Last week I was reading some early-19th-century piano playing methods and came across a few comments suggesting that the piano was the most (or indeed the only) fitting instrument for women to play, because it is the least likely to cause physical injury. For example, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, in the Foreword to his Anweisung zum Fortepiano-Spiele (Instructions for Playing the Fortepiano) of 1828, closes his list of the piano’s various advantages with the following comment:

…playing [the pianoforte] is also the least likely to have a detrimental effect upon the health of even the weakest body; not to mention other inconveniences, which occur in varying degrees with other instruments, but not at all with the piano.

Hummel doesn’t mention women specifically here, only “weak bodies.” Carl Czerny, however, in his Foreword to his Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Pianoforte-Schule (Complete Theoretical-Practical Piano School) of 1839, is a little more specific:

…[the fortepiano] is also almost the only [instrument] fit to be used by the fair sex in particular, since…the study of the fortepiano is the least likely to cause any kind of injury to the health.

In light of Czerny’s comment, I think that by the phrase “weaker bodies,” Hummel, too, probably meant female bodies in particular. I don’t know how typical these comments are for the period, and if I come across similar ones as I continue reading, I will try to make a note of it. They're immediately interesting to me because I don’t yet know of any such statements from the 18th century.

It is perhaps true that keyboard instruments pose fewer ergonomic problems than, for example, the violin or the flute, where different sides of the body are stressed differently. On the other hand, of course, one is tempted to suspect that what Czerny and Hummel really thought was that playing the violin or the flute was not physically harmful to women so much as simply inappropriate: not domestic enough (because a portable instrument like a violin or flute doesn’t tie you to the drawing room), too exhibitionist (too much puffing and blowing), or unwomanly in some other way. This fits in with a well-established picture of women in this period confined to the domestic sphere, primly making music primarily for the family.

I sometimes try to remind myself, however, that it can be a good idea to refrain from thinking I know what anyone “really thought.” What if Hummel and Czerny “really thought” exactly what they wrote—that playing musical instruments could be harmful to your health? What kinds of questions could I ask then? A few that come to mind, none of which I’ve ever thought about before: Did women themselves tend to agree that playing musical instruments could be physically dangerous, or was this really a means of patriarchal control? Did builders consider health issues when they engineered pianos? Were music lessons structured with health issued in mind? Was playing musical instruments in fact perceived as potentially dangerous not only for women but also for men with frail constitutions, as Hummel’s comment would seem to suggest? Are there documented instances of women or men becoming sick from playing an instrument? Were they treated for such ailments, and how? Is there any evidence to be found in medical literature from the period?

Perhaps none of these questions lead anywhere. On the other hand, I know it is true that taking historical accounts seriously, instead of “interpreting” them to fit into a picture whose outlines you think you know, can very often open up whole new areas of investigation, and for this reason it’s a valuable exercise at the very least. In other words: I always want to pay attention to what people actually said, not what I think they must have meant. It’s usually more interesting.

Continuo practicing

Depending on one's handedness, the preparation of continuo bass lines and continuo chords calls for different approaches. Obviously, continuo is about harmonies and bass line phrasing, but in terms of performance, it is first and foremost about being together. One could describe the ideal state of mind of a continuo player as 'being part of the music' to the extreme. Continuo playing is not about waiting and reacting, it is about anticipating, participating and breathing. No matter what her or his handedness, if the continuo player worries about the poor performance of her or his non-dominant hand, this will likely prevent the directness (I keep wanting to write "flow," but to be honest, I do not know very much about flow) and spontaneity necessary for a good performance.

For the right-handed player, the unanimous continuo teachers' chorus "listen to the bass" is, hence, not very edifying. Well, of course one needs to consider the bass. For a musical person, the proper phrasing of most bass lines can be worked out sitting in a chair. Preparing (or sight-reading) thoroughbass is - again - a matter of getting secure in the dominant hand in the first place. Granted, if we, for example, consider the jumpier sections of Bach's cello or gamba arias from the Passions, there are certainly good reasons for practicing the left hand too. These pieces are extremely exposed, and the gamba players will be grateful if they can concentrate on their performance without having to eclipse the bloopers from the organist. But it will be difficult to achieve true togetherness in this music - as opposed to merely wanting to be together - without special consideration for the timing of the chords in the dominant hand.

Left-handed continuo beginners usually have quite some difficulties in getting their chords together, and they tend to concentrate too much on their right hand for that reason - especially when they engage in competition with the right-handed fellow students, who soon learn to produce sonorous melody lines in their successions of ninth chords or to dissolve their Handelian continuo figures into merry twiddles and harpings. The left-handed continuo player has the task of getting secure in her or his left hand, which grants the opportunity of getting extra good at breathing together with the music, but which is, at the beginning, a bit disappointing. From my own experience, I guarantee that the twiddling, trilling and harping will become fully accessible even to the left-handed player if one first tries to be patient and constructive. Unfortunately I have also had the experience that conservatory committees tend to be impatient in this respect. There is so much one would like to say about conservatory committees.

Coordination

George Bland, the tragic hero in W. Somerset Maugham's short story The Alien Corn, studies piano for two years in Munich and, after returning to London, plays for Lea Markart, "the greatest women pianist in Europe." The narrator gives his impression of George's playing, "I felt that he missed what to me is the peculiar charm of Chopin...and again I had the vague sensation, so slight that it almost escaped me, that the two hands did not quite synchronize." Asked whether she thought that George could become a concert pianist, Lea Markart answers, "not in a thousand years." George shoots himself.

I always found this story fascinating but lacking in crucial detail. Has Somerset Maugham heard someone play the piano who had coordination problems, or did he invent these details in order to add verisimilitude to his plot? Naturally, if you have coordination issues, you may indeed arrive at interpretations that are lacking in "peculiar charm" as well - but is it truly not possible 'in a thousand years' to improve these things? Is it really likely that the great pianist would not offer any advice to help young George to overcome these problems? Of course there is a story behind my interest in this mini drama: after a few lessons, one of my earlier teachers commented - in a beautiful lack of logical consistency - on the imperfect coordination of my hands: in his long teaching practice he had never encountered a problem like this, he said, and according to his long experience, this particular technical imperfection could never be solved.

