I play piano. I took Trinity College London grade 6 practical and finished my theory course. I still don't understand why the Pedal sign looks like the word “Leo”. Could someone tell me why "Leo"?
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15Thanks for that. I'm now never going to be able to un-see it...– berry120Mar 11, 2021 at 22:49
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5When I was a child I believed that those signs were pictures of dogs. My mother played the piano and I asked her why there were all these dogs.– Lars Peter SchultzMar 12, 2021 at 12:08
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3For centuries before computers and fonts, people would write by hand using crude devices to transfer some type of ink or mark to a substrate like paper. Letters had a wide variety of shapes and styles, depending on the period and whose hand was doing the writing. As a matter of tradition, musical scores adopt modern fonts that replicate these older styles of hand-written text.– J...Mar 12, 2021 at 13:00
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1I always saw it as a reference to Led Zeppelin.– user9480Mar 12, 2021 at 13:59
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2I suspect the underlying question for this post is actually "Why does the Ped. sign still look like 'Leo' even though that probably impedes readability?"– DekkadeciMar 13, 2021 at 15:01
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4 Answers
As already mentioned,
it's "Ped." in a funny font.
Once you know it, I guess you can't unsee it.
The font "French Script" has a similar small letter D:
The font "Monotype C" has a similar capital letter P with the uncommon "leg":
It's even more pronounced in "Vivaldi":
But, usually, Ped. is modelled as a single glyph like in Bravura:
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10Add on to the single glyph info: this is Unicode 1d1ae MUSICAL SYMBOL PEDAL MARK : 𝆮 unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf Mar 11, 2021 at 15:51
It's "Ped." in a funny font.
answered Mar 11, 2021 at 1:22
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16@Aaron ... and what about the period behind its tail? Ah, I don't wanna know exactly. Mar 11, 2021 at 10:27
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3The period is there to show that it's an abbreviation. For the font: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter– ojsMar 11, 2021 at 11:27
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3@EricDuminil The body of the "d" is the dog's back haunch; the bend in the "L" is the forepaw, and the loops at the top of the "L" are nose and ear.– AaronMar 12, 2021 at 18:11
David Rowland, the author of "A History of Pianoforte Pedaling" (Cambridge University Press, 1993), suggests the script "Ped" mark may have emerged in the late 1830s with the publisher Breitkopf & Co. This is based on early Chopin editions found at the Chopin Variorum. He further proposes that Breitkopf might have received new engraving punches around that time, with other publishers following suit.1
Some further hunting...
The first of Breitkopf's Chopin publications to use the script "Ped." (also the first to use the "snowflake" for pedal release) is the Ballade in F Minor, Op. 52, published in 1843. (The French first edition of the same piece, published by Schlesinger, contains a block "Ped.")
Also in 1843, Schlesinger published Chopin's Impromptu in Gb Major, Op. 51. It contains a block "Ped.", though it does include a snowflakey pedal release indicator.
The prior publications, the Fantasie Op. 49 (Breitkopf, 1841; shown below) and the Mazurkas Op. 50 (Schlesinger, 1842), use the block "Ped".
1 Email with Prof. Rowland. Reproduced here by his permission.
Could someone tell me what this is supposed to mean?
As you already know, it means Ped.
I still don't understand why the Pedal sign looks like the word "Leo".
Because the glyph for the "P" is made look similar to an "L", and the "d" is styled like an "o" with a tail on it. So while it means "Ped.", it seems to some people to look like "Leo`".
