Why crescendo or decrescendo over one long note in piano music?
That C-chord on measure 6 of the system, from Grieg Piano Sonata, Op. 7, IV. Finale - Molto Allegro:
Why couldn't they just mark that D7 chord with a p? That G chord is marked pp.
Once you press a key on a piano and hold it, you cannot modify the dynamics. It will just decay by itself after a while. Why do some engravings have a crescendo or decrescendo over the full length of a single half or whole note (usually a chord)? There are not shorter notes in different layers that you could progressively play louder or softer while you hold the long note. It is not a trill or tremolo.
I just ignore these phantom crescendos and decrescendos when I see them in piano music. I can understand if you're playing woodwind, brass, or organ because it's physically possible.
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There are several situations where this notation makes sense in piano music.
There is one note in one part, for example the melody, but several notes in the accompaniment (written on the other staff).
There is a "symmetrical" arrangement of a two hairpins showing a crescendo and a decrescendo. One of the hairpins is over a single note, the other over several notes. If only one hairpin was written, there would be nothing to show that the dynamics should have returned to the original level after both hairpins.
Even over a single note, a crescendo hairpin shows that the following note should be played louder. You can play many more gradations of dynamics than a the small number of text markings like "f", "mf", "p". (A nice piano exercise is to repeat the same chord say 64 times, in a slow tempo, and make each chord slightly louder or softer than the one before it)
Here are examples of the second and third ones, taken from a standard edition (Breitkopf & Härtel) of Chopin's complete works:
But there is also a lot of incompetent music engraving being done, and "published" on the web, by people who don't know actually much about music notation beyond how to use a computer notation program.
There's at least one case of these "impossible" crescendi that definitely isn't a mistake: at the end of the Liszt Sonata, the fifth- to third-last chords are marked pp; crescendo; ppp. The only possible realization is through gesture, and certainly Liszt was aware of this.
I agree with Tab's comment — this is probably an artifact from re-arranging the piece from a wind/other instrument that could indeed alter the volume at will over the duration of a single note.
It could also be a poor way of indicating a transition from one volume to another, with the note being a single intermediary volume.
However, if the marking looks like an extremely short decrescendo on the note then it's actually an accent, indicating that the note should be accented and stand out (typically via a sharp boost in volume compared to the surroundings).
Source
This is obviously not an answer (can't post photos in comments), but here is an example: from Debussy's Des pas sur la neige, bar 1:
I agree with Pete on this one: my German/Russian piano teacher would often talk about how composers of the 19th century wanted to treat the piano as if it were not a percussion instrument, and how one of the most difficult but most important things about piano playing is to produce the illusion that the instrument can act like a wind or string instrument, with in-note dynamic changes. Of course this is impossible, but a composer who wanted their piano music to "feel" like orchestral music would naturally think of crescendos and decrescendos in this way, and expect a pianist to compensate through gesture or "cheating".
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