If all these and the innumerable others have no other value, they at least teach that inventive genius and the hunger for improvement do not entirely sleep; that the pianoforte is continually being improved, and that many are spending their time in finding new ways of improvement. It shows that the value of the pianoforte to the community is sufficiently great to cause the expenditure of much valuable thought upon its mechanical and musical betterment. The fact that these things happen should console anyone who has ever thought that the limit of mechanical excellence had been reached.
The designing of a pianoforte is art with a big A. It demands of its practitioners the temperament of an artist and the skill of an excellent mechanic. There is no greater pleasure and no nobler work than the construction of an instrument equipped to give forth lovely tone and to interpret the inspired works of the masters of music. May the advancing years bring the pianoforte as much more of mechanical and musical excellence as the last two centuries have so richly imparted.
And now our task is done. It has been a labor of love to place the results of long study and much practical experience before those to whom this exposition of the principles of pianoforte construction might be expected to appeal. It has been far from easy to put into really intelligible and concise English an explanation of certain of these laws; and if the reader finds here aught of vagueness or obscurity, may he blame the subject rather than the author. The latter has, as best he might, laid down the principles that underly the right building of the noblest musical instrument that man has yet devised. And in the contemplation of these principles he may properly be content to leave his patient readers.
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PIANOFORTE BUILDING.
APPENDIX A.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PLAYER-PIANO.
Events are moving quickly in these latter days, and the conservative pianoforte trade is feeling the effect of the extraordinarily active spirit of constructive commercialism that is so pronounced a feature of the contemporary industrial movement. When the first chapters of the present work were in course of preparation, some two years ago, the pianoforte equipped with an interior playing mechanism was just beginning to be heard of; to-day its manufacture and marketing are recognized features in the policy of nearly all pianoforte houses. It would therefore be unwise to conclude the present treatise without certain observations on the player-piano question, although a truly philosophic temper would probably prefer that some further time elapse before any feature of the player-piano problem be considered in a work of the same scope and character as this. Abandoning the strict scientific view of our duty in this matter, however, we may better adopt a more popular point d’appui and round off this work with a few observations on the more important and essential underlying problems connected with this new and remarkable movement in the pianoforte world.
Had the exterior type of pianoforte playing device—the so-called cabinet-player, in fact—remained alone and supreme in the territory that it first opened to exploration and development, this work would contain no notice of any mechanism of the kind. But since the movement has spread until it comprehends the pianoforte itself, since, in the nature of things, such a development must profoundly affect the solution of the problems that confront the pianoforte maker in the construction of his instrument, it seems to be not only natural, but imperative, that we should devote some space to certain notes on the player-piano problem and its relation to the application of such acoustical and mechanical principles as are germane to the theory of pianoforte construction.
We are under no obligation to delve into the history of these ingenious devices. The plan of this work requires nothing of the sort. We may say, however, that the first impetus towards the production of a piano playing mechanism came about through the success of the self-playing organ which began to appear about fifteen years ago. Meanwhile various inventors had experimented with electrical devices and had succeeded in producing a mechanism that could be placed within the case of the instrument without entailing any great distortion of form. Such devices, however, were, with some exceptions, exceedingly mechanical in effect, and did little to show the possibility of adequately rendering pianoforte music through artificial means.