|
We discuss with Lex Silbiger how pianos have evolved as instruments through the years and the deeper meaning of a donation of an 18th century Kirckman square piano to Duke University’s musical instrument collection.
Lex Silbiger is a Professor Emeritus in the Duke University Music Department, specializing in the study of 17th-century music.
Interview conducted by Peter Petroff, audio collected and edited by David Tierney.
Peter Petroff: [00:00:00] Today we’re here with Professor Silbiger, and we’re going to be discussing the Kirkman Square piano. All right. So I guess, first off, you know, when did you find this piano?
Professor Silbiger: [00:00:13] I found it when I guess got married more or less, because it belonged to my first late wife who passed away in 74. And I will tell you how how come? She persisted. She was from Canada, from Montreal, and there was an uncle of hers in Toronto who owned it. And apparently, for all we know and what I learned from her was that it had been in the family probably from the since the 18th century that it was imported. It was a fairly prominent Canadian family, and they probably imported it at the time. And so she had he had the family owned it in Toronto. And at this point, my wife John got wind that the uncle actually was thinking of changing to a writing desk, and it certainly would make a very attractive writing desk. But when she heard it and she was a musician like me or interested in early music and the keyboard, so she immediately, I guess, contacted him and said, Please let me have let me know before you do that. And John consented. So I imagine this was probably about in the middle or late fifties, and I can’t really give you a precise diet date. I can give you a date of when I married her. Well, actually, I first met her in 1963 and we got married in 65. I was living in Boston at the time, and so she moved with all her belongings, which included also a Steinway baby grand, and it included this Kirkman.
Professor Silbiger: [00:02:09] Now, I think at the time somebody had already tried to restore it. At that time, people didn’t have a clue about square pianos, you know, and the person who did that, you know, evidence put in a piano, regular piano strings also drilled. Well, if you looked at the instrument, you will see that the depends that the strings are round around are not like the ones on modern piano, the once in a modern piano, kind of hexagonal or big pins, and these very kind of narrow flat bands. But they were not. And the problem was also that, well, I’ll get to in a minute that the holes of the had been enlarged to accommodate those piano pins. Well, the instrument wasn’t sound and great. I think they also may have replaced the hammers. I mean, they just thought, you know, we’ve got to make it like a piano. Anyway, when we got it and it was sort of not working very well and we decided to see if we could get somebody to restore it. And the first person was Bruce Wetmore, and he worked with a one of the Boston harpsichord makers. I don’t know if you know, but Boston was a center of the harpsichord revival of kind of authentic so-called historical instruments. And there were actually three major builders, Frank Harbert, William Dowd and Eric Hertz.
Professor Silbiger: [00:03:44] And Bruce worked with Eric Hertz and. I guess joked instrument at a shop to fix it. He didn’t have too much of a clue either. Turn out. And so the instrument still wasn’t really very historical and not working very well. And then some years later and we were kind of frustrated because we were very much. My wife and I are active in early music revival and playing on authentic instruments of one sort or another. And she actually had a an authentic 18th century viola de gamba. So we wanted a piano to be a properly stirred and done. We consulted with Frank Herbert, who was actually maybe the leading maker of the revival. You wrote a fat book, which I’m sure you have here somewhere about this. And he also built me a harpsichord, which I still have actually right now. And he recommended somebody who was an apprentice with him by the name of Robert Smith. And actually, Robert Smith is the maker of one of the first two pianos the Duke owns. That’s downstairs, the so-called Mozart piano style and style of Mozart that they built later. In fact, our instrument was the first for the piano. He got to work on, but he was very serious, a conscientious and also, I think, supervised him. So he decided, for one thing, he needed to take out our spins and get historical pins, authentic pins and fell into holes.
Professor Silbiger: [00:05:32] And you can see all that if you look at the piano. Also to try and get strings that would be close to what they were and they were really quite different strings in that period. We weren’t quite sure there was some other kind of mechanism. There seemed to be some pedal mechanism, but all that was gone. There was a lever and lever which didn’t do anything. We figured there probably was some kind of knee pedal and it may have been something that would actually not be like a sustaining pedal, but rather put some soft letters against the strings and get a kind of more subdued sound. But main thing is he also put a new hammers that were not felt but leather covered. And so when he finished the instrument, it was sort of playable. However, you know, one of the problems it seems to be with square pianos in general is that there is quite a lot of tension. And, you know, these instruments, they don’t have any metal frame. It’s all wood and it’s kept pulling together, not pulling together as to effect fact. Of course it would because of the tension, it would not go out of tune. But the other thing is the hammers would no longer be aligned. If you look at the geometry, you see if you you know, if you imagine the hammers moving over and so they hit the adjacent string, there was not much clearance.
Professor Silbiger: [00:07:12] So that was after a while it was again, not terribly playable, it was a little bit playable and I messed with it and played a little bit on it. Mostly I showed it. It was a nice conversation piece first that lived in our apartment, and then when I moved here and I had a really large office before I well, I spent first ten years at the University of Wisconsin. By now, my first wife, who had owned a piano, had passed away. She had a heart condition. And I in Wisconsin, I remarried with Cathy or still so my wife and from Wisconsin at a very tiny office. But then I moved here. I had a beautiful big office. I think it’s the one that Professor Landreth has now. And so I had room for the piano. So the piano wasn’t there. So was my harpsichord and so was a grand piano that had been there. Mason Hamlin And so, as I said, it was a conversation piece that was not really working. It was enough work, and you could play a little tune in, a little bit of Mozart’s Sonata on it, but not properly. And at some point when the dynamic started, which was when I actually I was chair at the time and I, you know, modestly think I was kind of instrumental at getting that collection here.
Professor Silbiger: [00:08:39] I went to the owner, Norman Audi, I think around three or four times trying to butter him up and get him. To go ahead with this idea. And he had had this idea originally of wanting well, he was he got a PhD from Duke, but he was not a music actually, it was a sociology. But he had this idea that he wanted to give the collection to Duke because he thought there were really not many early instrument collections in this area. There were plenty, say, around Boston where he was living at the time, and in general in the Northeast, but not here. But then his family wasn’t actually too happy about him giving that. And so I had to fight trying to convince him against the family. And we finally succeeded. And the collection came here and he passed away. Also, his he was an artist and he painted these paintings. I assume they’re still somewhere here now. And some of them were not just what they looked like on the outside, but the mechanisms of some of the pianos before. Yeah, well, as you mentioned, he also restored some of the instruments and sometimes he would make the painting to show you the action before he finished his restoration. So they were very interesting. And there was some question, you know, do we want them? And again, I had to deal with the administration to see what do you want those things for? You know, they’re not great art and they certainly are not great art.
Professor Silbiger: [00:10:23] But I thought they were important part of the collection. So all this came here. And then at that point when we when I retired and I had to leave that office and I thought, well, it’s about time, my gift of piano to the collection here, because they can take care of it much better than I can, wasn’t really doing anything for me. And here people could see and I wasn’t even really dreaming about it being totally restored, but at least being cared for, being available for study and who knows what else. And so and I guess the next episode, which is that when Professor Gales came and became a curator of the instruments and I guess she was instrumental in getting the instrument fully restored, which can tell you make me ecstatic. When I heard about this, I was so happy that this piano finally would get to sound so much the way I did, even though I still haven’t actually seen it. And it’s a new state, so that’s pretty much. But I’m happy to answer other questions, but I’m not sure if I have the answers. There are a lot of questions I don’t know the answers to.
