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Kaatscast: the Catskills Podcast is a biweekly series featuring Catskills culture, history, sustainability, local interviews, literature, and the arts. Shows are hosted by Brett Barry and produced by Silver Hollow Audio, in the heart of the Catskills. Subscribe and experience what reviewers have called “delightfully informative” storytelling with “great production quality.” Voted “Best Regional Podcast” three years in a row. Episode archives, transcripts, and a robust search engine at kaatscast.com. Enjoy!
[00:00:00] Pam Weisberg: When we have a pianist come in who sits down at our Beethoven-era piano and starts to play Beethoven, they have a moment when they say, "Oh my goodness, that's how and why he wrote it that way."
[00:00:20] Brett Barry: Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, three decades before the famed Steinway & Sons was founded. There were no Baldwin's or Yamaha's either. They arrived in 1862 and 1900, but he did play on Stein, Broadwood, and Graf, and you can too. I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast." Today, we're off to the Piano Performance Museum in Hunter, New York, where you can see dozens of historic pianos, many of which are fully playable so you can hear and feel what composers like Beethoven or Mozart or even Bach might have experienced in their lifetimes. Come along with me to the Catskill Mountain Foundation's Piano Performance Museum at Hunter's Doctorow Center for the Arts, and we'll play through the collection with performing arts director Pam Weisberg and museum docent Stacey Bowers.
[00:01:23] Pam Weisberg: I'm Pam Weisberg, director of performing arts at Catskill Mountain Foundation. The Piano Performance Museum is about 20 years old now. It was started by Steven Greenstein, who was a piano technician and a restorer of vintage pianos. He put together the collection, and we were fortunate enough to get a grant from the Doctorow Family Foundation, which allowed us to purchase the collection for the foundation. We use the collection. We conduct tours for the general public. We also run a concert series. We run an annual fortepiano academy and international digital salons in which fortepianists get together all over the world and talk about and demonstrate on their pianos that they have access to.
[00:02:22] Brett Barry: And before I ask even my first question about pianos and pianofortes and fortepianos, I'd like to acknowledge the other person that's here with us today, if you could please introduce yourself.
[00:02:34] Stacey Bowers: Hey, Brett. I'm Stacey Bowers, and I'm the docent here at the museum. I do tours here. I'm here every Saturday, and I also work with the curator of the museum. His name's Richard Hester, and I do some work with him on maintaining the instruments.
[00:02:52] Brett Barry: So this is a beautiful space right in the center of Hunter, right next to the concert hall and Mountain Cinema, and it's chock-full of pianos.
[00:03:02] Stacey Bowers: Yes, it's an incredible collection here. We have 28 instruments in the room, all except four of them. Four of the instruments here are reproductions of historical instruments, but all the rest are original instruments, and with the exception of maybe one or two, they're all playable, and what's really extraordinary about this museum is the first thing I tell people when they come in is, "What you'll notice right away is you can actually touch these pianos, and you can play them." If you go to any other museum, you go to the Metropolitan Museum. You can't get anywhere near them. That's one of the great things about my job when I'm here: when pianists come in to watch the fun that they have playing these historical instruments and getting a sense of what the piano sounded like when Mozart was in Mozart's time or Haydn's time.
[00:03:51] Brett Barry: And am I correct? I'm kind of hearkening back to grade school music class. I think I learned that "pianoforte" is the full name for a piano, "piano" meaning "soft" and "forte" meaning "loud."
[00:04:01] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, it's actually fortepiano. That's the name that was christened in the early 18th century. When you have to remember there was a time when there were no pianos around 1700 or pre-1700, there were no pianos. There were harpsichords and other keyboard instruments, but no instruments that functioned as a piano does today, and it was around 1700 when the first ones were made in Italy, and they were given that name, "fortepiano," which is a funny name because "forte" means "loud" and "piano" means "soft," and the name "piano" has stuck through all of this time, and now we just call all these instruments "pianos," which just means "soft."
[00:04:44] Brett Barry: How many instruments do you have in the collection?
[00:04:47] Stacey Bowers: There are 28 instruments here. Let's see: 26 of them are pianos, one is a harpsichord, and one is a clavichord.
