A few months ago, when I received a call from Caroline Mousset who is the
Artistic Director of the concert series of The Phillips Collection
it was very exciting because they had raised the funds with which to rebuild
their piano. So we were thrilled; we've been caring for this piano for about
10 years, and we knew that it really, really needed this
and so it was very exciting. It was even more exciting when I learned that it was
for the 75th anniversary of the concert series, and the 60th anniversary of
Glenn Gould's debut, and the incredible pianists that are going to be playing on this
piano that we now have the responsibility to restore in a really small amount of time.
Every piano has strengths and weaknesses; no piano is perfect.
But the demands on this piano:
This is The Phillips Collection, this is Washington, DC; it really had to be a
great, great instrument.
The first thing we do is we assess the instrument, so we check everything:
We check the hammers, we check the strings and we check the bridges, we check
the soundboard and the pin block and the structure of the piano.
One of our technicians you got up under the piano and he found underneath the
soundboard in the ribs of the instrument cracks in a very unusual
location, and this was affecting the energy of the soundboard.
This was the opportunity to really do something great, to make it a great
Steinway, to get that beautiful authentic Steinway sound and performance, and we
knew that it wasn't a matter of repairing the factory work, but actually
we had to replace the soundboard, and we had to replace the pin block, and we had
to put in new bridge caps and new strings.
There have been observations about that piano, that it was out of balance:
much, much louder in the bass section than in the treble section, and it was
not a matter of tuning or voicing, or basic fundamental work; it was actually a
flaw in the factory soundboard.
Fortunately, we happen to have some beautiful, beautiful wood for the
soundboard of this piano from spruce trees between 600 and 800 years old, and so
that was exciting because we knew we had been seasoning this wood long enough
that it would give us a very predictable result; very beautiful, beautiful wood
and very stable. Of course, with the limited amount of time
everybody had to drop everything, put their focus on this piano;
we even had two of our expert bridge notchers working on the bridge at the same
time, one from one end, and one from the other, kind of notching the bridge and
they're going to meet in the middle.
What we want to start doing now is taking measurements that we use down the
road to basically get the plate back into place where we want it.
Those measurements will include string height measurements; right now I'm taking
the plate height.
One thing I noticed when I was looking at the height of the plate in the back
is that the plate is very low, which means the base of the plate is very
close to the soundboard. This is a very good thing when we're rebuilding a piano
because it allows us to increase the height of the plate in the back, which
will increase the thickness of the bridge cap, which we tend to find superior.
Now the next thing we're going to do is come up with the string heights; this
helps the action department adjust things like hammer blow, hammer strike
distance, without actually having the action inside the piano. You basically
accomplish this just by setting this dowel rod, and then measuring the height
of it, and this we try to get accurate down to a quarter of a millimeter.
The next thing we do is to determine that the scaling when we're done
with the piano is accurate as we measure the lengths of various strings across the piano.
One thousand three hundred and sixty-nine: that's the exact length of note 20.
Alright, thanks.
Now as you can see we've already removed quite a few pieces of the piano.
The dampers have been taken out, the back action has been removed, all the case
parts are now gone, and now we're clear to start de-tensioning
the wires.
Once that's done, we can actually take the plate out of the piano and start
working on everything else.
This tool we're using is actually over a hundred twenty years old.
I found it in an old piano technician's workshop. He had retired, and asked us
if we wanted to come in and see what he had. I found this thing and it's actually
one of the more valuable finds, but it has decreased the time it takes to
de-tension a piano by almost two hours.
Now we're going to remove the strings from the beckets of each pin. The next thing
we're actually going to do is we're going to further relieve tension on these
strings by cutting them.
Now we can safely remove these without any tension on them.
All right, now all we have left are the pins.
So what we're doing here is we're taking some new German Steinway concert grand
hammers, and we are narrowing them.
And that's for a couple of purposes:
They have to clear each other while the piano is being played, but more importantly
we have a certain goal in mind for the end hammer weight based on this
particular sound board system, and a lot of that information has been gathered by
measuring the weight of hammers on Steinway concert grands that have been
made over the last...literally more than a century, and what happens is you
come across one that sounds particularly good, and then you find that the
hammer weight on that particular piano is maybe surprising; and that allows us to
get a very predictable and very good result.
Everything that's holding the soundboard in has been removed, and we can
begin actually hammering the bottom of the soundboard out; it should pop, it should come
out very relatively easy.
Once the board is out, we're actually going to semi-reconstruct the old board
in order to be able to use that as a template to construct the new board.
So, any pieces of ribs that have busted off or broken or are missing, we've got to find
them, we've got to re-attach them the best we can.
That way, when were measuring lengths and rib taper, we'll have the proper
measurements to go by.
So let's find some of those.
There's an entire rib missing.
One of the cool things about Steinway and their pianos is this back structure.
What we're seeing is specifically designed to keep the case from moving.
Everything about the way these beams are set up, the way they're placed, the way they're
attached here in this corner
they're designed to absorb motion from the case as it expands and contracts.
Serial numbers on most Steinways are found in several places on the action,
oftentimes on the bottom of legs, sometimes underneath the lyres.
Unless it's been removed by somebody, you'll find it in the corner of the
plate right at the horn which in this piano actually has it right there.
But visually, this is the only one that you can see without the piano being torn down.
So this is a Steinway plate.
This came out of the Steinway D we're working on. This item serves a general
function of holding the strings in place, but the design of the plate is very important.
