FortePianos by Keith Hill Click here for a Sound Sample Over the last fifteen years, I have regularly made both five octave and six and one half octave fortepianos. The one pictured here is a Cristofori style fortepiano of my own design. The models which I made were selected on the basis of how well, in my judgment, the original maker solved all of the problems of physical design, functional design, and acoustical design. The action had to work smoothly and reliably under every manner of touch. It had to feel light yet secure. It had to function silently. It had to feel positive yet supple. The instrument had to hold its tuning for an extended period of time without being overbuilt. It had to be easy to get the action in and out of the keywell. It had to be easy to regulate and adjust; and it had to hold a regulation within a given season. It had to sound firm and resonant without sounding harsh or dull. It had to have an extremely full yet singing treble, a colorful and full middle range, and a solid, sonorous bass. It had to be loud enough for concerto playing yet be able to play at a pppp range with relative ease and still have that level of volume project to the end of a large room. Finally, it had to be a beautiful piece of furniture. PianoForte after Cristofori Based on the 1726 Cristofori now in Leipzig. Click here for a Sound Sample of my first Cristofori type fortepiano I have made four of this type of piano, like that shown in the picture above, in the last years and find that they are more rewarding to build than the Viennese type of piano—a wholly unexpected discovery—for a variety of reasons...all of them musical. The light and resilient parchment hammers make as pure a sound as possible on a piano which translates into a high degree of color or timbre flexibiliy for the player. The sound of brass wires is enchanting, which makes improvising on this piano easy. The action likes to play softly yet the light construction of the corpus gives the tone great resonance which makes for intensely sweet softs. The very light leather dampers silence the strings in such a way as to make using a lever to raise the dampers largely unnecessary. Still, I provide a knee lever for that purpose to make the performance of the later literature possible. Cristofori carefully solved most of the problems of making a piano. The only limitation with his design is that it has only four octaves. Like Silbermann, I make my Florentine style piano with five octaves but with an additional two notes to play all of Scarlatti. My Cristofori type pianos are strung entirely in brass as I believe the original to have been. The tone which results is pure, sweet, extremely colorful, and very resonant, yet easily loud enough to be used for Bach or Mozart concertos. Furthermore, Cristofori designed a powerful but subtle action. The only real defect in his design is his use of a “gang” axle for the hammers, which are fitted with hard leather bushings, supposedly to help silence any action noise--this always leads to a high maintenance, noisy clacking mechanism when the action is pushed to its limits. I have solved this design problem, to eliminate maintenance and noise, in a wholly 18th century manner. The result is an action that provides a controllable gradation from soft to loud (ppppp - fff) without clacking or distorting. Click here for another Sound Sample from my second Cristofori type fortepiano. In this perfomance of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata-first movement, you will hear the piece played exactly as Beethoven indicated. That is, senza sordini and una chorda throughout. One of the least expected benefits of each of these Cristofori inspired instruments is that they tend to stay in tune like a rock!!! At least after the first month of being strung up and put in tune. The first few weeks while the tension is forcing the instrument to get used to it and while the strings themselves are stretching out these instrument are as stable as any instrument experiencing its first taste of tension. But after that point they are vastly more stable than the Viennese instruments I have built or any harpsichord, for that matter. Every fortepiano maker today is faced with the vexing problem of how to obtain suitable leather for voicing fortepiano hammers. I conducted numerous experiments in leather making using vegetable liquors because I find all the currently available leathers to be technically inferior to the original leathers and, not surprisingly, acoustically incompetent. Solving this problem has not been easy because there are so many variables that bear upon the evidence left to us in the piano hammer leathers used by the Viennese piano makers from 1780 to 1840. Now, after countless experiments, I am happy to report, I have a vegetable tanned leather which fulfills my every demand for how a high quality fortepiano hammer leather should behave physically, technically, and acoustically.