It is certainly possible to improve the coordination between the hands. The first skill to develop is, naturally, to be able to hear what's wrong (since we tend to get accustomed to our shortcomings, this is no easy task, but not my main topic here). Then we can begin to analyze those moments where the coordination is imperfect. These are most likely spots where one hand has to join the other; where one hand plays a dotted rhythm against fast notes in the other hand; where one hand has embellishments and the other a regular figuration; where both hands have a movement in the same note values but very different figurations, such as a melody against an Alberti bass; polyrhythmic passages.

The problem of polyrhythmics is special, and I will not discuss it here (one trick is to listen to the compound rhythm instead of listening horizontally). I am interested in those figurations where one hand must react to what the other hand just did, or join the other hand, or where one hand makes movements that distract the other hand.

Consider, for example, the gigue of the first partita by J.S. Bach. The triplet figurations throughout the piece are divided into a downbeat quarter played by one hand, and two pick-up eights played by the other. To judge from the stem up - stem down notation it is clear that Bach intended the right hand to play the strong beats and the left hand to play the pick-up eighths. Curiously, the fingering in the well-known edition that I am using inverts this distribution - a good opportunity to test which of the two feels better. You will notice that it feels more natural to let your dominant hand, whichever it is, play the strong beats and to let the non dominant hand play the pickup notes. You will have an easier time achieving a regular exchange and the piece will feel technically less awkward. In other words, the coordination between the hands (in this example: their exchange) is easier to achieve when the dominant hand leads.

The true problem arises when there is no such choice, or when the non dominant hand for some reason tries to take over the responsibility. In my experience this happens typically when the dominant hand has pickup notes or second offbeat entries or is otherwise, for musical reasons, soft or subdued. Turned around, these can be passages where the non dominant hand has to perform strong rhythmic impulses, a technically challenging part or a very exposed melody.

My solution for such instances is to think of the dominant hand with its fragmented, subdued or offbeat part as second violin or viola player in an orchestra. It is a matter of professional pride and dedication for these players to give accompanying voices the very character they require, even if this character should be soft and, in the hierarchy of the score, secondary. The dominant hand must learn to perform such secondary tasks with true authority - not loud and belligerently, but precisely according to specifications. In this fashion we ("we" being, of course, our dominant hand) can learn to jump in onto an ongoing line in the non-dominant hand with utter precision, yet without making the slightest accent. In this fashion, we can leisurely but precisely accompany the virtuosic stunts of our non-dominant hand, rather than as brain dead and clunky followers. Most coordination issues are nothing else than a failure to acknowledge the importance of the dominant hand even in moments where it, as we tend to think, "has nothing to do."

The ideal of balance between the hands of a keyboard player was clearly not at all the most likely historical cause of why the standard keyboard developed as it did, with the treble at the right-hand side. To be sure, speaking as a historian, that cause can never be definitely stated. The development of keyboard instruments took a long period and most of the remainders of its early stages are lost. And even if they were not - surviving artifacts rarely disclose their most important secret: why their inventors made them as they did.

The only valid statement about the mechanics behind the development of the modern keyboard layout is, hence, one about correlations: the majority of people is right-handed; keyboard instruments have the treble at the right-hand side. This layout enables musicians of a statistically dominant group to create music especially well that features one specific important musical element: melody lines in a well-carrying register.

In spite of this likely reason for the treble being at the right-hand side of the keyboard, keyboard composers from very early on (such as Byrd, Bull, Sweelinck or Frescobaldi, to name but a few) were apparently especially interested in exploiting the virtuosic potential of both hands. In the polyphonic tradition, an equal share of responsibility of the voices is a prerequisite in any case. In real music, the keyboard's lopsided layout turned out not to be its most important feature at all. On the contrary, it was the potential of allowing for a wide range of playing approaches that became characteristic of the keyboard. One can use the keyboard in an ambidextrous manner if one chooses to; one can emphasize a virtuosic left hand passage; one can lose oneself in expressive right-hand melodies. So this is how we arrive at the requirement of balance.

The fact that human handedness, unlike the many possible uses of the potential of the keyboard, is not a matter of choice informs our techniques of learning to gain a balance between the hands. As said before, balance is a learned skill; it might overlay the natural handedness but it does not replace it; some people learn it better than others.

Learning is greatly helped by a stress-free environment and by positive motivation. This implies that bullying the non-dominant piano hand into the limelight is not an appropriate strategy. In this light, it is doubtful whether the existence of special studies for the left hand, like the ones by Brahms and Godowsky, are very helpful tools for the average (that is: right-handed) pianist at all. My idea is that one has to fully accept and to understand one's handedness as much as possible in order to arrive at practicing strategies that help the non-dominant hand to do a good job. Paradoxically, balance between the hands requires that we accept one hand as the boss and the other as the follower.

...continued

In one of the interviews presented in Bruno Monsaingeon's monumental video documentary Richter, the Enigma, Sviatoslav Richter mentions his belief that the right and left hands of a pianist need to be in balance. The video clips of Richter on this DVD (and any one of those available on YouTube) show impressively what he means by balance: the independence between the hands and, as it would seem to an observer, a lack of subordination of either of them. But the call for balance on an instrument played by both hands using the same set of basic techniques is, by itself, not very earth-shattering. Much more interesting is how the effect of balance is achieved, and at what costs. The following posts are about this topic.

To pave the way for explaining my view on keyboard technique and balance between the hands, I will, however, have to supply an introduction containing disclaimers, myth-destroyers, definitions and denials. Why? Because this is about handedness. I have heard very smart people say searingly stupid things about handedness.

For example, I once got drawn into an anti-Lefty e-mail quibble. I had sent a short message to the contact page of a private but voluminous and well-informed Beethoven website which contained a passage about how Beethoven was not a left-hander (this refutes one typical unsupported claim found on many Lefty websites). I admit that I was in a precise mood that day: I pointed out that, whereas Beethoven very clearly wrote with his right hand as all his autographs show, one can, in a culture where children were forbidden to write with their left hand, never be sure about his actual handedness. That was all.

