Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
Page 23
The transition from the horn springs of early medieval organs to the diverse actions of keyboard instruments is still imperfectly known. But historians have been able to explore their milieu: a burst of mechanical ingenuity most spectacularly expressed in the astronomical clocks of the day the first in the world to convert the force of a falling weight into uniform oscillating motion. Cathedrals and royal palaces soon boasted wonders of precision, with animated figures and sound effects, centers of pride and amusement and some of the first objects of mass technophilia.5
The same people who were building the new clocks probably played a large part in keyboard design. They were familiar with the latest in metallurgy and with the design of complex linkages like the mechanical crowing cock of the Strasbourg cathedral—the beginnings of the kinematics still used in constructing the reclining chairs we considered in the last chapter. They also were learned in astronomy, mathematics, and music theory. The author of the most important surviving fifteenth-century treatise on musical instruments, Henri Arnaut de Zwolle (d. 1466), was a physician, astronomer, scientist, and builder of clockwork instruments for the Duke of Burgundy. Arnaut’s manuscript has precise diagrams and explanations of four distinct ways of using keys to make strings vibrate. He and his colleagues were like the restless aerospace engineers of the twentieth century6
(Of course, didactic accessibility had, and has, a price. The twelve-tone octave of the standard Western keyboard excludes consistently accurate tuning. C-sharp and D-flat should really be two distinct notes, and on some experimental keyboards the black keys are split horizontally for this purpose. A number of tuning systems have attempted to avoid dissonance and preserve a smooth sound, but they all have one thing in common: at least some notes must be altered for the sake of the whole. In the equal temperament promoted by Johann Sebastian Bach in his Well-Tempered Clavier and almost universally used today, every note is slightly mistuned. Our ears have become so accustomed to this scale that it is easy to forget that it is a compromise forced by the limits of technology. The twelve-tone keyboard also complicates the tuning of instruments. As clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos, known collectively as claviers, spread in the eighteenth century, more and more musicians sought professional tuners. The construction of nineteenth- and twentieth-century pianos has made them indispensable. Like other simplified technologies, the keyboard needs formidable complexity behind its facade.)7
In the early modern period, the instruments described by Arnaut took two main forms. In the clavichord, the keys actuated flattened brass surfaces called tangents that made contact with metallic strings. Because the tangent continued to vibrate the string, the player could control the tone, even swelling it. The sound of a clavichord was clearly audible only within a ten-foot radius, yet in its domestic setting it could produce complex and graceful music. In the harpsichord, the key actuated a wooden bar (jack) holding a quill (pick) that plucked the string. The sound was precise and bright and could fill a room, but it could not be as expressive as that of the clavichord. There was no direct way to control the instrument’s volume or shape individual notes, and the quills wore out.
Three hundred years ago, instrument builders began to develop a technology that would open new styles of music to the keyboard. Bartolomeo Cristofori, a harpsichord builder working in Florence, probably was following a suggestion by his patron, Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, for an instrument that could reflect the expression of the human voice. The pianoforte was not just a clever idea waiting for musical material to take advantage of it; it was a response to a desire for new expressive possibilities. Cristofori abandoned the tangent and the pick for a more powerful way of vibrating the string, a hammer made of strips of parchment covered with leather. The hammer assembly was isolated from the rest of the instrument. The key did not activate the hammer directly as it did in the clavichord; it triggered a lever that in turn set the hammer in motion but broke off all contact with it. Thanks to Cristofori’s escapement mechanism, the hammer bounced off the string as though off a trampoline, awaiting a new stroke, even if the key was still depressed. The strings themselves were thicker and wound to higher tension than those of the clavichord, producing a stronger sound and also permitting more rapid repetition. A system of levers increased the force of the hammer eightfold. Even so, the sound was softer than that of the harpsichord, and softer than that of a modern, iron-framed piano. Linked to the keys were dampers— felt-covered blocks—that rose when keys were struck and made contact again to arrest the vibration of strings after the keys were released. Later in the eighteenth century, pedals were introduced to keep all the dampers lifted and prolong the sound.8
To keep the key from unwanted rebounds, Cristofori included a silk check-cradle to hold it back after it had fallen, without obstructing the next stroke. He changed the internal architecture of the harpsichord, moving the strings closer to the action. He developed most of the central concepts of the modern piano. Yet despite its possibilities and some interest from Johann Sebastian Bach, Cristofori’s invention remained mostly a curiosity for the rest of the eighteenth century, especially in his native Italy Some of his pianofortes were converted back to harpsichords, and in 1774 Voltaire deemed the pianoforte an instrument for a tinker (chaudronnier) “in comparison to the magnificent harpsichord.”9
What Voltaire missed, in his scorn, was the miraculous capacity of the pianoforte—then barely explored, it is true—to produce a range of shading and timbre even though the musician has no opportunity to change the color of a note after the hammer contacts the string, except by using the pedals. With control only over the time and strike speed of any given note, a pianist can appear to defy the laws of physics. Generations of psychophysicists and acousticians have wondered how the instrument can work as it does; Sir James Jeans even remarked that it did not matter whether a key was struck with a finger or an umbrella handle. Brent Gillespie, a mechanical engineer and musician, has argued that musicians produce “impossible” shadings by the overlap of notes in phrasing. He gives the example of an arpeggio played with slurred notes, which has a timbre distinct from one with articulated tones.10
The most important eighteenth-century innovation in keyboard technique was independent of Cristofori’s invention: the development of a new fingering system by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788) and his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753–62). C. P E. Bach developed a keyboard technique so valuable to his contemporaries that Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all considered it essential. His best-known innovation was a new emphasis on the thumb and especially its use as a pivot; most music before his time was played largely with four fingers. His father, Johann Sebastian Bach, had been the first to advise turning the thumb under the other fingers. Both technique and technology were ready for a new phase in the history of the keyboard: the piano’s emergence as the central instrument of Western music, and its global diffusion.11
THE MODERN PIANO
Practitioners did as much as inventor-craftsmen to bring about this transformation. Surgeons have long commissioned new instruments not just to improve existing procedures but to make new ones possible. Artists working with their suppliers turned acrylic paints from a World War II military expedient to the medium for achieving the flat surfaces of the New York School. For the spread of the keyboard, few individuals were as important as Ludwig van Beethoven.