Peter Petroff: [00:11:44] Yeah, no problem. No problem. So you mentioned earlier that your first wife’s family was in possession of the instrument.
Professor Silbiger: [00:11:52] That’s right. Yeah.
Peter Petroff: [00:11:54] And so do you know anything prior to that history, like anything about the making and production of it or who’s previously played on it?
Professor Silbiger: [00:12:02] Well, not really. I mean, the instrument was made in England by Joseph Kirkman, who was not I mean, the most famous English, probably most famous English harpsichord maker in the 18th century was Jacob Kirkman, who made it really practically mass production, which is amazing for that time. And they were so well built that are still many functioning and being played, but those are harpsichords. Then in the later 18th century, you know, interest shifted to piano for two pianos, although they still made harpsichords for quite a while, I guess. Joseph, I think, was a son who took over the business, so to speak, and he made, I guess, his instrument. Now, there were a number of Americans interested in Canadians and having pianos, and I don’t think and I don’t really know for sure when they started making pianos in this country, but I think in the 18th century, they generally had to come from Europe and Edmund England. I don’t think many, if any French aristocrats or as I know, were ever imported here, but some I think Barringer and Franklin, I think, brought some instruments here. There is more history to all that, which I’m sure you could find out. So I don’t know. To answer your question, really answer your question. That was the long no answer is that I don’t know. The piano was presumably bought by some ancestor and it might be possible to find out who that was because I know that from as I say, it was a prominent family.
Professor Silbiger: [00:13:44] And actually I remember it was a book that showed all the ancestors, I think, original. Their family came from the States. And actually I think some of them are even Mayflower ancestors anyway. So they got that piano and I guess there was somebody there who wasn’t necessarily a well, certainly not a professional musician, but, you know, it was fashionable to have a piano around and the ladies would play on it and entertain guests playing at the time, probably, you know, I don’t know what they played. Gallops They would start playing waltzes, probably not that early yet, but various kind of are probably most often actually arrangements of popular songs and arias. But I don’t really know. I don’t know what happened except that and I’m pretty sure John didn’t know either. My wife then you know what happened until she heard about this, his uncle who owned this thing. And he apparently she learned from him that as far as he knew, it had always been in the family. And that seems likely because, you know, we’re talking now about 20th century people were not yet really interested and certainly not people like that to try and get an antique piano from Europe or even get one. I mean, it was not the kind of thing people were maybe some some of the early piano people interested in early keyboard instruments might have, but they were not. And so I think that’s very likely that it was.
Peter Petroff: [00:15:33] Yeah, that sounds.
Professor Silbiger: [00:15:34] Great that it was brought here.
Peter Petroff: [00:15:37] Yeah, of course. So. You know, in your time owning this instrument, how has it felt playing it? Like before it was tuned. After it was tuned when you initially saw it, you know?
Professor Silbiger: [00:15:52] Yeah. Well, as I mentioned, the instinct tended to pull out of tune when we owned it. We had to keep it tuned about a full tone below for for the not to be. But so it wasn’t totally fell apart because it tended to, you know, the sides putting together. I mean, I think there was an inherent design problem of those type of instruments that they didn’t have. And the, you know, the wing shaped instruments. And I have a sense that these were really not concert instruments, but they were home instruments. They didn’t take much space. You know, they would stand against the wall and people would entertain, play, you know, popular songs, maybe hymns. But, you know, when I when I owned it, as I said, I didn’t I think there were times that I actually I seem to remember I tried to struggle through the hard enough minor variations, certain little Mozart sonatas. It was also a lot of work. It was a lot of work to tune it. But in general, tuning a piano is more work than a tuning, a harpsichord. You need to stick a little things in. But I think I did tune in a number of times, so it was sort of playable. But then, you know, the next day at which tuning would be gone, I don’t think we ever used it in any ensemble music for us. I can remember. So that’s that’s about.
Peter Petroff: [00:17:38] It sounds great. So. Now moving forward you. I understand that you specialize in 17th century Frescobaldi.
Professor Silbiger: [00:17:48] Yes, that’s right.
Peter Petroff: [00:17:50] Wonderful. So, you know, of course, among other things. But in relation.
Professor Silbiger: [00:17:55] To my my biggest claim to fame is Frescobaldi.
Peter Petroff: [00:17:59] Absolutely. So in relation to those studies of yours, how is this piano interacted with those throughout your time as a professor?
Professor Silbiger: [00:18:07] And you know, the harpsichord that I got it was made by Frank Hubbard I mentioned was actually a kind of instrument that would have been appropriate. That’s why I asked for it. It was a copy of an instrument in the collection in Edinburgh and I think the original stated from around 1600. So that would be very likely to count instrument. And I happened to have to say very fond of Italian style harpsichords. I mean, I also love Mozart and Haydn and the classic period and I, I also saw it, but I never ended up doing it or getting it for the piano. But the early for two pianists that were that were remade in the 1970s and eighties, a lot of those were they were kind of problematic. They were very hard to, you know, to regulate. They have come quite a long way again since then. Now, Robert Smith restored his instrument. He became quite well known as a leading maker of pianos. He learned it really on what was my instrument. I mentioned a little thing about him and that shows how serious he was. I mentioned that there was this kind of registration mechanism that was gone, you know, that at the stuff. And he said he did not at the time. He did not want to try. When he restored it, he didn’t want to restore that because he actually didn’t have a good model to copy it from. He said he wanted to wait. Maybe he would find an instrument like it that had it intact and then he could copy it and restore it. But he wasn’t going to just fantasize and do something which some other restorers might have done thinking, well, probably was this or that. So he was very, very serious, very conscientious. I’m not sure if he’s still alive, but that was his philosophy. He was a bit of a character. Well, most of these historical instrument makers are kind of characters, but I guess what has to be to get into that profession?
Peter Petroff: [00:20:28] Maybe. So would you be willing to talk more about I know you mentioned that you dedicated this instrument to your first wife.
Professor Silbiger: [00:20:39] Yes.
Peter Petroff: [00:20:41] So would you be willing to dive into, like, you know, that sort of journey and having this instrument here at Duke and just what that meant to you back then and now?
Professor Silbiger: [00:20:53] Yes. Well, yes. I mean, the point is actually that at the time when I was thinking and I have to say, of course, whatever I did, you know, you’re married, you discuss those with survive and that she was quite supportive. And I thought, well, this instrument really it was really her and John’s my first wife’s instrument. And if I give it away, I should somehow mark that. And the loss of my first wife was, you know, very difficult for me. It took me a long time to get over it. But, well, one really never gets over loss of somebody that’s close and certainly not a spouse or child. And I thought, well, maybe an appropriate thing would be to put it in her memory and to discuss that with my wife, because, you know, she how she felt about it. And she thought it was a great idea and was very supportive of it. And so when I gave it, I made that a condition. I said, you know, I’m giving this no other strings attached except as I would like. I wasn’t quite sure how it would be, would be like with something, but some way to remember her name. I guess it’s one thing when you lose somebody, we’d like somehow their name to be remembered and, you know, to associate her name with that instrument because it was hers and was through her that I had acquired it. So that’s, I guess, the story. And I must say that the curator at the time, Brendan, she was very understanding, put a sign on there and it’s been there ever since. As I say, at least one other curator came and went after that. But I think that’s what I can tell you about that. You know, I think it’s it’s not unusual when a gift is made.