This was perhaps an unnecessary and nitpicky comment, but to my excuse it should be said that I made it in a friendly spirit, and that I was using rather few, well-chosen words. I even wrote in the native language of the author of the site. I was clearly prepared for the possibility of some manner of disagreement, but the avalanche of incoherent e-babble that came streaming into my inbox in response took me by surprise. After a day-long lopsided exchange consisting of several incoming multiple-screen-length messages and my sporadic replies of a few lines at a time, I was presented with a direct question: could it perhaps be, my opponent wrote, that I myself was a Lefty? Determined to let things fully unfold while we were about it I took the bait: yes, as a matter of fact, I am left handed. Wow. So there, I learned, was the true root for my obsession - I had my own ax to grind! That explained it all, and she had somehow sensed it all the time. In the eyes of this person, the fact of one's own handedness obviously excludes the possibility that one can make rational statements about anything that has to do with handedness in general. The only group excluded from this rule is, naturally, the right-handers. It was at this point that I pitched the whole exchange into the trash can, which I then emptied.

In fact, both the irrational and the obsessive about this issue have nothing to do with my faint voice in the modern e-jungle. Rather the opposite is true. I was being naive, thinking that I would actually be able to reason about such matters. Instead, the irrational treatment of handedness is too deeply ingrained in most human cultures to allow for such a light-hearted approach. We are dealing here with religious issues and ideology, matters of psychological denial and of other personal agendas. In taking up this topic, I have to face a century-old cabbage stew of prejudice, which no Prussian sharp-edged intellectuality helps to avoid. So let's get over the central question. Do I have any skeletons in my assorted closets that have to do with my handedness? Answer: no. I fetched them all out of there years ago, and now they are neatly lined up in my study and grin at me every time I try to tickle them.

Before I proceed to explaining my strategies for bringing handedness and keyboard balance into agreement, I will have to make a few statements. I am not a neurologist, and what I have read about the nature of handedness is hence, of necessity, limited. A few concepts, based on the findings of relatively new research about the topic are, however, helpful for understanding my arguments:

- Handedness, no matter which variety, is a matter of life. As such, it is not a condition that has to be dealt with in any special manner at all. It is innate; it cannot be changed; we live with it (it can, however, be denied, but that is another matter). It only gets attention here because the piano keyboard is not, in the same fashion, automatically and inevitably divided into a more preferred and a less preferred side.

- Ambidexterity is today, in contrast, understood as a learned skill. It overlays one's natural handedness (again: whichever that may be). Some learn certain skills better or quicker than others. So some individuals have a special talent for developing ambidextrous behavior, others don't. In this context, I am especially baffled by the art of the Canadian pianist Marc André Hamelin (also present on YouTube).
Some people have so much talent that they fool themselves and others into believing that they are right-handed while they are, in fact, left-handed. In this corner most issues of self-denial lurk. My topic here is, however, keyboard technique and not turned-around left handers, so be assured: I will not take this matter any further.

- There is no complete consensus about how problematic it is to teach one's non-dominant keyboard hand to become more accomplished. In view of my idea of varying talents, pointed out above, this consensus is not likely to come in the future. It is, however, an established fact that an intricate action such as writing by hand, which stimulates a lot of diverse brain activity, should be carried out with the dominant hand: to use the wrong hand when writing can generate severe difficulties for the individual that substantially transcend issues such as the readability of one's handwriting or other niceties.

If we put these bits of information together we get some idea of what can, in rough terms, be done on a keyboard instrument and what can't:

It is absolutely possible to develop a balanced or even ambidextrous behavior at the keyboard. This would, however, require one to know and accept one's natural handedness, in order to avoid over-exercising the non-dominant hand: just as it is problematic to write with the wrong hand, it would be problematic to bully the non-dominant piano hand into a leading role.

...continued

If you, after reading this, have an overpowering urge to click into the "leave a reply" window and to post a quick witty remark about my sinister approach or anything else that contains more than one pair of scare quotes, think again. This post wasn't written quickly either.

Public outreach is a term that does very well in academia these days. It guarantees that one's research, one's department, or even one's university will be there tomorrow. If we want to make people appreciate our work and open their purses in our favor, we have to go to places where these people are and we have to learn to talk their language.

Musicians have known this for quite some time. Even for someone with good references, it is pretty much more difficult to get funding for a cute concert idea than it is for an established researcher to get a stipend for a snazzy research project. We have learned to talk about our work. We have also learned to deal with the old problem that one may not use too many words to tell an audience that what they never knew before one started talking is in fact very interesting.

This took me some getting used to. A few months after my arrival in Sweden, I was asked to participate in the annual three introduction days where concert arrangers could hear and see what productions the musical umbrella organization of our ensemble had to offer. Our ensemble's producer asked me to do an intro about the different types of harpsichords and to play a piece.

The spectrum of musical styles presented on such a day is very wide. I was new to the game, I was new to the country, and I was still speaking English. Unfortunately, nobody had the wits to give me any further directives, although I distinctly remember that I asked for them. Such as: a reminder that, if presenting in English, I might talk slowly and not too much; or an explanation that these people expected a presentation of a nice program for their little church or concert hall, and nothing else - that they, in fact, weren't even expecting a harpsichordist to be there and were likely completely disinterested in my work, unless I managed to interest them then and there.

I had no clue about all this. I thought that everybody would love the harpsichord. I gave, as I thought I had been asked, an impromptu lecture about the main traditions in harpsichord making, complete with squeaky felt tip pen drawings, and I concluded by playing Francois Couperin's lengthy and pompous b-minor Passacaille. Afterwards, someone came to me and said kindly but unmistakably that on the next day, I should just play my piece and someone else would do the presentation. My throbbing embarrassment was somewhat alleviated by the fact that that second presentation did not go too well either: after all, I had learned how to interpret the meaning of the collective sigh at the end.

The most important thing to observe before one addresses one's audience is what that audience can absorb in terms of length and density of information. For a verbal presentation of composers and the music during the program this usually (or should I say: hopefully) causes no real problems. For explaining exotic, large instruments like the harpsichord or the fortepiano, on the other hand, a parting session of Show And Tell is by far a better option than a mid-recital lecture. Audiences always do want to know everything about these instruments. However, they did come to listen to music in the first place, and one does well to honor this desire. I usually encourage people to come and look at my instrument after the concert. Here in this country, people are unfortunately sometimes too shy to do even that. Elsewhere, one might instead need the help of a second watch person to prevent curious people from creeping into the instrument.

