pedaling in Chopin etude questions

Hi Monica,

Good question about pedaling in this piece; it's a deceptively tricky etude to be sure. I think one thing to keep in mind about Chopin's pedal markings is that he was writing for an earlier instrument, namely the Erard or Pleyel, which had a much crisper and drier sound than the modern piano, so more pedaling was necessary in those days to avoid it sounding too dry. The rule of thumb with pedaling of course, is that it changes with the harmony, so you'll see that it's marked fairly religiously in that way throughout. I would certainly say that, depending on your instrument, you could certainly release it a little earlier right on the second beat rather than after it (and then possibly do that even for the ones that are marked through the measure because of the harmony). But that's only one thought; it really depends on the kind of sound you want of course. I might even be tempted to view this more as "portato" than "staccato," and I think you'd get that kind of effect by maybe following the pedal markings exactly, but then playing staccato in the right hand. Sorry for the vacillation I'm not sure there is a single right answer to this question, but these are just some ideas so I hope you find them useful.

Great choice of repertoire BTW. That's an etude that definitely deserves to be heard more, as probably do all the nouvelles etudes.

Joe

 

I see from the picture that the bottom key is a "C"! Looks like it's missing a couple of keys at the top, too.
Is it the angle, or is the shape a little different from modern pianos?

On the pedaling, Joe's answer is really good. Some pianists try to get half-pedalings on modern pianos; on slower pieces, that's ok, but when there's a lot else going on I find it's just one dimension too many. (I've always been a terrible organist.)

Besides, the pedaling does not mandate a change in the way you hit the keys, so the etude still stretches your technique. (It would stretch mine, for sure.)

 

You see this sort of thing in Debussy too. To our modern "scientific" minds it doesn't make sense to combine pedal and staccato: of course it's going to sound legato. But the point is that if you think of it as staccato, then you'll instinctively change other aspects of the tone quality too.

In this case, in my opinion, the point is that the right hand is clearly split into melody and accompaniment, and you want the accompaniment to be a lot softer than the melody. It's different from the other Chopin double-note etudes, opus 25/6 and opus 25/8, where although the top notes should still be louder, the two voices can be more equal because they're basically doing the same as each other. In this one, the staccato markings should encourage you to use a much lighter touch on the lower notes, making the difference between the two voices clearer.

 

You'd probably get several customers from this organization. So far, when choosing something to record, I usually choose between something 4 pages or less, or memorizing. (There was one longer than 4 that I read, but I can't remember how I did it.)

Xeroxing helps, but you're still at the mercy of the presence of convenient page turns, and trying to do it silently so the mike doesn't pick it up is murder. If the ends flipped up, I could get 6 pages across, which would help.

Even better would be a way of turning, or rotating, whatever was on the stand (like an escalator lying on its side), controlled by a pedal or button. Then you could get 12 pages! (But it would have to be very quiet!!)

Or perhaps something like a player piano, in which you'd have the printed music on the roll (but it would not control the piano action!)

 

Let me suggest that a possible reason then could be that he did not want the "sharper grittier sound". Perhaps his staccatoes are really "potatoes" indicating that the notes should be shortened only slightly (one style of staccato involves a staccato 8th note being equivalent to a 16th note plus a 16th rest, another style would involve a shorter note and a longer rest, he might want a slightly longer note and a slightly shorter rest) . Now it takes time to leap from the first of each pair to the second (particularly when the leap is of the order of an octave), perhaps more time than he wants for the "rest" part of the staccato, hence his suggestion to sustain the first part of the chord by pedal for part of the duration of the hands' flight time. The pedal markings (both on and off) are so squashed together, that they may well not mean what at first sight they appear to mean, namely that the "off" should come after the 2nd note of each pair, but that the pedal could be meant to come off just before the 2nd note.

Yeah, the notes are so far away they're not only too small, but also out of focus if your glasses are optimized for your usual music reading distance. How about a more or less U-shaped or semicircular rack with a radius equal to your reading distance? You should be able to surround yourself easily with up to 8 pages.

 

I wish I was artistically talented so I could draw one of those "Artist's Conceptions". For instance, a music stand which surrounds one's head a revolves via cues from eye blinks or something.

 

The second ending isn't too bad. I'd like to hear still more of the top A flat, but it's already audible. Probably you can make this work.

There's a third way that's worth considering too: roll both of the last two chords. Tell the audience that it's an artistic statement--you like rolled chords--it's nothing to do with the size of your hands ;-)

 

The second way would be better because it's what's written. At the moment the top Ab is certainly audible, but noticeably weaker than the Eb, with the result that the overall effect of the cadence is somewhat altered, almost giving the impression that you are ascending to the F of the final chord instead of descending to it.

I agree with Alexander in that it's probably worth persevering with this way if you believe there to be a good chance that you can improve the balance to at least your own satisfaction. If there's a danger you might do yourself an injury by overstretching, give up now and go for the first way. But if persevering, think carefully about how you want to finger it to best effect. If you are favouring setting the thumb squarely onto the Gb while just managing to catch the edge of the Ab with the very tip of your pinky (thereby weakening that note), it may be worth changing the bias; set as much as you dare of the ball of the pinky onto the Ab and rather risk the Gb coming out weak. Settle the edge or corner of the Gb key into the groove between the tip of your thumb and its nail. Choose between the alternatives 1-2-3-5 and 1-2-4-5 on the basis of which way the stretching hurts less. If your hands were big enough for stretch not to be a problem, you could probably slam this chord (i.e. accelerate your fingers downwards while airborne, and land on the keys with a crash), but as it is it's probably better to place your fingers carefully (land on the keys with zero velocity - use every millisecond of those rests in the previous bar to ensure the fingers are sitting comfortably) and then accelerate the actual keys downwards from that in-contact position (you may be doing it like this already, I don't know).

