At 18:16 -0400 31/3/08, Farrell wrote: >Um, not to seem overly critical or picky, but the plate is that hard >heavy metal thingee that the strings are tied to. It's the big gold >thing you see when you open the lid of the piano. I think that big >flat wooden thingee under the strings and under the big heavy metal >thingeeÊis called a soundboard or sumptin'. And not to be over-critical of American usage, that hard metal thing is called in England the iron frame or metal frame, and Theodore Steinway refers to it as the metal frame. A plate by definition is flat or sometimes domed and is a totally inapt term to use for the metal frame. The "soundboard" of violins etc. is correctly referred to as the "plate". That part of the metal frame where the hitchpins are is also a plate, the hitch plate, which existed before metal frames existed and which was eventually cast in to the metal frame. I don't know when Americans started calling the frame the plate, but it's certainly a misnomer. As to capo tasto, capotasto, capo d'astro, capodastro and, lately on this list "capo tastro", the only literate one of this glorious collection is the first and a capo tasto has no place in a piano. The fact that Steinway cast one or other of these illiterate misnomers into his old metal frames, which were presumably not yet misnamed plates, does not give it any validity. JD -- ______________________________________________________________________ Delacour Pianos * Silo * Deverel Farm * Milborne St. Andrew Dorset DT11 0HX * England Phone: +44 1202 731031 Mobile: +44 7801 310 689 * Fax: +44 870 705 3241 ______________________________________________________________________
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