Peter Petroff: [00:23:05] Sir. So I think. Final question, you know, having this instrument at dynamic. Yeah. You know, and presumably just knowing it’s here, being around this collection, what do you hope for the instrument in the future and what has your experience been with the instrument since you’ve donated?
Professor Silbiger: [00:23:26] Well, my experience has been that it’s been at has been put in the very visible part of the museum. People have seen it. Occasionally somebody has commented on it and but of course, it wasn’t really playable. So it was just there. It was not like the wonderful Clementi piano there. And of course, now I hope of course, I would hope that would change. I think it’s certainly an instrument that could be performed on. Well, I haven’t seen yet how it is right now, but I mean, that kind of instrument, there’s quite a bit of repertory that would be quite appropriate, mostly late 18th, maybe even early 19th century. I mean, the range of it, you may know it’s five octaves from F to F and you can play actually all of Beethoven, all the Beethoven sonatas before depression out on it. So there’s plenty of music. And of course, you know, people played I mean, my, my, the piano I own now, which is also a Steinway. It was built in the seventies. And I don’t say, well, I’m only going to play music from the seventies. Of course, you know, I play early music and I play later music when it’s appropriate. So I figured the instrument, it’s quite appropriate. It’s not an issue of whether it’s, you know, the music was written at the time. It’s more, for me, an issue about whether the music’s going to work well on that sound. Well, I don’t think Chopin would sound great on it. It would be kind of funny. Maybe some present a living composer might say, hey, this is an intriguing sound. I’m going to write a piece for it, and that might happen, that kind of thing. Often that that’s happened. But I would hope that people would play it much outside and maybe maybe Clementi. I think there’s certainly a play some Domenico Scarlatti, who whose music we know was played on very early pianos. So I would be delighted if that happens, if somebody here, maybe one of the students or a faculty member decides to just be called to play something on it.
Peter Petroff: [00:25:48] Yes, sir. So I guess that’s it. Is there anything else you know, any random factoids or bits of information about the Kirkman that you would like to share? If not, that’s perfectly fine.
Professor Silbiger: [00:26:04] Yeah, I’m trying to think I can tell you one of the first historical, I mean, authentic old harpsichord I ever played was a Kirkman. It was from the founder. It was in New York, and I was a student down at Columbia, and it would have been in the late fifties. And I was just overwhelmed by that instrument. It was so grand if you played, you know, some of this music by Handel, which was certainly on the piano, it’s kind of not all that interesting. I played on that instrument. It comes alive, you know, it’s just grand. So that’s another reason I was very pleased to have a Kirkman, even if it was Kirkman to younger. I know. Otherwise, you know, I’m just. I could only finish saying how really pleased I am, not the instrument that’s being cared for so well here at Duma and that that’s been restored, that this makes me really very happy.
Peter Petroff: [00:27:00] Yes, sir. Well, hey, thank you so much for your time. You’re welcome. I really appreciate you coming out here for this interview. And I believe that’s all we have.
Professor Silbiger: [00:27:08] Okay. Thank you. This was my pleasure.
Peter Petroff: [00:27:11] Thank you, sir.
We discuss with Larry Todd the importance of curating historical sonic experiences and how music allows us to tap into the past.
Larry Todd is a Distinguished Professor of Music at Duke University, specializing in the study of 19th-century music.
Interview conducted by Peter Petroff, audio collected and edited by David Tierney.
Peter Petroff: [00:00:00] All right. Well, today it’s Monday, June 13th, 2022. I’m Peter and I’m here today with Professor Larry Todd. And we are going to be talking about the Duke music collection, specifically the keyboards within the collection. So, Professor, thank you for coming in. Thanks for being willing to talk to us. Sure. And so I guess I’ll lead off with just in general, how have the keyboards in the collection helped you understand just historical keyboard performance practice.
Professor Todd: [00:00:33] Sure. Well, as a historian, we’re always interested in. Connecting with actual historical objects. So to have, for instance, the Clementi piano piano manufactured by MUZIO Clementi’s firm. This one probably wasn’t played by Clementi himself, but he certainly would have been familiar with it, as would a number of composers from around 1800 or the 1790s. You know, it’s very exciting. It’s like reclaiming a bit of history. You know, we study the past in order to understand the present and prepare for the future. And so for me as a musician, it’s, you know, it’s it’s an attempt to sort of recreate a sound world from, you know, a couple hundred years ago now. Having said that, we’re always chasing cameras. We can we can never recreate exactly how Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony sounded when he premiered it in the 1780s. But this is a pretty good approximation. And we can see where pianos were in their early days and how they evolved and do what we have today. And there are quite a few differences that musicians, regardless of the types of instruments that they are performing, whether they’re period instruments or modern instruments need to take into account. The main thing for me as a as a pianist and historian is that the, you know, the sound world then was much smaller. It was more concentrated. If you look at that Clementi piano, it’s it’s a fragile instrument. It’s mainly wood would, of course, expands and contracts. So on a bad day, as Rosina knows, it easily goes out of tune. This one has pedals. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they’re a little irritable. But once you can get past that, you enter into this intimate, sort of sound world on which to play Mozart or early Beethoven, or indeed MUZIO Clementi. And doing that is almost as if we are reaching back to reimagine or to rehear of that music and then to figure out how it relates to the traditions we know today.
Peter Petroff: [00:03:10] So regarding how it does relate to the traditions we know today, you know, the social context surrounding those instruments was very different than it is nowadays, especially with the ones we make now. So do you have any knowledge on specifically, I guess, the instruments in our collection and how social context influence their playing, making and so on?
Professor Todd: [00:03:31] Sure. Well, for two pianos, have a you know, they have a fascinating history. They go back to the time of Bartolomeo Cristoforo, who was centered in Florence and somewhere around 1700 we don’t know exactly when, but he came up with the idea of a new type of keyboard, which would allow the pianists to obtain graduated dynamic levels simply by the pressure used on striking the keys. And this this was a huge sort of thing on the harpsichord. Of course, you have low level planes of sound because the strings are plucked with the same tension. The origins were centered in Florence. Eventually they spread to Spain, to Germany. There is a possibility that J.S. Bach, who when he visited Frederick the Great in Potsdam, came into contact with some early forte pianos. If not Christopher, he’s probably not Christopher. He’s but probably some of some German builders who were starting to develop their own German types of pianos. But the full force of of what the arrival of the piano meant really wouldn’t be felt until the 19th century. You know, we think of when we go to hear the great pianists play a concert, we think of a huge concert hall with hundreds of people in the audience. And we think of the pianist sitting in front of a nine foot Steinway concert, grand or maybe a fuzzy, early and wonderful Italian instrument of today, of which only about five or ten are made each year.
