Stephen Birkett in the news

[Kent Swafford]

Building a piano anyone can afford

Engineering professor Stephen Birkett is convinced he can improve on  
the instrument's 300-year-old technology -- and make it cheaper, to  
boot


  By STEPHEN STRAUSS

  UPDATED AT 3:34 PM EDT
  Saturday, Oct 23, 2004

Stephen Birkett has a vision of better days for piano manufacturers and  
cheaper prices for piano buyers -- and, Mozart knows, they need it.

Even when the very best Steinway grand can retail for half a million  
dollars, and a lesser brand may suck $130,000 out of a musician's  
wallet, the industry has been collapsing. In 1988, Sherlock-Manning,  
the last Canadian piano maker, closed its doors, marking the end of a  
homegrown industry that at one time numbered 100 companies. By 2000,  
London, Ont., which once boasted the largest number of piano makers in  
the world, suddenly had none.

This deflation reflects, in large measure, the arrival in the music  
world of cheap, electronic instruments and keyboards that destroyed the  
low-end piano market. But it's the astronomical price of the new  
instruments that has long troubled the 49-year-old University of  
Waterloo engineering professor who, at one point in his youth, imagined  
a life as a concert pianist.

  So he has embarked on a project, "to redesign and re-engineer an  
instrument which is still being constructed [on principles] based on a  
300-year-old technology." The mission of what is called the Facility  
for Research in Piano Design, Technology, and Manufacturing is "not to  
think of how do you make a piano now, but how could a piano be made if  
you started from scratch," he says.

Buttressed by a portion of the promised $280,000 in funding from  
industry and government, Prof. Birkett is bringing a variety of  
high-tech machinery to the study of the centuries-old technology that  
is the piano. There are many questions to ponder. Is there some  
material other than wood that will produce the dulcet sound of a  
Steinway without costing a mint? Can we figure out a way of  
constructing the keyboard-action mechanism (the keys striking the  
strings) so that it doesn't take an army of craftsman to put it into  
place? Can you change the shape of the piano and still allow it to  
resist the 20 tonnes of pressure the wires exert? Can piano wire be  
made differently?

Today's pianos are still built on the principles of the instrument's  
inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori of Florence. The harpsichord and spinet  
maker, who took care of the instruments of the Medici family, by 1700  
had invented the hammer action, improving the harpsichord's jack and  
quill action, which plucked the strings. It took him almost 30 years to  
perfect his invention, and it is Cristofori's principles that are still  
followed by piano manufacturers, who may not understand precisely why  
they are doing one thing and not another.

"Think of it as designing a car based on a horse and buggy," Prof.  
Birkett says, adding that in the current science of piano construction  
"a lot of what is known is anecdotal, and some of it may not be true."

He has undertaken what he believes to be the only research project  
anywhere in the world on how to re-engineer the piano. The effort,  
which he hopes will include a pianist as a research partner, comes with  
an important caveat and a promised goal. "It has to seem to a pianist,  
and to someone listening, like it really is a piano and not a  
fundamentally new instrument. We are re-engineering rather than  
rethinking the piano," he says.

  The ultimate goal is to come up with a piano that costs less than half  
of today's high-end products, and "maybe even take it down a good deal  
more than that," Prof. Birkett says, so that "someone could buy a grand  
piano who wouldn't even consider it today."

How realistic his mission is should be known in two years, when he  
hopes to have a prototype piano. His goal is greeted with a mixture of  
skepticism and hope by people who have watched the decline of the piano  
industry. Ken Elford, a salesman at Toronto's Remenyi House of Music's  
piano department, who has spent 50 of his 72 years in the business,  
admits that the high cost of a grand piano drives daggers through the  
heart of many people, particularly parents of children who dream of  
concerts.

  "A lot of people have tried the same thing and gone broke," says  
Elford, before adding: "But gee, that is how things start: Somebody  
starts to work on something and then develops it."


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