To demonstrate how a harpsichord works is not difficult. The jackrail can easily be opened and the working of the jacks can be shown to a fairly large group of people. Fortepiano actions are trickier. One needs to concentrate pretty fiercely when extricating and putting back such an action without causing an accident. If one touches a key while doing either, the next thing heard is a faint Crick! - and that was your hammer. We like to avoid this risk - re-gluing hammer heads is fiddly and the result is almost never as mechanically stable as the original thing. My friend Matt Bengtson has solved this problem in a great way: he presents a short video on his website where he explains what various fortepianos do, how they can sound and how the Viennese action in his own instrument works. Here is the link:

http://www.mattbengtson.com/fortepiano.html

Can this be transferred to professional keyboard playing? Is there an ideal manner of sitting behind the keyboard that makes us play more relaxedly than any other way, that prevents the development of back trouble and that helps us to concentrate on the music instead on tense or blocked muscles?

To prepare yourself for my non-linear answer, take a few minutes break from reading here, go to youtube.com, search for Brendel, Horowitz; Berezovsky, Cziffra; Kempff and Gould and look at some of the videos. High low; high low; high low.

If you manage to return from these fascinating videos to this post, you may appreciate the fact that historically, the ideal sitting position was not a matter of unanimous agreement either. In 1716, Francois Couperin wrote in his harpsichord method l'Art De toucher Le Clavecin, "The elbows, wrists and fingers should form a horizontal line, and the seat is to be adjusted accordingly."

Seven years after Couperin, in his keyboard method De la mechanique des doigts sur le clavessin, Jean Philippe Rameau offered a more nuanced approach to the height of a harpsichordist's seat. Rameau writes that the pupil needs to be seated so that the elbows are just above keyboard level. The hands fall naturally on the keyboard and the elbows hang relaxed and neutrally in their natural position, only to be moved in strictly necessary cases. The first and fifth fingers are placed towards the edge of the keys, and the other fingers are curved to form one line with the first two. However, as soon as the hand has been developed, the player’s seat is gradually lowered, until his elbows are just below keyboard level; this is to ensure a hand position close to the keys and a good legato.

I have always found it difficult to understand the reason for Rameau's change of the seat position. A young student (not even necessarily a beginner), cannot possibly sit with her or his elbows higher than the keyboard, put the first and fifth finger at the front edge of the keys, place the other fingers in between, also along that edge, and not curve the fingers so much that s/he plays on the rim of the finger nails or alternatively becomes tense in many parts of the hand or the arm.

The crucial issue here seems to me the development of the thumb joint and of the surrounding tendons and muscles. A well-trained player can, without much tension, bring the thumb forward to form a line with the naturally curved fingers. Consequently, this player would also find that a higher position requires less strength, which may indeed seem important for a beginner, whereas a lower position encourages a closer key contact. But a true beginner would perhaps not find a higher position easier at all, whereas a lower position would create less tension in the thumb and less curving of the fingers. Perhaps Rameau wrote after observing his own position; he was certainly such a well-trained player - in any case, for a beginner's training I do not find his advice convincing at all.

The key to sitting properly seems to me to find a neutral point between the possible greater tension when sitting high and the greater force required when sitting low. In this light, Couperin’s sitting position between Rameau’s two extremes makes quite some sense. What a relief that we find it echoed in an encouraging modern book, Madeline Bruser's The Art of Practicing (Bell Tower: 1997). Even Bruser argues for minimum hand tension and, in agreement with Couperin, arrives at a sitting position where the elbows are level with the surface of the naturals (p. 97-98).

It was here that my trouble started. Following Bruser's advice, I took a yardstick and tried to figure out how high my elbows were. For some reason this is very difficult. My measuring stick kept giving me totally random results. One moment I thought I was sitting relaxedly, but perhaps I didn't; once I was grabbing the stick with my other hand exactly where I thought my elbow was, but couldn't read the numbers; another time my grip slipped, before I could read them. Then I used a mirror, but the measuring stick dropped on the floor...

After an extended exercise that must have looked like a scene with Mr. Bean, I arrived at new measurements and changed my whole way of sitting and playing. I entered my workshop and made a new bench. I played a few insecure concerts with tense arms. Then I noticed that I was sitting a mile too high and, during several weeks of trial and error, I cut loads of inches off the legs of the new bench. Now I'm sitting so that my elbows are somewhat higher than the level of naturals of the lower keyboard, and that feels good.

Entertaining as this may seem, it is absolutely necessary to work out a good playing position. Otherwise, nature takes its revenge, at least if one plans to spend any substantial time exercising at the keyboard. It is definitely not our hauling the instruments that makes our backs collapse after fifteen years of use, it is our tense and uncoordinated approach to the basics of our technique. On the harpsichord, sitting correctly makes all the difference. We have no large keys to knead into in compensation for our lack of key-contact in a too-high position; there is no pedal that helps us to create our personal tone, if our fingers don't do it for us. The cash register kind of signature-sound of the I-can-play-this-thing-too-sichordist is typically a result of that player being not only mentally distant from the harpsichord but also physically. Sitting well doesn't solve this, but it helps.

The other thing a good position helps to solve is the fat finger problem. Especially the tiny French-ravalé octave span creates a Serkin-esque* problem for the harpsichordist: some chords have to be played with one's fingers far into the sharps, and on these keyboards there is almost no safe position possible. If one does not sit at the proper height, and this is a question of half inches up or down, one's chances to keep clear of the enharmonic undergrowth get substantially reduced.

Print this out and show it to those teachers, colleagues or parents who are making fun of your efforts to find the right height of your piano or harpsichord bench through fiddling (if the bench can be adjusted) or by means of adding bits of phone book or layers of folded dish towels.

* In the biography Rudolf Serkin: a Life we learn among other things that Rudolf Serkin (one of my heroes), had very thick fingers.

Usually mid-December is where things go dry in these parts. Any relative humidity lower than 40 per cent brings one's instruments into the soundboard crack risk zone. Some of the changes that happen to wood in extreme conditions are not reversible, as this excellent article explains. In any country where the outside temperature can drop below freezing point, harpsichord owners need to have a good humidifier (and a trained dog to refill it).

The first humidifier in our house was an electrical fan, mounted above a container with water, that turned so fast that it tossed a mist of water drops up in the air. I loved crouching above it and getting my face all wet - this shows how long ago this happened. This gadget was quite useful as a humidifier, but it made a hyperactive combined whine and hiss, and it also distributed an indissoluble layer of mineral matter on surfaces such as keys and instrument lids.

