Author: jhart

Politics is a sticky subject, and one that seems to show up in every aspect of our lives in some way or another. Throughout all of American history, minority groups and underprivileged people have been systematically oppressed, and this oppression usually gives birth to many different forms of protests. When most people think of protests, they think of the images of Martin Luther King Jr. making a speech or staging a peaceful march, or of the many protesters holding up signs in a city street. What usually doesn’t come to mind, though, is protest music, and it is protest music that this post will focus on.

Protest music has been created throughout history by many different musicians from many different backgrounds, and it is one of the clearest examples of how politics can make its presence felt in every part of our life. There have been many examples of protest songs in America, from Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”, to Edwin Starr’s “War”, to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, protest music has been a part of American culture for a long time. Recently, with the introduction of social media into our daily lives, political tension is seemingly reaching greater and greater levels as people become more aware of the atrocities committed in America.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at perhaps the most provocative piece of protest music we’ve gotten in a long time: Childish Gambino’s 2018 song, “This Is America”. When Childish Gambino (real name Donald Glover) released this song and its accompanying music video, it went viral, and is currently sitting at 536 million views on Youtube. If you just listen to the song on its own, it doesn’t seem like such an overt piece of protest music, but it’s the music video that makes it so provocative. The video contains countless references – some subtle, some not so subtle – to issues that the black community faces in America.

The video is extremely clever in the way it symbolizes American culture. There are two things to pay attention to: what is happening in the foreground, and what is happening in the background, and how they relate to American society. The foreground happenings are all centered around Gambino. Gambino’s dances throughout the video are taken from many viral dances and videos around the internet. In between the dancing, there are two instances of gun violence shown; the first, where Gambino shoots a man tied to a chair with a bag over his head, and the second where Gambino shoots a singing and dancing chorus. At both of these points, the music switches from a cheery, gospel-like church chorus sound to a heavy, agitated rap verse, before slowly returning to the more cheery sound. In the background, the references are more subtle. People carry the guns off-screen carefully handled and wrapped in cloth while dragging away the dead body in the first instance, or running towards the chorus angrily in the second. A man (who looks to possibly be representing a police officer) forcibly pulls someone out of their car. Another man jumps from a high place in the rafters in what looks like a suicide attempt. Other younger people sit on their phones recording all of these events happening.

What happens in the foreground and background in the video is similar to what happens in the foreground and background of our lives. Gambino’s dancing seems to be a reference to how we as a society get easily distracted from these issues with viral trends, and when the terrible events do happen – the homocides and mass shootings that make national headlines – it doesn’t take long before they fade back into the background.

This video is a perfect example of how protest music can use a medium like music and video as a way to protest. A couple years before this video was released, Colin Kaepernick also used a new medium to protest; the medium of the National Anthem ceremony before football games. It just goes to show how many different ways there are to protest politics, and similarly, it shows how politics can make its presence known in so many different areas of our lives.

If you’ve ever played the piano before, chances are you’ve used the pedals by your feet. Most grand pianos will have three of them, and they all have different uses. But where did they come from? How, and why, were they developed?

The modern piano’s three pedals have pretty distinct functions; the right pedal, or the damper pedal, is the one that is by far the most used. It lifts the dampers off of the strings so that every note you play sustains even after you release the key. The left pedal, also called the una corda or the soft pedal, is designed to create a softer, more muted sound, and it achieves this on most piano designs by shifting the keys and hammers to the right so that each hammer only hits one of the strings (many notes on a piano have two or three strings that create the full sound). The middle pedal, which is rarely used, is usually a sostenuto pedal. It has the same effect as the damper pedal, but only on the notes that you are already holding down when you press the sostenuto pedal. This lets you sustain certain notes while simultaneously playing shorter notes elsewhere.

The first mechanism that changed the sound of the piano in a way that resembles our modern piano pedals was the una corda, invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy. Cristofori’s 1700 piano is the first pianoforte that we know of. You’ll notice that Bartolomeo’s una corda shares the same name as our modern left pedal, and that’s because they shared the same function; however, Cristofori’s original una corda was a hand stop, not a pedal. This made it very clunky to use, as the pianist would have to stop playing with one hand every time they wanted to use it.

Moving ahead to Germany in the late 1700s, Johann Stein, who designed the pianos that Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn wrote music for, found a way around the problem of having to use your hands by using a knee lever instead. The lever itself is believed to be developed around 1765, and Mozart wrote about them in a 1777 letter, in which he says,

“I have played my six sonatas by heart repeatedly, both here and in Munich. The fifth in G, I played at the distinguished Casino concert, and the last in D, which has an incomparable effect on Stein’s pianos. The pedals, pressed by the knees, are also better made by him than by any one else ; you scarcely require to touch them to make them act, and as soon as the pressure is removed not the slightest vibration is perceptible.”

The first instance of the pedal itself is not as clear, but the consensus seems to be that it came from England. Gottfried Silbermann, the first German piano builder, had many English piano builders as apprentices, and a few of them are credited with first incorporating the damper pedal. Americus Backers, one of these English apprentices, has a surviving 1772 piano with what are believe to be the original pedals.

Piano makers were very experimental with how they arranged the pedals from then on, and the configuration changed constantly. Beethoven owned several different pianos from different makers, all with different pedal configurations. His Broadwood grand had a soft pedal and a separate damper pedal for the treble and bass notes. He also had a piano designed specifically to be louder for him, as he was going deaf. This piano had five different pedals as well as more strings on some of the notes.

The piano pedals are very important in modern classical playing, and looking back on the history of their creation and all of their different variations can be very interesting. It is entirely possible that the modern pedal configuration may end up changing at some point, so looking back at how these changes were made can offer a unique perspective on something as taken for granted as the piano pedals.