On Nov 20, 2010, at 5:08 PM, Alan Eder wrote: > Another hundred pages? Montal is rather prolific, for someone who > has been dead so long. 30 years later. Lots of new actions and designs of pianos. A lot of new material in the repair section (especially about grands and various uprights). The history of the piano section was dropped. A long section added to the end devoted to various documents honoring the author: reviews of the second edition, various medals he got for his pianos, praise for his various inventions, etc. He invented, besides the sostenuto, a soft pedal that simultaneously raised the hammers and lowered the keys proportionally, a transposing keyboard for uprights that raised the action parts while the keyboard was moving it and lowered them when it had got to place, and some six other patents, one of which had to do with use of iron bars for the case. Also a detailed new chapter added concerning the training of the blind to the profession. Fortunately (for me) he used a lot of the original without alteration, just adding paragraphs and sections. BTW, he added a new chapter to the tuning section for tuning a temperament from a C fork - the original only used an A. At any rate, it is quite clear that what I had come to believe from secondary sources is, indeed, correct, that he was the Braid White of his time and place, having written the definitive book and kept it up to date for a few decades. Regards, Fred Sturm University of New Mexico fssturm at unm.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20101120/064e163e/attachment-0001.htm>
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