POMONA VALLEY CHAPTER
March Meeting: (3rd Monday)
Date: Monday, March 15, 2021
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Your Device
Zoom Meeting ID: 382 070 2249
Password: 324673
Hello fellow technicians! Hope everyone is well and staying safe out there! This month we are very pleased to have the great David Standwood of the Boston Chapter teach his class:
Core Concepts of Tone and Dolge's Dilemma
The piano hammer of the late romantic period (1840s) inspired the creation of great works by Frédéric Chopin. Those hammers were lightweight, springy soft on the outer surface, with progressively denser layers of felt or leather in towards the wood molding core. The outer layers produced sweet rich pianissimo tone. The dense core drove out a beautiful singing forte tone. In between those extremes the pianist could pick from a wide palette of tone colors. How do these inspiring characteristics carry forward to present day pianos?
Just a few decades after the time of Chopin, piano hammers evolved into unlayered solid felt stretched with high pressure and tension around a wood molding. This produced a hammer of considerably heavier weight to match the increased tonal output for the new high tension instruments of the modern age (1870s - present). Alfred Dolge pioneered the design and manufacturing of these full weight hammers. His methods of production are used on all pianos to this day. The modern hammer is ever denser from surface to core and ever increasing in resiliency and tension from core to surface. In keeping with the Chopin model, Dolge espoused the ideal hammer as having graduated density - softest on the outside and dense within. Therein is a dilemma: How can the surface of hammer felt which is stretched taut also be soft enough to produce the sweetest and richest pianissimo range?
The solution is revealed with some sleuthing into Dolge history, a little basic wool science, demonstrations with mono density rubber hammers, and a bold new approach to sweeten and extend pianissimo ranges. The take away for the piano technician is a deeper understanding and new skills for dealing with piano hammers that are tonally less than their best so that by our work we may bring forth the ageless qualities that inspired Chopin.
David Stanwood lives on the Island of Martha's Vineyard. He is the
inventor of Touch Weight Metrology and Precision Touch Design. His contributions
in that field won him the Distinguished Alumni Award from the North Bennet
Street School as well as induction into the Piano Technicians Guild Hall of
Fame. He has gained deep insight into the mechanical qualities of wool felt by
working with is wife Eleanor who is a professional sheep shearer (retired) and
an internationally recognized felt artist.
http://stanwoodpiano.com/dcs-bio.htm http://artfelts.com/history.html
Hope to see you all there!