[00:04:55] Brett Barry: Explain those. The harpsichord has a different sound to it, and then I guess that evolved into a piano in some way?
[00:05:00] Stacey Bowers: Exactly, you know, again, going back to 1700, imagine being in Italy in 1700. For the prior couple of centuries, the instrument of choice was a harpsichord, and without getting into all the details, the way the harpsichord works is the strings are not struck, but they're plucked, and in a minute maybe we'll listen to the instrument, and you can actually hear it being plucked as you can feel it when you depress the key, so it's a very, very different sound, but the reason the fortepiano came to be is because you cannot play a harpsichord expressively. You can't play it loud. You can't play it soft. It just plucks it. However it plucks it, that's the volume.
[00:05:45] Brett Barry: And plucking seems actually more sophisticated of a mechanism than striking, is it?
[00:05:50] Stacey Bowers: Well, it seems like it is, but not actually. The invention that the first piano maker—his name was Cristofori—came up with was actually pretty ingenious and pretty sophisticated. The challenge was how do you strike a key and have a hammer in motion go up and strike a string and be able to do it soft and be able to do it loud? So yeah, it's a pretty sophisticated mechanism that's been developed over the centuries, and really a very similar physical acoustic event is what happens on a modern piano today.
[00:06:25] Brett Barry: Pianos strike with varying softness and loudness. Harpsichords pluck with consistent volume. To demonstrate, Stacey showed off a replica mid-18th-century harpsichord. Okay, so you're seated at a harpsichord, and it's got—looks like it's got two rows of keys.
[00:06:44] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, we call them a manual. It has two manuals. Not all harpsichords do. Often it's just one, but the reason it is like that is you recall I said earlier you can't play this instrument expressively. You can in a way because you can determine how many strings are actually going to be plucked, so on the upper manual you have this sound. I'm plucking now octaves down here on the other manual, so you see it's a very different sound, actually a little bit louder, but now, again, I remember I talked about how the string is plucked, and I think you can hear that there. [HARPSICHORD PLAYING] So here's a little bit of Bach played on the harpsichord. It's one of his really famous preludes. [HARPSICHORD PLAYING] This one is a replica. It's a replica of a Pascal Taskin harpsichord from the mid-18th century, probably around 1760. His harpsichords were considered some of the finest made in France at that time, but again, this is a reproduction, and it's one that's a really well-done instrument.
[00:08:27] Brett Barry: And it's got a very compact keyboard, but the instrument itself has some depth to it.
[00:08:31] Stacey Bowers: This type of harpsichord—they typically were very long instruments, kind of in the shape of a grand piano as we think of them today, with long strings. One thing you'll notice is it's all wood. There's no metal inside of a harpsichord or in some of the early fortepianos when we see those. The only metal you'll find would be the strings themselves. The entire structure is made out of wood.
[00:08:56] Brett Barry: And then next to the harpsichord, some—this looks like something very similar.
[00:09:00] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, it looks similar, but now we're looking at a fortepiano, so we're jumping ahead—actually not so far. This was the late 18th century. They were still making harpsichords in the 18th century even after pianos came to be, but now this next instrument is also a replica after a Stein piano. This is a Viennese fortepiano from, I think, around 1780 or 1770 to 1780. This would be a classic instrument used by Mozart or Franz Joseph Haydn.
[00:09:35] Brett Barry: So this would've been one of the first iterations, coming off the harpsichord.
[00:09:39] Stacey Bowers: Exactly, now you can see it still has the natural keys that are black, and what we call the sharp keys are white, so that was typical in a harpsichord, so we haven't made that change yet, and it's also a very short range, only five octaves. Maybe we should listen to that one.
[00:09:54] Brett Barry: Sounds good.
[00:09:55] Stacey Bowers: You'll see a very, very big change in the sound. Play a little bit of Mozart here. Everyone knows this piece. [FORTEPIANO PLAYING] So here you get a totally different sound from the harpsichord starting to sound like a piano that we might hear today.
[00:10:25] Brett Barry: Dramatically different, so name some composers who had the experience of having a harpsichord and being introduced to a fortepiano in their lifetimes and using both and composing for both.
