# 15 — PEDAL POINTS
I have loved listening to classical music for as long as I can remember, but in my childhood there were certain times when the music sounded scary and I had to fast-forward the CD player until the main melody returned again. And yes, I mean “scary” in the sense that I was uncomfortable and frightened, like how a young child might be afraid of the dark. Back then, I wasn’t sure how or why I felt that way. Now that my listening instincts are more properly developed and honed, I’m able to clearly identify such passages that once terrified me in my youth. Although those passages carried different musical phrases and sounded different, they all shared a common device in composition: the pedal point.
The pedal point is a musical section in which one note underlies a bunch of stuff in the upper registers/voices for a significant duration. The etymology of the term comes from the pipe organ: The organist would push down and sustain one pedal with his foot while playing all the higher notes with his fingers. However, this compositional device is not exclusive to organ music. It is most commonly found in the development sections of pieces, particularly anything that utilizes a sonata-allegro structure.
Brahms, Johannes (1833-1897). Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 108, mm. 84-89.
In the example above, the development section in the sonata-allegro form has a clear pedal point: The note A — which, in the key of D Minor, functions as the dominant — is sustained in the left hand while the upper two staves handle the more prominent musical motifs. That is just a six-measure excerpt, by the way; the pedal point continues all the way up to m. 130, where the recap begins and the music returns to the home key of D Minor.
The pedal point is a useful tool not only for reinforcing a specific note, but also for highlighting a specific section of a piece. However, in the case of the first movement in Brahms’ Op. 108, the pedal point is sustaining a “wrong note.” In addition, the development section is like an experimental laboratory for the composer’s genius and creativity; he can take the musical motifs from the opening exposition and twist them however he wants; he is “developing” those motifs in a section of unsettling instability and tension. Now, imagine all of that with an underlying pedal point. That’s a lot of dissonance right there, with an overwhelming abundance of clashing notes. Although a pedal point might seem like a source of stability, the sustained A doesn’t alleviate any discomfort because my ears established earlier that the home key is D Minor. The longer the note A is sustained, the further away my ears feel from home. Finally, after 46 measures of scary-sounding development, I hear the pedal point slowly dissipate and the opening melody return again at m. 130, like rays of sunshine pierce through the clouds and brush them aside to reveal the blue skies after a seemingly non-stop thunderstorm.