The humidifier of my student days was based on evaporation; here, a zigzag strip of thick blotting paper was immersed in water and the fan blew cold air along the wet paper. The whole machine was only moderately effective to begin with, especially in combination with the drafty Dutch way of not-fitting their single-pane windows. In this case, the residue from the water stayed in the paper which had to be replaced every two months. Other humidifiers that I tested were either noisy as industrial vacuum cleaners or huge as a freezer box (or both); some spread a sinister white mist around where they stood without affecting much of the rest of the room. Others emitted convulsive boiling noises at ten-minute intervals. One had a fan that needed to be coaxed into working every month or two and developed a high-pitched squeak, while the fan axle wasn't accessible for the application of the necessary half drop of oil.

It is a little confusing to realize that, simultaneously to making and selling such utter rubbish, humanity has had the capacity to develop functional rat-traps, computers and triangular toothpicks. No wonder the people from Venta ended up giving their excellent products a very high price: they let us pay for the fact that nobody else was able to figure out how easy it is to make a great humidifier.

The Venta works according to the same evaporation principle as my student-house paper fan, but the water is blown away from a stack of very many slowly turning slotted wheels made from solid plastic - the various models differ in the number and size of these stacks of wheels (I run a one-stack model upstairs in severe winter conditions and a two-stack model downstairs during every winter. This is enough for my whole house). These machines are effective according to the specifications given by the manufacturer, possible minerals from the water stay in the machine and can be cleaned away if necessary. Additionally, dust is being sucked in the apparatus and stays in the water. Their noise is relatively low. As said before, their price isn't. We're paying for the invention - not for a fan, a container and a stack of plastic wheels. Still: this is the best solution of all, in my experience.

As the old spoof ad about the fire extinguisher goes: the best humidifier is useless if you're not at home. My solution for Decembers abroad is this:

You need a bucket for every instrument. Stuff this bucket with tightly rolled-up, vertically arranged newspapers. Fill it with water, re-fill until the newspapers are completely soaked through, place right under the instrument. Adjust your central heating to a frost-safe minimum. Take care that no direct sunlight reaches the instrument. Don't miss your plane/train.

You can view high-resolution scans of the manuscripts, and the search capabilities are excellent. The catalogers have identified people, places, objects, etc. associated with each manuscript, and you can search for these either in specific search fields or in a freetext search that searches the whole text of the catalogue. According to the website, there may be as many as 40,000 documents in the collection, and the project to catalogue and digitalize them is ongoing.

In a search for “pianoforte,” I came up with a letter of May 4, 1827, from a Professor Eschenmayer in Tübingen to the piano builder Johann Lorenz Schiedmayer in Stuttgart. (The catalogue record for this letter tentatively identifies the addressee as Johann Lorenz’s father, Johann David, who was also a piano builder, but died in 1805. Johann David worked with Johann Andreas Stein in Augsburg.) Eschenmayer writes that he is sending back the piano he bought from Schiedmayer 12 years previously for repairs: the pinblock has apparently warped such that the hammers bump into it before they can reach the strings, and the soundboard has a number of cracks.

Tilman and I had a good time transcribing the manuscript together. At least I did—I’m proud to say that I have gotten a lot better at reading old German handwriting and I managed to get through a lot of it myself. But there is nothing like having an authentic German, head brimming with authentic German grammar and vocabulary, to come in and do the heavy lifting.

At any rate, here’s our transcription. A few preliminary notes: Eschenmayer writes that he has had a local organ builder, who usually tunes the piano, carry out some repairs. The name in the text is hard to read but looks like “Straser.” I have found a mention of a “Straßer, Johannes, Orgel- und Instrumentenmacher” who received permission to live or work (Gemeindebürger- und Beisitzrecht) in Tübingen in 1818, so perhaps this is the same man. Eschenmayer also mentions the driver who is going to deliver the piano to Schiedmayer; this name is also hard to read but looks like “Seidel.”

Geehrtester Herr Schiedmayer!

Schon seit mehrern Jahren fieng das Instrument,
das ich vor 12 Jahren von Ihnen gekauft habe, in
manchen Tasten zu klappern an. Der hiesige Orgel-
macher Straser[sic], welcher gewöhnlich das Instrument stimmt,
sagte, der Stimmkasten werfe oder senke sich, so daß
die Hämmer an das Holz schlägen bei der Berührung
der Saiten; Er half diesen Tasten gewöhnlich da-
durch, daß er den Hämmern, wo sie die Saiten be-
rührten, ein oder mehrere Lagen von Leder unterlegte,
wodurch die Reibung an dem Holz auch wirklich
verhindert wurde. Das Sinken des Stimmkastens dauerte
inzwischen fort und machte immer neue Reparatio-
nen nöthig. Während der lezten Osterferien aber
wurde es auf einmal so stark, daß nun eine Menge
Tasten gar nicht mehr an die Saiten sondern nur

[beg. page 2] an das Holz anschlagen und die ganze Dämpfung
wie eingeprest[?] ist. Auch fanden sich außer dem anfäng-
lichen Sprung im Resonanz-Boden noch mehrere Sprünge.

Das Instrument bedarf einer durchgängigen Repa-
ratur; Ich werde es Ihnen daher mit dem Fuhr-
mann Seidel[?] von hier nächster Tagen zuschicken
und ersuche Sie, mir dasselbe nach allen Theilen sobald
es seyn kann wieder herzustellen und mir den Conto
davon mitzusenden.

Ein Stab, der durch die Züge die stärkere Dämpfung
hervorbrachte, wurde schon vor vielen Jahren herausge-
nommen, weil er die Töne verwirrte. Ich schicke ihn
zugleich mit.

Mit—-
Professor Eschenmayer
Tübingen d. 4. Maj. 1827

My favorite part is the last paragraph, where Eschenmayer says that he is sending back a hand stop that “created a stronger damping” because it blurred the notes and he hasn’t used it for years. Eschenmayer’s tone is admirably controlled throughout the letter, but you just know what he’s thinking: “Take your wretched piano back, and that stick I've been tripping over since 1816 with it.”

Please speak up with any corrections or comments!