[00:10:37] Stacey Bowers: That's really interesting because I was just thinking earlier today, and I was playing around with this. You know, Johann Sebastian Bach, the great Bach, was a perfect example of that. Bach died in 1750, and at that point there were fortepianos being made. There was a maker in Saxony right near him near Leipzig named Silbermann. Silbermann was an organ maker, but he started making fortepianos, so at the very end of Bach's life, he was experimenting with pianos. He wasn't—he was a little bit leery of them, but, you know, the piece that I just played on the harpsichord is an earlier Bach piece, one of the preludes, but his later works he was playing on the harpsichord but also on a fortepiano, so I could imagine that he was, you know, experimenting with that. Here's just a little tiny bit of "The Goldberg Variations," which was a very late piece of his. He very likely might have been playing. [FORTEPIANO PLAYING] I would imagine he played that on a fortepiano.
[00:12:00] Pam Weisberg: And many of the pianos in this collection came from the Museum of the American Piano in New York City, and Kalman Dietrich, who was also a master piano technician, put together that collection, and when he passed away, they closed down the museum, and Steven was very fortunate to get a number of the pianos, which we now have.
[00:12:26] Brett Barry: And Steven lived in the area, right?
[00:12:27] Pam Weisberg: He lived down in the Hudson Valley in Accord.
[00:12:31] Brett Barry: How did he find you or how did you find him? How did that relationship...
[00:12:35] Pam Weisberg: He found us through two concert pianists, Vladimir Pleshakov and Elena Winther. They came up to us and suggested the possibility of starting a piano museum, and then they introduced us to Steven.
[00:12:52] Brett Barry: Stacey, what's your background with pianos, and how did you get involved with this collection?
[00:12:58] Stacey Bowers: Well, I recently retired a couple of years ago, and I mentioned Richard Hester, our curator. I've known Richard for years, and Richard is also a maker of fortepianos. When I had a little bit more time on my hands, I called Richard one day, and I said, "I've got to get up and see this museum," and I came up one day and met him here, and I met Pam, and we got talking, and they needed somebody to help out with doing some tours, and that's why I'm here, so it was meant to be.
[00:13:26] Brett Barry: Was music part of your career or a hobby?
[00:13:29] Stacey Bowers: Yes. Go back two former lives: I was a performing musician, taught at the University of Cincinnati at the conservatory, and was trained as an orchestral percussionist, and so yeah, I do have a musical background.
[00:13:43] Brett Barry: What's it like to play this collection and have access to it?
[00:13:46] Stacey Bowers: It's very interesting. It's very enjoyable. Prior to being here, I never really spent any time playing these types of instruments. I'd always just had a, you know, I've got a modern Steinway in my home, and that's what I've always played, but it's just so much fun to play this music on these instruments. It takes a lot of getting used to, and I'm not really great at it by any means, but it's a lot of fun and always just so interesting to sit back and think that this is how, you know, Beethoven, the piano that he was playing on, what he was hearing, and how he was writing the music for these instruments.
[00:14:25] Brett Barry: Now, you said that this is a performance museum, so anyone can come in and see the collection and play the instruments. Is there a limit to that privilege?
[00:14:35] Pam Weisberg: Well, we have a responsibility to the pianos to protect them so that as many people as possible in the future will be able to hear these wonderful instruments, so when a group comes in, Stacey introduces them to the pianos and then makes a suggestion as to how they might play them because a modern instrument, a modern piano, is played so differently than these pianos. Not only are some of these pianos over 200 years old, so there's a certain fragility, but the sound is different and the way to make the piano sing is different than on a modern piano, and one of the things that I love to see happen is when we have a pianist come in who, say, sits down at our Beethoven-era piano and starts to play Beethoven, they have a moment when they say, "Oh my goodness, that's how and why he wrote it that way," and that's a wonderful moment, but modern pianists, if you want to play fortepiano, you need to learn. You need to learn to listen to the piano because the piano will tell you what it can and cannot do, and it takes a very, very good artist and ear to bring the full music out of these instruments.
