Know Thy Piano: Almost a wonderful performance—except for cantabile and pianissimo ruined by the thunk! thunk! of the damper pedal hitting the top of its travel. If the player had only known that piano design helps you pedal silently.
Experiment for yourself: With pedal down, play and release a chord. Slowly raise the pedal, stopping when the sound stops; then notice how far the pedal still is from the top. Alternatively, with pedal up, play repeated notes staccato. Keep playing as you depress the pedal. Note how far down you must go before the notes lengthen.
In other words, the pedal has "free play" at the top. To change pedal cleanly, we need only bring the pedal into the "free play" region, not all the way up.
To practice silent changes, play a two-handed C chord with pedal. Release the chord and hold the pedal. Still holding, play an F# chord. Now change the pedal silently, getting rid of every trace of the C chord. Do the same thing again, but with a quicker change. Finally, change at the very moment you play the F# chord. A minute or two on this daily, and soon your ear won't tolerate thunks ...
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Transcription and reconstruction of the1889 Edison wax cylinder recording of Brahms.Brahms, Edison, denoise, Disklavier, performance practice,19th century music, Hungarian Dance
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Learn to move the lower torso in a musically appropriate and biomechanically correct way to maintain freedom in the body, and to engage and enhance the metric and phrase rhythm of the music.teaching piano, piano technique, Charles Aschbrenner, movement and rhythm, pulse patterning, piano pedagogy
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