A Passion For Pianos

Wednesday, May 31, 2000

Here we are at the end of a three hundred year development of the idea of a pianoforte. I'm not using the word 'evolution' but 'development' instead, since if you have read any of my website, especially The Polar Bear, you know that I am averse to using that word. No, the 'development' of the musical instrument we just call a 'piano' for short, was based on a lot of conscious planning and design, plus the timely application of technological advances from other industries. People like Jonas Chickering and Henry Steinway seemed to have had 'critical mass' concepts of the thing that have pretty much affected everyone else's concepts over time.

What we have at the present time are quite a few instruments, the new ones, which are really replicas of SOME of the best of older designs. With the variety comes a range of ideas about what a piano should sound like and feel like to play. Mat's idea that the best of today's instruments are going to become tomorrow's 'classics' is almost certainly true, just as some of the Cremona violins made today, patterned after Stradavari and Amadi designs will become the 'classic' violins of tomorrow. They're even making bass violins there now, some of which if you are into it sound incredibly fine.

Certainly time will mellow any good instrument that is kept in the best conditions; tuned regularly, any problems fixed correctly and quickly, humidity controlled, etc. What usually happens is that a good piano develops something of its own personality. Alfred Brendel talked about this somewhat in the article of his I posted here some months back. But I do not think that innovation in piano building has reached an end yet. On one hand we have things like the Schimmel Pegasis, and other strange new exterior designs of piano. On the other we have the notion of making a classic looking piano using new materials and this is where I fully expect the innovations to take place.

Today I saw some of the core material that is used in some of the Korean made pianos, basically a resin and wood pulp substitute that is acoustically dead, just what you want in a rim, lid, or a speaker cabinet for that matter, and harder and heavier than any similar wood product. Those of you out there that have some idea that this material is 'cheap' or inferior to wood, which in a rim is basically a multi-ply anyway, might re-consider that this material is indeed so hard that it requires a special carbide tipped saw blade to cut through it. Larry Fine was ambivalent on this point, he was much more concerned that finer details of the piano's design were carried out. This material has nothing in common with the terrible stuff that cheap bookshelves and other furniture has been made of over the years.

One of the next steps will be to reduce the weight in a piano while increasing the harmonic deadness of the parts that must not contribute to a piano's sound; the rim, the lid, even the PLATE.

Right now, for a limited time only, Weber is offering their six foot grand around here for $10K in ebony polish. If you didn't know any better you'd expect to pay more for it considering the way it sounds and plays, and no I'm not drooling. This is a replica of one of the fine pianos from yesteryear.

The sales trend is to more people who really want pianos buying GRAND pianos rather than uprights. So I see the vertical piano facing a problem in countries where people have the space for a larger piano. In Europe the quality upright has been a boon, since they don't often have the space. So, the press is on to lower the cost to produce an acceptable 'parlor' grand piano at under $10K, a critical price point, that is a third or better lighter and has better tuning stability than anything at present. Of course the closer it sounds and plays to a top flight piano the better. My guess is that the really bright, 'glassy' piano will never really fade away, but that what customers will be offered in future will be an array of choices and these will have to do with a choice of hammers and possibly 'touch designs' a la Stanwood. I'm not as certain about the future of a Wapin bridge. My suspicion is that the winner is going to emerge from China. Perhaps the Fandrichs will be the designers.

Here are some other facts; the amount of soundboard required in a grand piano is already too much, the soundboard could be made of an alternative material which could be cast or poured as one piece with the supports it needs from below, a structure that would resonate perfectly, in fact it would always resonate perfectly without any deviations as at present, NEVER LOSE ITS CROWN, and be minimally affected by changes in temperature and humidity. It would never crack, split, etc. The obvious candidates for something like this would be in the area of extruded plastics. Of course there's no reason that such a 'soundboard' needs to look any different from a wooden one as it could be any color so why not tinted to the light shade of natural spruce?

The basic length and thickness and tension of the strings can't really be changed to improve anything very dramatically although many of the classic scales can and have been improved, especially in the tenor and bass sections.