[00:16:06] Brett Barry: Modern pianos—is that short for fortepiano, or is there some leap that happened between fortepianos and pianos that we know today?
[00:16:14] Stacey Bowers: There was certainly an evolution over, I think of it as over about 200 years because if you think back to, like, the instrument that we were just listening to maybe around 1760 and the newest pianos that we have here were built in the 1960s, so 200... 1960 is actually a pretty long time ago, so yeah, there were many, many changes, but it seemed like it was sort of just a logical evolution over that time. The bulk of the changes all happened in the 19th century when pianos went from being built in small workshops to being built in large factories.
[00:16:54] Brett Barry: Yeah, a big leap to my ear between the harpsichord and this very early piano, the fortepiano.
[00:17:01] Stacey Bowers: The leap keeps right on going. You know, one of the next instruments we should look at would be, well, it's my favorite in the collection. It's also probably the most special piano in the collection. It's another Viennese piano made by Conrad Graf, but it's an original instrument, and this is a Beethoven, a Robert Schumann, or a Johannes Brahms-era piano. They all had a Graf piano.
[00:17:25] Brett Barry: Let's go see it.
[00:17:26] Stacey Bowers: Sure, this piano was built, we think, in 1825 or 1826, and again, it's an original instrument, so I'm sitting at a piano that's 200 years old almost exactly. It was built in Vienna by a piano maker named Conrad Graf, and he was undoubtedly considered—these were considered the finest pianos of that era. When you hear this, you'll see this is another one of those big leaps in terms of the mechanism and, most important, the sound of the instrument. It's still very much a fortepiano of Viennese style. There's, again, really no metal in the instruments, primarily wood, but now we're getting a much bigger sound as the keyboard is expanded. We've gone from five octaves to six-and-a-third octaves now. Conrad Graf actually gave Beethoven one of these instruments, probably very similar to this one because this would be around that era, and I think we all know that Beethoven was going deaf at the end of his life. One of the changes on this piano is each unison note now has three strings, which is typical on a modern piano today. The fortepiano that we listened to earlier has [actually] two strings per unison, so now we have three, so it's a little bit louder. Graf actually made Beethoven's piano with four strings so that it would be a little bit louder to compensate for his deafness. Whether that helped, we don't know, but that's how much Graf cared about Beethoven and how important Beethoven was at that time in Vienna that he would be given a special instrument like that.
[00:19:11] Brett Barry: When do you tune these instruments, or who tunes them?
[00:19:15] Stacey Bowers: They're primarily tuned by Richard, our curator.
[00:19:18] Brett Barry: And so, tuning an instrument with three strings or four strings per key, do each of those strings get tuned individually?
[00:19:25] Stacey Bowers: Every one of them.
[00:19:25] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:19:26] Stacey Bowers: It's a job of patience.
[00:19:27] Brett Barry: Yeah.
[00:19:28] Stacey Bowers: A modern piano has 88 keys, and most of them have three strings, so you're looking at tuning 250-some strings.
[00:19:34] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:19:35] Stacey Bowers: One at a time, so yeah, it's an interesting job. Well, let's listen to this piano here. [PIANO PLAYING] So a very, very different sound on the right, a much bigger sound. [PIANO PLAYING] It's a lovely instrument.
[00:20:05] Brett Barry: Yeah, a beautiful sound.
[00:20:06] Stacey Bowers: It was tuned pretty recently, so that's why it just sounds so, so great. One of the things I neglected to talk about on the earlier fortepianos: you might have noticed there are no pedals on that piano, and you lift the dampers with these knee levers, which we also have on the fortepiano over here, but so now a little bit later now, they've come up with ways to, you know, use foot pedals to lift the dampers and to do some other effects. This Graf instrument actually has four pedals. Most people find that very unusual. Three of them are actually to play the piano softer, so one pedal lifts all the dampers so it'll keep ringing, but then we have another one that will shift the keyboard, so now we're only going to play two strings instead of three strings, two strings, and now we're going to put a piece of felt between the hammer and the strings, and it's very soft. That was a very common thing to be done back in that time. They were trying to make the instrument incredibly expressive.
