Una Corda Adjustments and Christian Zimmermann

Horace Greeley hgreeley@stanford.edu
Tue, 04 Jan 2005 14:48:35 -0800


Dave,

At 02:28 PM 1/4/2005, you wrote:
>David:
>
>Where did you hear about the action swapping?  That one is hard for me
>to buy having done quite a bit of installing a Steinbuhler action in
>several "D"s.  The Steinbuhler action is designed to be adjusted for
>different pianos but it still requires several hours to set up.  What
>kind of action is he taking with him?  Does it have a non-standard
>keyboard?
>
>Inquiring minds......

I did it with stock NY keyframes, keysets and action rails, with 
combinations of NY and Renner/Hamburg parts.  While it certainly did take 
several hours per move, the results were generally well worth the trouble.

As to the Steinbuhler - Several years ago, I was able to spend some time 
with a D which had been fitted with the Steinbuhler action (though, clearly 
not as much as someone who works with them regularly).  It was, in many 
respects, the best instrument at the show.  At the same time, after 
spending a fair amount of time listening to a wide variety of (mostly 
younger) pianists, I came away from the whole thing thinking something 
along the lines that....here are these young kids, with the skeletal and 
muscular systems still very much in quick development, doing (in that 
setting) a fair amount of practice (which is to say, developing the 
muscle-memory that comes from repetition in practice) on an instrument 
which gave them an ungrounded sense of accomplishment and ability.  This is 
not to say that there were not some exceptionally talented people 
playing.  It is to say that one wonders how these folks might, if afforded 
such actions for protracted periods of time (for, say, a number of years), 
adjust when the get to the more "real" world, and have to play on whatever 
is presented to them.  There is already such a tendency for younger 
students to be pushed into literature which they are simply not 
sufficiently developed physically that I really hate to see those problems 
exacerbated.

FWIW, it was particularly informative to go to the performances of those 
same students who had been given so much time on the modified D.  While I 
did not make any effort to get reductive data, it was clear that a 
significant number of them had noticeably more, and more serious, technical 
errors than the students who had been practicing either exclusively on 
standard keyboards, or who had spent only limited time on the Steinbuhler.

Knowing that you have one of these beasts, I would be interested to know if 
the above has any correlation in your experience.

Best.

Horace



>dave
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: pianotech-bounces@ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces@ptg.org] On
>Behalf Of David Love
>Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2005 4:13 PM
>To: 'Pianotech'
>Subject: Una Corda Adjustments and Christian Zimmermann
>
>I heard a story from a pianist recently about Christian Zimmermann who
>apparently regulates his own pianos for concerts.  The story is that he
>regulates the una corda so that it has 4 distinct positions that produce
>four unique tones.  Has anyone worked with him to know what that's all
>about.
>
>An interesting side story about him (if true) is that he apparently used
>to travel with his own two S&S D's.  They were evidently on their way to
>NY when 9/11 happened.  The story is that the pianos were traveling with
>some type of chemical that triggered some sort of bomb alert and the
>pianos were subsequently hacked apart in an attempt to find the
>material.  Now he travels with his own action which he fits to each
>piano that he plays.
>
>David Love
>davidlovepianos@comcast.net
>
>
>
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