legends Greater Astoria Historial Society 35-20 Broadway, 4th Floor | L.I.C., NY 11106 718.278.0700 | www.astorialic.org Gallery Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays 2-5 PM Saturdays 12-5 PM Exhibits ~ Lectures ~ Documentaries ~ Books Walking Tours ~ Historical Research Unique & Creative Content For more information visit us on the web at www.astorialic.org This image adapted from an invitation to the Long Island City Athletics 33rd Annual Masque Ball, 1909. 32 SEPTEMBER 2013 I LIC COURIER I www.queenscourier.com Our story starts with Heinrich Steinweg, son of a German woodworker, whose first musical instrument crafted was a simple fife. After marriage, he made musical instruments in Seesen, a small town near the Harz Mountains. In 1850, he came to America with his family. Only eldest son Theodore remained in Germany and assumed the reigns of his father’s German operations. In 1853, Heinrich and his four sons formed their partnership, Steinway & Sons. Two sons, Henry Jr. and Theodore, took up the task of reinventing the piano. Henry won acclaim with adding the middle or sostenuto pedal to the piano and with revolutionizing the stringing of the harp, thereby greatly enhancing its tone – two breakthroughs that got the world’s attention. Henry Jr. died in his mid-30s of poor health.Theodore not only continued Henry Jr.’s work, but brought his own boundless energy and genius to the effort making him, in some regard, the most innovative technician in the instrument’s history. Theodore kept a lively correspondence with German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, the pioneer for the study of acoustics who, incidentally, worked out his ideas on a Steinway piano. Countless experiments were conducted at the Steinway factories. Theodore set the length of the grand piano at nine feet, banished the traditional square piano in favor of uprights and set their height at five feet. The number of keys in a piano, which had been growing over the decades, was fixed at 88. His improvements to the action assemblies were so advanced for their time that modern components still seamlessly fit into his 1871 action assemblies. Theodore’s experiments on the harp developed a bronze-iron alloy that could easily bear double the previous string tension. Within a fraction of the previous size and footprint, the piano’s power, volume, and brilliance jumped accordingly. He created the “duplex scale” – essentially coaxing the entire string to contribute to the note, and by doing so, created a dimension of sound not found in other makes. LEGENDS OF LIC BY GREATER ASTORIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY LEGENDS OF LIC Finally, he made the instrument more stable by gluing together, in a rim press, multiple laminations of wood. Not only was it far stronger than traditional designs, but the rim’s sleek smooth “S” curve in the treble that bent, on the base side, back to the keyboard with once continuous piece is both elegant and sublime. Craig Collins, in his profile of the Steinways titled “An American Saga,” stated that the entry of the Steinway Centennial Grand at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition “stunned every piano maker at the fair. Its showing was, in effect, the world premiere of the modern grand piano. Piano makers saw the Steinway, recognized it was the future, and went home to copy it. Soon virtually all adopted the ‘Steinway System.’” The modern grand piano was developed while the Steinways lived at the Steinway Mansion at the end of Steinway Street in Astoria. Next: “Papa would be proud” – founding the Steinway settlement Making Making the modern piano modern
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