Posts from — December 2008

Some piano owners just want to play the thing…well, hopefully. They’re too busy being concerned about the functioning of their own fingering and innards, while sitting at the keyboard, to care much about the movement of the springs, parts and mechanisms inside the piano. I understand. The inside of a fine Swiss watch is an amazing interlacing of precision gears and movements, but when I look at my watch, I just want to know the time.

But a modern-day grand piano is made up of some 9000 individual parts, many of them moving parts, and many people are fascinated by how it all fits together and "ticks." These next posts are for you!

First lets take a look at an exploded view of a modern-day grand piano, and talk about the function of each component.

This shows the basic large components of any grand piano, minus the strings and tuning pins (which can be seen in the open-top view on the grand in our last post, The Modern Piano Emerges.)

The S-shaped outards of every grand are referred to as the piano’s case or rim. The straight bar of wood that across the front of the piano, directly over the keys, is called the "stretcher." The wood that closes over your keys is called the "fallboard," and there’s a couple blocks of wood on either side of the keys called "cheek blocks" and a long thin strip of wood just in front of your keys called the "key slip," which round out the main furniture parts of the piano’s case. The stretcher is mortised into the piano’s rim, but the fallboard, key slip and cheek blocks are all easily removable, and you’ll see your technician quickly setting these furniture parts aside if he needs to access the action & hammers. As you can see by the photos above and below, on a grand piano, the keys & action just slide out of the front of the piano like a works-in-a-drawer. That’s important, because although tuning does not require action removal, virtually every other adjustment to the action and hammers does, so the technician has to be able to slide it out often and fast.

We’ll take a look at the works of the piano’s action in our next entry. The soundboard and iron plate that seem to be floating above the piano in the top photo, are glued and bolted down inside the piano’s rim. After the strings are installed, they will pass over the treble and bass bridges and send their vibrations down through the bridges to the soundboard, which is the main sound-amplifying body of the piano. The heavy cast iron plate bears the tremendous tension of these strings (up to 20 tons) so the wooden case doesn’t need to.

If you look close at the front end of the iron plate in the top photo, you’ll see lots of little holes just in front of the red felt strips. You’ll see similar holes in the shelf of wood just behind the stretcher, called the "pin block." These holes line up when the iron plate is bolted down into the piano, and the metal tuning pins are driven through the holes in the plate, down into the wooden pin block, to hold the tension and tuning of each string, as illustrated below.

 As you can see, the inch-and-a-half thick pin block is multi-laminated and cross-grained for a super-firm hold on the tuning pin. That’s a good thing, as the tuning pins don’t "screw" into threads in the wood, but are held just by friction. How? The tuning pins have a very fine thread, giving them a "rough" surface, and they are precisely .010 (ten-thousandths) of an inch thicker than the hole they are being pounded into, when the piano is initially strung at the factory. That’s it! The pin’s just a little thicker than the hole, so it’s tight in there…but they can & do come loose after the pin block has been subject to either significant age (50-100 years) or significant dryness in low-humidity climates.

The top diagram shows how they pass through the holes in the iron plate (the greyish cutaway,) then down through the pin block holes, at about a 7º backward-leaning angle, to further support the immense pull of the string. The string is coiled about 3 full turn around the pin, with the tip of the string inserted into the tiny hole drilled through the pin (see above) called the "becket."

To see how it all fits together, check back to that open-top view of a grand piano in the last post by clicking here. In our next entry, after the Holidays (hope you have a "Grand" season!), we’ll take a deeper look at the soundboard, bridges and action works.

Thanks to the remarkable inventiveness of Broadwood in England and other European contributors, the piano was reaching maturity on The Continent by the middle 1800s. The next bold steps towards the modern instrument would come form New World builders across the ocean (albeit transplanted Europeans themselves.) America was in throes of the world’s biggest advancements in industry & technology, and it was here that so many fine piano builders started to set up camp and invent wonderful new improvements for the instrument.

Jonas Chickering established his piano company in Boston in 1823, and industriously set out making many important improvements to the plate, bearing and tension of the stringing scale. Other famous makers sprung up in Baltimore (William Knabe and Charles M. Stieff) Boston (Mason & Hamlin) Ohio (Baldwin) and the countless piano manufacturing companies that sprung up in New York. Of these, the most prominent and legendary is Steinway.

In 1846, after years of building pianos in his kitchen and workshop in Germany, cabinet-maker Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg decided to move his family to the New World. One of his sons, Theodor, stayed back to continue the family’s German piano business, and eventually sold the business to three other piano builders to form the Grotrian-Steinweg company, still in business today in Braunshweig. Theodor then left to join his family in New York, which, had since changed its last name to Steinway, to demonstrate their full embracing of the American way.