That was the first time I was out there lurking. Apart from two short visits at the music market of the Utrecht Early Music Festival and a conference with an instrument exposition where I was invited to play and present a lecture, it was also the last time: the usual harpsichord exhibition - inevitably part of the conference - is, as I have learned to understand, too many instruments crammed into too small a space and preferably played simultaneously. Nobody can hear anything apart from the shop talk of the more vociferous section of the instrument makers. An experience I can live without.

There was such a harpsichord exhibition in Stuttgart. Someone displayed a five-octave muselaer. The concept resembles a corkscrew of the size of a toilet brush or a candy bar as heavy as a dachshund. Perfect for table tennis, I'm sure, and ideal for repertoire such as Rachmanineelinck.

The only event that was, as it turned out, actually intended as curious (in the Mozartean sense: "Curios!!") was pianist Richard Burnett's improvised and extended sit-down comedy before his recital on several early pianos. This event took silently place behind the back of the brave but uninitiated introductory speaker who for a long time could not understand why the audience seemed to find his well-prepared and informative organological lecture so hilarious. Which, of course, was part of the performance: every time the speaker turned to Burnett to find out what was the matter, the latter sat still - the incarnation of innocence. Eventually securely seated, Burnett played brilliantly.

One evening, the late Christiane Jaccottet played the whole WTC I, while a cluster of harpsi-kit dealers, seated far back in the hall, kept mumbling to each other and continuously shook their heads because they fancied other tempi and other registrations. Try shaking your head for almost two hours. It hurts. Try playing the whole of WTC I in one concert. Shaking your head is peanuts, in comparison. I am telling this story only because I want to show that there is only one thing members of a concert audience remember more than the bloopers of the player and that is the misbehavior of other members of the audience (Christiane played without bloopers).

As one can see in this crudely jpg-ified version of my original vector graph of a Walter action, the amount of pre-touch is defined by the distance of the hammer beak (which is, of course, one part with the hammer shank a but gets here a separate letter f) and the escapement hopper (some cawl it a pawl). The brass capsle is the diagonal part at the left-hand side of letter b; it is screwed into the key end. By turning the whole assembly of hammer (a) and capsle (b) a whole twist counter-clockwise, the hammer beak would come closer to the pawl hook and that was the whole idea.

Think again.

The capsle is screwed into the key at an angle. Turning up means inevitably re-locating the hammer beak upwards but backwards as well (to the left, on this graph). The resulting greater overlap of beak and pawl means that the escapement occurs at a higher point. In practice, a whole outward twist of the capsle usually makes that the hammer escapes past the level of the string, or in other words, jams into the string before even thinking of escaping at all. How do we solve this?

Naturally by trying to reduce said overlap. This can be done by slightly bending the capsle shaft towards the player (on the graph: to the right). But what happens when we bend the shaft to the right? Because the capsle, as said before, is mounted at an angle, it will not only move away from the pawl and towards the player, but also upwards. In other words, re-adjusting the escapement in the described manner will very likely reduce the (already reduced, see above) pre-touch to beyond zero: the hammer beak will not even slip under the pawl any more. At the end one would either have to reverse the whole action and live with the original pre-touch, or cut layers off the beak leather in its present position, in the hope of making the action work again. On can also despair and call a tech - better late than never. And I have not even mentioned the - at the end of all this - necessary administrations for regaining the proper function of the hammer check (e).

A fortepiano tech would have a few tricks to work around many of these problems: she/he would, after turning the capsle only half a turn, have the equipment (and experience) to completely re-shape the shaft angle for an optimal function in the new situation. But this work is extremely time consuming, and most of the time really not necessary at all. She/he would also be verbally equipped as to convince the pianist that slight deviations in pre-touch (we're talking here about a range between, perhaps, 0.8mm and 1.5mm) are not nearly as crucial for a regular touch-sensation as a properly set-up escapement and a properly working hammer check. I began at that end and have tried to convince my friend to stay away from the capsles of his piano. (Ah. Hum. I am sure that he would have been able to solve the matter most brilliantly, of course!)

Think, for another example, that you want to reduce the length of the plectra of a whole register in your harpsichord. Of course there is a screw or a wedge at the end of the rack that can easily be turned or readjusted for bringing all the jacks of a register closer to the string. Many people will also have thought of the necessity of reducing the string-overlap of the plectra after this. But here the real problems begin: many plastic jacks have tiny screws on top that help to regulate the overlap. Turn them clockwise and the overlap gets less. But wait! The angle of the plectrum also changes. Turning all the jack screws in a whole rank'o'jacks inward in order to regulate the plectrum-string-overlap will expose all sorts of secondary irregularities you never knew about - half of the jacks will all of a sudden seem too long, since their plectra won't return properly. Also the entire pluck-sequence between the register you're presently working on and the other registers will be upset. So, in a way, one can be happy if there are no adjustment screws on top of the jacks, although one will have to cut all the plectra shorter by hand. In any case one will probably have to re-locate the dampers, because they will, in most cases, have come too close to the opposite string.

What I want to show here is that most harpsichord or fortepiano regulations that involve changes of distances, the turning of screws, cutting away material or adding shims of paper are likely to trigger some chain reaction. In average harpsichords or fortepianos there are far too many screw heads exposed and accessible for real comfort. I would guess that around a third of the work of a professional harpsi-tech involves the undoing of other's regulation mistakes, as opposed to true maintenance. It is true, most of the screws can serve to get a regulation better. True too, many people have a very technical mindset and, although no professionals, are perfectly able to understand the relatively simple mechanics of these instruments.

But most of the time the human mind wants it otherwise. "Do this get that" it shouts, simultaneously holding up flashing big ugly signs with the word "because" written on them. Make the jacks shorter and improve the touch. Make the jacks longer and improve the touch. Reverse staggering and you'll be surprised. Fine-tune the coupling mechanism because the builder couldn't do it. Take the leads out of the key fronts and put them into the back, it always works. Make the keys lighter and you'll play more crisply. Change strings and get a better sound. Make the soundboard even thinner and the instrument will get louder. Make the jack rail more flexible and you'll be playing with more dynamics (I am not kidding, I've heard that one). Eat fish and you get smart.

In an intermission of psychology class (yes, we had psychology at the conservatory) another member of the group, a violinist, worked his way towards where I sat and spoke, "Ah, Er, do you harpsichordists also practice very much? Because we violinists need to practice very much." Matter of one geek telling the other one who of the two is the better geek.

