Music Trade Review

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PIANO FACTORY and
PIANO SERVICING
usis I
fa
DR. WM. BRAID WHITE
D
URING the last few weeks I have
been giving a course in the Acous-
tics of Music to graduate teachers
who are studying for the Bachelor
and Master degrees in Music at the Chicago
Musical College, the director of which is the
eminent pianist, composer and conductor,
Rudolph Ganz.
My work included some consideration of
the theory of tuning, but from a scientific and
an historical standpoint. What, however, will
mostly interest my tuner readers and what in
fact constitutes my reason for talking about
the matter here is the fact that I found my
students as unacquainted with every part of
the subject as they were interested in what
I had to say and to show them. What I
shall say here about this course of lectures,
then, bears a genuine and direct interest for
all my readers, because it deals with a very
important part of their own world, namely,
their contacts with the professional musicians,
for whom and for whose pupils they tune
and regulate pianos.
I said that my students were intelligent.
That is a plain statement of the facts.
Several of them were nuns, members of
Catholic religious orders who devote them-
selves to teaching. All, men and women
alike, were professional musicians, engaged in
teaching piano, theory, and other branches
of the art. All were taking the course as
part of the required curriculum for the de-
grees of Bachelor of Music and Master of
Music. All therefore were graduates, and
their average age was well over thirty.
Each also was taking other classes in theory,
harmony, counterpoint, composition, piano
playing, and so on.
Now, it is a common complaint among
tuners generally that, no matter how intelli-
THE
MUSIC
TRADE
DR. W M . BRAID WHITE
Technical Editor
TRAINING ARTISTS
IN THE MECHANICS
OF THE PIANOFORTE
gent and sympathetic may be their customers
among the professional musicians, few if any
of them have any notion of the mechanism
of the piano, or of the equal temperament
system of tuning. In consequence, as most
of my readers know only too well, two
languages are talked whenever a musician
and a tuner try to explain things to each
other. The musician talks entirely in terms of
aesthetics, subjective and intensely personal,
based upon emotion. The tuner talks in
physical and mechanical terms, objective and
not at all based upon emotion. A pianist,
thus, will talk about "touch" in a manner
wholly unintelligible to the tuner, merely be-
cause he will be mixing up half a dozen dis-
crepant concepts in one set of w 7 ords. The
pianist will think of his muscular contractions
and flexures. He will think of the emotional
value of the tones he is producing. He will
mix up the physical act of touch with the
aesthetic value which he perceives to
arise out of it in the way of a resulting
tone; and he will suppose that because
he translates his feelings about the act into
aesthetic term, these terms actually represent
physical truth. If he feels that a certain
set of muscular actions directed towards a
key of the piano gives him a tone that he
calls, let us say, "mellow and round" he may
come to imagine that those parts of the mus-
cular action which are the most spectacular
but at the same time the least useful, such
as the flexing of the fingers, their curvature
and the feeling of tension or of its opposite,
are what really matter. He may therefore
go on to ascribe magical virtues to these
actions, and to become angry if anyone
knowing the mechanism of the piano better
than he does presumes to take issue with him.
He may even go so far as to refuse even to
look at the action, much more study its move-
ments, on the ground that his cultivated
senses given him an infallible guide. Every
experienced tuner, who deals with many pro-
fessional pianists, knows what I mean by all
this.
The tuner, who knows the piano action
and its movements from key to hammer, will
find a great deal of what our imaginary
pianist says quite absurd. He may therefore
refuse even to try to understand, and may
justify his refusal by an appeal to physical
facts. But it is precisely because this atti-
REVIEW,
September,
1931
tude has been taken by technical men in their
dealings with musicians that now, at a
moment when the strongest kind of coopera-
tion for common benefit is desperately needed,
each fears to try to build up a rapproche-
ment with the other, whom he has for so
long thought of as strange if not as actually
hostile. Misunderstandings, based upon dif-
ferences of standpoint, have produced, in this
as in so many other cases, a most unfortunate
state of affairs.
ONE WAY OF APPROACH
Now it was one of my aims, in taking the
class to which I have referred at the begin-
ning of this article, to do what I could to
make these ladies and gentlemen understand
just so much about the mechanism of the
pianoforte that they could never again plead
ignorance of the functions of the action. To
this end I devoted all of one and part of
another lecture to a careful description of the
construction of the pianoforte and particu-
larly to an analysis of its key and hammer
mechanism. The results were striking. I
had been talking during previous lectures
about Sound, its propagation, its pitch, in-
tensity and quality. I had discussed the
general subject of the production of musical
tone by the voice and by musical instruments.
When then I turned to the piano, as to the
most important of all musical instruments, the
class had already some background of acous-
tical knowledge. What, however, I soon
found was that the construction of the in-
Estate
MANUFACTURER
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104!*—3rd St.
NORTH BERGEN. N. J.
Tel.: 7—4167
27