If you do go for rolling, I again agree with Alexander that it makes sense to roll both chords because it allows you to pretend to be doing it for musical reasons. In that case the thing to do would be to pretend Chopin had written wiggly lines alongside them, i.e. you should arpeggiate all six notes of the first chord (and all 5 or the 2nd). At the moment I'm not sure what you're doing, it kind of sounds like you're rolling only the RH and playing the two LH Abs at the same time as the RH's Gb (I hear only 4 distinct bangs, not 6).

To give greatest smoothness to this 6-note arpeggio, I would play all three Abs with the LH, that is to say I would finger the RH using 1-3-5 for Gb-C-Eb, and while the RH is working its way along those 3 notes, the LH (using its second Ab as a kind of spring board) flies over the top of the RH, landing on the top Ab (probably with its 2nd or 3rd finger or both), at just the right moment after the RH has played its Eb.

 

That's a pity. How do you manage in the rest of the piece? There are plenty of Gb-Ab ninths. Are they less of a problem for you when there are no other notes inbetween?

Yep, there was a guy posting here about it some months back. I think he had emigrated to Santiago de Chile.
Trouble with this is that it has two different and essentially (it seems) unrelated properties which tend to be conflated. One is the layout, the primary purpose of which is to make transposition easy without changing fingering. The other is the increased reach, but this does not seem particularly related to the layout, it's just that they made all the keys smaller, and there's no reason why you couldn't do that while retaining the conventional keyboard layout. Aren't piano-accordion keys slighty narrower than piano keys, for example?

Surprisingly, that sounds reasonably convincing. I can only tell if I really concentrate hard. The effect of the chord containing the "wrong" Gb is much weaker than that of the top Ab coming out stronger. Another thing you might like to try instead is losing the very bottom Ab, and to play the other LH Ab with 5, and the original Gb with your left thumb, or do you think that would sacrifice too much sonority?

Well, it boils down to your deciding which option would be least likely to make him turn in his grave. Since you visited it, you'll probably have some insight there.

Speaking of which, you also mentioned recently that you had visited Poulenc's grave nearby, but that mention, together with your photo, seems to have vanished without trace almost as soon as you posted it, as if you had decided you were unhappy with your re-recording of that novelette. No matter. It's just that I had been meaning to ask you about who that was in there with him. So I had to work it out for myself. It's his niece, sole heiress to his estate, who sadly died only a few months after him.

 

If you were playing for an exam or audition I'd agree with this: you don't want to do anything unexpected in those circumstances. But there's plenty of evidence that 19th century pianists respected the score a lot less than we do now--even Chopin didn't play his own pieces exactly as written--and in particular, people rolled chords whenever they felt like it. For me, rolling the chords is definitely the lesser evil compared with being unable to balance the notes the way you want.

I can hear the difference, and I think some of the warmth of the A flat chord is lost. There certainly are situations where you can get away with rearranging or leaving out notes, but usually in passages that are a bit more active rhythmically (I left out quite a few notes when I played the Schubert-Liszt Erlkonig, and noone was any the wiser); for my taste, it doesn't work so well here. It's a good idea though, and I'm sure you'll make use of it another time.

 

Yep,... he still didn't die and still lives there; enjoying an ice-cream in hot Chilean summer.

I'm still at it... at desperately trying to convert my Tyros 3 zebra piano Kbd into Janko Kbd layout. Musical creativity is part of my inherited burden and so, whether I like or not ...have to put up with it. - My Tyros Kbd conversion will take a while, I stick to my whistling to musical creativity of whistling to music, which sadly was not welcome by some forum members.
To progress my Tyros 3 Kbd conversion, I tried to get plastic printers to fabricate the Kbd keys, but their quotes were about $500 for 61 keys.
So, I had to dream up another solution ...and found one:
I just use 0.3mm thin tin covers, which clip onto the keys to protect them. That offers me a firm surface onto which I then epoxy glue the square Janko keys and is easily reversible, in case I need to sell the Tyros later on.
The advantage of this Janko musical Kbd is that it offers hobby musicians (like me!) to play the Kbd 10x faster and easier; i.e. 1 year of Janko practice equals 10 years of zebra piano Kbd practice!! This advantage is too good to be missed.
Most accomplished zebra piano Kbd players hate the Janko Kbd idea, because to them it's "just unfair" for Janko players to enjoy all these benefits! Zebra piano players had to struggle the hard way to get there so, why should Janko players have it any easier?! "Why have it easier ...when it can be made more complicated!"
The same with traditional notation. That's why I invented my own WYSIWYG Janko notation, which allows to visually transfer the notes from the sheet music to the keys and to forget about irregular scales practice and music theory. That makes sense, doesn't it? Here are some more details about it:

I also converted an old 120-button Farfisa accordion bass (bass section only) to MIDI. It was a hell of work combining, wiring/ soldering up all basses and chords via some 200+ signal diodes. This will enable me to enjoy musical creativity just like a singer or whistler, without bothering about irregular scales and chords with #+b and other Garbo irregularities.
Now all I would need is to find a PC programmer, who could accelerate the music conversion from traditional notation to my Janko notation.
Besides, I converted an old 120-button accordion bass (bass section only) to MIDI, fabricated a special cover for it, decorated it with cloth of my old shirt and sold it in two day for almost $400 on eBay. It was easy to do: I just added 24 switches onto it air flaps, but I didn't like it, for its 120 buttons had to operate the mechanics and that made the buttons hard to press, whereas my Farfisa accordion bass only activates one soft contact per button!!
Here's a great Janko piano Demo: