Allan Gotthelf wrote:

>Alice Chung writes:
>
>>Not only through touches and strikes on the keys on a technical level, but
>>also a lot of controling tones has to come from our interpretations of the
>>music.
>
>I certainly believe this.  But I think the original question was asking
>*how* it could be that the pianist's interpretative sense *could* affect
>tone.  I'd love to hear Alice or anyone else comment on that.

Much of what we call "tone" comes not from the raw striking of notes by
themselves in isolation, but our sense of the relationship between one note
and another.  These relationships constitute what is called "tone".  As
with many senses, we hear, not absolutely, but relatively, and we hear
tones not purely, but in combination.  We judge effect not alone, but with
a delicate sense of timing.  Each instrument also has a range where its
tone is most rounded, hit harder and one produces a jarring brittleness,
hit too softly and it becomes lost.  A good pianist can sense, and find,
this range with only a small amount of playing.

Physically what this boils down to is that each finger has a characteristic
length of time and force in relation to each other finger, and the timing
of the note, and the pedalling, determines the "context" of the striking of
the note.  Notes with gaps in the wrong places, pauses that are too long or
too short, sound poorly.  Notes where the pedal is depressed to late sound
flat, notes where there are many lines which are pedalled too much sound
muddy.  Consider that the pinky will sound different if one has just
depressed the thumb on a distant note, than picking up the whole hand and
striming with the 3rd finger.  The first will be closer to the original
note, but softer, the second will have a slight gap, but will be stronger.

In each of these things it should be realised that tone and technique are
related to timing, and timing is controlled at the minute level by how the
hand moves from one note to the next, the position of the hands and the
shoulders.  The ear is sensitive to very minute variations in loudness and
timing, and it is the use of the fingers, hands, wrist, elbows, shoulders
and whole body which produces this delicate interaction.

Tone then comes from the all of the strings which are resonating at a given
moment, and making sure that this resonace is neither too much - and hence
muddy, or too little, and hence "brittle" or "dry", and that the new notes
being added to the sonority altering it in the correct way.

- - -

Consider the difference betweeen holding the pedal down, hitting two
chords far apart on the keyboard, and then instantly hitting two chords in
the middle at the same force.  The new chords drown out the old, but the
overtones from the bottom create a muddiness, because the resonate with the
new notes, and the overtones from the high chord make the central chords
sound "off" since they become part of the upper overtone series.  Now do
the same thing, only waaiting just a split second, and hit the new chords
so the notes come out at the volume that the sound from the old chords has
- that is striking just slightly less strongly than the sound you hear at
the moment you depress the keys.

Suddenly the chords sound correct, because they fill out one large chord
exactly evenly, and have a luminous, rather than brittle and distempered,
tone.

So there it is, the key to tone is the relationship of the timing, and of
the relationship of the force, in order to control the shape of the sound.
Much of what makes music enjoyable is the correct control of resonance.
This is why music written for the open air can often engage in much farther
ranging dissonance than music for the indoors, since old notes fall away,
and do not create echo and resonance which sustains or reinforces the note.

Stirling S Newberry
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