Category — Piano History & Evolution

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.

As you can see in our last entry, Cristofori’s early "pianoforte" looked more like a haprsichord, with no inner metal frame, only two strings per unison, and only a 4 octave range. But it was definitely a beginning for the first keyboard instrument to strike the strings with a hammer instead of plucked with a quill (harpsichord) or struck with tiny tangents (clavichord.) Cristofori used deer leather to fashion his original hammers.

By the 1720’s Cristofori had made some twenty "gravicembali col piano e forte" ("harpsichord with soft & loud") and had added a padded "backcheck" to catch the hammer on the rebound. A sketch of Cristofori’s early piano action is shown below

 This original design was little changed over the next fifty years, as keyboard players of the day just began to explore the potential of this new "soft-loud" instrument. One of the key limitations (no pun intended) in Cristofori’s early design was the necessity to allow each key to raise all the way back up, before being able to play the key & hammer again for another strike of the note. You had to lift fully off the key because that’s what it took to bring all components back to their ready-to-play positions. This made it impossible to repeat notes quickly, and as new composers for this wonderful instrument entered the field, they demanded faster repetition for their more allegro, presto and vivace compositions. Cristofori began work on the early versions of an extra stick of wood, a "repetition lever," that would hold the hammer aloft only half-way back to rest position, allowing it to  be replayed without allowing the key to raise fully back up.

This repetition action was improved further by the great Parisian piano maker Sebastian Erard, who invented a "double escapement" around 1821 (Erard pianos are still made today!) Indeed, this ability to repeat any note more and more rapidly, with less and less raise of the key, became one of the most dominant quests in piano evolution, as great composers of the baroque, classical and romantic eras wrote more quick & lively passages and trills into their increasingly ornamental pieces. And although many would surmise that we have come as far as we can, and achieved maximum key-repeat velocity in the modern era of piano design, a visit to the Steinway factory in New York (a field trip I highly recommend!) will reveal that their action technicians still work on ways to improve this even further, introducing new experimental action designs every few years.

But increasing the rapid repetition of keys and notes proved to be only one of many problems that would rear their head in the evolution of the modern piano.  A discussion of these issues, and one man who made huge improvements in these areas, John Broadwood, follows next

Ah, those Italians, genius engineers and master inventors – Galileo, Da Vinci, Fermi, the moving vehicle, the make-up of the Solar System, the electric battery, the Fiat…OK maybe not the Fiat so much. I had one of those damn cars and it spent more time in the shop than on the road.

But truly, the Italians have produced some of the greatest scientists, philosophers and inventors ever seen, and perhaps none more important for music lovers than Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua. Cristofori moved to Florence in 1688, at the behest of his Prince, de Medici, at the age of 33, to be the Prince’s own court inventor of clocks, mechanical devices and musical instruments. Cristofori was already competent at building the plucked-string kyboard instruments of the day, the spinette and the virginal.

Around 1700, Cristfori invented an instrument he named the "Arpicembalo", literally "harp-harpsichord." It was the first keyboard instrument with two strings per unison and the strings excited by a strike from a hammer instead of a quill plectrum. The fact that it could produce a wide range of volumes, from soft (piano) to very loud (forte), eventually caused everyone to substitute "pianoforte," or the soft-loud, for Cristofori’s original harp-harpsichord moniker

The amazing genius of Cristofori’s invention was the "escapement action." Configuring just a few sticks of wood and a few springs, Cristofori fashioned a mechanism that allowed the hammer to be lifted up to string by pressing down the key, but then having the stick that was pushing the hammer up, snap out, or disconnect, from the hammer at the precise moment just berore it struck the strings. Obviously, without this "escapement" ability, the hammer would hit the strings but also be held against them, therefore instantly stopping the vibrations, as long as the player held down the key. The escapement mechanism allowed player to strike the keys, set the notes vibrating, and release the key only when necessary, at any pace they desired. Thus was born the sound and playing style that allowed for the beautiful "Piano," as it came to be known for short.

The piano is now 300 years old, and so many improvements have proceeded from Cristofori’s original cabinet, frame, string, hammer and action designs (covered next post.) But as I viewed some of Cristofori’s original 1720s pianos at the Smithsonian’s heavenly "300 Years Of The Piano" exhibit in 2000, as a technician, the thing I was most struck by was how little his basic action design has been changed, how similar the functional design is to that of a grand piano built in the 21st century.

Ah, those Italians, they’ve given us so much joy! I like the shoes, too. We’ll look at some of the improvements and evolution since Cristofori’s day in our next entry.

Music has been an essential part of life since the beginning of time. It has been used to accompany all nature of ritual and ceremony – from the earliest aboriginal drumming to signal an important event or to provide rhythm for tribal dance -  and to provide a blissful form of enjoyment and entertainment.

There are so many different kinds of music, from all corners of the globe. Wavy singing and string instruments from the Orient, tribal drumming from Africa, digeridoo droning from Australia, stiff & starched Baroque music from 18th-Century Europe, Ragas form India based on a scale with many more tones and semi-tones than the mere 12 in Western music, and "pop" music blaring out of boom boxes and iPods everywhere.

Regardless of the type of music, it’s always made up of a sequence of rhythms, notes of the melody, and some type of chordal or droning accompaniment, that immediately forms a higher-order language of its own, capable of communicating right to the core of our beings in, ways words always fall hopelessly short. No matter what mood you start out in, music can instantly transport you to another world, another state of consciousness, and often, absolute ecstasy. A so-called "music-reviewer" or journalist must have the most absurd job of all, as music can only be experienced directly, never described or explained.

In the history of Western music (a history we will venture into further in another post,) the earliest form was "organum" or single note chants and hymns sung by church acolytes. You can still hear many examples of monks singing biblical liturgy in latin, in unison, one note of the scale at a time. The western music scale was further defined and catalogued as 12 distinct semi-tones by Pythagoras, and by the 15th Century, singers and musicians were combining 2 and 3 notes at a time to form harmony and chords. The most popular instruments of the 16th and 17th Century were stringed instruments, early reeds  horns, and the earliest keyboard instruments: the cembalo, the celeste, the virginal and the harpsichord.

All these keyed instruments used a keyboard divided into the twelve semi-tones of Pythagoras’ Western scale. Pressing down any key set one or two strings vibrating by means of pushing or pulling a quill or plectrum across the string, somewhat similar to using a plastic guitar pick to strike one of the guitar’s strings.

Setting the strings in motion in this way allowed for only a relatively thin sound (as in the beautiful but rather tinny and metallic sound of a harpsichord), and greatly limited the range of soft-to-loud any player could produce, no matter how soft or hard he struck the key.

In order to produce a much wider range of volume and a much richer tone, some type of soft-but-firm "hammer" had to be discovered for striking the strings, and some type of mechanism had to be invented to allow the pressing of the key to "throw" the hammer against the string, yet still get out of the way once the string was struck, so it could vibrate freely.

Enter Bartolomeo Cristofori…(continued)