Hi, Clark: What I have to conclude a high pitch in early Steinways so far is: 1. A85 speaking length, which looks odd all by itself - as I mentioned, note 85 is 1 7/8", when a modern piano should have 2"+ at note 88. 2. Pscale data, in which the entire top half of the treble bridge is outside of the parameters, and more so as the scale moves to the treble. The tension data is extremely low and the inharmonicity data extremely high. I could send you a file if you were interested. (I also entered data from a Style 4 with a replaced soundboard (the work was done 20 years ago, and the bridge may have been moved; only the lower 1/4 or less of the original bridge remains, and the rest is horiz. laminated pinblock material. This scale works well on Pscale, but I wonder if the piano was not rescaled and the bridge pivoted in the low treble or tenor to add string length in the upper treble.) 3. The opinion of a colleague who recently rebuilt a Style 2 by duplicating everything as much as possible, including the replaced soundboard. He was pleased with the sound of the piano when he first chip tuned it--while it was very sharp. He is now very unhappy with it at A-440. I hope to look at this piano sometime - it is about 75 miles from me - maybe after the board has had a little time to settle in I can exclude it a little more from the equation. 4. The Steinway fork data. Not only did Steinway have that one A-457 fork in London, but a grad school colleague unearthed a reference to another very high Steinway fork - A-454 - on this side of the Atlantic from about the same period (I am taking the research class in my Master's program right now and a fellow student just presented an excellent paper on the history of pitch). He also reported that when a French govt commission established 435 in 1859 that pitch was 50% lower than the prevailing pitch. (I assume that means about 50 cents, which would make A-45? the "prevailing pitch.") I am also interested in more information on Steinway's pitch. I suspect that one of our luminaries might know more about this history - Bill Garlick may have found out about this in his patent research, or Steve Marcy. This information might be contained in the archives at the library in Queens, and if Richard Lieberman is still the archivist he might have some info about this. William Steinway documented so much of what he did that I wouldn't be surprised there is more info. <> It seems right. The tough part here is that since the 1860's and 1870's Steinways were very modern in most respects. IF the main difference is in pitch, and IF is established that they are built for a very high pitch, the the pianos can be very usable instruments when the adjustments are made for this in rebuilding. I have less problem doing this on my Style 2 because the cabinet was so modernized 75 years ago, but it becomes a real issue if the piano is pretty much original. Bill Shull, RPT In a message dated 11/1/00 1:56:21 PM Pacific Standard Time, caccola@net1plus.com writes: << Hi again, I'm curious - I read the evidence for 457.2Hz is a single fork, and which was related to me after I first posted - perhaps it was used for chipping. As I only just found this out, have S&S any official standpoint on this issue, perhaps with better documentation in fact that they did scale to such a pitch? and Bill - what looked so strange about the scale in Pscale? Clark >>
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