# What exactly do piano aficionados mean when they say "great tone"?



## clavichorder

I can usually identify the signature sound of a great pianist. But what does 'tone' really mean? Whatever it is, I want to understand this concept more clearly so I can cease to be annoyed by my own defensive skepticism on it. Because to me it has less to do with the depressing of any specific key than the context, which has more to do with voicing(vertical) and phrasing(horizontal).


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## Taggart

You run across "tone" in some simple exercises - playing forte against piano for example. Somebody remarked it's not so much the volume as the richness of sound - the ability to make one line stand out above the the other. One technique is to play the piano line with the fingertips and the forte line with the flats of the fingers to get a richer sound without being "bangy and loud".

If you want to get technical you can get way into piano construction, hammer weight, felting goodness knows what. If you want to keep it simple, try this - play a simple piece first of all using arm weight and sinking deeply into the keys so they accelerate all the way down; then play it again at the same volume but pressing shallowly so the key goes fully down but there is no acceleration at the bottom. You should be able to spot a difference in sound quality - which some people call tone.


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## Triplets

Taggert gives a good technical explanation, but as with many things in music, words cannot adequately explain imo an aural concept. The Piano is a percussion instrument, and when I play it, all listeners become painfully aware of this fact. Now certain types of music deliberately attempt to emphasize the instrument's percussive qualities, but for the most part, most of the music we listen to emphasizes it's melodic and harmonic capabilities.
The best way to understand tone imo would be to listen to some great Pianists who are known for great tones. I would start with Claudio Arrau, Artur Rubinstein, and Arturo Benedetto Michalangeli. The latter imo was a great example of what Debussy described as making the instrument play without the sound of hammers. Arrau was described as having a buttery tone, and Rubinstein as poetry in sound.


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