra’s — is encapsulated entirely within his head.
Despite his music gift, Derek’s verbal skills are limited. His English is well-spoken, clear and loud, but his capacity for thought does not stretch far.
He is an echolaliac, meaning that he echoes what you say to him, turning your question into a statement.
‘Do you know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Derek?’ I ask.
‘Yes, I know Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Harry.’
‘Are you looking forward to playing in London?’
‘Yes, I am looking forward to playing in London, Harry.’
There are flashes of humour. At a recent recital in 11 Downing Street, hosted by Alistair Darling, Derek launched, unbidden, into a version of Big Spender. At an earlier concert at No10, he coaxed Cherie Blair into singing along to The Beatles’ When I’m 64.
Usually, though, Derek’s thoughts dwell on the immediate future and no further. ‘Where will we go after the concert, Adam?’ he asks Adam Ockelford, the Professor of Music at Roehampton University, who has taught Derek for 26 years. ‘Can we have fish and chips?’
Derek - the Duchess of Cornwall's nephew - has been nicknamed The Human iPod because he can recite any piece of music he has heard just once
This short-term view of life means he barely suffers from nerves. Half an hour before tonight’s concert started, he asked Roger Huckle, the artistic director of the Emerald Ensemble, what they were going to do that evening. On being told that he was going to play a concert, he said calmly: ‘Yes, let’s do a concert.’
For someone so handicapped, it is a godsend that his hidden talent was unleashed at all. Much of the credit goes to his nanny, Winifred Daly, who died 12 years ago.
She had looked after several generations of Derek’s mother’s side of the family — the Parker Bowleses, as in Camilla. Derek’s mother, born Mary Ann Parker Bowles, is sister to Andrew Parker Bowles, the Duchess of Cornwall’s ex-husband. It was Winifred Daly who first spotted something unusual in Derek.
Looking for a diversion to occupy the blind 20-month-old, she dragged down a small electric organ from the attic of the Paravicini home in Berkshire; the organ had belonged to Derek’s grandfather, Derek Parker Bowles, after whom he was named.
To begin with, Derek used a jumble of fists, palms and knuckles to knock the living daylights out of the keyboard. Gradually, though, with no tuition, he started moving his hands in synch, up and down the keys. Soon he was forming chords, until one day, his older sister, Libbet, came rushing into her parents’ sitting room and announced: ‘Quick, quick, come and see, Derek’s playing that hymn we sang in church.’
What had happened? How had he magically summoned up the capacity to produce music from within his damaged brain? ‘His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first 20 months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form,’ says Professor Ockelford. ‘And it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.’
If it was Winifred Daly whose love — and repeated singing and talking in the nursery — sparked off Derek’s talents, it was Professor Ockelford who harnessed them and moulded them into concert-worthy form.
‘The man is a saint,’ says Derek’s father, Nic Paravicini, a banker who now lives in Wales. ‘I tried to pay him and he refused. I had to force petrol money on him.’
They first met at Linden Lodge — the school for the blind attended by the celebrated jazz pianist George Shearing in the 1920s. Professor Ockelford taught Derek conventional musical techniques and untaught his unconventional ones — in particular his desire to play music as loudly as possible.
Still today, in Bristol, the professor is at Derek’s side, gently cueing his intros and tapping him on the back, encouraging him to take a bow when the audience erupts once more.
In time, news of Derek’s exceptional talent spread. At seven, he gave his first concert in Tooting Leisure Centre in South London. At nine, he was on the Wogan show.
At ten, he was presented with a Barnardo’s Children’s Champion Award by Diana, Princess of Wales. She was unruffled by the fact that he was Camilla Parker Bowles’s nephew, even though her marriage was on the rocks at the time. When Derek suggested playing Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, she laughed uproariously.
Derek first used an electric organ when he was 20 months old and gave his first concert at the age of seven
In recent years, he has played at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Las Vegas and has accompanied Jools Holland. He has appeared in two documentaries about genius savants, and the show I attended was being filmed by the popular American show 60 Minutes, on CBS. Now he is embarking on his first tour with a 20-piece orchestra.
