>My guess is that Steinert copied most of the Steinway scales, so Steinway >thought turn around was fair play and copied the Steinert A and made the >"S". >It's nothing factual, just my theory. It's hard to get much info on the >Steinert. >Al G Al, There's a lot of information about the Steinert pianos and the company itself kicking around Boston. Heck, I bet there are still people in the piano business around Massachusetts who got some of the lore passed down to them from relatives who worked at the factory. You just have to pick the right brains... The Steinert company itself is a remnant from the pre-depression glory days of the American piano industry, when there were dozens of piano manufacturers all around Cambridge, Roxbury and some mill towns such as Lowell, Haverhill, Leominster, etc. The Steinert store is the last remaining one of what used to be known as "Piano Row" - two solid blocks of Boylson St. with nothing but piano and music stores fronting on the Boston Common and the Public Garden where every manufacturer had their own store. Chickering, Vose, Estey, Mason & Hamlin, Ivers & Pond, Wurlitzer, the list goes on... Steinert's is the last one left. When I was working there in the early nineties, the only other remnants were Fischer Co. and the Boston Music Co. - music and instrument stores. One moved and the other one closed during that time. One of the old "Piano Row" blocks was leveled to build the Four Seasons hotel. The other is still there - with Steinert's the only music-related business on it, as far as I know (for a while a Baldwin dealership occupied the old Wurlitzer store). In my eleven years in Boston I managed to absorb an awful lot of local piano information from various people - I'm sure some of it urban legends. But if you are really interested - there are people there who could tell you... The trick is to get a hold of them. The story I got is that Steinway at the turn of the 20th century could not possibly meet the demand for their pianos - couldn't even come close. So it allowed its dealers to copy their scales for pianos that they built - or had built for them - on the condition that they not market them under their own (the dealers') names. So the initial pianos built at Morris Steinert's Leominster factory with Steinway scales were marketed under the "Jewett" and "Hume" brands. I was told that Mr. Jewett was the factroy foreman and Mr. Hume a scale designer. Or vice versa. In 1912 (according to Pierce Piano Atlas) Steinway dropped the restrtiction and allowed dealers to market the pianos with copied scales under their own brands - which is when the "Poor Man's Steinway" Steinerts first show up. As far as the "reverse copying" of the Steinway S scale from the Steinert A - I don't know, doesn't quite fit my idea of how they operated in the old days (pre-CBS). .. Israel Stein -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20090707/63e5df1c/attachment-0001.htm>
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