Stacks of books have been written about the incredible rise of the Steinway Company, their inventive genius, their bold marketing by securing the endorsements of the top pianists of the day, their full employee "village" campus, complete with schools for the employee’s children, their foundries and three world-spanning manufacturing outlets in New York, London and Hamburg. Thick tomes and coffee-table books like Ronald Ratcliffe’s "Steinway", D. W.Fostle’s "The Steinway Saga", and Chapin’s "The Making Of A Steinway Piano" are all readily available in both new and used editions, and make fascinating reads for anyone interested in delving deeply into the making of both the piano and the company.

Steinway had held over 100 patents for inventions pertaining to virtually every component of the piano. They invented a special quarter-round fulcrum under the keys to speed play, calling it the Accelerated Action; the Duplex scale for extra harmonic string resonance; the middle pedal on grands, the Sostenuto, which allows for selective sustaining of individual notes; and wooden dowels to allow the iron plate to hover slightly over the soundboard. One significant improvement to the piano which Steinway is credited for, stands out above the rest: the "overstrung" stringing scale.

In the photo below, you can see how the copper-wound bass strings go over the treble strings at an angle, whereas prior pianos like Broadwood had bass strings going straight to the back on the same plane as the trebles. This overstrung designed allowed for increasing the length of the bass strings by several inches, and repositioning the bass bridge more to the center of the soundboard, both resulting in a deeper, richer tone in the bass section.

 My passion for sharing the piano with everybody has made it fun for me erect this piano lover’s website, and to spend these last several posts giving a quick overview of the piano’s history and evolution. If you’re crazy about the piano like me, and would love to learn even more about the piano’s "grand" history, there are many books devoted to a thorough coverage of the subject. Here I’ll just mention a couple favorites: "Pianos And Their Makers" by Alfred Dolge, and Arthur Loesser’s "Men, Women and Pianos – A Social History." And for an up-to-date overview about the current state of the piano industry and all the brands still in production today, every piano fanatic will want to own a copy of Larry Fine’s "The Piano Book", kept current with Annual Supplements.

In our next post we’ll take time out to view some exploded perspectives of the inside and outside of both grand & upright pianos, for those who wish to understand how their beloved instrument works.

The popularity of the piano  grew throughout the 1700s. Mozart was soon composing for the German-Viennese version of the instrument. By the century’s end the piano had replaced the plectra instruments in the public’s affections. The development of factory manufacturing, as distinct from workshop production, had reduced prices; ownership of a pianoforte soon became a desirable symbol of respectability.

But as Western music left behind the delicacy of the Baroque and light Classical eras for the more florid & forceful pieces of the Romantic Era, and as composers like Beethoven and Franz Liszt performed in larger halls, requiring richer, louder broadcast from the piano, the next era of pianoforte development was entered in earnest.

Composers and pianists wanted pianos that would reach large audiences with full and rich tone. In order to achieve this, several evolutions had t take place in the pianos components. Hammers, originally pea-sized leather, had to grow in girth and be made of other, more resonant materials (which would, of course, make them heavier, resulting in a harder key pressure.)The strings they struck had to grow from 2 to 3-string unisons across much of the scale, and be made thicker and heavier for more resonant vibration. The thicker the string, the greater the tension pulling on the frame of the piano, so something had to be done to keep the whole instrument from buckling to splinters under the increased tension.

In England, John Broadwood attacked many of these engineering feats, and virtually re-invented the "grand" piano.

First he added a screw-regulator for the repetition, quickening the piano’s touch. He displaced the bass and treble wires across two separate bridges, as seen in modern-day pianos, allowing for more individual tension control over the ever-thickening bass-wires. This layout also allowed for more strings across a smaller area, and by 1794, Broadwood’s pianos boasted a range of over 6 octaves. He also invented a foot pedal to lift the dampers off the strings to provide long sustain, a process formerly activated by pushing a lever with the knee…ouch! These improvements alone allowed Broadwood pianos and England to dominate the new piano industry,  and become the piano of choice for expressive composers like Beethoven.

But Broadwood’s most important contribution lie in the strengthening of the piano’s frame. All these increases in hammer-weight, number of strings, string weight and tension, etc. conspired to put frightening demands on the perimeter of the piano.

Like it’s keyboard predecessor, the harpsichord, the early pianos were all strung against a wooden frame. This was fully sufficient to bear the tension and tuning stability of the light string load found in these instruments. But as the string number and tension grew, it threatened to ruin all attempts at stable tuning, at least, and pull apart the entire piano at worst. Throughout the late 1700s, attempts to bolster to frame were made with wooden struts and beams. But by the beginning of the 19th century, the emergence of the industrial revolution brought forth the age of working in iron, and by 1821, the Broadwood Company’s pianos featured 5 iron bars reinforcing the piano’s frame across it’s full stinging scale. France’s Sebastian Erard added the invention of brass string-length terminators called "agraffes" to keep the string properly bearing against the bridges, and from that point onward, the partial or full iron-frame, or "plate" was a fixture in every evolving piano.