As is amply documented in Rudolf Serkin's biography (Stephen Lehman and Marion Faber 2003. Rudolf Serkin: a life [Oxford: Oxford University Press]), Serkin used to begin his practice sessions with technical exercises, and he sometimes somewhat embarrassedly called himself "old fashioned" for that reason. I recall at least two interviews of pianists who do not play exercises, a fact they both announce with a total lack of that kind of embarrassment. Instead the one (Zoltan Kocsis) coyly admits that he might have played some scales when he was younger, while the other (Alfred Brendel) states more boldly that he extracts whatever technical exercise he needs from the music itself.

Is there any true reason to be bold, coy or embarrassed when talking about one's personal choices in matters of keeping one's playing in trim? I believe not. One keyboardist "brushes the teeth of the monster" every day, the other uses technical exercises to soothe his nerves, a third believes that they are the only manner of making him keep up playing at all, a fourth uses them as extended meditation and a fifth, finally, believes that they are disturbing and hinder his artistic approach. Such choices cannot be subject to competition. The grooming of one's technique is - what a relief - totally private. Matter of all geeks going home and doing their little geeky things, alone.

As a matter of fact, in the phases when I play (as opposed to doing research) I usually do practice - even technical exercises. Where an indisposed violinist perhaps plays a little out of tune a harpsichordist inevitably plays a big pile of mistakes. Perhaps, as a malicious joke about an imprecise player suggests, one sometimes only needs to adjust the chair an inch sideways to solve the problem. I find it safer to keep my fingers up to date with the key relief on a more direct and above all: a continuous basis. I have experimented with "extracting whatever technical exercise I needed from the music" for a few years and I am not content with the results. I have returned to the use of exercises for warming up, for practicing a relaxed approach in an environment where no musical expression is required, for training my muscles and their precision at the same time, for waking up my brain and my ears and because I need that period every day where I just do this and nothing else. In this I am not feeding the universe with a spoonful-a-day of compliance to still-spooking First Year Must Dos, but with my being content with what I'm doing.

I hadn't been aware of the problem of slipping brass loops at all when, a few years ago, some of the strings in a harpsichord used by my ensemble suddenly gave up keeping their pitch. There seems to be a dual explanation for my lack of experience: 1) The brass sections in my own instruments are strung in beryllium-copper, a material that has characteristics in some ways closer to early brass (for example it only stretches very little before settling, and it sounds pretty nice from the start on). As an aside, beryllium copper looks like copper-bronze (which many people find useless - I have no experience with it) but is something else nevertheless. What matters here: reasonably well-made Beryllium copper loops just don't slip. 2) One of the things apparently typical to brass loops is that they begin to slip after years and years of behaving nicely. At the moment the trouble started, the instrument in question was about ten years old.

In any case, I went through all the steps of "what now?" solutions that, as I learned recently, make the entire harpsichord world happy.

I took off the string and tried to wind the loop tighter. It snapped.

When winding the loop for the new string, I tried to make the double helix tighter than usual in order to avoid the new string from slipping as the old had done. It snapped.

Fiddling around, I finally created a loop that didn't slip. I left the problem behind me with the slight bewilderment of someone who just solved a Windows crash but doesn't really know how.

So in a way I was grateful when the topic came up on the list. Some people have a theory: modern histori-surrogate brass slips, the old brass didn't. Other hpschd-listers have a solution. If everything else fails they drip crazy glue right into the slipping loop.

I can't comment upon The Theory, I'm no metallurgist. However, a new brass string leaves a deep black trace behind on a leather strop or a micro-fiber cloth. This indicates, to my practical mind, that its surface might be contaminated with grease or other residue from the manufacturing process. Either might add to the string's slipperiness. I have now started to wipe all new strings before making the loop very thoroughly and I've had no problems since then (let's, however, wait another ten years)

I was at first a little sceptical about The Solution. I don't really believe in the long-term stability of crazy glue. But perhaps I'll have to admit that the idea of, with a simple drop of goo, instantly stopping that enraging continuous dropping-of-a-semitone-whatever-one-does that some of these strings develop is very tempting.

Some people recommended the so-called German loop, as known for example from the harpsichords by the Klop firm. If made properly, the German loop doesn't slip. On his website, Carey Beebe shows great pictures of both the German loop and a nifty "secure loop" (click through the arrows of the "technical library" until page VI). On page V of the same site, we can find a picture of the standard kind of loops that I normally make. The only difference is that I actually make them free-hand. Here's how:

Place loop end in non-dominant hand; hold both string and the short string end tight in dominant hand at the place where the double helix will be; begin twisting each (or only one) hand as felt appropriate; pay special attention to the two string ends twisting around each other, as opposed to one staying straight while the other one gets twisted around; stop when almost done; finish off by winding string end a few times around the string to prevent spontaneous unwinding.

This technique works really fine; only the lower strings of post-1800 fortepianos and the thinnest brass diameters are tricky, for opposed reasons. The thick ones are fat and stiff and make one's fingers hurt. The thin ones are springy and brittle and either don't want to wind up properly or tend to snap.

No wonder that on one of those days, when I was touching up a few unisons, I tuned every note jerkily up and down again. My teacher's eyebrows shot up in intelligent acknowledgement: "Aah, you always tune a little higher first - is that to make the string hold better afterwards? Very interesting method!" 28 years after this event I can disclose that I simply was very nervous. But there are methods that help harpsichords, clavichords or fortepianos keep their tuning and there are some things better to avoid when tuning. I am, naturally, talking about such instruments where the tuning pins hold well in themselves.

Four factors can work together to fool the tuner into prematurely abandoning a string that has not yet settled on its proper pitch. Tuning pin (lengthwise) torsion, tuning pin (sidewise) bending, and any overly enthusiastic turning up and down are all incompatible with the retarding effect of the friction at the bridge- and nut-pins. This friction delays, to varying degrees within one instrument (and in wildly contrasting patterns between instruments) the process of tension-equalization of the three sections of a string (the sounding section and the front and end sections). The string needs a little time to settle, time during which the pin should not be turned, twisted or bent.

