Dear Mr. Chappell:

I was reading your article on pedals and was wondering if you could name some piano pieces that utilize the sostenuto pedal.

— Pedaler

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Dear Pedaler:

• Samuel Barber: Piano Sonata, Op. 26; fourth movement; Schirmer edition, page 34 and page 36
• Aaron Copland: Piano Variations, last four measures
• Elliott Carter: Piano Sonata; Mercury Music Corporation edition, page 8 and page 39 and elsewhere.
• Percy Grainger: a very high percentage of his piano solo works. Example: “Piano Album”, Schirmer edition, page 44 (arrangement of “Molly on the Shore”). But I just grabbed that example at random by flipping the book open.

If I spent even more time researching this, I could find even more instances for you. It tends to be, of course, later-20th- and 21st-century composers who use this indication. Some performers use the sostenuto pedal at their own discretion to facilitate passages in Debussy’s and Ravel’s music in particular and elsewhere ad libitum.

Closing thought: organ transcriptions for solo piano would be the ideal material for this usage. I don’t see any indications in Busoni’s transcriptions at a quick glance, but Harold Bauer used it on page 9 of the Schirmer edition of Bach’s Toccata in D Major (harpsichord, not organ, actually) and pages 3, 4, and 5 of Arthur Brisker’s transcription of Bach’s Great Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, Carl Fischer edition.

— J.C.