Research Guides: Music Library Thematic Displays: Steinway and Sons

Who is Henry E. Steinway

Henry E. Steinway (1797-1871)

Born in Wolfshagen, Germany, Steinway lost most of his family, so he joined the German military. During this time, he mastered woodworking and cabinetry and soon became an apprentice to an organ builder. Steinway fell in love with building instruments and created his own square piano in 1835. Due to the political climate in Germany, Steinway and his family immigrated to New York City in 1850. Henry and his sons created Steinway and Sons in 1853 as the local piano factory, but soon grew to impact culture and the future of piano playing.

"Henry Steinway - Builder of Outstanding Pianos" by Dennis Karwatka
Call Number: Online Article
Publication Date: 2012

What is Steinway and Sons?

Steinway and Sons

Henry E. Steinway instilled an understanding that each Steinway piano is to be built by experts’ hands that “humanize” the pianos as a work of art. Every individual part is created unique just like the person purchasing the piano. Because of this commitment to quality, Steinway became the choice for 98% of concertizing artists.

Steinway and Sons by Richard K. Lieberman
Call Number: ML 424.S76L54
The Steinway - once called the instrument of the immortals - is considered by many as more than the pre-eminent American piano. It is also a symbol of Old World craftsmanship combined with American capitalism, of technological innovation, and of remarkable family management. This study tells the story of the Steinway piano company and the people behind it.
The Official Guide to Steinway Pianos by Roy F. Kehl
Call Number: ML694 .K44
(Amadeus). The Official Guide to Steinway Pianos is a compendium from the archives of renowned piano maker Steinway & Sons to encompass for the first time reference material and details from 16 decades of Steinway piano making in New York. Thirty years of research and compilation by authors Roy F. Kehl and David R. Kirkland bring to light with thorough precision the production history of Steinway pianos. A "family tree" of Steinway production history provides in-depth, complete historical listings of every model produced and their characteristic details, with first/last serial numbers and production dates, individual scale studies for major models, highlights of important changes and events in Steinway piano production by serial number and date, a gallery of Steinway decalcomania by years, a table of Steinway patents, and tables of historic Steinway steel wire sizes. The Guide is an indispensable tool for piano technicians and dealers who need to determine the relationship of a particular Steinway piano within the historical framework of the company's overall production, as well as a means to help identify, establish the provenance of, and verify and preserve the originality of any given Steinway piano. Through compilation of pinpoint information, the Guide offers an accurate and fascinating resume of Steinway & Sons' ongoing production history.
People and Pianos: a Practical History of Steinway and Sons by Theodore E. Steinway
Call Number: ML424.S76 S8

All-Steinway Schools

The All-Steinway School designation is given by Steinway and Sons when an institution meets certain criteria concerning ownership and maintenance of Steinway and Steinway-designed pianos. The school must own at least 10 pianos, and 90% of their pianos must be Steinways or Steinway Designs, including Boston and Essex pianos. The remaining 10% is to accommodate special pianos that are gifts to the school or serve the purpose for being maintained.

The first All-Steinway School was the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1877, since then over 200 conservatories, schools, colleges, and universities have been given the distinction. UTK received its distinction in 2013.

Below are just a few fellow All-Steinway Schools in the United States and abroad:

Cleveland Institute of Music - Cleveland, OH
China Conservatory of Music, School of Piano - Beijing, China
Curtis Institute of Music - Philadelphia, PA
Franz Liszt College of Music Weimar at Kangam University - Seoul, South Korea
Hastings College - Hastings, NE
Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama - Cardiff, Wales
University of Georgia - Athens, GA
University of Minnesota - Minneapolis, MN
Vassar College - Poughkeepsie, NY
Yale School of Music - New Haven, CT

A glass-cased display commemorating UTK becoming an All-Steinway School. It is located in the front office!

A plaque certifying UTK as an All-Steinway School. It is located in the front office!

