I’ve had some experience with both laws. Once in the 80′s when a container of new Bosendorfer pianos was held up due to a CITES issue with keyboards and recently with the paperwork required by the Lacey Act to import pianos into the US.

The interesting part is an article in the November 2011 issue of the Piano Technicians Journal (rush out to your newstands…) written by Del Fandrich which quotes court papers as follows:  “Gibson sourced its unfinished wood in the form of blanks from Nagel (in Germany) which obtained it exclusively from Roger Thunam (a supplier in Madagascar). The filing goes on to state: “…Roger Thunam is one of thirteen known traffickers in illegally harvested Madagascar timbers”.

Del goes on to elaborate on the second raid which targeted ebony sourced from India which was 10mm thick, 4 mm over India’s legal limit of 6mm.

Why does this matter to piano makers? The primary way is through keyboards. Ivory is essentially gone as a white keytop material, but real ebony wood for sharps is still greatly preferred. In addition rosewood is a highly desirable veneer for the case, with other woods like mahogany in (relatively) high demand. Spruce does not seem to be on anybody’s endangered list, thankfully.

All in all a great article that goes into much greater depth than the light surface coverage by other industry publications.

Retail Service means tuning and repair calls coming from customers who call Steinway asking for service. It also means initial service calls on new pianos sold by Steinway Hall. I don’t know the details but I understand that this used to be a fairly active  with something like 6 full time technicians.

This is absolutely NOT meant to imply that service standards have been lowered. There are a number of excellent technicians in NYC and just working for Steinway does not mean one is any better.  It is more interesting in that it implies either a change of strategy or cost cutting with my guess being cost cutting. Somebody may have decided that any additional cost of having an in-house service department, whether it was $100,000 a year or $10, was too much and chose to just get rid of it.

I’ve worked in and managed a number of piano service departments, both for manufacturers and retail. Service can be a huge asset or annoying drain, depending on how it is managed.

If you play, a piano is a means of expression, a means of communication. It has been said that a piano is western civilization’s most perfect tool for the communication of emotion. That can be external communication, directed to an audience, or internal, directed only to oneself. It can be a tool of profound exploration or simple time passing, but so can any piano, right?

Yes, of course, but also, no, obviously not. A craft built piano has 2 important qualities; musical range and a story. The range comes from the combination of carefully selected and treated materials and skilled craftsmanship. These elements DO make a difference and even the most casual piano player can tell the difference.

One common experience occurs when a fairly accomplished amateur, somebody who has a reasonable command of a couple pieces and some serious study under their belt, visits a store to try a variety of pianos. This has happened often enough that I no longer consider it a fluke. This person visits various pianos in the room, spending significant time at each piano exploring its capabilities before coming to, in my experience,  the Bosendorfer. After a couple of minutes at the Bosendorfer you can not only hear the change but you can see the light bulb of awareness light up. The same musical phrase is explored over and over, a smile often crosses the face. Afterwards, almost verbatim, the comment is made: “I didn’t know I could play that well”

Their teacher had been trying to get them to explore certain chord voicings, or to shape a phrase in a particular way, but their consumer grade piano just wasn’t up to the task,  it simply  wouldn’t give up the goods. It’s like trying to drive a mini-van in a Formula One race. The problem is that it wasn’t clear that it was the pianos fault…it must be the pianist, right?

Not always.

If a piano is going to be used for a concert with an orchestra, or as a recital piano in a hall with poor acoustics or over 1000 seats, power is important. The simple reality is that the piano must be heard whether one is battling a huge space, an insensitive conductor and orchestra, or uncooperative acoustics.

Many young pianists, striving to make a name for themselves and influenced by some iconic references including Horowitz and Russian school proponents, find themselves striving for power at the expense of color, dynamics and range. The phrase I heard at international piano competitions is that the contestant wants to “pin the ears of the jury to the back wall” as if the jury is there to simply identify  the loudest pianist, or the one that scares them the most. This may be the nature of a circus, action movie or fireworks display, but it is not the nature of music.

Music is a vehicle for expressing emotion. Yes, emotions can be fiery and loud, but they are more often subtle, quiet, like a soft hand on a shoulder rather than a slap in the face.

