Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (27 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Mechanical music had a long but restricted
history before the late nineteenth century. As far back as 1430, wheels with pins were built into stringed instruments, and a related playable instrument, a barrel organ, survives from 1502. Nineteenth-century technology gave new vitality to this old idea. The first systems were not great improvements on their medieval predecessors. A British patent was issued for a crude barrel piano, activated
by pins on a large cylinder, in 1829. Most of these devices, though, were intended for taverns, dance halls, or street performances rather than bourgeois homes.
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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.

The player piano substituted technology for skill with unexampled boldness and ubiquity. Automata built in the late eighteenth century had executed drawings, and had even
appeared to play chess, but they had been precious playthings. Player pianos were affordable and widely available. Small motors replaced foot pedals as sources of air pressure. By 1910, a second generation of “reproducing” pianos appeared, using a system developed by the German firm Welte to record the subtleties of performance. Nearly every celebrated pianist of the time was recorded with this
system. By 1926, one maker was even able to capture the speed with which hammers hit the strings, making such accurate and complete data recordings that—when converted for playback on today’s CD-controlled pianos—they produce uncannily vivid musical performances with no trace of the original roll’s honky-tonk effect. Pianists were even able to edit master recordings to correct their false notes.
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High-quality recorded music led to bitter controversies over copyright laws, much like present-day litigation over shared MP3 files, but disputes went beyond intellectual property issues. Composers, performers, and critics wrangled over the consequences of the new devices for the study and use of the piano. Did technology threaten musicianship or promise to enhance it? Foreshadowing some of the
points later made by Walter Benjamin and other members of the Frankfurt school, the bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa wrote a widely reprinted article, “The Menace
of Mechanical Music.” Player pianos and phonographs, he warned, were about to “reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things,” diminishing
music by soulless uniformity Cultural technophiles among music critics and teachers countered that what detractors scorned as “canned music” was welcome competition for inferior live performances. Not only would musical reproduction elevate tastes, they believed, but the player piano would aid teaching. Musical notation could be printed on the rolls themselves, though it seldom was in practice.
Speed could be adjusted to help students learn complex pieces gradually; between the wars some celebrated performers, including Fats Waller, learned this way
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