Piano Detectives

[Les Smith]

On Fri, 31 Oct 1997, Delwin D Fandrich wrote:
> Next question, Professor Sherlock Smith: just when did Chickering drop
> some of its distinctive features? ...

FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS! I have a close friend who restores vintage
Thunderbirds. That's it. Nothing else. Ask him a question about  '57 and
he'll talk your ear off; ask him about a '77, and he'll quickly set you
straight that there are Thunderbirds and THUNDERBIRDS. The early 'Birds
are Bill's passion. He doesn't give a rat's you-know-what about the later
ones and he lets you know it in no uncertain terms. Bill and I are a lot
alike in that I suffer a similar myopia regarding vintage pianos.
   I was not just a piano tech, but also a pianist who once studied for a
concert career. Playing since I was 6, and tuning since I was 14, I have
spent most my life judging pianos from both sides of the keyboard. How-
ever the pianist has always led the way and the technician followed, be-
cause my primary interest has always been those instruments best capable
of handling the upper reaches of the Classical repertoire.
  From the beginning, my instincts as a pianist led me to the old pianos.
They just seemed to sound and play better than the newer ones. Eventually
I cam to realize that the old Knabes, Stecks, Webers and others which I
favored as both a pianist and a tech shared one thing in common--they were
virtually all built before their respective companies merged into the
large corpporations like American and Aeolian. It seemed clear that while
such mergers might be good for the COMPANIES, that wasn't necessarily true
of the pianos, themselves. Just look at what happened to Knabe.
   Under the stewardship of Ernest, William's son, Knabe built some superb
pianos during the last quarter of the 19th century. However, when Ernest
died the future of the firm was passed on to his two sons, Earnest, Jr. &
William lll. In short order they decided to merge Knabe into part of the
then forming American Piano Co. Earnest, Jr. became the APC's first presi-
dent, William lll, it's first VP. They lasted one year and then walked
away from their grandfather's and father's firm, leaving it's fate in the
hands of others. They went on to form the immortal Knabe Brother's Piano
Co. and were never heard from again. Neither was the APC Knabe. Such sce-
narios played themselves out with increasing frequency as the century un-
folded. 
   For this reason, I consider such questions as when did Chickering drop
their sectional pinblocks, or scrrew-in damper system; Weber, their tun-
able duplex scale; Steck their individual agraffes; Knabe, their mitered-
in pinblocks,; or even Fischer, those nifty solid-brass key pins--all done
for reasons of post-merger corporate expediency and product-line homogenu-
ity-- to be irrelavant, because my interest has always been those pre-mer-
ger instruments that still retained those distinctive characteristics
which made a Chickering a Chickering, a Weber a Weber and a Steck a Steck.
I suppose, however, that if one considered an Edward Gibbonesque chronical
of the devolution of the American piano over the last 90 years to be a
desirable thing, that the techs who regularly rebuild such pianos could
pool their acquired knowledge and write a difinitive work on exactly how
the first-class pianos became second class; the second-class pianos, third
class; and then those third-class pianos extinct, but why bother? What re-
mains of the US piano industry today resembles Hiroshima AFTER we dropped
the bomb. To those who haven't noticed, the Fat Lady is warming up in the
wings; Yogi Berra is dressed in street clothes, ready to go home; young
pianists will grow up thinking that Knabe's first name is Young-Change;
and nothing will ever again be as it once was. Never.	
   I am no longer able to work as a piano tech, nor even play. Three
storkes have left me lucky to be able to knock out an occasional e-mail
at the computer, but I still prefer to remember American pianos as they
once were. I've longed believed that the finest pianos ever made were
built right here in the US between about 1875-1915. And the the best
efforts of the likes of Steinway, Chickering, Knabe, Weber, Steck, Richard
Gertz and a few others reflected standards of excellence in design, con-
struction and philosophy which have been irretrievably lost with the pas-
sage of time. Those were the pianos I chose to play; those were the pianos
I chose to work on. Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of some superb
techs who share my sentiments, enough meticulously-restored examples of
those old, benchmark instruments survive today that they can "speak" on
their own behalf with far more eloquence than I. All one has to do is
listen
   An old, wise Greek dude once observed that happiness lies in doing as
an adult, that which you enjoyed doing when you were young. That's cer-
tainly been true in my case with vintage pianos and in my friend Bill's
case with vintage Thunderbirds. Plato might have added, however, that 
it's probably a good idea not to take ourselves too seriously, because
in the end, nothing lasts. Nothing. Least of all arrogance. Just ask the
Knabe brothers!

Les Smith