Beethoven was the greatest representative of a generation of composers and performers who sought new volume, range, and dynamic shadings in their music. They deliberately exceeded the limits of the instrument with the assumption that if the pianoforte could not produce the sound they desired, its design rather than their music would have to change. Even when performing Mozart’s music at the Viennese court in his youth, Beethoven played with such expressiveness that his page turner later recalled spending all his time removing broken strings and freeing up hammers. Until Beethoven’s time, Viennese pianos had been known for a softer, more “singing” sound than
their English counterparts. Beethoven’s hearing loss, which began in 1802 when he was still in his early thirties, led him to demand even louder adjustment, which he achieved by working with local manufacturers, and to play with even more force. (Musicians favoring a more delicate touch worked with other makers. Chopin was known for his affinity with the Paris firm of Pleyel.) As heavier frames and hammers and higher string tension prevailed, sounding the same note quickly in succession became more difficult. Another famous maker, Erard, responded with a repetition mechanism that kept the hammer poised to strike the same string again.12
To these improvements in technology were added electrifying innovations in technique. As usual, the migration of skills from one domain to another was crucial. The twenty-year-old Franz Liszt, after hearing the astounding (and in popular lore diabolically inspired) effects of Paganini at a Paris concert in 1831, resolved to bring the same style to the piano, and spent several years developing a mixture of technical virtuosity and emotional intensity that made him the most celebrated musician of his time. Liszt’s widely imitated technique in turn helped force changes in technology. In the early 1840s, pianos went out of tune and strings snapped when he performed. His demands helped drive the instrument’s next great change.13
Nineteenth-century pianists, teachers, and manufacturers formed an exceptional community in which the techniques and criticisms of outstanding users were constantly employed to refine and improve products. The ultimate response to the perceived need for a bigger sound became the foundation of the modern piano, the cast-iron frame. Early in the century, makers were bracing wood frames with metal to support higher string tension of up to ten tons and prevent warping with seasonal changes. But cast iron, not reinforced wood, proved the ideal material for piano frames because of its exceptional compressive strength. Today’s frames remain stable under as much as twenty-seven tons of tension in the strings of some grand pianos. Several European and American makers introduced these frames in the 1820s, but the most influential variation was developed by Jonas Chickering of Boston in 1840; by the 1870s, Steinway and Sons of New York had devised the frame and stringing used for grand pianos ever since. Steinway boasted that its design could resist seventy thousand pounds of tension.14
Manufacturers maintained concert halls in major cities as showcases for their instruments and affiliated artists. Long before the golf equipment and athletic shoe industries, they were pioneers in engaging star performers to help market high-technology products. Late-nineteenth-century instruments overwhelmingly incorporated the cast-iron frame and Stein-way’s cross-stringing. Each maker had, and their successors often retain, distinctive innovations and features, but by the 1890s the grand piano was a fully mature technology.