Professor Todd: [00:05:30] But it wasn’t like that at all. The exactly when 40 pianos started to enter in concert life is unclear. We do know that. Johann Christian Bach, who was another one of J.S. Bach sons, worked in London and that he gave concerts with a German musician named Abel LaBelle, who played the viola gamba, and that these were public concerts in London, meaning that if you could afford to buy a ticket, you could go hear these musicians playing concerts, chamber music. And this would have been one of the earliest organized concert series to to use and recognize fortepiano. We know that Haydn and Mozart started making the transition from the harpsichord to the fortepiano in the late 1760s and 1770s. So really it’s the last three decades of the 18th century when the fortepiano becomes established and becomes a recognizable feature in concerts. We know that when Haydn, for instance, came to London in the 1790s to premiere his 12 London symphonies, we know that he led the orchestra from either a harpsichord or a fortepiano. We’re not quite sure which, but probably by the 1790s he was using a fortepiano.
Professor Todd: [00:07:04] So this was a kind of revolution in sound in terms of the other social history of these early instruments. It’s the 19th century where pianos really become established. For one, more manufacturers are turning their attention to them. For another, they’re they’re making them bigger and stronger so they can withstand a greater tension on the strings. And they’re becoming more affordable. It’s really a kind of economy of scale. So if you were Schubert’s in Vienna in the 1820s, you had, you know, a fortepiano or a piano in your residence and on which he composed his songs and piano pieces and so forth. And pianos become a kind of staple item of furniture if you are, you know, successful, established middle class and you have the capital to invest in pianos, you would do that. And the pianos were basically early entertainment centers. So this is where many people practice their musical skills and acquired their interest and taste in music. There’s a wonderful essay by George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, which he wrote, I think, in the 1890s. So this is the end of the 19th century and it’s called piano culture. And he explains that the piano was what he used to become, musically cognizant. And he writes a hilarious paragraph where he says he had the score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera.
Professor Todd: [00:09:07] He had a piano reduction of it, and he sat down at his piano. And the very first chord is a minor chord for the full orchestra. And he took 10 minutes to set his fingers. And after a few tries, he managed to to hit the chord on his piano. And that was how he got to know Don Giovanni, not by going to the Opera House at first to see the actual opera, but by reading, trying to play it from a score at his piano. So pianos also became, in the 19th century, sort of a symbol for musical intimacy. If you read the novels of Jane Austen, for instance, just about every one refers to a piano. And if you go to her residence in in England, not far from Salisbury, she had a music library, and her novels are filled with these musical allusions. The piano was a was a sort of mechanism or a conduit for expressing feelings, emotions, passions that were perhaps better set in music than they were in her written prose. So all of this is going on and starting to emerge in the late 18th century, and then it gains real force in the 19th century.
Peter Petroff: [00:10:34] All right. So, you know, with the rise of Fortepiano. In the 18th and then up to the 19th century initially and throughout, they were you know, they became staples of concerts, you know, with well renowned pianists who began to be playing them. But in regards to the making of those instruments, like both initially and as they gained prominence and became more technologically sound, do you think that there was any context regarding how they were made and if their makers intended for them or were thinking about the future when they made them, or if they were more geared towards the present moment and those players who were playing them at the time.
Professor Todd: [00:11:20] Sure. I’d say both were were true. And I should explain that there were you know, if if you were in Vienna, the Viennese pianos were different than, say, the London pianos that Haydn might have played. The firm in London was an addition to Clementi because Clementi retired to England and he died in England. The main maker there was Broadwood and Broadwood were more powerful, stronger. Broadwood was always trying to to expand the registers and add more keys. Broadwood sent one of his instruments to Beethoven, and a lot of these builders, in fact, were currying favor with Beethoven. They were trying to impress Beethoven with their piano so that they so that he would endorse them and that sort of thing. And that once it turned into a kind of industry, then yeah, it was who can make the better piano that stays in tune longer, that has a more powerful middle range. That was a desiderata of Chopin and Mendelssohn and those players. The. And what what you encountered at first was the remarkable versatility of of these instruments. Some had light relatively light actions. Others had heavier actions. Some had all the bells and whistles. They had pedals that operated with the feet to engage or raise the dampers so that the strings could freely vibrate. At first, that was a kind of was regarded by composers as a sort of unusual feature, not to be used too often to be used as a special effect. Some pianos didn’t have pedals, but they had knee levers, so you had to raise your knees to raise the dampers. And it took a while for this diversity of instruments to sort of coalesce into pianos that we would recognize today. That really doesn’t happen until the middle of the 19th century.
Professor Todd: [00:13:38] It’s been referred to as sort of the homogenisation of pianos, meaning that, you know, if we were to place them on this upright behind me and if it were in tune and then play some some notes on a Steinway concert, grand, they’re going to sound different, but we’re going to recognize them both as pianos, modern pianos, the early Viennese pianos, Italian pianos, French pianos, and the London English Pianos. They all had different colors. And so they were. If you’re writing for the music, for the piano, you had to take that into account. There’s a wonderful anecdote by Mendelssohn. He has a passage in one of his concerti where he places the theme in the middle register. It’s to be played by the thumbs, so the left and right hand and then the other fingers are doing things above and below. And he writes that he needs a piano that will allow that register to sing out more. Other pianists were interested in writing rapidly repeating pitches, the same pitch rapidly repeated, which is really hard to do on a modern piano because the action is so, so stiff. So the builders were concerned about pianos that would stay in tune, pianos that would endure increasing pressure or tension on the strings, and particularly Beethoven in his late period, you know, when he was composing in the 1820s from the prison of deafness he no longer could hear. He starts writing his extraordinary music for the piano. And he is. It’s as if he’s searching for higher and higher and lower and lower. Pitches and encouraging piano manufacturers to to make them. So it’s a it’s a world unto itself, but it’s that world that we’re connected to today.
Peter Petroff: [00:15:55] So talking about pitch and talking about tuning. And I know you specialize in 19th century music, Felix Mendelssohn’s biography and just playing Beethoven, perhaps on the Viennese piano in the collection and just on those pianos in the collection. How has pitch and tuning and all the different variables that go into how an instrument sounds and plays affected your experience with those pianos?
Professor Todd: [00:16:22] Right. So, you know, we usually classify modern pitch. We take the pitch A and we identified as a 440 and in the 18th century pitch was probably a half step lower. So what we know is an A today back then probably sounded closer to an A-flat. So it’s as if, you know, if you are blessed and cursed with the with perfect pitch, it can be a kind of nightmare because, you know, you could be playing a sonata in a major, but it’s an it sounds as if it’s in a flat in terms of modern pitch, and it sounds as if everything has just been lowered, shifted down. So you have to take that into account. It takes a while to get used to that. The other thing is that these instruments are relatively delicate. So it’s it’s a it forces the pianist to become a musician of nuance. Nuance is more important than anything else. So banging away at a piano is not going to do much. It’s going to have a negative effect unless you’re Mozart writing your Rondo al-Turki and he’s writing his Turkish Rondo and he wants to suggest a percussive effect. So he literally writes chords, you know, very strident chords that are there to imitate the Turkish musicians, the janissary musicians of the Turkish military. And it said that Mozart had a an instrument that had a stop that enabled him to engage a kind of drum like effect. Actually, there was another instrument that the percussive effect was created by raising and lowering the lid. So the thing actually banged, you know, but that’s an extraordinary thing and it’s a very rare it’s really, you know, playing this music is about playing and thinking of nuances and subtleties rather than, you know, on your sleeve, you know, full out.
