The soft-focus sound: reverb as a gendered attribute in mid-century mood music.

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington

Hebenstreit liked to roll great billows of arpeggiated chords over the wide range of his instrument and to allow the full resonance of the undampened strings to die slowly on the listeners' ears. It was a new sensation at the time, and it seemed ravishing.

Arthur Loesser on Pantaleon Hebenstreit, exponent of the triple-strung dulcimer around the year 1700

IN 1783, the Broadwood Piano Company of London began incorporating into the design of its instruments a sustain pedal mechanism. The device allowed a performer to instantaneously raise all the dampers off the strings at any time; a rich resonant effect could be achieved even if the player depressed a single key, as sympathetic vibrations would resonate throughout the full set of strings and across the whole soundboard. When Broadwood's pianos immediately began outselling all of its other builders adopted the Broadwood design, and soon pianos everywhere came equipped with the pedal. Ever since, the device has been regarded as something of a mixed blessing: an invaluable tool for a sensitive performer, the pedal is also seen as the source of a great deal of slovenly musicality whenever amateurs are tempted to "overpedal" and muddy the sound. An experience common to beginning piano students everywhere is the strict prohibition against using the pedal, which elicits a persistent, unsatisfied curiosi ty about its function. For years, my own piano teachers forbade me to go anywhere near the pedals, even after my legs had grown long enough to reach them comfortably. Finally, once I was deemed musically mature enough, I was instructed to use the sustain pedal very sparingly, and expressly for the purpose of creating legato lines. It was never to be used in Bach, the music that consumed most of my practice time. What a great treat it was, then, when I was first sent home to practice Debussy's "La fille aux cheveux de fin," my introduction to mandated extensive use of the pedal. Not only was the work harmonically ravishing, but I was actually encouraged to let the chords blur a little into one another, to linger over the sensuous quality of the timbre of the instrument. The effect of pedaling through the spacious G-flat and C-flat major chords, of allowing the resonance of the pentatonic melodies to accumulate and billow, to floor the pedal for no other reason except that it sounded fine--this was one of the m ore exhilarating moments of my early musical education, an experience surely repeated in the lives of countless other young pianists.

Arthur Loesser, in Men, Women, and Pianos, suggests that there is a connection between the introduction of the pedal in the nineteenth century and the sounds of popular musical instruments of earlier times, particularly the hammered dulcimer. (1) A decidedly lower-class instrument, the dulcimer was never heard in church or in court, but the highly reverberant quality of its undampened strings made it irresistible to the popular audience that encountered it in the public spaces of taverns and markets. The pedal, in one sense, was a gadget which increased the piano's mass-marketability. Indeed, there seems to be an enduring popular predilection for "aftersound," for reverberation and echo effects, one that extends into the twentieth century. I am thinking of popular musics, and especially of the countless lush string arrangements of the 1950s and 1960s, the staples of FM easy-listening and "mood music" stations in the '70s--a musical style in which reverb plays a crucial role. It is a sound that is closely link ed with developments in audio engineering during this same period. But the hazy, syrupy quality of heavy reverberation has always existed in an uneasy relationship with our dominant musical values, values instilled through formal musical education--like piano lessons--and through our encounters with scientific and other prestigious discourses about sound. As a defining characteristic of the hugely successful pop string movement of the 1950s, reverb was at the same time much maligned by hardcore audiophiles of the same period who considered it an imperfection...

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