Steinway Artists

There are musicians who have made the commitment to play only on Steinway-made pianos who are recognized as Steinway Artists. Anton Rubinstein was one of the first pianists to make such a partnership when William Steinway invited him to play on Steinway pianos for his 1872-1873 American concert tour. There are hundreds of artists and groups that are recognized as Steinway artists, including Lang Lang, Billy Joel, Diana Krall, The 5 Browns, Tania León, and Charlie Puth. Hundreds of more Steinway Artists can be found on Steinway & Sons' Artists Page.

Lang Lang

Image Source: https://www.langlangofficial.com/

Billy Joel

Image Source: Ticketclub.com

Tania Léon

Image Source: Yale School of Music

Diana Krall

Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12093265

Charlie Puth

Image Source: The LA Times

The Five Browns

Image Source: https://www.steinway.com/artists/the-5-browns

Piano Tuning and Maintenance

Pianos are highly complex instruments that have many skills and tools for maintenance. Just a few tools include the tuning lever or hammer, tuning forks, and lifesaver systems that maintain proper humidity. With so many parts made out of wood on most pianos, too high of humidity can cause the wood to swell, and too low of humidity can cause the wood to crack. Lifesaver systems monitor the humidity around the soundboard of the piano and adjust it accordingly. Keeping a lifesaver system hydrated is also called “watering” a piano.

A man tuning an upright piano, 1950.

Image courtesy of ARTStor: https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/SCHLES_130733621

A set of tuning forks.
Image courtesy of ARTStor: https://library.artstor.org/#/asset/26433500

Some piano tuning tools. From top to bottom: a tuning hammer, a felt mute, a rubber mute, a felt temperament strip, and a Papps mute.

Image source: By Adjwilley - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24449835

A diagram of a piano lifesaver system.

Image source: https://www.pianolifesaver.com/english/products/grandsystem

Piano Tuning: A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs by J. Cree Fischer
Call Number: MT165 .F48
If you have a note that has dropped in pitch, do you have to call in the tuner? A stuck key? Sympathetic rattle? Missing bridles? A broken hammer shank? An unglued ivory? The answer, in each case, is no: you can make all of these repairs yourself! This is the clearest and most complete book available for beginning tuners and amateur pianists. It explains all the basic processes practically and with model clarity. A non-musician can use this book without too much difficulty. You will learn how upright, grand, and square actions work, and how to take care of the smallest repairs — repairing stuck keys, poorly adjusted bottoms and capstans, crowded back checks, felts and leather on the hammers, hammer stems; softening damper and hammer felts; installing new bridles; eliminating "sympathetic rattle"; all with a minimum of tools and training. You will learn a professional method of tuning based on slightly flattened fifths, where only the octave and the upward fifth intervals are used. This is one of the easiest systems to learn, one capable of a great deal of control, and one perfectly suited to adjusting one or two keys. It is a tested method especially right for amateurs working without a teacher, and a method that trains the ear for other recommended systems. The author also explains "beats," the theory of the tempered scale, and useful experiments you can make with harmonic phenomena. If you want to experiment with tuning a piano, there is no better book to start with. It will help performers and teachers make occasional repairs and learn the structure and scale of the piano. Those who want to know how pianos work will find this book both clear and useful.

History of the Piano

Before the Piano:

Clavichord – around early 14th century
Harpsichord – around 15th century, strings are plucked not struck
Gravicembalo col piano e forte – literally means “harpsichord with soft and loud,” created by Bartolomeo Cristofori, the strings are now struck by hammers

Key Figures that Improved the Piano:

Late 1700s – John Broadwood created louder and richer tones
1821 – Sebastien Erard improved the hammers
1825 – Alpheus Babcock improved the cast iron frame by cross stringing pianos
1855 – Henry E. Steinway combined all of these inventions and his grand pianos are what most pianos look like today.