Peter Petroff: [00:18:45] Yeah. So I guess moving specifically to the pianos that we have here at Duke, is there any that you’ve specifically, you know, had a relationship with or like enjoyed playing more than others or just that has taught you something maybe that the others haven’t?
Professor Todd: [00:19:04] That would definitely be the Clementi. I mean, the Clementi is sort of the jewel of the collection. The the vertical piano is a fascinating instrument, you know, in which the strings run vertically instead of horizontally. And that’s that’s very nice. But the Clementi is the one I’ve played the most and I’ve played Clementi’s music on that and Beethoven Horn Sonata and some trio sonatas with Rossini of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. And it works very, very well for that kind of music. But what I’m always, you know, my take away when I come away from performing on an instrument is, you know, getting out of that or getting, first of all, getting into that diminished sound world and trying to create nuances that are powerfully meaningful. And then coming away from that instrument. It’s always a shock coming back to, you know, the reality of today and going to a modern Steinway or whatever and and comparing because they’re really two different worlds. The some of the special effects on the instrument. You’re using the pedals on a good day. They work on another day, they work less well. But the main thing is it’s it’s about the. Horses. We can get to making a direct connection to the past, which we are losing more and more touch with, regrettably. But the committee was the pride of Norman Eddy’s collection. I visited him years ago, before the collection came to Duke. He lived in Cambridge and all of these instruments were strewn around his house. I mean, you would think the vertical grand when you came in the front door that was off to the left and the Clementi Grand was in a room sort of by itself and surrounded by his paintings. And it’s wonderful that they’ve come to Duke and that we have these and and that they’re being curated so splendidly by Rossini. And I hope that the collection will stay in good shape for many, many years to come.
Peter Petroff: [00:21:43] Yes, sir, of course. So how can we take these instruments and as you refer to them, expand that sound world and then take that into the classroom and really teach students and this next generation about this historical, you know, sound world that these pianos cover.
Professor Todd: [00:22:05] Well, the main thing is for students to hear them and the students to try a few notes on the Clementi and then try a few notes on the modern piano, you know, touches a very powerful way of communicating. And it’s the difference between them comes through right away. That’s that’s the first thing. The second thing would be to hear performances of 18th century music and even 19th century music, which we think we know so well. On these early instruments, you know, if you if you perform Chopin, for instance, he lived until 1849. So he was using a variety of pianos that that had great diversity of colours. And we think of Chopin as a modern pianist. And he was. But the pianos that he had, his disposal were not yet what, you know, the same as what we’re familiar with today. So contextualizing the music and its historical situation is important. Having students opportunity to experience firsthand what it’s like to play these instruments is is another.
Peter Petroff: [00:23:30] Yes, sir. So I think that about wraps it up. Is there anything else regarding any specific of the pianos or just anything more general that you like to andalus with?
Professor Todd: [00:23:45] Well, I don’t know if I can to die with anything, but, you know, I would just maybe conclude by saying that I often cite this quotation to my students the English composer Elgar, known as the composer of the processional graduation hymn that maybe will be played when you all graduate, said that music is all around us and you simply have to take as much of it as you need. And I would extend that to suggest that music has been all around us and will be all around us. And we need to encourage ourselves to free our imaginations to imagine what the music sounded like then and what it sounds like now. It’s all music. And music is meant to be free and there are many ways of presenting it, and the collection is a marvelous way to do it in the context of a museum. And, you know, we can learn a lot about our own musicianship, whether we’re trained musicians or not, by seeing and hearing these instruments.
Peter Petroff: [00:25:01] Yes, sir. Well, thank you so much, Professor Todd, for coming in. Sure. And I think that about wraps it up.
Professor Todd: [00:25:06] Okay.
Peter Petroff: [00:25:07] All right.
We discuss with John Watson his upkeep of Duke University’s instruments and the significance of conservation, both physical and regarding the original intent of instrument makers.
John Watson is a piano conservationist and member of the American Musical Instrument Society.
Interview conducted by Peter Petroff, audio edited by Abby Johnson.
Peter Petroff: [00:00:01] Hi, Mr. Watson.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:03] Hello. Greetings.
Dr. Giles: [00:00:06] So it’s so nice to see you. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you taking.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:11] The time and good to see you. Thanks. Thanks to the magic of Zoom, we’re able to have a meeting very conveniently, isn’t it?
Dr. Giles: [00:00:20] Yes.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:21] Great.
Dr. Giles: [00:00:22] So this is Hannah, one of our graduates, Hannah, and Peter, who is going to be conducting the interview. He’s been working with a team of undergrads who have been working with the musical instruments.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:32] For.
Dr. Giles: [00:00:33] Almost six weeks. So.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:35] Very fantastic. Fantastic.
Peter Petroff: [00:00:39] All right. Well, if you’re ready, we can get started.
Mr. Watson: [00:00:43] Yeah, I’m. I’m looking forward to this.
Peter Petroff: [00:00:46] Fantastic. All right. So I guess, first off, how did you how did you start your career in keyboard building and conservation?
Mr. Watson: [00:00:55] Yeah, I got very interested in early keyboard instruments when I was in undergraduate school and back in those days in the 1970s. It’s interesting. I find myself part of a boom generation that many of us started around that time. It seems several of the scholars that have that have been in the field for for many years and written so many articles seem to have gotten started. And there was a great I don’t know if certainly it was a sense of enchantment that was very common at that time in early keyboard instruments, a real a real kind of surge in the revival. And certainly I got that bug and started out making keyboard instruments, making harpsichords, but I did not apprentice with anyone. I tend to be a autodidact in general. So it was a very comfortable for me to to read the literature and experiment and in the workshop and to work up the the skills and the knowledge on my own. But because I did not apprentice with someone, I was not a student of anyone in particular. I came to feel that the historic instruments themselves were the teachers, and that really became a North Star for me in my career where the idea that a historical instrument. Is actually is actually like an encyclopedia written by a historical maker that tells in detail how they made the instrument, what things what aspects of the design they considered important or not. You could see in in how careful they were and the workmanship here versus there. It’s amazing how much you can learn from from a historical maker by looking very closely at their work.
Mr. Watson: [00:03:11] So that they were my mentors. And of course, in those early days there was not much chance to see actual antique instruments. I didn’t work in a museum. But over time, museums were didn’t have specialists working for them, and they had to seek out people like me who are knowledgeable and bring instruments to us. So I did a number of restorations for museums of early keyboard instruments and some really fairly important ones. And then when the job opened up at Colonial Williamsburg, I had done some work for them that they liked, and I was able to take a position as a conservator of instruments there. And once in a museum environment, I was able to work with other conservators to learn a great deal more about the discipline of conservation in its breadth. But I think my orientation was always a little different. Most of the other conservators went through a graduate degree program in conservation, science and my orientation. I had been a music major, not a not an art history major or chemistry major, as many of them were, but a music major. And to me, the instruments, the historic instruments were historical documents from which I was learning a great deal. But think of the think of the implications of that for the whole question of restoration and and preservation. The. I should. I said lest you let you drive the questions because you get me on a roll here. I won’t.
Peter Petroff: [00:05:00] Tell him. That was great. It’s fantastic. You know, anything you want to tell us is new knowledge for us.
Mr. Watson: [00:05:06] Yeah.