After 26 years of tuition, Derek’s playing style is much more traditional. But still Professor Ockelford is trying to work out exactly how his genius works. ‘Recent research has revealed that only one in 10,000 babies who are born at term have absolute pitch, but 40 per cent born prematurely have it,’ says the professor. ‘So there is a link. And it seems that all the brain capacity that would have gone elsewhere, into verbal reasoning or social skills, is transferred to music.’
Certainly, Derek’s emotional capacity is limited. When his beloved nanny Winifred Daly was on her death bed, she said to Professor Ockelford: ‘He won’t miss me, you know.’
She appears to have been largely right. He remembers Winifred, but has not cried over her. He very rarely cries — and then it will be over physical pain — and he has no self-indulgence. ‘He never says he’s ill,’ says his stepmother, Suki Paravicini (Derek’s parents divorced when he was five, and have each since remarried.) ‘All he’ll say, very politely, is: “Can I have a Lemsip?”’
His playing, though, has grown more emotional. Professor Ockelford has determined that Derek is not just a human iPod who can replay exactly what he has heard after listening to it once. Instead, he initially recreates pieces by recalling crucial fragments and reassembling them as he plays.
If a piece is too long or complicated for him to absorb at one sitting, he is inventive when he plays it back, reordering the snatches that he can remember, borrowing snippets from pieces with a similar stylistic pedigree or making up new material.
Whatever magic is going on in his head, certainly it is when he is at the piano that he is most at ease. As he comes on stage, led by Professor Ockelford, his steps are hesitant. His hands clutch at his trousers, fingers twisting the cloth.
And then, as he sits down, his hands reach out for the keys. As soon as his fingers hit the ivories, the hands relax. His head sometimes sways with the music, much like those other blind pianists Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.
At other times, his head is still, his sightless gaze fixed in the direction of the hammers of the Steinway, furiously striking away to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. He is doing what he was born to do. from "Mail Online" (5/6/2009)
If we concentrate only on developing "finger technique" and neglect music during practice, we can pick up non-musical playing habits. Non-musical playing is an absolute no-no at all times because it is one form of mistake. One common symptom of this mistake is the inability to play the lesson pieces when the teacher (or anyone else!) is listening. When an audience is present, these students make strange errors that they didn't make during "practice". This happens because the students practiced without regard for music but suddenly realized that music must now be added because someone is listening. Unfortunately, until lesson time, they had never really practiced musically! Another symptom of non-musical practice is that the student feels uncomfortable practicing when others can hear them. Piano teachers know that students need to practice musically in order to acquire technique. What is right for the ears and the brain turns out to be right for the human playing mechanism. Both musicality and technique require accuracy and control. Practically any technical flaw can be detected in the music. At the very least, the music is the supreme test of whether the technique is right or wrong. As we shall see throughout this book, there are more reasons why music should never be separated from technique. Nonetheless, many students tend to practice neglecting the music and preferring to "work" when no one is around to listen. Such practice methods produce "closet pianists" who love to play but can't perform. If students are taught to practice musically all the time, this type of problem will not even exist; performing and practice are one and the same. We provide many suggestions in this book for practicing to perform, such as video taping your playing from the very beginning.
Many students make the mistake of thinking that the fingers control the music and they wait for the piano to produce that gorgeous sound. This will result in a flat performance and unpredictable results. The music must originate in the mind and the pianist must coax the piano to produce what s/he wants. This is mental play, introduced above; if you had never practiced mental play before, you will find that it requires a level of memorization that you had never achieved before – but that is exactly what is needed for flawless, authoritative performances. Fortunately, mental play is just a few steps beyond the memorization procedures in this book, but it accomplishes a giant leap in your musical capabilities, not only for technique and making music, but also for learning absolute pitch, composing, and every aspect of piano playing. Thus technique, music, and mental play are inseparably intertwined. Once you are deeply involved with mental play, you will discover that it doesn't really work without perfect pitch. These discussions provide a firm basis for identifying the skills we need to learn. This book provides the practice methods needed to learn them.
