Neolexia

Things for which terms should exist, but don't:

• The manoeuvre made by horn players whereby the instrument is spun around its centre axis several times until the condensation within dribbles out of the bell onto the floor.
• The exaggerated follow-through gesture all string players, but notably cellists, make with their right hand after a pizzicato. There are varying degrees of this.
• The dirty bit of the bow hair right next to the frog, which never sees either rosin or contact with a string.
• That thing oboists and clarinettists do to clear water from a key, namely inserting a roll-your-own paper and blowing through the instrument in a faintly immature manner.
• The duuu-yurrrrr-yumm bell-curve glissando commonly found in cockney music whenever trombones are involved.
• The conductor's gesture of tapping the stick three times on the stand to get the musicians to shut up.
• That quasi-arpeggio pattern of pitches trumpeters always do at the start of rehearsal.
• The experience of only being able to play a rapid passage of notes correctly when one doesn't realise one is doing so.
• The thing string quartet players (usually the leader) do where they nearly-but-not-quite jump up from their seat during moments of excitement.
• A particularly necessary one: the layouts where the strings are laid out Vln1-Vln2-Vla-Vcl or Vln1-Vcl-Vla-Vln2. I use 'new/modern layout' and 'old/proper layout' in conversation but this can often confuse folks who have only ever seen the former.
• The film canisters wind players carry and always have to go to the lavatories and fill with water to soak their reeds in.
• The person who places the conductor's score, open at the first page, on the stand before a performance.
• The person who presents the soloist with flowers (women) or booze (men).
• A person who claps in the wrong place at the end of Sibelius Five.

Don't play it again, Sam

I get through a fair amount of piano music these days, with the various choirs, accompanying and other engagements I have.  Inevitably, one comes across things in piano music which are a little less than appropriate for the instrument, and so it's worth sharing a few to show that even the greats get it wrong sometimes.

At the risk of stating the obvious (which seems to be happening with increasing frequency on this blog), it is worth setting out clearly and briefly how the pianoforte works: The player presses down the keys and holds them there for the required duration of the note. This causes various components to move, releasing the damping mechanism and striking a hammer against the string(s), setting it ringing until the dampers are allowed to move back into place. What this means is that the only things the player can actually control are:

1. The velocity at which the key is initially struck, and thereby the volume and tone of the note;
2. The duration of the note;
3. Whether a pedal is used to add or reduce resonance.

And that's it! The player cannot control the note after it has been sounded, cannot alter the decay of the vibrating string, and cannot alter the volume in mid-pitch.  With all this in mind, let's take a look at a few examples of absent-minded piano writing.

The first is this, from Dvorák's otherwise delightful Sonatina, Op.100:

Now that's just stupid, isn't it? As we've explained above, the note cannot be altered once it has been struck. So to expect the player to suddenly reduce the volume or the piano's natural decay to drop suddenly but then level off to produce this effect is silly. I have tried suddenly releasing the pedal but the resulting change in volume is mostly wishful thinking. I suppose what Dvorák was trying to show was that the pianist should be sensitive to the violin's fp when playing the E minor chord, but the fact remains that they can see it in the violin part above, and the effect is unplayable.

Sibelius next, and this from his own transcription of Finlandia:

Now, this is not necessarily an error. A pianist can play repeated notes quite rapidly (viz. Rachmaninov's celebrated Op.23 No.5 prelude) but it is inadvisable to write this many in succession, and not as a four-finger chord, especially bearing in mind the tempo of this passage. What makes it particularly fair game to criticise this, however, is that less than twenty bars later he writes the eminently more sensible:

The texture in the orchestral score this is derived from (trumpets, heavy brass) is near-identical in both bars, so it's not even necessary to differentiate between contrasting timbres.  The second version also reproduces the slight variation between chords one would hear from an orchestral brass section. 


Actually, I am loath to lay into this too much, as it's an otherwise fantastic transcription and actually reveals many details which are often overlooked in orchestral performances of this work.  Particularly striking is the variety of articulation markings in the central 'big tune', which may seem slightly odd in view of the lovely, but bland, legato lines so often heard.  There are also some dissonances which add interesting passing colour, yet are hardly noticeable when orchestrated.  Most of all, apart from the above example, the transcription is gloriously pianistic.  Not a small number of the articulations just mentioned correspond perfectly with where the fingers might need to leave the note early in order for the hand to move, and correct balence in chords and accompaniment figures is easy to achieve. Watch a better performance than I can currently produce here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaogrOWfnb8 (and he nails the repeated semis three times!)