[00:21:10] Brett Barry: Wow, and it's most likely, I would think, that Graf had his hands on this instrument.
[00:21:17] Stacey Bowers: I'm sure he did. I think his workshop was probably a pretty good-sized shop. I don't know how many folks might've been working in there, but it was definitely still not a factory situation, and I'm sure his hands did touch this instrument, and maybe he could have had a very big part in building it.
[00:21:37] Brett Barry: Wow, beautiful!
[00:21:39] Stacey Bowers: So we have a pretty comprehensive collection of early American pianos, and we've been thinking about those and talking about them quite a bit lately because of the 250th this year, and we have several square pianos. The square piano originally started in Germany. The Germans called them "tafelklaviers," which means "table piano," because when they're closed, it looks like a dining room table. They were all the rage in Germany and in England, and then a lot of those makers started making their way over to the United States. You know, we had huge immigration from, especially from Germany and from England, in the early 19th century, so they were coming over to the big cities, primarily in New York and Philadelphia, and so we have some really interesting pianos built by some of the best square-piano makers of that era. We'll start with one made by John Geib. He was a German, made his way to London, and then came to New York. I wish your listeners could see this instrument because one of the things Geib was known for was the incredible cabinet work. He must have had some amazing cabinetmakers, and, of course, the English were famous for that also, so I'm sure he had some cabinetmakers come over from London. The instrument that we're sitting at here is a real, truly a museum piece in that it would've been probably in a Gilded Age mansion somewhere in New York City. It's just incredible craftsmanship in the woodworking.
[00:23:15] Brett Barry: In order to also help people visualize this, and maybe you'll cringe, but almost like a coffin shape.
[00:23:23] Stacey Bowers: Yeah.
[00:23:23] Brett Barry: It's got kind of that short coffin...
[00:23:24] Stacey Bowers: They do, they do, they do have that look, yes.
[00:23:27] Brett Barry: ...and it's got the little kind of embellishments on the corners like a really fancy coffin might have.
[00:23:33] Stacey Bowers: Yep, it's definitely fancy. It's even got little drawers on each side. You can put your music in there, so this piano, we, you know, we were listening to the Conrad Graf made in Vienna. This instrument was made right around the same time. We think around 1830. There's an identical instrument to this, almost identical, in the Smithsonian [Institution]. So this would be considered even though square pianos were being made even at the beginning of the 18th century in the U.S., especially down in the Philadelphia area, so this wasn't like the very first square piano, but this would be one of the earlier ones. Square pianos had a relatively short life in the United States.
[00:24:11] Brett Barry: And I'm looking at all your square pianos. They're more rectangles than squares, actually.
[00:24:14] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, they're definitely not square. They're...
[00:24:17] Brett Barry: Just so you can visualize.
[00:24:18] Stacey Bowers: They're actually a couple of the very original ones in Germany that were pretty square, but they became much more rectangular when we came here, so I'll play just a short little piece. You know, keep in mind that at this time music publishing was starting to happen, so people were able to buy sheet music at a very low price. Having a piano was something everybody wanted to do. Pianos in many, many homes: not as fancy as this one, but everybody was learning pieces. This was a relatively easy little piece, kind of a salon piece. It's actually "Clementi Sonatina." [SQUARE PIANO PLAYING] Just kind of a fun little salon piece.
[00:25:16] Brett Barry: And when they say tickling the ivories, these appear to be ivory.
[00:25:20] Stacey Bowers: Yes, they are. They're definitely ivory. We don't see that anymore, thankfully, but yes, in the day, that's what they were using ivory, and, in some cases, we were using calf bone also.
[00:25:32] Brett Barry: Ivory was tusk?
[00:25:33] Stacey Bowers: Yep.
[00:25:34] Brett Barry: Of what?
[00:25:35] Stacey Bowers: An elephant.
[00:25:35] Brett Barry: Elephant, oh wow.
[00:25:37] Stacey Bowers: There's actually a town in Connecticut called Ivoryton, and that's where the largest piano action and piano key makers were in that time.
[00:25:47] Brett Barry: And this piano has two pedals.