The plates could be made of materials that can easily handle the stress applied to cast iron and have far less acoustic resonance even than the best cast plates. My guess is that this technology will emerge from ceramics, especially compounds of carbon and certain metals. A poured plate of this kind is supposedly capable of accepting more than 60 tons of lateral stress which is twice that required by most concert grands and upwards of six times that required by an average parlor grand and would be as much as one fourth the weight of a comparable iron plate. The same process could be used to make the rim and lid. Now these ceramic materials can be worked with precision tools just like wood allowing any finish or veneer to be applied to them, glued with a super thin epoxy applied in a vacuum.

A space age grand piano would sound like a piano does now, there would still be hammers and an action that would work the same as they do now. But two or three men could easily lift and carry a concert grand around a stage and you or I could easily roll a parlor grand around without affecting its tuning or throwing our backs out. We could even lift it up by a leg to get a rug under it if necessary. Of course a rug under a piano of this kind wouldn't cause any problems at all neither would placement of one against a heating duct or in direct sunlight. Well, maybe direct sunlight over the tuning pins would still be bad but you have my idea.

It is even conceivable that we'll have 'dial a piano' in fifty years. Let's say I want to buy a piano that looks, plays, sounds, etc. like a 1915 vintage Steinway O. I could just dial one up on the internet and six weeks later the newly produced piano would arrive at my doorstep having taken that long to assemble rather than the year or more a piano usually takes to build. I might as well have them add Victorian touches if I want them too or have it done in some exotic wood or picture of same. All the work would have been done by robots. This is not at all a far fetched idea.

I have looked at what is going on in the combination electro-mechanical pianos. While I'm not in any way interested in one of these, I know that some people will be. This is also a future trend. A lot of these seem targeted at semi-professional composer arrangers and what have you,....

But, here we come to the BIG question....

Who is really going to be interested? For example, I have two teenage daughters, 18 and 13. They seem pretty typical. My eldest is sort of like Daria, and her younger sister is sort of like Quinn. My point is that despite being in an environment all their lives where the fine arts were at least honored, neither of them thinks much of the fine arts to bother being interested in them. In fact, they aren't all that interested in reading for pleasure either. My older daughter is interested in reading for knowledge, she reads technical manuals almost exclusively and it's hard to get my younger daughter to read anything more than is required to get through school. The music they both prefer is HORRIBLE in my opinion but you know it does nothing to complain about it much as that makes them stick to it even more.

I have noticed that many people who revert to serious piano study are ADULTS. In fact the recent piano recital I attended featured a pianist that was in his early seventies despite the fact that he was playing SCRIABIN and LISZT, lifting himself up off his bench and leaning into the piano with his frail old body just to produce the force to make the huge chords he wanted in the Liszt pieces. And I was almost the youngest member of the audience! Now I am aware that people are 'finding' classical music all the time, so it isn't completely dying out, and after reading Arthur Loesser I am aware that it never was a music of the masses anyway, and it really is for the most part 'adult' music, but....

One can't live on a diet of old museum pieces forever and if this genre of music is allowed to lose its vitality by not developing along with the piano itself, WHICH HAS BEEN AT ITS CORE, well it matters little what technological advances may bring. I have noticed that there were many composers whose music used to be better known even a hundred years ago who are practically forgotten today. Was it really that their music was no good? I doubt it. There is rumored to be a Carl Czerny revival coming and I'd like to see a revival of Cyril Scott as well. That's only two where there are legions more.

We have wondered on this forum about whither pianos go, I think we should be bothered a bit more about whither music goeth as well. I have suggested that there is a group of people thinly scattered around the world who know what good music is, even if some of that music is atonal and scratchy sometimes, similar to different styles in art. If the audiences I usually see at classical music concerts are any indication I'd say the average interested person is not much younger than 45 years old and usually older, has something either vaguely 'successful' in a worldly or business sense about them, or are 'eccentric' and sometimes both, are probably pretty well educated, may speak a couple languages, might have been a foreigner or certainly possessed of a 'cosmopolitan' outlook. I have suggested that it is important for us all to do far more networking than we already do and dare I suggest it, evangelizing younger people to the depth and breadth of what we have come to call 'classical' music.

In closing, my thanks to Mat D. for his kind wishes for me acquiring a better piano. I know not whether I will finally end up with a BB, an A, a C, an O or something more exotic. It will be something that gives me that ache to play. But long before that, I am on the road to recovering my past technique and expanding my repertoire. I'll need it for whatever piano I end up with.

Your comments on or off this forum are greatly appreciated!!!