Jack,
Isn't the 121 the 5'3" piano and the 135 the 5'8"? Also, I have
seen (in Hurst) a Chickering Quarter Grand apparently similar in all
aspects to the 121 but lacking even the very small cheekblocks of the
121. There were no cheekblocks whatsoever; they were not simply
missing - the piano had been obviously designed without them. It had
the customary stamping indicating "Quarter Grand BOSTON U.S.A." on the
strut as the pianos from pre-1909 or so do but where there is usually
the mark "121" it said "122". There was apparently, a very short run of
these pianos.
Not a quarter grand but an amazingly good piano was the Chickering
which I had in my shop several years ago. It was one of the best I have
ever heard and many others who heard it thought so or thought indeed the
piano was the best they had ever heard. One customer said that he would
"sell whatever it took to get the money to buy it". This customer has a
great sounding M&H "A". If memory serves the Chickering had the
designation "235" in the usual place on the plate near the tail where
one can find the model number on most early Aeolian Chickerings.
This was a most interesting piano, obviously designed by an experienced
and thinking person. The piano was close to eight feet in length, its
serial number(again relying on memory) indicated it was built about
1920.
An astounding and remarkable feature of this piano was its
placement of the bass bridge relative to the long bridge and the scaling
arising thereby. This large piano had, relying once again on the
foibles of memory, I think, 27 or 28 bass unisons and perhaps as many as
32. The bass bridge, although substantially taller than most, was
placed as one would expect conventionally - far enough back in the case
to require the use of bass strings of the length one commonly
associates with a piano of about 8 feet in length.
However, the long bridge had dimensions that approximated those of
a substantially smaller piano in that the bridge and scaling appeared to
be taken from a piano of about six feet in length. The scaling
therefore did not take full, or even merely normal advantage, obviously
by design, of the possibilities of length offered by the conventional
overstringing arrangement used in most pianos - one thinks of the 121
where the tenor strings are as long as those on a Steinway "O" even
though the 121 is about seven inches shorter. There was a very
large distance between the tenor area of the long bridge and the bass
bridge. The longest strings, and they were plain wire, in the tenor
were greatly shorter (perhaps by about two feet) than the shortest
strings in the bass. This piano had the softest timbre of any piano I
have ever heard although it had plentiful power and ringtime
thoroughout and was a wonderful instrument. Basically, it was a six
foot piano with a long and enlarged bass section with a very tall
bridge. It was, again relying on memory, a roundtail, or, if the tail
was squared this was not as pronounced as one ordinarily finds to be the
case.
As the piano had been restrung some time previously and was in the
shop for action work only, which was all the rich but tight customer
would spring for, I did not take the scale from it. It was late enough
that it had the wooden flanges, longer hammers, metal brackets, and
more conventional action of the early Aeolian period. The pinblock,
also, was one piece and conventional.
The sound of Chickering pianos even into the Aeolian period is
equal in many ways in terms of quality, at least to my ear, and in some
ways better than that of Steinway pianos, and I thoroughly agree with
you that the idea of the decline of Chickering with the advent of
Aeolian is incorrect, at least until the 1930's. The two companies
represent to me, insofar as American pianos are concerned, two
different conceptions of piano design, particularly in the instruments
produced by Chickering in the last 30 years of the nineteenth century
and the first 30 or so of the twentieth, with Chickering slowly but
surely conceding point by point its unique characteristics and,
ultimately, becoming just another Steinway clone.
However, along the way many great, interesting and unusual pianos
have been built. If one looks at Steinways prior to their redesign in
the 1870s and the development of the A,B,C, and D - models which have
been the basis for so many similar designs by others - one finds that
the plate looks very similar to that of Chickering at the time. This
suggests to me, although truly this is just speculation, that Steinway
designed their plates during this period to resemble those of Chickering
- perhaps as a way of addressing the need to market their pianos in
competition with a more established competitor. Once they had become
preeminent their redesign of their instruments in the 1870's could
forego any visual similarity to Chickering and their technical
innovations both at this time and prior to this period added to the
increasing differentiation of the two approaches.
Eventually, for whatever reasons, and to my mind these reasons
certainly could not be technical or tonal superiority, the market
conferred success in greater measure on the one than the other and we
are left with the predominance of Steinway-style pianos. The
characteristic features of late nineteenth century Chickerings some of
which are: brass flanges and metal rails, plywood action brackets,
angled hammershanks and whippens, segmented pinblocks fit to double
flanges which were bolted underneath, the built up case, the damper
system, the stile and rail system of the keybed, the use of a flat
keyframe with the balance rail contacting the key bed directly, the
absence of glide bolts, the use of much more widely spaced ribbing
resulting in a lessened number of ribs, the floating of parts of tenor
area long bridge and bass bridges, the larger number of unisons placed
upon the bass bridge, and, in particular, the location of the bass
bridge and resulting scaling of the bass strings represent to me a very
great design and one that definitely lacked the transition problems of
the Steinway approach. Some models, of course, have, on occasion, weak
trebles but they are not that bad with good work and I like even them.
Nevertheless, slowly but surely most of these features except for the
last two or three have been abandoned in favor of the Steinway-style
approach but along the way many interesting hybrid pianos were produced
which are most instructive to contemplate. The 235, apparently, was one
of them.
With the right kind of rebuilding I think even the somewhat
maligned 121 is a great piano, particularly, for such a small
instrument. It sounds like a much larger piano throughout most of the
scale and I don't find objectionable or even noticeable when playing,
the lessened ring in the treble, in fact I like it.
With Steinway-style pianos a chord placed across the ends of the
bass bridge, where it is curved, will be almost parallel to a line
visualized on the long axis of the tenor area of the long bridge. On
Chickerings these diverge to a much greater degree, perhaps as much as
45 degrees, resulting in significantly longer strings on the tenor end
and middle of the bass bridge which progressively become relatively
shorter in comparison to the scaling of the Steinway-style bridge.
This is a characteristic feature of the bass scaling of Chickering
pianos, even during the earlier Aeolian period, and seems, to my ear, a
better solution of the transition problem from bass to tenor which is
relatively more prominent on Steinway and Steinway-style pianos.
I like the 121, at least the three or four I have rebuilt, and I
have another one under way, for their timbre which is highly musical and
emotionally expressive at least for my taste, and not simply for their
power or ringtime, both of which are, perhaps, susceptible of
improvement. I lose awareness of deficiencies in this respect once I
start playing the piano when the sound is as nice as it has been on the
121's in my experience. This piano is really a big piano in a small
case and, as I said above, the string lengths are, except for the last
three or four notes in the bass, essentially as long as a Steinway O.
There must be some significance, although I don't know what it is, which
has to do with the ratio of a set of such long speaking lengths to such
a small soundboard as exists on this piano. Perhaps, something similar
exists on the Baldwin Acrosonic, another piano that has, to my ear and
others, an expressive, musical timber in spite of being inordinately
small.
Regards, Robin Hufford
JWyatt1492@AOL.COM wrote:
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