[00:25:49] Stacey Bowers: Yep, now we're back to two. One is a sustain pedal, which lifts the dampers, and the other one is a soft pedal. [SQUARE PIANO PLAYING] Let's go look at the next generation of a square piano. It's called "Nunns & Clark." William Nunns and John Clark were partners, and again, they came from England. They came from London, and they set up their factory on Long Island. They had various partners over the years. Their pianos were considered very, very high quality, and again, your listeners can't see this, but one of the things that you'll notice now looking down into this piano is you're going to start to see some steel, some iron. I've mentioned a couple of times these pianos that I've been playing. There's no metal inside. It's all wood. Now, you see a great big steel reinforcement tube here and some cast-iron over here. This isn't the first piano to—actually, it's one of our other square pianos made by Babcock. He was the first person to put steel in a square piano, so now what's happening is these instruments are getting bigger. The strings are getting longer. They're getting tighter. There's more and more pressure and tension in these instruments, so the wood is not enough to keep the structure, so now we're adding steel, and you'll see at a certain point there's just a massive amount of cast-iron going into pianos to keep them stable. [SQUARE PIANO PLAYING] That's Haydn, a little bit of Haydn, a totally different sound with this instrument. I think now we'll go up. We'll take a jump ahead again another 20 years to really the culmination of the square piano, where it kind of ended up around 1860. Oh, interesting! You can't see this, but right next to me is a Chickering square piano. We're not going to play it because it's really in need of work, but this instrument is almost identical to one that was in the White House when Abraham Lincoln was the president. He actually chose this Chickering piano, and I'm not sure how long it stayed there, but it's not there anymore, but Chickering was probably the second best-known piano maker. They were based in Boston.
[00:28:22] Brett Barry: And it looks like a, well, it's called a Chickering Square Grand.
[00:28:26] Stacey Bowers: Right.
[00:28:26] Brett Barry: A really chunky looking...
[00:28:29] Stacey Bowers: Very chunky, you can see in every piano we're seeing here now it's getting a little bit bigger, and now if you look in here, look at all the cast-iron in here.
[00:28:37] Brett Barry: Wow!
[00:28:37] Stacey Bowers: It's all solid, solid metal.
[00:28:41] Brett Barry: Okay, so this is a brand I recognize.
[00:28:44] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, okay, so now we're finally at a Steinway piano. I think Steinway is probably the piano name that everyone is quite familiar with, recognized as being the finest pianos made, probably the finest pianos ever made, and they still are being made. At one time, there were several hundred piano factories in the United States. Today, there are three. One of them is Steinway. They're still in their—it wasn't their original location. Originally, they were in Manhattan, but they're in Astoria in Queens and still making Steinway pianos there.
[00:29:20] Brett Barry: I'm actually pleased to hear that we have three piano factories in the country.
[00:29:24] Stacey Bowers: Yeah.
[00:29:24] Brett Barry: Yes.
[00:29:26] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, it's amazing. Heinrich Steinweg came to the United States from Germany in, I think, 1851 with two of his sons. They quickly changed their name to Steinway. The three of them worked in small piano factories in New York City for a year to kind of learn. I think probably what they were learning was the language and to kind of learn and get accustomed to what was happening in New York and see and kind of learn the piano scene there and very, very quickly started making incredible instruments. I mean, if you—this instrument, this square piano here, which is just an amazing instrument in terms of the technology that went into building it, was only built, you know, less than 10 years after they came to the United States. Here we have a solid rosewood instrument. I can't even imagine how much it weighs. It's very, very ornate. We now have a full 88-note keyboard. The top of this piano is so heavy that I can't put it up myself. It takes two people to do it and prop it up, but even with the top down, it's got an amazing... [PIANO PLAYING] Really, the sound of a Steinway concert grand. Pianists are just amazed when they hear it but also can play. Let me see if I can do this. [PIANO PLAYING] So you can play soft and lovely too, not just loud.
[00:31:24] Brett Barry: And still two pedals.
[00:31:26] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, we still only have the two pedals, sustain and a soft pedal, so this piano, again, was built around 1860, and by the middle 1880s, all square pianos stopped being made in the United States. Even Steinway stopped making them. Nunns & Clark went out of business in the 1860s, and what replaced it was the upright piano. We have a few of them here. We have four or five of them against the wall over there, and the upright piano is the one that everyone is probably pretty familiar with.
