As a player the first interaction with the piano is the interface of the keyboard. For many playing stops there. Provided our fingers are right then the sound that results will be right. Wrong.
What is music? What's it all about? What's it made of?
Vibrations.
If the vibrations aren't right, then the air doesn't move upon us in the right way and the interface with our brains and our emotions just doesn't get it. A load of use it is understanding English if the words that are spoken are Zulu or Farsi.
This is the situation in which music has lost its meaning over the past century, leaving the sustain pedal merely as a loud pedal to provide accents. When I see a performance, of course I can hear the difference, but I see the pianist using the sustain pedal as if it was mechanically a kick-drum pedal, I know that the pianist isn't receiving the communication from the playing instructions that the composer intended and won't be communicating that to an audience.
What is a key?
The music has become dissociated from the language and the language has lost force of meaning.
Why is the changing of the tonic called a change of key?
In Italian they use the word sonority. But even Italian musicians have forgotten. Is the change from C to C# a change in sonority?
What does a key do? The real meaning of key?
What do you use it for? For unlocking and going through a door.
Where does the door go? To a different place.
When you change key on your piano do you go to a different place?
If not, it's not your fault. It's the vibrations. They haven't been tuned properly.
For the past dozen years I've been leading a change and that change is tuning.
When did you have your instrument last tuned? Many will say months ago or some will say years ago, and think it's still in tune. Why is that? Not because of any matter of musicianship but because the modern tuning was introduced in the 1870s when mass produced pianos were made in universalism and when freshly tuned, the sound glistened and impressed. And because the tuning is out of tune, one really could tolerate it going more out of tune for quite a while.
When a piano is well tuned, it should be able to achieve stillness. That stillness is not permitted in modern tuning where every major third beats equivalently and faster as you go up the scale.
That stillness is crucial both to the aural identification of keys and the colour of the rooms opened up by the doors, as well as resonance. When the instrument is capable of stillness, then the ways in which the whole instrument is able to vibrate are focused to be still in some keys, and so distinguishable from scale notes in other keys that they're not excited in vibration.
This is crucial to the use of the sustain pedal of course. And if tuned well, that sustain pedal can do what it says on the tin - to sustain. And when this happens you can restore the long pedalling instructions of both Chopin and Beethoven. And Haydn can sing instead of being played staccato. And the dour keys of F minor and C minor really do express that grief that is absent from modern performance.
The other day I went to tune for a friend
https://www.nigelallcoat.org/ who likes French Baroque
and here you can hear his use of the sustain as if he was playing this in the cathedral.
And in Nice where I tune for the International Competition here's a young lad playing Bach
=7280
Listen to the reaction of the Jury after his second performance after I let on to him the secret.
Yes - all one pedal.
A little while ago I had fun tuning a horrible piano to see if the tuning would make a difference . . . and it did. My playing is really awful so please forgive me but perhaps it's possible to hear that I really couldn't get the instrument to do what I wanted without it being tuned properly
https://hammerwood.mistral.co.uk/tuning-performance-examples.htm gives an outline of recordings of the whole while over a long while and
is another friend
https://ralphallwood.com/ for whom I tune.
Revising the tuning of instruments can open the door to interpretation and other worlds, allowing the piano to enter dreamstate. Would you ever think the Raindrop prelude was anything other than the way Lang Lang plays it? With resonating tuning one can hold the pedal down . . . for bars on end, playing sensitively and faster . . . and it's drizzle dropping out of the mist in a place where you can't distinguish sea from sky, with the sun breaking through and sometimes dark clouds. Anyone who's been to Valdemossa might be able to imagine.
It's really vital in performance to go to the place, to go to the time, to go to the instrument, to go to the vibrations, the tuning all of which were the inspiration of the composer at the time. Without this, the black notes on the white page are meaningless.
Here's a performance
with another friend
https://www.adolfobarabino.com/ for whom I tune which might initially sound ordinary. But for me, the piece comes to the stillness of Lake Tun, mirror smooth with birds flying aloft and flurries of leaves at the bank where water laps and the music reaches new dimensions.
And yes the music can live in the romantic as well as the baroque here
=1125 a snippet with violin in a recording about to be released.
I tune in a special way, particularly in the bass and setting the scale differently, and if you would like your tuner to do something like this for you then please get them to contact me and I'll happily give instructions.
Best wishes
David P
Topic: The importance of tuning on performance.