Peter Petroff: [00:05:06] So, you know, building off of that restoration in your book, Artifacts in Use, I know you use that term restorative conservation. So how like what are the advantages and disadvantages of keyboard conservation or restoration and how they’re linked together through that term? Restorative conservation?
Mr. Watson: [00:05:28] Yeah, great. Well, as you can imagine, if you can really the easiest way I seem to have lost my. My video. Okay. The best way to think of this again, I call the instruments primary documents, historical documents. The metaphor of the the instruments as documents speaks volumes, truly. So now we’re more familiar with with how we preserve paper documents. So if you were to walk into the special collections at the library at Duke and you ask for a diary that was written by your great, great, great grandmother, about a time in your family history, you know, a little bit about, but you’re doing some research. So they bring out this diary that in their gloved hands and they instruct you how to treat it so that you don’t you don’t damage it in any way. And as you read the diary, you see some ambiguities, as there always is. Like, here’s a place where a C, a D is not close, so it looks like a seal. But you know, you know that that’s a place in your family. You know, it’s supposed to be a D, so you reach for your pin and you pull it out. What how do you feel when I say that you start tensing up? You know that’s not right. Don’t know. No. The primary documents are never to be changed. It’s fine for you to write down on a piece of paper what it says.
Mr. Watson: [00:07:18] And you can close that D and you can. You can write down what you know it meant. But to change the original document is is is really incredibly discouraged forbidden. Well, musical instruments and for that matter, all historic objects. You can say all the same things we know as restorers. We look at the thing and we think we think we know what the original maker intended. And so we roll up our sleeves and we we replace a part that’s damaged or missing. We fabricate one and we make all of these changes to the object with great confidence that we’re we’re doing the the maker’s bidding. But really, in truth, the restorer is no more knowledgeable than you as a researcher in that archive. And so in an ideal world, we would avoid any kind of change of the historical instruments. But musical instruments are they’re a complicated kind of artifact and making a reproduction, yeah, it can be done. And actually I’ve done that a few times where the object is so important that it’s simply better to make a reproduction. And I’ve done that a few times. You just recently did it a couple of times. But. But that’s not always possible. And so anyway, that whole concept of conservation, restorative conservation is an approach to restoration that is really quite radically different from normal restoration, where you approach the the work with full knowledge and respect for the idea that the object is a document.
Mr. Watson: [00:09:21] So. So you ask yourself now here’s here’s a thing that’s that’s missing. Well, let me take an example from your from your collection. The the Catholic. Was missing its moderator. Now. How do I. Why do I think it had a moderator? Well, I can see the two holes where it was attached. I could see the the attachment holes where the trap work was that manipulated it. There was a lot of evidence that it had been there. So. Well, no problem. I could just make one, but I could be confusing the historical record. If I just make it and and in the future someone and this is this is the worst thing that could happen to me as as a researcher, that someone in the future can look at that instrument, see the moderator, stop and say, Oh, that’s how Catholic made moderator stops. No, that’s how John Watson did. So I’ve got to keep that record clear. That’s the restorers in the conventional sense. Wouldn’t worry about that. You got your moderator. Don’t worry about it. You know, it’s good. But as a researcher, my feeling is the the historical integrity of the object can be very easily watered down and and actually falsified. If I don’t somehow find a way to make it absolutely clear what is my work versus what was Tonix work? And so how can I do that? I could most importantly write it into a report, be very clear about what I’ve done.
Mr. Watson: [00:11:14] I can mark the date on the pieces that I’m making for the instrument I could in places that are maybe out of reach that you won’t see in a concert listening to the instrument. But a future scholar who’s examining the instrument to see how Catholic made pianos, he’ll see or she will see some modern tool marks on the bottom side of the of the baton that holds the moderator pads. In other words, I intentionally. Don’t cover my tracks. I want to. One way that some museums think of this is what we call the six inch, six rule, six inch, six foot rule, which is. From. From six feet. I want to fool you. I want you to think you’re looking at an untouched original 1802 object. But from six inches, you’re a scholar. You’re looking close. You have a magnifying glass. From that close. I want you to see the evidence that. No, it’s been changed. And that’s not original. It’s a little bit like. I don’t know. It’s a it’s a. It’s a little bit like. No, I don’t. My metaphor is not coming to me very clearly, so I won’t go there. But anyway, I hope that gives a sense of the difference between conventional restoration and restorative conservation.
Peter Petroff: [00:12:53] Yeah, very interesting. You know, with all that in mind, when you go to work on a specific keyboard, how do you prepare for that?
Mr. Watson: [00:13:03] Yeah, well, the first thing might be to take a good inventory of its condition and get a sense of what is what has been altered in the past and what is fragile or weak, broken or easily about to be broken. So there’s a certain amount of research that goes on in examining similar instruments from the same period by another maker or similar sources. Lots of very close examination of the object itself. And by the way, the kind of information you’re you’re taking in during that process never stops the whole time you’re working on it. It would be nice to think that you see everything in that first examination, but there was a pretty dramatic example of something we missed when we started with the the restoration of the the Kirkman Square piano. We were fooled. By the last restorer, he had made all new dampers. And they looked they looked pretty good. We we thought they looked, period. But then it wasn’t until we were really into it and we started saying, Well, wait a minute, this doesn’t seem right. This doesn’t seem right. And then we looked close enough to realize that, no, he had replaced all of the dampers and did so not from not having done enough homework. And I would not criticize him for not doing enough homework really? Because, you know, 40 years ago. When when restorers were doing their work. We know so much more now. You know, and so I would not criticize anyone for that. But but but we we were in a position now we were better connected with other similar examples. There are databases now of surviving antiques. We can catch up to the the best examples. And there was in the case of Cookman Square Pianos of that period, there was an example in South Carolina at the Segal Music Museum, there was very nearly the same date and had original dampers, and I had occasion to spend a couple of hours documenting those dampers and I was able to make a new set of dampers.
Mr. Watson: [00:15:40] And I documented in the report that we made new ones and and probably in some ways on the instrument itself, I don’t remember exactly how you might have inscribed dates, but yeah, that’s, that’s one of the things you do. You do your homework and try to figure out what what is not right and, and whether it needs to be corrected. Another thing you do is, okay, now you know that something or other is not right is let’s see if I can think of an example on those instruments. Well, I’m going to have to talk in generalities. I’m not thinking of an example, but but there’s considered that there’s there’s some problem that needs to be corrected. And my routine at that point in planning the treatment is to think of a solution. It needs such and such a part made and designed it like this. But I never just then act on that plan, even though it may be a good plan, because I as a personal discipline, I think this is worth doing. I think of another approach. Let’s say, for example, this first idea is not going to work or just put that out of your head. Now think of a different way, and I think of several different solutions to whatever the restoration problem is to solve. And then I choose from those different options, whichever one will. Now, here’s a really important phrase. Get the restoration job done with the least impact on historical evidence.
Dr. Giles: [00:17:34] What about? Can I just interrupt just for one second? You know, the Broadwood piano that we discovered had a massive crack in it. Would that be an example of of when you’re trying to come up with some sort of solution that would save it?