[00:32:00] Brett Barry: And so, a grand piano, we have strings horizontal to the floor...
[00:32:06] Stacey Bowers: Right.
[00:32:06] Brett Barry: ...and you need a lot of space in the room for it because of that.
[00:32:10] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, and part of what, you know, the reason this piano sounds so big is, well, it is big, but it's also because the strings can go horizontally as opposed to straight. In this size case, we've got the strings almost the same length as a concert grand, so that gives you that really big sound, but what was happening, you know, in the mid-19th century with the Industrial Revolution and all the immigration and all the people moving into the big cities? Everybody wanted a piano but you. These pianos were totally impractical to go into the apartment houses, so Steinway was actually one of the first companies to develop an upright piano that took up much less space, was less expensive, and was easy to move up and down those stairwells in the buildings.
[00:32:54] Brett Barry: Easier.
[00:32:55] Stacey Bowers: Easier, yes, the square pianos faded away, but here in the United States, there was still a very, very vibrant piano-making environment for another, well, really right up until the Depression. [SQUARE PIANO PLAYING] Okay, I'm seated now at another square piano. This is actually the earliest one that we have and dates, I believe, from what, 1803? We're thinking this is one of the very earliest English square pianos. It was made by Muzio Clementi. Pianists will know that name. He was a real Renaissance man. He was an Italian, and he was a composer. His, the Clementi's, sonatinas and sonatas are actually lovely pieces. He was a publisher, and he also was building pianos, so Mozart knew of Clementi. Haydn knew Clementi. I think he became a very wealthy man because of all of his interests and how he was able to integrate all of that in the musical scene in London, so I guess if I had a Clementi, I should probably play that Clementi piece again. [SQUARE PIANO PLAYING] It's a really sweet little sound. There's a piano very, very similar to this in the Jane Austen house. At least the picture is—I think it's basically the exact same instrument, and she, of course, loved playing the piano.
[00:34:46] Brett Barry: And it has a beautiful hand-painted whatever-that's-called right above the keyboard.
[00:34:51] Stacey Bowers: That was very... this on the fallboard. We call this the fallboard, and that was actually a very good, good observation. That was very common at the time, that they would... Clementi would have had in his workshop an artist that would just do beautiful paintings on the fallboard, and sometimes they would do it on the lid, and this one's had a lot of work done on it recently here, so it's playing real nice.
[00:35:14] Brett Barry: It's really like beautiful pieces of furniture that just happen to house an instrument.
[00:35:19] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, some of them are pretty plain, but you can see that a lot of the English were very good cabinet makers, and I think they took a lot of pride in that.
[00:35:29] Brett Barry: And I would imagine that the different types of wood also add some real acoustic character.
[00:35:34] Stacey Bowers: Absolutely, so this is a—we're now standing at an upright. This is the only upright piano that we've really looked at or talked about today. This came with the original collection of instruments. It's a Pleyel upright piano made in Paris. This would have been a piano that, you know, Chopin, would have maybe, maybe played on. We've just done quite a bit of work on this. It's a very interesting action. Everything about it is very, very well made, and it's, again, a full, almost a full 88 keys, and it has a very, very big, big sound, but it's a lovely instrument. [PIANO PLAYING]
[00:36:29] Brett Barry: What do these pianos need from the room? What kind of environment do you have to maintain here for them?
[00:36:36] Stacey Bowers: They need consistent humidity. Very, very important, and for all your listeners, if you have a piano in your home, that's critical in the winter, especially here in the Northeast where it can get down to, you know, 15% humidity in our houses, and that'll just ruin an instrument. It'll ruin a piano. It'll ruin a violin or a guitar. Any instrument made out of wood really needs humidity control, so that's something that, you know, we've got. They're not working so hard right now, but all winter long we've got, I think, five humidifiers in here.
[00:37:08] Brett Barry: And then Stacey took me to the back of the room to showcase one more piano, a giant with a celebrity past.
