Music So I'm going to pull this pin out here and the action sits on a sled. I have to look down to make sure I don't break any hammers. And out it comes.
Now... On this piano, the hammers are leveraged up. When I rock the lever, it pushes a little beak here right past a thing called an escapement.
So the hammer can hit the string and then fall right back without making a thunk. The hammer heads are covered with deerskin. And since piano builders were experimenting all the time during this time period, because piano was a new type of instrument, some people used the shiny side of the deerskin.
skin up and some people use the fuzzy side. This piano uses the fuzzy side. So as you can see we've got the key lever, the hammer, a thing called a back check so that it doesn't bounce back like someone on a trampoline, and then the escapement so that the hammer can escape and fall back down.
Now we put the action back in. And we'll hear that the sound of this piano isn't nearly as loud as that of the modern piano. But what it has is an interesting tone color change.
If I start by playing really softly and I start to play louder, you're going to hear the actual attack of the sound change. The treble range of the instrument was said in the 18th century to sound a little... bit like woodwinds, I think especially clarinet. The bass on the other hand is kind of reedy and you can understand why in Mozart's piano concertos even a small instrument like this could stand out with an orchestra. Now, you notice, well, those of you who might be able to see my knee down here, there's no pedal on this instrument like there is on a modern piano.
If I want to lift the dampers, I do it with my right knee. If I use my left knee, I can interpose a layer of felt in between the hammers and the strings. And that's called a moderator. It disappeared from the piano. It was never on English pianos, which are more the direct ancestors of the modern piano.
But when it disappeared, we lost a valuable tone color. It's very kind of muted and muffled. A little bit harp-like. We can imagine it in certain places in Beethoven and other composers. When these Viennese or South German style pianos got bigger, they still kept that moderator style.
And so they had that color as an option into about the 1830s or so. But this is the piano that Mozart would have played his concertos on. And as we can see, when we progress over to the modern piano, that it is...
It's gotten a little bit bigger. The modern piano arrives on the scene probably sometime in the 1850s or 60s. And one of the first pianos to really attract a lot of attention as a modern piano is the American Steinway piano.
Now we know later that Steinway set up a factory in Germany and what we have here is a German Steinway. It's from Hamburg in the north of Germany. What I think I'd like to do though is play you just a short selection on each piano. and you can hear for yourself exactly what the difference is between the instruments.
So, I'm going to give you about eight, ten bars of a Mozart piano sonata on this piano, and then I will take it over to the modern piano. We move now from the South German Viennese. style piano to the modern Steinway. And we've just heard that short example from Mozart, and we're going to hear that again on the modern piano. Now, among things that happen before modern pianos really come to be is that this instrument, the Viennese piano, is entirely wood-framed.
And pianos would be wood-framed for 20, 25, maybe 30 years later. But in the 1820s, an American named Babcock invented the idea of a metal part or metal parts to support the piano more. The other thing you can't see but this instrument has a solid bottom so the sound board like on a harpsichord or a clavichord forms a baffle.
These still owe a certain amount to harps and guitars but as I move over to the modern piano we're going to see that nowadays we have a full cast iron plate. that sits inside the instrument. You can see that the instrument is much more massive. And this case, the curved case, is made with layers and layers of laminated wood, steamed and bent over a period of about a month. Now, we need this big metal plate in here, and it would take several strong people to put it in, because this instrument, fully tuned like it is right now, supports a pressure of about 30 tons inside.
So you want to make sure you never drop one off the stage that'll implode. But let's hear the Mozart example played on this instrument, and you'll get a difference, or a good sense of the difference, of how the instruments make their sounds. Now the range of Mozart's piano was here to here. Excuse me, there to here. This is called Contra F. You'd notate it with two capital F's.
This is little F3, F sharp 3 and G3. So again, we've got 58 notes here. We go to 88 notes now on the modern piano.
And we have very long strings, various processes came in that allowed them to build the piano bigger, louder. So that we... get a sound of incredible power and brilliance, but the tone color remains basically the same. If I start from the softest sound and go as loud as I can, the volume will change, but the tone color really won't.
The tone gets more and more massive, and this just reflects different musical needs. It's probably best to think that each of these historical instruments served the music of its own time best. After all, you wouldn't necessarily restore an old oil painting with acrylic paint.
even if you choose not to play the historical instruments, if you study them and how they work, it will modify your approach, I think, to make for a clearer, nicer performance on the modern instrument. Those of us who choose to eat everything on the plate will play all the instruments.