On Feb 19, 2011, at 11:20 AM, Ron Nossaman wrote: > We grade everything different against what we're used to. It's > partially intellectual, but mostly glandular. I have little doubt > that if we had grown up listening to pianos like the redesigns > coming out of good rebuild shops, we would have no tolerance for > badly balanced scales, bright metallic voicing, aurally obvious (to > offensive) break transitions, and killer octaves and trebles that > overdrive into distortion at anything over moderate attack levels. A lot rides on the descriptive words chosen. But I think there is a philosophy here that may be rather mistaken when it comes to meeting the expressive needs and desires of the pianist. If you design a piano so that it doesn't distort when overdriven (in your opinion), you run the risk of doing the equivalent of putting a governor on the carburetor of a race car: you keep the driver from killing the engine by flooding, but you also remove his edge and control, his ability to get maximum acceleration. He will not thank you for protecting him from flooding the engine. As a pianist, I don't want somebody making my concert instrument incapable of being overdriven, for one thing, or removing all "ugly metallic sounds" for another. Those are both possibilities I expect from the instrument, and I use them. If the piano can be redesigned so that it has more focus and can be driven harder before distorting, great. If the price to pay for more focus and less distortion is that the piano has less presence, less spice, gives the impression of being muted, is harder to create accents and bring out one voice over another, then it is not a success, at least for the solo concert world, and definitely not for me personally. Looking at older pianos I have played, from mid to late 19th century and early 20th, my impression is that while there is certainly less power, and I have to live with that, there is broad range of color, and it is readily available by varying the touch. And it is quite possible to overplay those pianos, to distort them and make incoherent sound, with too heavy a touch. That is not a problem. One simply adapts to the ceiling. I guess my point is that the principle that pianos should be made so that it is impossible to hit the keys so hard that they will distort, is not a sound principle. It ends up being counterproductive in other ways. Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm
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