Pianos and Their Makers by Alfred Dolge
Call Number: ML652 .D6
The late Alfred Dolge was one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the piano. First trained in the German piano industry of the 1860s, he continued to work and study under the great Mathushek upon coming to the United States. He went into business for himself, manufacturing hammers and other components (eventually founding the piano town of Dolgeville, New York), and achieved an international reputation as a manufacturer, designer, and inventor of piano-making machinery. In addition to being one of the top technicians in the world, he had a unique circle of business and personal acquaintance with everyone of importance in the piano world of both Europe and America, on a level that no outsider could ever attain. All this culminated in the 1911 publication of Pianos and Their Makers. To prepare the reader for more technical exposition, Dolge first gives a brief history of stringed keyboard instruments, from the early pianoforte up through the square piano, the development of the upright, and the modern grand. After this, he explains the development of individual components: the full iron frame, the keyboard, various types of action, hammer, soundboard, as well as woods, felts, and wires. The heart of this book, however is a close history of the development of the nineteenth-century piano, with full credit to the great designers and manufacturers. More than 100 pages are devoted to American advances alone, all highly specific. There are also profiles of important personalities. In addition to covering the standard piano, this volume is also one of the few sources to cover in some detail automatic instruments, including player pianos, reproducing pianos, transposers, and cabinet piano players. The result of this incredible amount of data is a book that is both necessary and fascinating to anyone seriously interested in the piano of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether in historical developments, background for an instrument that the reader may happen to own, restoration and repairs for unusual devices, and overall background. The diagrams and illustrations alone make this book indispensable, providing — as Grove's has noted — "invaluable data about American piano making."
The Piano: Its Story from Zither to Grand by David Grover
Call Number: ML650 .G75
A Natural History of the Piano by Stuart Isacoff
Call Number: ML650 .I83
A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff--pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization--unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna's coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.
The Early Pianoforte by Stewart Pollens
Call Number: ML655 .P64
This is the first comprehensive historical and technological study of the pianoforte based on important primary source material. Most histories of the piano begin with its invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Florence in about 1700: this study begins with the earliest fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript sources and extends over Cristofori's rediscovery of the principle of the hammer action, the early exportation of Florentine pianofortes to prominent European courts, and the building of copies of these instruments in Portugal, Spain and Germany. Technical information is presented in a comparative format and the text is illustrated with many photographs, measurements, line drawings and tables. While written primarily for the technical specialist, there is much here of significance for the history of the piano and performance practice.

Anatomy of Piano

The outer layers of the grand piano are made up of: the lid, which can be open or closed to control volume; the action frame, made of cast iron and strong enough to accommodate 35,000-45,000 pounds of string tension; and the sound board, a thin piece of wood that vibrates with the strings.

The piano produces sound when one or a combination of the 88 keys is pressed and initiates a hammer, made of wood and felt, to strike the string associated to the key(s) pressed. There are usually 220 strings tuned to the 88 keys. 58 tones are unison and these tones have three strings while other pitches only have the two strings. They vary in size from six inches and thinner (higher pitches) to eighty inches and thicker (lower pitches). When a key is no longer pressed, a damper is released to press the string until it no longer vibrates.

Pedals are located at the bottom of the piano and played by feet to change the quality of sounds. The right pedal is the damper pedal that allows the strings to vibrate freely. The left pedal is to soften or lighten the tone.

Types of Pianos

Grand pianos are mounted on legs with the strings and soundboard parallel to the floor. These pianos range from parlor or baby grands (5-6ft.) to concert grands (9ft).

Upright pianos are vertical pianos with the strings and soundboard perpendicular to the floor. These pianos tend to have poorer quality than grands, but that is likely due to the manipulation of the soundboard being upright. A Spinet upright is 36-38 inches tall, console upright is 36-40 inches tall, and a studio upright is 45-50 inches tall.

Square Piano

The Well-Prepared Piano by Richard Bunger and John Cage
Call Number: MT165 .B85
A thorough description on how to construct or manipulate a prepared piano for Cage's compositions.