With the strings, what we'll do is, they're attached to a pin that sits through the
plate at one end, it comes through things called agraffes; the string will then
come across the soundboard, go up to the bridge, and then back down to the plate
around a hitch pin, and then back across the bridge through an A-graph and into another pin.
Where it terminates on the plate and where it terminates on the bridge
creates the speaking length, plus the tension on the strings creates the pitch that
you want for each individual note. What we are doing here is we are shaping the
bridge of the piano.
The bridge will set the exact string lengths for each string.
What we've done is we've removed wood from the bridge, and the strings come through the notch
and they actually begin touching the wood right at the end of the bridge notch.
As you can see, there are
pins on some of the notches back here. What the string does is, it comes and hits
the pin, and if we go over to this piano here you can actually see that
where the string will leave the top of the bridge and then have plenty of clearance
so that as it vibrates, it does not touch the wood in its speaking length:
and the speaking length is the point of terminating on the bridge, to the point
of termination at the plate at the A-graph.
So we're going to put the action into
the newly-strung piano, so what we need to do now is, we need to start off
by aligning all the action parts, we need to align all the hammers to the strings
and once we align all the hammers to the strings, we start to align everything
below the hammers: we align the wippens, which are below, and we align the back
checks to the back of the hammers.
We also actually have to space just in general the keyboard, the entire thing
left and right, in and out, to the correct position: even a millimeter or two of
error and the position of the action up here in the treble will have a huge
effect on the tone.
So let's go ahead and put it in. In we go.
That's good, so I'll lock it into place.
Let's take a look at the hammer spacing. Looks like everything is relatively
close right now, but there's a few up here; that one there I can see needs to go to the
left, and I take it
loosen the screw, space it to the left
put it back in again, make sure it's in the right place, in and out.
That one's good now.
So now I've got to re-align the wippen to where I put the hammer.
This is the same process for all 88 notes. I've got to align the hammer properly.
There's a very small tolerance for error.
The hammer is only slightly wider than the strings are themselves
so if it's spaced even a little to the left, or a little to the right, all three
strings and the treble won't hit the hammer, and we'll have a big tone issue
because it will only be hitting two strings.
So now i have to bend the back check that direction, and square it up; and it's
just a little bit off-square, so
I'm going to turn it slightly. So what you'll be able to see here is,
the player presses the key down at the front, it moves up this little whole part
here which moves up this whole part here, at which point it hits, and then it drops
back down. You can see this little part here trips out and falls down.
So basically what we're going to adjust is, we have to make sure that the
jack here, which is what this is called, is aligned properly with there, and then it
slips out at the proper moment, which is just the last second. And then we also
have to make sure that it drops down a little bit, because otherwise the pianist
won't be able to feel properly.
It's one of the most sensitive adjustments in the piano in terms of tone, because it
really controls whether the pianist can play softly.
The effect I'm looking to achieve is this one here, which is I can play
softly at the bottom of the key, and I get that nice soft sound; it's soft but it's
not muted. See, this one here
I don't get quite the same sound with the same touch, so I'm going to adjust that one closer.
There we go.
So when the piano is first strung up, it's not yet in a musical pitch, so the first thing we do is just go
over the entire piano and pull it up to a musical pitch.
I think the difference we're going to hear is, I think the whole piano is
just going to be a little more live.
The newer wood, it's more spring-like. The soundboard is basically a big spring
that reflects sound, and in this case effectively what happened is, thousands
of pounds of pressure pushing down had basically crushed the board into a more
flat position. One of the terms we use a lot is "capping out": how soon does the
tone cap out? If you push hard on a note in the treble, how does it cap out?
That's what this one was doing previously: you'd hit the treble, and it
just wouldn't go anywhere; it was a little bit plinky; "plink" as supposed to "ping."
It's not really a technical term, but I mean, it's odd because we use "fuzzy"
mellow, soft, you know, it's all these things where you're talking about
sound, but you're using terms that people use to define all sorts of other things like
light. It sort of creates this environment where you're not sure
how to how to describe what you're hearing.
It's hard to say what exactly is the sound i created.
There are so many different things in each piano that affect one part of the sound:
it's hard to say what exactly you did. But it is definitely a fulfilling thing to
hear the piano when it is done
Because you know if you did mess up certain things, that the tone would not
be any good in certain ways.
So if the piano sounds right, you know you did it right; let's put it that way.
One, two, and three!
So, why go through all this fuss?
It's a good question in this day and age. But it's important that a great concert
series has a great instrument, in the same way that you go to The Phillips
Collection and you look at one of their magnificent paintings: that painting has
to be illuminated a certain way.
If you just had some fluorescent lighting around that painting,
you wouldn't really be getting the gist of what that painter was trying to
express. In much the same way, if the piano is sufficiently expressive and has
enough range and enough beauty and enough of a tonal palette,
it allows the pianist to really get to the heart of what Beethoven was trying
to say, to get to the heart of what Chopin was trying to say, to get to the
heart of what
Schubert or Rachmaninoff or Liszt were trying to say
and for the audience, that gives them a deeper experience. For the people who
attend concerts like this,
that's critically important. Of course, the composer is the most important, and
the pianist is the second most important;
actually, you could argue and say that the audience member is the most important
but without a great instrument
what the composer worked so desperately hard to say, and what the pianist is
interpreting for the deep musical experience of the audience, it would get
lost, or it would be lessened if the instrument is not a great instrument.
The better the instrument is, the deeper the experience the audience will have
and the better the pianist plays.