Piano Video Lesson: Can You Make a Crescendo on a Chord on the Piano?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin with a wild question today. Can you make a crescendo on a chord on the piano? Let me ask you, how many of you have seen your score a held chord with a crescendo on it and you wonder can you possibly do something like that? You push, you don't get much do you? So you wonder is the composer just crazy or did they not understand the physics of the piano? Why would they ever write a crescendo on a held chord? Well there's some very good compositional reasons for this and I'm going to show you how you can achieve the effect of a crescendo on a chord on the piano. And as an example of this I've pulled up Greig's lyric pieces and in the third one Watchman's song, wouldn't you know it, in the very end there is a held chord with a crescendo on it. So first thing I'm going to do is going to play this for you and let you see the score while I do that, alright? So what is meant by that crescendo? Well the composers are trying to show you how this phrase is not ending gently, it's moving forward. And there's some things you can do to achieve this effect. One of them is the use of the pedal. Watch if I play this without trying to do anything special with it and I'm going to show you what I'm doing with the pedal first not doing anything with it and listen to the sound and not really trying to propel forward and this is how you don't get any quality of a crescendo there.

Now this time I'm going to do a pedal technique. First I'm just going to let you listen to what it sounds like, this one chord with and without pedal.

Now with the pedal.

So even there you'll get a little bit of a sense of a growth of the sound as all the other strings of the piano can resonate because the dampers are lifted. And when you play it and kind of move forward right at that point you almost get the sense of a crescendo. Listen to this and watch the pedaling as I do this.

So you may have heard I kind of move forward and I actually play that chord a little bit louder in anticipation of the crescendo pedaling very soon after the initial attack to get more of a boomy sound whereas usually the way I like to pedal chords is to pedal later when you're holding the chord to mitigate the dying away of the chord and try to increase the sustain. Here I'm trying to get a downright crescendo so I put that pedal down very soon after the initial attack which is stronger than it might be if I didn't see that crescendo. Then I'm moving forward almost anticipating the next chord to try to get the sense of the crescendo. Listen to it one more time.

So indeed you can get the effect of a crescendo on a chord even though physically it's not really possible but you can get the effect by utilizing the pedal by anticipating that crescendo a little bit early letting the music move along through the crescendo so you get the sense of a crescendo on the chord and that's what the composer intended. They weren't out of their minds when they get crescendo. It wasn't like they didn't understand the physics of the sound of a piano. I'm sure Greig did and you can hear the effect that it creates when you follow the composer's intention. After all the piano is an instrument of illusion. There's so much we do with the piano that you wouldn't think is possible. For example just getting a singing line out of a percussion instrument where every note is dying away is a huge challenge. So this is what you must do. Think of what the composer is intending and find a way of achieving it with the way you approach the music and how you apply the pedal.

I hope this has been helpful for you again. Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Think about subscribing if you like videos like this and sharing them with your friends on social media. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining me.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/can-you-make-a-crescendo-on-a-chord-on-the-piano/

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