ALL OF THESE PIANISTS —amateur and professional—drew on the music available in their time, a repertoire that mushroomed decade by decade.
Across the keyboard, different locations, or
registers, provide their own individual
sonic imprints. On the far left side, the lowest, deep bass notes are
capable of sinister mutterings and thunderous growls.
In the middle of the instrument,
where the singing ranges of men and women meet, the sound is solid, clear, and warm. The highest treble notes, on
the far right, tinkle, glitter, and
ring like chimes
These vibrations are all picked up and amplified by the piano’s
soundboard. In modern pianos, it’s a thin sheet of spruce—fine-grained and
elastic—maintained in an arch shape and kept under a constant level of tension.
As the strings cause this diaphragm to vibrate, it transmits its waves to the
surrounding air, which
then move the elastic membranes of our ears. We experience these vibrations as sound
when the varying pressure on our eardrums induces oscillations in small bones,
which in turn cause a spiral-shaped structure called the cochlea to generate an
electrical signal to the brain.
A player can further shape the outcome through foot pedals hanging below the keyboard’s
center. On modern instruments, there are usually three: on the far right, the
sustain, or damper, pedal, moves the dampers (which muffle the vibrations after
a depressed key has returned to its original position) away from the strings,
allowing them to continue resonating; on the left, the una corda, or soft,
pedal, shifts the playing mechanism over so that the hammers will strike
only two strings (in Beethoven’s day it was only one string, hence the “una”) rather
than the three assigned to most notes; and in the middle, the sostenuto pedal
sustains only certain selected notes (those that are struck and held just before
the pedal is depressed). Using these, pianists can add bloom to the sound, dull
it, or suspend a choir of tones in the air while allowing others to bubble up and
disappear without a trace.
The great pianists often used these pedals in combination, the way
a painter mixes tinctures to find just the right color. Some, including
Beethoven, used the sustain pedal along with the una corda pedal to create a
special sonority for highlighting themes that recurred within a piece.
According to one observer,
Chopin also “often coupled them to obtain a soft and veiled sonority [and] he would
use the soft pedal alone for those light murmurings which seem to create a transparent
vapor round the arabesques that embellish the melody and envelop it like a fine
case.” As Chopin biographer Frederick Niecks remarked, “Every pianist of note
has, of course, his own style of pedaling.” For example, the difference between
the playing of Sigismond Thalberg and Franz Liszt, who met on the piano field
of battle, was described by one witness as that between “an atmosphere charged
with electricity and quivering with lightning” (Liszt) and one “floating in a
sea of purest light” (Thalberg). Their pedal techniques had
much to do with it.
Even the shape of the piano’s individual tones provides a foundation for myriad
styles and musical approaches. The very name piano actually suggests what we
hear when its keys are struck.
In its wake, a soaring diphthong arises: ia—two vowels strung together
and held out just long enough to suggest the birth of a song. But this new
sound soon becomes pinched—only briefly—by the nasal n, before sailing outward, with
rounded lips, into a final o, in an intimate gesture of openness.
Listen to the tones emanating from the instrument and you’ll discover a similar
sonic profile. Play any simple chord and after the initial percussive hammer
strikes (p), as the strings begin to vibrate, the sound stirs and blossoms like
the singing of vowels. But pay close attention and you’ll notice a slight wavering—as
if the strings are ever so softly repeating that n—while the music fades slowly
into the openness of the surrounding air. (Those wavering sounds
are known as “beating,” and they result from a slight out-of-tuneness that
occurs between the strings.) The sound is in constant flux, brimming with life.
Musicians may exploit any part of that tonal configuration, along with the instrument’s
dynamic flexibility, to achieve their musical goals: emphasizing its percussive
beginning, for instance, for rhythmic vitality; its long, leisurely diphthong
for languid melodies; the loud roar of hammered keys and the whispers from
those gently pressed for music filled with emotional turbulence; the magical
resonances that occur when tones interact in particular combinations, creating
a unique atmospheric chemistry. That’s why the piano can perfectly render the
lyrical simplicity of a Mozart melody or the rhythmic snap of an Oscar Peterson
run, the explosive din of Beethoven’s fury or the shimmering mists of a Bill
Evans ballad.
An ancient cosmologist might note a relationship between the four
components of the piano’s sound (the percussive pop, singing diphthong, shimmering
wave, and gradations of volume) and the primary building blocks of the world
described by Empedocles in the fifth century BCE: earth, water, air,and fire.
They are, it turns out, also convenient metaphors for describing the nature of
the musical universe.
The element of fire, for example, suits the Combustibles, figures like the turbulent
Ludwig van Beethoven, rock ‘n’ roll’s Jerry Lee Lewis, and jazz avantgardist
Cecil Taylor, who bring edge-of-your-seat volatility to the keyboard, exploiting
the piano’s vast dynamic range to give birth to music that can smolder and
explode.
The supple nature of water suggests the quality of the Melodists, such as Romantic
composer Franz Schubert, classicist J. C. Bach, and jazz pianist
George Shearing, whose streams of tones suggest sinuous waves, rising and falling
and curling back on themselves in soft arabesques. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who declared that melody was the basis of all musical expression, claimed
it was born of our most primitive impulses crying for release. But others have
compared melody to nature’s gentle geometry: the soaring arcs of birds in flight,
the spirals that build nautilus shells, the graceful undulations found in desert
sands.
Air befits the world of the Alchemists, musicians such as jazz pianist Bill Evans,
impressionist Claude Debussy, and bebop eccentric Thelonious Monk, who are
masters of atmosphere. Combining tones (and silence) in mysterious ways, they transform the mundane ingredients of musical
composition into haunting, resonant worlds, like alchemists changing ordinary
lead into gold. While melody seduces, alchemy entrances.
Finally, the solidity of the earth is the fundamental quality of
the
Rhythmitizers, like rock performer Fats Domino, Latin jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill,
and classical composer Sergei Prokofiev: musicians who take the percussive
“pop” that brings every piano tone to life and place it center stage.
Rhythmitizers bring the swing to jazz, the spice to salsa, and the trance to minimalism.
If melody tugs at the heart, rhythm’s symphony of pulses ignites the rest of
the body’s musculature with music that twitches, lurches, taps its feet, and wriggles
its hips.
No musician can be forced into just one of these types. Beethoven might unleash
fireworks in one moment and conjure angelic reveries in the next. Most great
artists find the boundaries permeable. Indeed, these essential musical elements
are usually intertwined; almost all melodies are infused with a rhythmic
contour. Still, composers, improvisers, and interpreters, no matter how chameleonlike,
tend to display particular traits in their pieces, and history often
remembers them in that light. For that reason, it’s often possible
to place diverse artists who worked continents and centuries apart, and in
vastly different genres, within these four basic rubrics.
EmoticonEmoticon