Broadwood Bass string

[John Delacour]

At 8:27 pm -0500 18/3/07, Annie Grieshop wrote:

>A related question:  is there a single source of at least general
>information about the history of wire manufacture and string making?  After
>listening to Chopin on the 1883 Chickering last week, I questioned how the
>materials/construction/sound of modern strings differ from what would have
>been on that piano originally, and nobody could tell me.  Thanks for any
>pointers........

Though I am not familiar with Chickerings, since unfortunately they 
are rare in Europe, an 1883 piano is practically a modern piano and 
very different from the pianos Chopin played, which were pre-1850 
(the year Henry Steinway moved to America), after which there were 
many hugely important developments, not least in the tensile strength 
of steel wire.  Between 1867 and 1893 Poehlmann set the pace for 
piano wire, so that in 1876 their No. 17 wire broke at 342 lbs. 
compared with Washburn and Moen's 242 lbs.  I guess Chickering would 
have used Poehlmann wire at this time, as most great European makers 
did.  Today's wire is not as good in any way as Poehlmann's and has 
not the same tensile strength, with the result that the strings on a 
piano strung with modern wire will be close to their breaking strain, 
and that is all to the good in some cases.  As to the covered 
strings, unless Chickering originally used iron covering wire, there 
will be very little essential difference.  Steinway used iron 
covering wire at one stage but that was earlier, probably about 1865.

You can reckon the sound of Chopin's Pleyel was very different from 
_any_ 1883 piano.  I made the strings for one of Chopin's pianos 
about 20 years ago and probably still have the scale, as well as 
several others from the period.  Last year I made the strings for a 
piano identical to Chopin's little upright Pleyel using modern (R) 
wire.  My colleague was not happy with the extreme bass, so we remade 
them using a weaker make of core wire and there was a marked 
improvement.

Almost certainly the 1883 Chickering will have had more purity and 
clarity than most of today's pianos, many of which I hate to hear, 
especially the hateful Bösendorfer, which makes any melody in the 
bass sound like an earthquake or a washing machine.  In my opinion 
the piano has gone downhill since about 1905.

JD