Finally, a variety of piano parts for various pop songs, 'musical theatre' and show numbers. A lot of this music features successive complex chords - that is, damn near everything has a seventh or ninth or sus 6 added to it, resulting in waves of modal tone clusters which have to be splodged with the right hand (the left hand, meanwhile, usually plays some variant on successive parallel fifths to give the chords some semblance of having a pitch centre). I'm sorry if this is all a bit subjective and value-judgement-y, but I play a fair bit of this music and apart from finding it rather derivative and sentimental, it seems to completely disregard the principles of harmony and chord progression found in most tonal music.  The constant addition of extra tones to chords and the copious amounts of pedal required means the music is often just a mush of the same notes in different combinations ('all the white keys, all the time!') and lacks the variation in tension between degrees of dissonance.

Most of all, this results in some highly un-pianistic flailing about in order to play every single chord, because it seems making the notes lie at least reasonably under the hands just will not do.  A number from Wicked I've been doing with somebody recently has actually been harder to learn than the Polonaise from the Goldberg Variations, because despite its speed and hand-crossings, the Bach falls under logical fingering patterns and uses only one note per hand at a time. I realise much of this music is guitar-based, and these chords probably present themselves as relatively elementary if you have six strings and frets, but the piano is also pretty common in pop and stage music and thus should be written for accordingly. The fact that sheet music includes chord symbols as well as a written-out realisation (note to self: future blog post on similarities between this an baroque continuo) doesn't really make it any easier to play, as I seem to spend as much time groping for Cm sus2 (no third) as I would for some blobs on the lines.

Just as an example, consider the following. I need four fingers to play the first chord, and it seems logical to use 1,2,3,4 on it in order to use 5 on the semiquaver that follows. But reaching the chord on beat 2 is problematic. I'm now stuck with lifting the hand over my weakest and shortest finger to play the chord, making it impossible to have the fingers ready for it and make a smooth transition. Using another finger would break the legato between the first chord and the semiquaver.  About the best I can do in performance is shown on the right:

If the extra A were omitted, I could move the hand easily and play three acceptably smooth chords. As it stands, I risk playing a wrong chord entirely, due to having to scramble to get the little finger out of the way, and grab the third chord as quickly as I can, whilst using the pedal exactly for the purpose I was told not to by my piano teacher. There is simply no good fingering here.

But I'm 'classically trained'. What do I know?

Pianistic preferences

I am called upon to perform on both digital and acoustic pianos about equally in my working life.  Naturally, I press the keys on whatever is put in front of me without quibble, but if there is a choice I will always plump for a traditional acoustic piano. I have sometimes been questioned as to why, and at times this can appear a counter-intuitive option (I have played some pretty ropey pianos over the years) so I wish to make a case for why the traditional acoustic instrument is, at least in my experience, preferable to modern electronic keyboards.

We must begin by stating that electronic keyboards in general posses the following advantages:

1. They do not go out of tune.
2. If the function is supplied, they can be re-tuned to mean, Pythagorean, modal temperaments and baroque pitch at an instant.
3. They are not susceptible to changes in temperature, humidity and movement in the way an acoustic piano is. In fact the only possible damage from these factors would be water ingress causing short circuiting.
4. They are usually equipped with a moderate-to-wide range of timbral possibilities, albeit synthesised. This is probably the most significant advantage of the instrument.
5. Other useful functions such as transposition and recording capacity are often fitted.
6. They are cheaper to purchase, smaller and more portable than traditional pianos.
7. On high-end instruments, the key and pedal action is weighted in an attempt to imitate that of an acoustic instrument, aiding the traditionally trained player. 
8. They are easier to amplify as a PA system can be plugged directly into the instrument without the need for a microphone.

