Archive for March 5, 2006

The Pain of the Piano Panel

March 5, 2006 at 8:40 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

Yesterday at 4:45 PM I had the Panel (because there’s a “panel” of judges) in the theory room in Stanford’s Braun Center. Needless to say, I screwed up.

Let me defend myself before things get too severe. First of all, although the tone of the piano was decent, it still had numerous inherent problems.

  1. The most obvious to me was the amount of dust on the flank keys. I mean, come on. I was the last person to use the piano on that day, yet there were more dust on the edges than on my table here. And as you know, dust makes the keys slippery, so naturally I slipped a little on the Haydn Sonata and the Chopin Etude, both of which had tons of 32nd notes jumping up and down, sliding back and forth between octaves. I tried to ameliorate the situation by blowing and wiping off some dust while I was waiting for the judge to finish writing critiques. Still, it was unbearable.
  2. Secondly, the pedals were too high. Those pedal on, off, on, off passages were hard to do considering whenever I pressed on it, my foot slid backwards and off the pedal. Quite simply, I cannot keep moving my foot onto the pedal while concentrating on the ups and downs of the Etude.
  3. Thirdly, the sostenuto pedal was weird. For my Prokofiev (”Montagues and Capulets”, a dance I think) I tried in vain for five seconds to press the damn sostenuto pedal (the middle one, which retains the sound of the keys already pressed, and does not exist for upright pianos so I couldn’t practice this at home), and I realized that the damper pedal was just too damn fat, unlike the one at my home which is kind of skinny. Anyway, this bothered me.
  4. And lastly of the problems with the piano itself, the lower registers were much louder than the higher ones, and that made all my pieces sound somewhat unbalanced. I tried to play the upper notes louder, but the 12-foot Steinway was just not very nice.

I think I made my case clear about the problems of the piano itself. Now, onto other factors that screwed me up:

  1. Obviously those problems listed above procured psychological problems. I could not focus, not that I could normally :P I think I may have ADD, not as severe as Joe’s, but still quite. And the thing is, the occurance is completely unpredictable.
  2. …

I’ll finish my complaint tomorrow.

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