Mr. Watson: [00:17:48] Absolutely. And I’m glad you thought of that for that. Right. And that that’s a fantastic example, just because it’s so tough. And yeah, I made a game of trying to think of all the possible solutions and each one was very intrusive. You just it’s there’s something about the way the the way the dovetails fit on the front, back and side and how everything is glued up. It’s not a matter of just detaching the side, gluing it back together and reattaching. You have to break apart a bunch of other stuff and stuff that really was not intended to be easy to break apart. So yeah, sure, it’d be done. But it’s, it’s really, it’s really very intrusive. And someday I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll think of the perfect solution. And I’ll call you on the phone and tell you what it is. But meanwhile, I’m still stuck on that one.
Peter Petroff: [00:18:56] All right.
Mr. Watson: [00:18:58] So.
Peter Petroff: [00:18:59] You know, speaking about a lot of these instruments in our collection and just in general, how can collections like ours maintain the work that you do on these instruments?
Mr. Watson: [00:19:08] Yeah, that’s a great question. So the idea is. The work has been done by restorer or conservator and is delivered to you and it plays well. And now time, this time does its dirty work and there’s deterioration. Wear and tear happens. If you’re going to use the instruments, there absolutely will be wear and tear. But even if you didn’t play the instruments, there’s also going to be some deterioration at that point. Conservation exists in several, several different forms. One is in preventive or restorative conservation. It’s really hands on. You actually are changing the object to to to restore it. But another is what’s called preventive conservation. And there are many conservators who who that’s that’s what they are, preventive conservation or conservators in which they’re not so much working or not at all working on the objects. They’re paying attention to the space around the objects. They’re looking at humidity and the fluctuations of temperature and relative humidity. They’re looking at radiation. Most damaging it. All of all, it is sunlight reaching the object. They’re looking at biological hazards such as bugs or or mold, mildew that could come from high humidity. They’re looking at all these different threats that act on organic materials. And and that’s a big job all by itself. So and another part of that, you know, we spend a lot of time as conservators talking about what we call the agents of decay. And I just named several of them.
Mr. Watson: [00:21:25] But one of the agents of decay is people or handling or maybe we should say mishandle. And really in a musical instrument collection, mishandling can take the form of overuse. Maybe because we need to be aware that because there is wear and tear in use, then I think of it in terms of cost benefit balance. So so let me give an example. Somebody wants to maybe a. Somebody wants to experience the Clementi grand piano. And they’re they’re pianists and they’re very enthusiastic and they want to learn what it’s like. So they come in, they get permission, and they spend a couple of days playing it. But no one is hearing them play. So there’s there is really substantial wear and tear going on. That’s the cost. What is the benefit? Well, there’s benefit. This person is satisfying their curiosity or they’re learning about the piano. And it kind of then depends on what in the future, how will they put that knowledge to work, to spread it to many other people? But just contrast that with arranging a concert or a recording and and there’s some practice. And then there’s the performance that is put on a recording that then is heard by thousands of people. And that’s a that’s a that’s a very big benefit. So it’s everything. It can really be judged as far as our handling is concerned in terms of cost and benefit.
Peter Petroff: [00:23:27] I’m sorry. I was muted. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That’s really interesting. I think we’ve got one more question for you.
Mr. Watson: [00:23:37] Okay.
Peter Petroff: [00:23:39] So just regarding the work that you’ve done with the keyboard instruments in the mic, is there an instrument in the collection you’ve particularly enjoyed working on or presented as an interesting challenge?
Mr. Watson: [00:23:55] They, you know. I think I hope this doesn’t seem disappointing, but I think whatever I’m working on at the moment is the most important, most interesting instrument I’ve ever seen. And and I guess maybe that’s a way of saying every one of them, even when they’re not unique. They they are in some ways all unique. And there are always variations. I’ve often thought that. I’ve come across. I do. I keep a database of historic pianos. And I’ve had a couple of occasions I’m thinking one in particular where a piano in Florida and a piano in Richmond, Virginia, made by the same maker with four digit serial numbers that are one number apart. So like the two were in the workshop together, probably made at the same time. And for all practical purposes, you look at them and they look identical. Well, to me that. That is so exciting because. Not because they’re probably similar, but well, what are the differences between them and what does that say about how the work the workshop worked? You know, did did they use templates or did they kind of measure from scratch? Did they. Did they you know, were they working in a creative way, separately on each one, or were they just sort of cranking out, according to however, their jigs and templates were made that would tell us a great deal about that workshop precisely because they seem very similar.
Mr. Watson: [00:25:44] So which is an extreme example, just to say that every instrument has something pretty important to tell us about the past. One of the things that that I that I really hope to to impress on people who work with historic objects is especially musical instruments. I think we’re always we’re sort of oriented to excellence. And we judge we judge good playing or bad playing good instruments or bad instruments. But when it comes to historic instruments and now I’m speaking as a as a historian, there can be no such thing as a bad instrument. There can be no such thing as the maker getting it wrong. They’re doing an honest effort to build the instrument the way they think it should be made. And if there’s something I disagree with about the way they did it. That’s evidence. That’s something. Something interesting that I should be paying attention to. So all of these objects are trying to tell us. About a moment in the past, a moment that we care about. It’s not just trying to get the perfect instrument to recreate a Beethoven sonata. It’s it’s about trying to get back in, step into a world from 250 years ago and and understand the workshops that created these instruments. Yeah.
Peter Petroff: [00:27:19] That’s fantastic. That’s so much information. And we really appreciate you coming on being here with us. Is there anything else just to finish up that you’d like to tell us about? Restoration, conservation?
Mr. Watson: [00:27:38] I. I don’t think so. I might. I might report that. I’m a member of the American Musical Instrument Society. And and so here’s a group of people, scholars of different types that gather. And we care a lot about historic instruments. And there’s there’s discussion from time to time about collections. Some collections are private. Some collections are by individuals and or or major museums. But there’s a class of collections that are at universities and do is often comes up as an example of that. And certainly Yale University is one. And the the the early keyboard studies people at Cornell have a growing collection and so forth, and there are many others. But there’s an interesting different set of challenges that university based collections have. And, and it’s on the one hand, there are students who stand to gain a great deal from that collection and then propagate the benefits through a whole career of working with teaching other people and playing music and so forth, enriched by their experience of the university collection, where they where they were taught. That’s that’s the ideal. But on the other hand, it’s kind of it’s not unusual that the collection was. A gift at one time. And the the management of a collection is not the same as what universities do. So in a way, it’s kind of a peculiar marriage that is not is not necessarily natural. So there are challenges. You have some special challenges because of being a university collection. So I don’t know. I guess I would just say there are people out here that really care about your success and and very eager to help in some way in terms of advice or or whatever. But but what you’re doing is important. And and I really appreciate I really appreciate seeing what you’re doing right now because you’re reaching out and you’re you’re trying to you’re trying to enhance kind of your own understanding of the collection that you have. And that’s that’s fantastic. I cheer you on.
Peter Petroff: [00:30:24] Yes, sir. Well, thank you so much. And for your help, your time. And we promise we’ll do everything we can to make make better.
Dr. Giles: [00:30:33] So I think. Yeah, that was that was wonderful. Thank you, Peter. And also, of course, to John for such wonderful I mean, so I wonder if we could just take a brief second. I mean, the students have had have been working very hard. And I wonder if we might just amongst us just talk a little bit about Hannah and Peter. You could tell John about what you’ve been doing and see what he thinks of it, which I think would be great, because they’ve been getting kind of different perspectives on musical instruments from people who, you know, who play them or who know about their social history. And obviously, you know a lot about the very practical, the way that they’re built and how they’re they’re preserved for us to learn from. So, I don’t know, I guess. Do you want to Hannah and Peter just take a second to tell to talk about what what you’ve been doing and see, you know?