[00:37:18] Stacey Bowers: Okay, well, this piano we're going to hear now, this one has quite a story. I'm sitting at a Baldwin nine-foot concert grand. It was built in 1965, and it had a very famous owner. I'm sure everyone listening has heard of Liberace. He was at one time the highest-paid performer in Las Vegas, which is even more than Elvis from what I understand. He lived in Las Vegas, but he was a Baldwin artist. Baldwin Piano Company was at one time kind of Steinway's rival. It was Steinway and Baldwin that were the two really big, big piano companies in the United States. Baldwin was based in Cincinnati. In addition to quite a few other quite esteemed pianists, Liberace was a Baldwin artist, and Baldwin would make for him. They would kind of make antique-looking pianos for him, you know, really fancy pianos that he would use on stage. This piano that's here is not one of those. This is a nine-foot concert grand, again, in an ebony finish. It's a very plain concert grand piano, and believe it or not, this instrument traveled with Liberace and was put in his hotel room whenever he was traveling so he could practice at night.
[00:38:36] Brett Barry: This piano...
[00:38:36] Stacey Bowers: This piano, which is...
[00:38:37] Brett Barry: ...which is massive and looks very heavy.
[00:38:40] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, it's heavy, and they're actually relatively easy to move if you know what you're doing or if you have piano movers, but yeah, that's the story of this piano, and it's actually a lovely instrument. It's got a huge, huge sound [would probably blow your microphones]. [PIANO PLAYING] Big piano!
[00:39:32] Brett Barry: And you mentioned how the earlier instruments were all wood. This one seems to have a lot of metal inside.
[00:39:41] Stacey Bowers: Yeah, if everything you see in there [that's the gold color or the bronze color] is all the cast-iron frame. It would take five or six people to lift that in and out of a piano. It's very heavy, and it's—you can see it's bolted all around the rim, big heavy bolts going down into the wooden frame, and it goes all the way up here. It comes all the way up to the front of the piano, so all the tuning pins here... that's all going through the cast-iron frame. This piano probably has about 28 tons of pressure from the strings, and that's—it takes this kind of construction of the instrument to keep it, you know, from imploding. There's a lot of tension and a lot of pressure. Liberace actually signed the inside of the piano, and it's about midway in the back. A piece of plexiglass was put over it, you know, to protect it for the years to come, but it definitely officially was his piano.
[00:40:45] Brett Barry: And if you'd like your own tour by Stacey, here's Pam Weisberg to tell you how.
[00:40:51] Pam Weisberg: Stacey is here on Saturdays, and the piano museum is open starting at 11:00 until 3:00. If you have a group, Stacey might be able to come back at other times during the week to give a group tour.
[00:41:06] Stacey Bowers: To do groups, we can schedule those probably almost any time during the week if necessary, or we're talking about maybe doing some school groups. Those'll probably have to go to school—school kids would have to come during the week, and so we can do... I wish I lived right around the corner, but we'll get here whenever necessary.
[00:41:23] Pam Weisberg: We do have a number of performance programs that take place throughout the year. Coming up soon on June 20th, Jerome Rose is going to be performing "Brahms' Rhapsody Opus 79" and "Schubert's Sonata in C Minor" and "Liszt's Sonata in B Minor." That's going to be a big program. That's big stuff, and on our—it's going to be on our nine-foot Yamaha. Then we encourage everybody to come by on July 4th. Stacey's going to be here giving round-the-clock lectures and talks and tours and performing, and also we will probably add a couple more pianists, so it's going to be a celebratory day. We're going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country, and we're going to feature a lot of our American pianos, and the pianists will be playing American music.
[00:42:24] Brett Barry: For more information and a schedule of performances, piano, and more, click over to catskillmtn.org/piano-performance-museum. "Kaatscast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio, always free every two weeks with a weekly radio encore on WJFF Radio Catskill, Saturdays at 11:00 AM. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas and a full searchable archive at kaatscast.com. "Kaatscast" is looking for underwriters, organizations who are invested in the Catskills, and want to reach an engaged local audience. If that sounds like you, let's get in touch. You can reach me directly through the contact form on our website. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.