Is power the only, or even the most important attribute a piano must exhibit? There are 2 other adjectives that are too infrequently used to describe piano tone, but are even more important; color and range. The ability to produce a range of tonal colors is all to often lost on many pianists, for the basic reason that many pianos cannot produce colors, no matter the technique used.  My personal belief is that once you use lacquer as a hardener you destroy a pianos true ability to create color. The fibers that make up hammer felt must be able to move through the voicing process. Once you glue these fibers together with lacquer, the result is simply gradations in volume, not color changes.

A punch in the jaw has more power than a kiss on the cheek. But, which one would you rather have?

It is one of those things that you really have to hear to believe, since piano legs are not given much thought as a tone affecting element. He calls the effect the Resinno effect

Justin showed his legs (I know, it’s funny, but let it go) in the DPA microphone booth at the Audio Engineering Convention in NYC last week. Big success. Shown here is the Royal Ebony set, consisting of 3 legs and custom designed pedal lyre, bench and music desk.

Speaking of moving on, I’m the new North American distributor for Feurich Pianos. You can learn more by visiting www.feurichusa.com. If you are really interested in the details, be sure to check out the .pdf backgrounders provided there. Or, for that matter, check them out here.

This all was put together during a trip to Gunzenhausen Germany and Vienna in July. I’m really excited to be working with Julius and Ernest!

Ernest Bittner, Julius Feurich and me

Recent events at the college level of piano education and performance has brought to my attention an area of great importance, especially in how it affects our future piano teachers and performers.

Let me begin with a little background before I state my case.  I graduated with a music education degree in 1973.  Yes, that is a long time ago, long before digital pianos were a gleam in Mr. Kurzweil’s eye.  I had  two major instruments as part of my degree, trumpet and piano.  Since then I have taught music, become a piano technician and worked for two piano companies that would be considered “world class.”  The first was Bosendorfer, which was owned by Kimball International at the time and the second was Yamaha.  Both of these companies maintained a concert pool of pianos that served top artists throughout the world.  In my time with both companies, I was taught by experts what it takes to not only build a fine concert instrument, but also how to maintain and prepare one for performance.  I also had the luxury of working with the artists themselves, becoming aware of what they want in a fine performance piano.

Based on this background of both preparing and playing fine instruments, I find myself today in quite a different position.  I have retired from the music industry and thought that it would be challenging to once again take up the study of piano, which I have done  at the local college in our community.  This brings me to the point of this article.

My lessons are on an older instrument, a 7′ grand that still has good potential if it was only maintained.  Although it is tuned twice a year, this is far too little for an instrument that is played and performed on as a solo instrument and as one that accompanies the colleges vocal groups.  Regulation and voicing is not something that this instrument has seen, as least in many years.

When asked to perform at the end-of-semester recital I was greeted with a beautiful concert instrument.        The instrument was out of tune and badly out of regulation.  Dampers danced on the end of keys (the damper up-stop rail was out of adjustment), the touch was uneven and the voicing had never been touched from the day the piano arrived, which was at least a few years ago.   Impressive to look at but a disaster to perform on.  The head of department (not a pianist) gave a speech at intermission on how blessed we were to have such a fine instrument, donated by one of the local philanthropists.

What I see missing here at our local college and I fear throughout many music departments is an understanding to what effects a poorly maintained instrument is having on our students.  We are teaching our future pianist that this is an acceptable standard, one that they will probably accept until hopefully someone, someday will properly educate them in what it takes to maintain a quality instrument.  It may be a traveling concert artist that demands a properly prepared instrument for performance or it may be the school’s piano technician who dares to educate the educators without fear of losing his or her contract.  Like any other fine piece of machinery, fine pianos need complete maintenance to perform at their best.

If you are the one who can take on this responsibility, please do.  Let us not allow future pianists and teachers to be complacent with high-end pianos performing at the low-end of the scale.

I spent 2 weeks at the J.C. Neupert Company in Bamberg Germany alternately freezing and being humbled by how little my piano technical skill seemed to carry over into this new world. Neupert, founded in 1868 as a piano maker, is the last remaining historical keyboard instrument company. That doesn’t mean there aren’t individuals in different parts of the world making these instruments. It’s just that Neupert is the last company that offers a full range of instruments from modern harpsichords to a complete range of historical reproductions of the various design “flavors”.

It’s a new world to me, but one that feels right. Dedicated, skilled people who feel the world needs these instruments. I’m going to do what I can to help connect them with the right people.

R6M3SXXXQG37