There are two things to find out: 1) how much do the tuning pins twist before they actually move in the pin block? 2) how slowly do the strings react in a given instrument? On the intuitive understanding of these matters and on the getting-to-feel the moment when things move and settle, the tuner's decision to turn, retry and leave alone will be based.

There are two things to avoid: 1) tuning too enthusiastically up and down. 2) bending the pin instead of turning. The first issue is most likely the result of a combination of an insecurity about hearing the pitch well, and of mechanical difficulties when turning the tuning hammer. Frequently, one's inability to hear whether a note is slightly too high or too low is simply a matter of a slack concentration. Often it will be sufficient to let the only interesting question emerge clearly in one's mind: is this note too high or too low? Make up your mind and correct according to your guess. If an ever so slight correction makes things worse, the guess was wrong, but then you have the right answer - the insecurity is cured and you can correct the pitch safely, fully focusing on the mechanical aspect of turning the tuning hammer. If you still should tune past the right pitch, it will not be much. The second issue, bending, is either (if you use a T-shaped tuning hammer) a sloppiness that needs to be corrected: turn both sides of the hammer evenly and avoid pushing and bending sideways during that action. If you are using an inverted L shaped hammer (of the shape of a modern piano tuning hammer) sideways bending cannot be avoided. Why do these hammers bend the pin? Because the applied force is not, as in the T-model, applied at two points that lie at even opposite distances in line with the turning axle, but it is instead applied only on one side, far away from the turning axle. The force is hence transferred to the pin from one side only and the rigidity of the pin alone makes this principle work. A thin pin is less rigid than a thick one, and hence it will bend, albeit ever so slightly. These tuning hammers are, simply, worthless for being used on the thin tuning pins of most historical keyboard instruments.

Two actions of the tuner will help the string to settle into its final state: 1) play the note a few times while not tuning at all. 2) loosen your grip on the tuning hammer while checking for the last time, in order to make really sure you didn't bend the pin by accident. For clavichords it will be necessary to touch at the dynamic level that will be most common when playing music. On fortepianos, some tuners have developed a habit of loud banging to get the string tension evened out. This is not good at all. One should indeed play the note fortissimo once or twice, that is: a musical fortissimo, not a grinding Beethoven-parody-sforzato. Otherwise several undesirable things will happen: 1) there will be too much wear on the nut pins, the hammer leather and the escapement hopper hinges (often strips of parchment that are difficult to replace). 2) the tension between the three string sections will in fact not even out, but instead be whacked out of balance by a too hard blow, and the tune-keeping afterwards will be less stable.

Only after this beginning, we will be able to talk cents, beats and deviations between temperaments. That is, if we also manage to keep the temperature and humidity in the room constant and if we avoid direct sunlight on the instrument.

On an early Viennese fortepiano with its light and shallow touch, these passages require little force (or weight), so a quick touch is possible in spite of the the twiddling and the stretched fingers. This fingering might be more difficult to realize when playing on a heavy piano (the Wiener Urtext Ausgabe offers an alternative set of fingerings). Simultaneously, on such an instrument, the risk of inadvertently added stray sharps is also highly increased. The practical Carl Czerny recommends for people with small hands to use the second finger of the left hand for the beginning note of each group - this would make the passage much easier "without changing the composition in the least."

I am certain that literal pianists like Arrau or Serkin would have disagreed with Czerny. The fortepiano specialist with fat fingers is, however, faced with a dilemma. What is, after all, more 'Beethovenian': a gritty passage performed with the authentic fingering, or Czerny's water-in-the-wine approach for the Small Of Hand? Can we trust Czerny when he decides for us that the easier approach keeps the composition intact? Is grit perhaps the very ingredient that is necessary, the most Beethovenian approach of all? More practicing will give the answer.

The early part of the story is recorded somewhere on the yahoo fortepiano list. Some years ago, a friend from Göteborg asked me for advice because he had turned out his attic and stumbled upon a half-forgotten early piano, which he had purchased years earlier and which was in a really not too fantastic state. I sensed that he was genuinely unsure about the value of the instrument. The nameboard read "Hagen 1810". I could not find any information about a maker in Vienna called Hagen. When I came there, there stood a Schanz-ish six-octave Viennese piano, which made my heart jump. But, while much of the original concept seemed to be preserved or could at least be guessed, the state of the instrument was bad enough to calm me down again.

The really good part was that the action was complete. Although many hammers were lying about, unhinged from the brass capsles and were hard to fit back, only two of them were broken and another one sloppily fixed. Most of the remaining action parts were in original shape and complete. The hammer beak leathers were probably original and the escapement hoppers in a very good state with all the original springs.

The case was outwardly fairly well preserved. There was no visible tail twist; the veneer seemed nearly undamaged, apart from some bleached areas, surface scratches and a few loose or missing bits, and the hitchpin rail had only a few cracks and loose pins. The wrestplank, however, was tilted and bent and the strings in the treble had been reduced from three to two per tone (I actually missed this when I first looked at the instrument), and an ugly iron beam had been added in the treble. The pedals were not original and most of the registers had been taken away.

These administrations were apparently part of a late-romantic and probably still Viennese repair, in the course of which also the hammer coverings in the bass were replaced by late romantic Viennese-style felt covered with brown-leather. Another set of repairs falls into the category of crude twentieth-century butchering: two roughly cut openings in the bottom (one of the internal beams was damaged by this) and the replacement of at least three now lost soundboard ribs either with wood chips or two much thicker pieces of softwood, using some bone-white glue.

Structurally, the case, the soundboard and especially the bottom of the instrument were in a really bad state. The joint between cheek and bentside appeared to be partly open, the soundboard was cracked in many places and all the joints of the bottom planks had opened up. This made me not want the instrument for myself - The damage was far too substantial for casual repairs and I also saw no chance to get this box restored in the Bremen workshop. Instead I alerted a fortepiano specialist who came and bought the instrument, making the previous owner (and himself) very happy.

This restorer now told me that the instrument was in fact made by Müller (the Hagen nameboard was false), and that the date 1810 is likely to be correct. The instrument had taken more work hours to restore than any other instrument before. The result, I am told, is a breathtakingly beautiful instrument.

Naturally the whole story makes me also a little sad. Here I had been looking for a six-octave fortepiano for years - but in fact there's no place for it here (I'm nevertheless still looking...), and also, I couldn't afford a restoration like this...