Mr. Watson: [00:31:29] Yeah.
Hannah Krall: [00:31:30] Yeah. I think it’s important to note the first few weeks of this program, the students took an interest in the non-Western instruments in this selection. So they moved the ratio of instruments where I believe it used to be probably like 85% Western instruments, you know, 15% non-Western instruments. And I would say right now it’s, you know, 5050, almost like there’s probably. So I think that’s what.
Peter Petroff: [00:32:01] Probably more non-Western instruments.
Hannah Krall: [00:32:03] Honestly, that’s great. But they move the ratio around, which is really interesting, taking these instruments out of what we call the Harry Potter closet because it’s underneath the stairs and actually getting to put them in the museum instead of hiding them away has been a really fulfilling part of this project for me.
Mr. Watson: [00:32:27] It’s so interesting that you should bring that up and make that observation. As I said, I just I just came from an AMIS meeting that was in Calgary, and I’m now at a stage in my career, you know, I’m an elder statesman. Or to put another way, I’m sort of on the decline here. And as I look at the young people and Amis has done a pretty good job of of involving young people. So there are a growing number of them in in the group. And I yeah, I came up, you know, in the 1970s, all the rage was very Eurocentric and and that’s where my roots are and that’s where my knowledge is. And at this conference, I never thought I would observe this about an AMIS meeting, but the word harpsichord was said once from the podium, and it was in relation to a sculpture that was marble. It was a non playing instrument. The word clever chord was never mentioned once, but there was one session on woodwind instruments. But there were. There was more about ethnographic instruments, non-western. And in that particular setting, being at Calgary, they’re far and away.
Mr. Watson: [00:33:56] Their strength is electronic instruments, electronic recording, studio equipment and all of that, all of which can be considered musical instruments. And I can’t tell you how many electronic circuit maps I saw projected on the screen. So yeah, times are changing and I, you know, I applaud it. By all means. We should be it’s essential for inclusion to to consider the music of the whole world. And I don’t know, I’m debating with myself and I kind of if I had my conference to do over again, I think I would interview some of the younger some of the people like yourself and find out what draws them to this other these other worlds of music, which I absolutely respect. But to find out more about it, but also I kind of I can’t help but wonder about the world that I grew up with. And what have we done? Have we finished with the 18th century? Is that do we know all we need to know about the 18th century? And now we really need to focus on popular music of the 1960s. Maybe I just find that an interesting question that I.
Dr. Giles: [00:35:25] I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but we have a kind of derelict Moog synthesizer. It’s somewhere, and I. I don’t know. I think it’s still works, but it’s one of those things where, I mean, you can’t you really can’t get around the fact that it is a historical instrument.
Mr. Watson: [00:35:40] Absolutely.
Dr. Giles: [00:35:41] You know, even though it and then the whole idea of all these things that you’re talking about, conservation and restoration, I mean, that needs to be restored in order. Yes. Because it can it can be from someone who knows how to make it work again.
Mr. Watson: [00:35:57] Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, if you ever if you ever have a chance to experience a studio bell in the National Music Museum in Calgary, that’s their world. And they have I think they have either on staff or in a tight orbit around them. They have the brightest and best in the world. And they’re so knowledgeable and so enthusiastic. And as I said, you know, a a a console that I don’t remember what they’re called, but the thing with hundreds of knobs on it that you the technician, operates during a recording session from the 1960s, they are fully aware of it as an instrument itself. It had an impact on the sound and and they respect it for its material preservation of of a historical thing time situation. And they’re trying to to respect and preserve these things they need to keep them playing. But. But capacitors, link leak, PCBs. And they have to be replaced. And it’s it’s a mess. But oh, they’re so very, very serious about it. That’s time marches on. Music marches on.
Dr. Giles: [00:37:24] Peter, do you want to take a minute to just talk a little bit about what what you’ve been doing with the website I saw this morning? The entry on the porta tube organ is really, really neat. Just want to take just a couple of minutes.
Peter Petroff: [00:37:37] So there’s four students, four undergrads working on it, including myself. And with the website we are taking all the stuff we’ve researched and taking photos of all the instruments that we’re including in the collection. And right now we’re right in the thick of it, but we’re putting all the basic details that we can find, like a place of origin, date created or range of dates and the collection numbers. So it’s still like accessible for anyone who’s working with the collection or here visiting the actual museum. Great. But we are putting like we have all our sources cited and we’re creating a database basically for everyone who wants to visit virtually to find all the instruments in the collection, just the same as if you came here and be able to see them and read about their story. They have a section dedicated to story and it can change depending on the instrument. Some have very interesting makers, some have very interesting locations, some at both or others just different ways of exploring the impact of those instruments in different eras.
Mr. Watson: [00:38:49] Fantastic.
Peter Petroff: [00:38:50] Yeah, so we’ve been doing that research. Took a while. This is going to take a while as well, but it’s worthwhile and that we put a lot of work into it. So, you know, the structure is all there and now we just have to put the information in.
Mr. Watson: [00:39:07] That’s fantastic. You’re not at the mic. You’re not as reliant on foot traffic, people coming to visit as other museums. But but I’ll just mention a phenomenon. Some some museums are still a little concerned. You know, if they put too much on online, then why would people bother to come and visit and pay for tickets to see our collection? But in fact, the opposite is true. This was driven home to me a few years ago, and then I’ve had it reinforced a hundred ways ever since the the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was discussing this and this idea of how much do we put online and will it keep people from coming to visit if we do that? And he said the one exhibit that he was involved with in the whole history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that attracted the most visitors. It was when they had the Mona Lisa. And you think about it, the one image that everybody knows best in the world, was that enough to have seen, you know, reproductions or pictures of it? No. The mere fact of the. The year of it made it all the more desirable to come and actually see it with your own eyes. So maybe maybe I’m warning you, you’re going to you’re going to get more people wanting to visit.
Peter Petroff: [00:40:34] I’m pretty sure ours is free anyway, so yeah, either way. But yeah, I know that. Yeah, that’s a great point.
Mr. Watson: [00:40:40] That’s. That’s terrific. You’re doing all the right things, so I’m thrilled.
Peter Petroff: [00:40:47] We really appreciate that. Yeah.
Dr. Giles: [00:40:50] Wonderful. Well, thank you again for for joining us. It was really fantastic.
Mr. Watson: [00:40:56] Great. And the next time the university collections come up in the in a discussion at AMIS, I’m going to be able to give a very glowing report on what they’re doing down at DUMIC.
Peter Petroff: [00:41:07] Well, we’ll be looking forward to that.
Dr. Giles: [00:41:09] Yeah, we’ll be sure to send it to you when it’s done so you can have a look for yourself.
Mr. Watson: [00:41:13] Yeah, great. I will look forward to it.
Peter Petroff: [00:41:15] Thank you again.
Dr. Giles: [00:41:17] Okay, great. Thank you, everyone.
Mr. Watson: [00:41:19] Yeah. Okay. Bye bye. Stay well.
|
|