[MUSIC] Well, as we follow Robert Blocker from piano to piano, I think you're coming to have an appreciation of why this Yale collection is arguably the finest collection of keyboard instruments in the world. In the far corner you see another remarkable piano, one owned by Richard Wagner at his home in Tribschen, Switzerland. And it was on this instrument that Wagner composed parts of the music of the Ring Cycle, parts of Siegfried and Gotterdamerung. And of course, Wagner's father in law, Franz Liszt played on this piano as well when he visited Wagner. Yet as rich as this instrument is, when Robert Blocker plays it, you'll be struck by its clarity. >> And now here today at Yale we have not only the opportunity for our students to play and to learn from this instrument, but with yet a new technology to share this with a wider world. As Craig pointed out earlier, this piano has a lot of clarity. And I wanted to use a couple of examples from the Brahms Intermezzo, Opus 118. Late pieces in Brahms' life where he's refined this orchestra style in an economy of resources, and you can hear some of the contrapuntal things that I'm going to point out and what clarity is. First of all, an excerpt from Opus 118 Number 2. [MUSIC] So you can hear the voices very clearly interacting with each other. The piano has a lot of strength from Opus 116. Again, the B section of the capriccio. [MUSIC] So in this piano we better understand certainly the dramatic contrasts that we hear in Wagner's writing. Because the piano gives him that basis for thinking about this in his own imagination. >> Now we move to an instrument that is less clear but much richer in sound, the massive Steinway of just three years later, 1867, only three years after the end of the American Civil War. The Steinway in the Yale Collection is so big that it requires a special corner all to itself. Notice that it's far bigger than any instrument we've seen, the biggest in the collection. We've arrived at the nine foot long concert grand of today. But the year is only 1867. It was built, not in Vienna or in Berlin by Germans, but by German immigrants coming to America, in this case one Henrick Steinweg. Now, Herr Steinweg soon became Mr. Steinway, who setup a piano manufacturing company in New York in the 1850s. And we'll be joined by Nicholas Renouf, senior curator of the collection to introduce us to this massive new instrument. So welcome to America, that burgeoning dynamic new country in which technology was changing everything. We're going to take a look now and a listen to beautiful large Steinway piano that has a signficantly different sound to it than the one we just heard with the earlier Wagnerian Bechstein. So we've left Germany, Switzerland, and now we are only three years later in the United States with this new Steinway piano. >> This instrument, dating from 1867, was made at a time when our country was coming of age, not only industrially, but culturally as well. Examples such as this, and instruments by Steinway's rival, Chickering, set the European industry on its ears. They were appalled that we had done something that so impressed the public and musicians as well. What we see here is a complete unitary cast iron frame that's absolutely rigid in its resistance of the string tension. So even greater sonority is possible with this instrument. It has the overstrung bass that made history as well as the cast iron frame. And it gives us really the modern piano. >> It also, I should add, has a very different action. And when we speak of the piano action, it's the way the keys react when they're depressed. And this is a very, very sensitive action but certainly not as sensitive as some of the earlier pianos. >> [LAUGH] >> Nothing is as sensitive as that first Beethoven piano. But just to give us a good comparison, I want to use the same Brahms examples that we did on the Bechstein. And you can see, even in this wonderful, large Steinway piano, you have a clarity of sound and even more expansive range, and especially color because of the cross-stringing. [MUSIC] >> To amplify two points made by Nicholas and Robert, the massive size of the Steinway is made possible owing to an innovation of an American company in Boston, the Chickering Piano Company. Now Chickering introduced the uniform or single piece cast iron frame. Now you can see on the left here, the German Bechstein of 1864 with the pieces of iron that are attached to other pieces of iron. With the Steinway, there is much more iron surrounding the entire sound board. it's all one piece, single cast. And a second point, Robert mentioned the over stringing of the Steinway. You can see with the Bechstein on the left that the bass strings run out in a straight line with the other strings. To the right you see that the Steinway company decided to take those bass strings and run them up and over the middle strings. The earlier Bechstein did have an advantage. Parallel stringing did produce a very clear sound. The Steinway, with its overstringing, creates a richer, more homogenous sound. And after Steinway really all grand pianos were made with this overstringing technique. But as we can see, the overstringing is more readily apparent here on this overhead photo of a modern Steinway. The middle strings run straight out. Follow the red arrow there straight out. While the low bass strings ride up and over, as indicated by the blue arrow. Let's go back to the collection now for a final thanks to our two guests. So that concludes our brief tour of this extraordinary collection of keyboard instruments. Again, arguably the finest collection of keyboard instruments in the world. My thanks to Robert Blocker, Dean of the Yale School of Music, Senior Curator Nicholas Renouf of the collection of musical instruments. This collection, this splendid collection is open to the public. So if you're ever in New Haven please come join me and join our colleagues at the collection here at Yale. Thanks very much. And the final takeaway from our visit to the Yale collection of musical instruments, in the first 100 years of the existence of the piano, from its invention in 1700 to the piano of around 1800, not all that much changed. But during the next 60 years or so, up to the Steinway of 1867 that we saw, the piano changed enormously, going from an almost tiny toy with limited sound to a monster of various colors and huge sound. Notice of course that all this happened during what period in Western history? Well, the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America. For the piano, the great age of change was the 60 years between 1800 and 1860. And not much has changed on the concert grand since then. The Industrial Revolution with the piano and with other musical instruments, as we'll see, was the first great era of technological change in Western musical history. The second great change of technological advance came during the 20th century with the popularization of recorded music. And then especially with a capacity to digitalize recorded sound to the point that the entire world of music can now be contained in a phone and held in your hand. Now that's real change.
