Kissin Review/concert prep

[Horace Greeley]

Fred, Rob,

I think you are both making very good points here.  An elaboration:

I recently was called to get a D ready for a performance.  It was a C&A 
piano, relatively newly delivered, on which the regular technician had 
spent a very great deal of time making modifications.

Among these was to lower the overall damper setup to where no combination 
of pedal and/or key would give much more than 2mm lift.  Needless to say, 
the pianos had little above mf that was not pretty dramatically affected by 
this "performance improving" change.  No, the trichords had not been 
trimmed, mores the pity.

The only way to "compensate" was to essentially leave alone the glassy, 
over hard hammers so that they could, so some degree or other "blow by" the 
dampers.  A most mediocre "fix", to be sure, but there was not time to 
reregulate things.  In order to buy a little bit of dynamic range for the 
poor pianist, I lightly touched up some of the more surface voicing, and 
opened up the lower end a bit - a poor trick, but all that was available.

Having now seen a number of instruments which have had their actions 
modified in various ways, I would offer two most urgent suggestions:

First, consider that any modifications that we do are essentially 
"point-in-time" types of operations.  I have never been massively enamored 
of the need for a striking hammer to be precisely at thus-and-so an 
angle.  The very first time you shape the hammers again, those 
relationships change.  Act accordingly.  Put another way, is the time and 
effort which you put into a given piece of work going to yield some 
tangible musical result in excess of the increase of dollars in your pocket?

Second, more important in some ways than the first, is that, having decided 
that a certain instrument will truly benefit from a certain 
procedure...follow the procedure through.  Do not start at some 
hypothetical step 50 of a 75 step procedure and expect things to work very 
well, if at all.  The instrument described above had lead weights inserted 
into the moldings of many of the as-yet-unshapen, quite asymetrical 
hammers...which were hung on shanks and flanges which were most oddly 
pinned...you get the idea.  Very poor.

Best.

Horace





At 01:07 PM 1/8/2001 -0600, you wrote:
>Untrimmed trichords (legs hanging below the bottom of the strings at
>rest) really exacerbate this, especially if someone has been strip
>muting without depressing the pedal: as the felt at string level is
>compressed, the felt below tends to expand. When the pedal is depressed
>enough to clear all other dampers, trichord felt is still between
>strings in the tenor. Careful trichord trimming is an absolute must in a
>high-level situation.
>
>Fred Sturm
>University of New Mexico
>
>edwardsn@rpa.net wrote:
> >
> > I'd like to add one point I learned from an Eastman Professor here in town:
> > The farther away from the strings you can get the dampers when you are wide
> > open the more ring you will get out of the piano.  It is amazing how 
> much sound
> > they can absorb if they are close to the strings but not touching.
> >
> > Rob Edwardsen
> > Rochester, NY