The cast-iron frame fostered careers by making possible solo performances in ever-larger auditoriums and, for the few, princely incomes even in the decades before recording royalties. For amateur musicianship, the great innovations were industrial production and commercial promotion. The instruments of the early century, regardless of frames or mechanisms, were high-priced artisanal products for the upper middle class and upper class. The piano became part of mass culture beginning in the 1850s. Not only was it the most practical way to enjoy music in the household before—and even after—the appearance of the first recordings; it was also a pedagogical tool, thought to build character through exercises and forming an essential part of middle-class education, especially for women. By the turn of the century, economies of scale, including the proliferation of firms supplying actions and other standardized parts for manufacturers, had brought pianos within the reach of the better-off working class. Uprights could rival small grands in tone and occupied far less space than the discredited square piano. In England, pianos were available for as little as £15 at a time when artisans made forty to fifty shillings a week. High-quality pianos were perhaps the greatest bargain; a superb small Bechstein, the equivalent of an instrument costing thousands of pounds today, sold for only about £50. In the United States, Sears, Roebuck advertised a model in the 1890s for $98.50. American piano production reached a peak of 356,000 uprights and 10,000 grands in 1909. Seldom had mechanization so transformed and diffused what remained a complex product of craftsmanship. By 1920, the United States had 7 million pianos for 105 million persons or about one for every four households. Low-priced pianos may have been shameless knockoffs of the great brands, yet their sound satisfied most untrained ears. The keyboard had at last reached the people; for those who could not afford even a cheap piano, there was the accordion.15
SUFFERING FOR BEAUTY
The piano was not just a half-ton of machinery in a wooden cabinet. It had become the centerpiece of a middle-class way of life, in which young women were destined to sacrifice their leisure. For girls of Northern Europe and North America, the skill of playing was an “accomplishment,” a character-building domestic counterpart of the tireless work of the male head of household. The keyboard was a technology that enforced a discipline of practice; it became a kind of Prussian parade ground for young fingers. Most American teachers had learned pedagogy from followers of Siegmund Lebert and Ludwig Stark, authors of a classic treatise on method that went through seventeen editions between 1858 and 1884. All students were expected to follow drills and exercises for hours on end to strengthen the fingers for their “conquest” of the piano. In the 1930s, a contemporary recalled the “torture” of his female contemporaries, comparing practice to “the binding of the feet of the Chinese female child, and for the same purpose—to increase her social prestige when she grew up.”16
Nothing reveals the inexorable demands of nineteenth-century practice as much as its technological fringe, the apparatus sold to develop skills. For building strong fingers, there were spring-loaded devices with names like La Mère de l’Élégance and the Dactylion, and practice pianos with variable resistance. The Technicon and the Manumoneon were multipurpose finger gymnasiums. Gustav Becker, inventor of the second, revealed the mechanical, and dictatorial, side of piano pedagogy in the copy he wrote promoting his invention: “The fingers of the performer are compelled to make the desired motion in a perfect manner, and thus by attentive and continued practice, as per special direction, the student cannot help learning soon to make the movement of his own volition.” Simpler pocket exercisers used rubber bands, and manuals of hand gymnastics recommended corks and napkins. A number of surgeons had thriving practices “liberating the ring finger” by severing the tendons between the fourth and fifth fingers to increase the player’s span. The Ontario engineer J. Brotherhood, not satisfied with the Technicon he had invented, had his right hand modified by a surgeon and was evidently so pleased (and confident) that he later cut the tendons of his own left hand. The leading piano journal, Étude, even endorsed the procedure.17
MECHANIZATION TAKES THE BATON
The triumph of mass manufacturing brought into the skilled worker’s parlor an instrument he and his family no doubt considered superior to the harpsichords of the eighteenth-century aristocracy. But it had a more ambiguous side, and not only for its part in the slaughter of elephants for ivory and the destruction of tropical forests for veneers. As rationalized production and aggressive marketing spread the piano beyond the leisured classes, first-generation piano students discovered that mastering their instrument took more time and sometimes painful practice than salesmen were willing to acknowledge. Indeed, even early in the century some of the aristocratic London clients of the virtuoso teacher Ignaz Moscheles were requesting “brilliant but not difficult” pieces so that their daughters could impress listeners with minimal effort. The search for superficial éclat was the other side of the dictatorial pedagogy the instrument also inspired. And it proved the more durable. We have seen the variety of chairs produced in the late nineteenth century using mechanical systems to relax the upright sitting that had been a Victorian mark of good breeding. It was only logical that the same ingenuity would be applied to tame the imperious piano.18
Nineteenth-century automation promoted new devices and ambitions. Beginning in 1815, the silk mills of Lyons and other cities were using strings of cards with punched holes to reproduce designs on special looms developed by the manufacturer Joseph Marie Jacquard. This was one of the earliest forms of automatic process control in industry Pianos, organs, and other keyboard instruments were obvious candidates for more advanced systems for reproducing recorded notes. The first automatic pianos were rudimentary instruments for places of cheap popular entertainment. The 1880s and 1890s saw a wave of more sensitive players, beginning with organs, that used air pressure controlled by holes in rolls of paper. In 1896 the most influential of the automatic pianos appeared, the Pianola, an initially bulky apparatus that fit over part of a standard piano keyboard and struck the notes in an approximation of a human musician. The pneumatic-activated paper piano roll was some of the first music software: instructions encoded in a flexible medium that could be reproduced and transferred from one playback device to another. In little more than a decade, the flourishing industry was able to build the roll reader and keyboard control systems into the piano itself.