The (Collaborative Pianist’s) Art of Pedaling: Part 2: Everything You Need to Know About a Damper Pedal in One Exercise

The (Collaborative Pianist's) Art of PedalingPart II: Everything You Need to Know About a Damper Pedal in One Exercise Margo Garrett (bio) COLLAB CORNER When I play a concert on pianos and in halls I do not know at all, I request my own private practice time as far ahead of the concert as I can arrive and the venue can allow. Ideally, I like to do this the afternoon or evening before the concert, so that if I have special requests of the piano technician, there will, hopefully, be time to address them. The need for this practice is to get to know the piano, the acoustics, and go through a few pieces on the program that have technical issues for my hands or feet, so that there are no surprises in the concert. If I do not know the piano's idiosyncrasies, I will be nervous for the whole concert and will not be able to enjoy making music with my partner or partners. I make a list of all my requests for the technician as I practice, so I don't have to rely on memory when speaking to him. Most of the time pianos are good and in good working order, but when there is an issue that is not routine and easily corrected, it usually has to do with the pedals. This will not often be the case in a professional venue concert hall, but in other performance spaces you will undoubtedly—I hope only occasionally—encounter some problems. The worst one I can remember was a sostenuto pedal that made clanking noises loud enough to render it unusable, but I have heard of pianists finding inoperable sostenuto pedals on performance pianos. Because such repairs take time, I must remind you to give notice, as soon as you discover your program includes a need for the sostenuto pedal. There is less often a problem with the una corda pedal, gratefully. Also called the soft pedal, this modern mechanism is an on/off lever, designed to be engaged fully or not at all. When engaged, and when well regulated, the entire action assembly of a modern piano moves exactly the distance of one string to the right (in threestringed notes), allowing two strings to vibrate instead of three and softening or changing the color of any passages that are played with this pedal depressed. I always spend an early part of my private time at the piano and in the hall with an exercise that introduces me to the damper pedal of that piano (they are all different). The exercise will tell me if the pedal is well regulated so that my right foot can, in fact, rest on the pedal without engaging it at all, as it should, or if the pedal has too much or too little play in it. It happens sometimes that the pedal has too little space at its top, where the right foot's [End Page 251] relaxed weight should be able to rest without releasing even a bit of the dampers' muting of the strings. If the damper pedal is badly adjusted, the weight of one's foot can lift the dampers off strings just enough to create what I call an aura of resonance or wetness, as I like to refer to sound (wet or dry), even though you are not aware that you engaged the pedal at all. So it is possible to think you overpedaled on a particular piano, when in fact the piano overpedaled you, so to speak. This exercise also tells me how many sonorities the piano's damper pedal contains and where in the pedal I can find them, from touching it with the least possible weight from my foot, to full foot weight at the pedal's bottom. If the piano has little variety of amounts of dynamic and color contrasts, or if the percentages of what you find are not more or less even, you need the aid of a technician. Pianists, even those who know exactly what they want from a performance keyboard and know how to ask for it, often are not even aware of the...