10 years ago by
A Pianist
Arg!
Okay, so the problem is that I "clunk" the pedal at the top of its travel (when my foot comes up). My teacher complains about this during my lesson.
Now, she has a grand piano. For practice, I only have an upright piano available. And it seems like the pedal action feels completely different on the upright-- I'm told they use quite different mechanisms.
So I told her that I'm having trouble adapting to her piano. She said, "Of course, that is the whole challenge, you'll always have to adapt." But then I explained that I only have one specific piano available for practice, so how can I get experience adapting? If I got to play on different pianos all the time, then that would be a great experience.
She didn't seem to understand my point. She said "Just do it," in essence.
I'm thinking of designing my own awareness exercises. Perhaps I can practice greater awareness of the pedal as I play. I could practice deliberate half-pedals. I could practice very slow pedal movement while I'm playing and using my ear to hear the moment the dampers come up. Basically I need to practice using some percentage of my attention on the pedal as I play.
Oh, I should mention that these are not "binding pedals" but "touch pedals" or "accent pedals".
I think Alan wrote something about the sense of balancing against the resistance of the pedal in the craft of piano. I forget exactly what he wrote, but I have an approach that is on rather similar lines. Basically, find a part of your foot where the "down" position is the default. Think of the smallest "press" possible to keep the pedal down. On some pianos weight alone is enough whereas more powerful springs may require a small additional sense of acting down. Then think of the up as releasing the weight/press from your leg enough for the SPRINGS to press you up again. You don't seize your foot up or necessarily even think of lifting it at all. Rather you perceive a tipping of the interaction until it's more like the pedal is lifting your foot than you are. Instead of your foot exerting slightly more force on the pedal than it does on you, you exert slightly less than it does on you. In a sense, you might still want to think of the remaining "down" feel as you travel up. The up movement is the controlled release of the slight "down" force- not an instant reversal of direction.
This isn't precisely how Alan describes it, but basically it's about perceiving how the pedal acts back on the foot- which I believe is the same point he made. If the pedal is banging at the up point, this shows that you're not in contact with its resistance but are letting it coast freely. Your foot is travelling too quick and allowing the spring to send the pedal cracking against the wood on its return. If you focus any awareness exercises around perceiving the pedal's push back at you, you should find that you can learn to maintain contact with it- which gives it no chance to be sprung hard against anything.
When it becomes an interaction with the pedal, you can do it just the same on anything. If you focus on the superficial exterior of the movement, it won't transfer. The key is to make every single movement an "improvised" and well perceived interaction between both what you apply to the pedal and what the pedal applies back to you.