The Teaching, Learning, and Techniques of the Piano

UT Libraries offers many sources for beginners to advanced musicians to learn how to play piano. These sources explain piano techniques through illustrations and examples of pianists. This shows that anyone can learn to play the piano with these resources.

The Pianist's Craft by Richard Paul Anderson (Editor)
Call Number: Stacks ML700 .P53
No pianist can experience the full flowering of her art without eventually grappling with those great musical minds who composed specifically for piano. In The Pianist's Craft, Richard Anderson collects from his fellow pianist-scholars 19 articles on the teaching, preparation, and performance of works by the greatest composers in the standard piano repertoire. This collection ranges in subject matter from Inge Rosar's meditation on playing Bach on the modern keyboard to Gary Amato's assessment of Haydn's sonatas, from Christie Skousen's review of tone production in Chopin to GwenolynMok's foray into recreating Ravel's works on an Erard piano, the same used by Ravel himself. Readers will find essays as well on Mozart's piano compositions, Beethoven's sonatas, the influence of Schubert's lieder on his piano works, and works by Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Bart k, Gershwin, and Crumb. The contributors--all recognized nationally and internationally for their contributions as performing artists, teachers, recording artists, and clinicians--write thoughtfully about the composers whose work they have studied and played for years. Each author addresses issues unique to the individual composer they have chosen to explore, examining questions of phrasing, tempo, articulation, dynamics, rhythm, color, gesture, lyricism, instrumentation, and genre. Valuable insight is provided into teaching, performing, and preparing these great works. In The Pianist's Craft these great artists and teachers answer questions for readers that are otherwise only addressed in conferences, master classes, and private lessons. In this collection of essays, key points of information and instruction are offered with over 200 musical examples included as illustration. The Pianist's Craft is intended for teachers and students of the intermediate and advanced levels of piano, instructors and performers at the university level, and those who love piano and piano music generally.
The Pianist's Craft 2 by Richard P. Anderson (Editor)
Call Number: ML700 .P532
In The Pianist's Craft 2, pianist and scholar Richard P. Anderson gathers together a new collection of essays by renowned performing artists and teachers and discusses the preparation, pedagogy, and performance of selected works by an entirely different set of composers whose works are standard in the piano literature. In this volume, readers will find an invaluable collection of contributions on C.P.E. Bach, Antonio Soler, Felix Mendelssohn, Gabriel Faur , Erno Dohn nyi, Francis Poulenc, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Alberto Ginastera, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage. The contributors--all nationally and internationally recognized as performing artists, teachers, recording artists, and clinicians--write thoughtfully about the composers whose work they have studied and played for years. Each author addresses issues unique to an individual composer, examining questions of phrasing, tempo, articulation, dynamics, rhythm, color, gesture, lyricism, instrumentation, and genre. Valuable insight is provided into teaching, performing, and preparing these great works--information otherwise available only in conferences, master classes, and private lessons. This collection, with more than 250 musical illustrations, is intended for teachers and students of the intermediate and advanced levels of piano, instructors and performers at the university level, and those who love piano and piano music.
Physics of the Piano by Nicholas J. Giordano
Call Number: E-Book
Why does a piano sound like a piano? A similar question can be asked of virtually all musical instruments. A particular note-such as middle C-can be produced by a piano, a violin, a clarinet, and many other instruments, yet it is easy for even a musically untrained listener to distinguishbetween these different instruments. A central quest in the study of musical instruments is to understand why the sound of the "same" note depends greatly on the instrument, and to elucidate which aspects of an instrument are most critical in producing the musical tones characteristic of theinstrument. The primary goal of this book is to investigate these questions for the piano. The explanations in this book use a minimum of mathematics, and are intended for anyone who is interested in music and musical instruments. At the same time, there are many insights relating physics and thepiano that will likely be interesting and perhaps surprising for many physicists.