With all this in mind, one might wonder why anyone bothers with traditional pianos any more. By comparison, they are expensive to purchase and maintain properly, are difficult to move, can only produce one sound 'patch' and have no 'performance aids' other than three pedals and that the stool adjusts up and down.  Electronic keyboards work on the same principle as other electric instruments such as guitars: by creating a tiny sound (in this case small bars which are struck like chimes by the keys) and amplifying it, usually modifying the resulting wave as well. This means that a lot of delicate and temperamental components can be eliminated and replaced by circuitry. So why do I still prefer a 'real' piano?

Firstly, the instrument has a richness and sonority that is impossible to imitate digitally. Chiefly this is due to the effect of the strings vibrating in whatever acoustic space the instrument is played in, but also to do with the fact that the strings vibrate in sympathy with each other. The reason why this is nearly impossible to synthesise is that the additional overtones created thus, which depend on so many multiple factors - the exact notes played and the attack of each, what degree of pedals are being used, what strings may still be vibrating from the previous combination of pitches - that the memory and processing power required to store and activate the sample of each possible combination would be in the range of a supercomputer.  Even then, it is a difficult task indeed to make what is essentially an amplified glockenspiel sound like felted hammers hitting sets of metal strings.  The tone of electric pianos is almost always too fuzzy and boomy by comparison (a common problem with amplified instruments) and lacks the crispness one can get from a well-practiced staccato.  In addition, the percussive effect of the felt making initial contact with the string is difficult to synthesise, often replaced by sound of the plastic key thumping against rubber bearings and electrical contacts.  Pedal action remains a weak area, largely because of the above issue of sympathetic vibration and, on the other foot, so to speak, the fact that an una corda or due corde marking has acoustic implications far beyond simply reducing the volume a bit. I have yet to play a digital piano in which half-pedalling was at all satisfactory, and on most it was impossible as the sustain pedal was considered a binary switch which when on simply added a set amount of reverb.

As an addendum to the above, there are certain pieces which are absolutely impossible to perform on a digital piano as they require this sympathetic vibration as an essential effect. A piece titled simply 'Harmonics' in the fourth book of Bela Bartók's excellent pedagogical series Mikrokosmos is one example, requiring the player to depress keys without them sounding and then allow the strings to be set vibrating when other notes are struck. This simply could not be accomplished on a non-acoustic instrument.

The other, related, consideration is the feedback the player gets from the instrument.  Even the most sophisticated digital key mechanism cannot emulate the action of the 80-or so components that are needed to play even a single note on a strung instrument. When playing a real piano, one can directly feel, even in notes of short duration, something inside the instrument applying force to something else, changing centres of gravity and creating inertia, which provides valuable information on how the note will sound even before the sound reaches one's ears.  Electronic instruments lack much of this vital 'touch' due to there being essentially a short-cut in the action. (For much the same reasons, I dislike driving cars which have too much electronic intervention in the controls).  Furthermore, the key action often lacks sufficient resistance, meaning than when playing fast passages or using the position of one key to find another it is far too easy to accidentally sound the wrong note when passing the hand over it, as well as making chord voicing harder.  All these factors force the player to take time to adapt; whilst the musical results will probably not suffer having done so, it remains that the pianist is essentially learning a new type of instrument.

Finally, another issue which has not been satisfactorily solved by the manufacturers of synthesised instruments: volume. Not the amount of it, for most keyboards and electric pianos have a volume control in addition to touch-sensitive keys which provides more than adequate range, but the guesswork that must be undertaken to find the correct setting.  Of course this can be an advantage, as it allows the relative volume to be adjusted to suit a large or small space, but it is often a source of frustration when the player finds that what seems deafeningly loud to them comes across as feeble at the back of the room. A chief cause of this is that speakers howsoever positioned (usually under the main body or key rack) cannot synthesise a large soundboard reflecting string vibrations in a universal direction. As stated, this is less of an issue when a PA system with large speakers is connected to the instrument - but this instead creates the potential problem of the source of the sound being some distance away from the player and thus not in sync with the action of their fingers. When sitting at an acoustic piano one can always assume, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, what volume any given amount of force on the keyboard will produce.

The pipe organ is, of course, a separate instrument entirely, but has equally valid considerations in the electronic vs acoustic choice. A good full-size electronic church organ is as good as its traditional counterpart, but as far as I can see a small portable organ cannot compete - it'll simply never be as loud without excessive amplification.