Birdcage pitch raise

[David Boyce]

John, you mention:

>Once all the good makers had adopted the underdamper action, the
>overdamper action was fitted only to cheap and generally nasty
>pianos, but it seems that the overdamper action must have been
>actually preferred by an important proportion of the buying public......

>Not all overdamped pianos are rubbish, though
>probably 99% of them are.


Absolutely!

Erlich, in "The Piano A History"  Chapter 10 "Between the Wars" (pp 183/184) 
quotes J. L. Stephen writing in Music Trades Review in 1921 about the 
cottage industry piano factories still proliferating then in England, 
producing straight strung (and overdamped) pianos.  Stephen wrote then that 
no foreign dealer would accept such antiquated designs as vertically strung 
uprights, but demanded "something at least as goodf as the American, 
Canadian, German and Japanese pianos".  Reform necesitated the education of 
manufacturers, dealers and public to "appreciate a real musical instrument - 
not bits of furniture with tensioned wire".

Music Trades Review seven years later, in 1928 re-visited this same issue.

So certainly birdcage pianos were still in production in quantity in England 
in the late 1920s.  How far into the 30s they continued I am unsure, but I 
can confirm that my "patch" has innumerable 1920s birdcage pianos.  Some are 
quite presentable.  I too have found, John, that one sometimes encounters a 
straight strung piano that is surprisingly full in tone.  There is one, now 
disused, in the local theatre, a Hopkinson or Brinsmead, I forget which. 
It's pre First World War I think, with a spring and loop action, but a 
pleaingly large and full sound.

Best regards,

David.