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Gee Mike, I am more than touched by that,

Posted by Timbo in Oz (A) on November 13, 2011 at 02:14:57

In Reply to: Well... posted by Mike Porper on November 11, 2011 at 09:32:05:

there are two kinda 'paths' with piannies!

[There IS a third path, the English single action which became a dead end. No escapement and no check. NO dazzling ripple and not LOUDDD! JCB's (the London Bach) PC's were mostly written for them. A dead end.]

Two main sort of structure/mechanics issues, stopping the hammer bouncing again and again (check/escapement) and how the whole thing would sound.

Two design/aesthetic paths too, power and weight, versus speed and subtlety. Two different actions.

There were the folks who wondered what they could do with a harpsichord, sharp hard and clangorous. One that could play loud OR soft on any given single note, instead of a pretty much fixed loudness with a given size of furniture. Cristofori began this path, left hanging for 50-100 years. Silbermans (organ makers of northern 'germany') - brothers & cousins etc took it up. Spread to England, France, via Andreas Baeckers (ex Silbermann trainee) through Broadwood, Clementi, Erard, Pleyel. These double-actions were so powerful that they needed heavy and quite resonant (lots of boundary joins) timber frames, which couldn't be made stiff and fast until the iron frame came along mid 19C. Long decays, big-hall sound. A bit hard and sharp. Like a HC! ;-)!

Then there were the folks who tried to get a very pure, fast, subtle, and expressive (2H/4H/6H/8Harmonic) 'clavichord' sound. The clavichord being a composer's tool. An explorative and inward sound which went a LOT louder than any clavichord's limited dynamics per note, but with very fast decay.

It split into two paths with the HAAS family's BIG clavichords late 18c and the forte-pianos of Stein/Streicher (Augsburg/Vienna and a marriage), Walter, Haschka, and ultimately Graf, and Bosendorfer which stopped making Viennese Actions around WWI. Yet THIS path is what made the piano famous among kenners - via Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert all preferring VAs, most of their lives.

These VA pianos have very fast decays, and can play very, very softly, yet they can't play as LOUD as a contemporary Silbermann or Broadwood, Erard, Pleyel or Cristofori. BUT they are wonderfully a clever bastard's instrument and fully mature technically by 1800. Wrest-planks - where the pins are - in front of the keys - tend to warp over many decades / centuries. Fast, stiff and light.

Mozart NEVER had enough money but his second-hand Walter was treasured rather more than was Constanze IMO.

By the time LVB was being sent pianos he was profoundly deaf, he received several DA's from French and English makers which could not have done well over all those mountains in carts.

A simplification? - consider the Celestion SL600 and SL700 against say a smallish 5-driver Dunlavy column, big heavy and good too.

With the rise of the middle classes, the concert halls got bigger, and the Double Action piano won.

It's not better, nor superior in any expressive sense, it's just the winner within a mass-market of newbie 'aesthete' bourgeois wannabees.

Unlike many people I am not a devotee of '"free?" markets' being 'wonderful' and worshipable, because I am not at all convinced that the short-term interests of consumers are always in their long-term interests.

I did spend most of my career in reform of Australia's markets and industries. As an analyst, and later a change-agent in health-care and its use of informatics. Before that I was an infantryman - a senior NCO, and then what we called 'Int.'

Warmest

Tim Bailey

Skeptical Measurer & Audio Scrounger

Edits: 11/13/11

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Herbie's Audio Lab

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