Xiyao Liu Pianos
The History of Piano Tuning
It was while tuning an elderly upright piano that I first considered piano tuners and tuning as themes for academic study. I noticed, scrawled on the hammer rest rail of the piano action, the initials and tuning dates of twenty piano tuners who had worked on the instrument over its long life. They are nothing unusual. Such dates are commonly found when tuning and, in decades as a professional tuner, I had seen plenty of them. What caught my attention was that I was tuning this piano one hundred years to the very day in 1892 that ‘R.W.F’ had carried out that same task. This set me thinking: who was R.W.F? Where had he lived? How did he become a piano tuner? How had he travelled around? Had he even been a ‘he’?
My curiosity piqued, I went home to look up information on piano tuners’ lives in the 1890s and found… nothing. I consulted local libraries and the internet to no avail. Whilst there was plenty of information on the design, construction, tuning, sale and playing of pianos, there was little on the people behind the instrument.
Read more here...
https://pianotuner.org.uk/2022/06/15/the-history-of-piano-tuning-pt1/
Prior to the advent of the piano, most musicians tuned their own instruments. This was a necessary part of owning one; to call someone in to tune a harpsichord would have been as preposterous an idea as calling someone in to tune a violin for a professional violinist. A combination of factors made the harpsichord far easier to tune than the piano: there was generally only one string per note, and where there were more they were easily isolated by use of the stops, while the strings were at a far lower tension than those of the piano. At first ownership of the instruments was limited to richer families who employed musicians, or to musicians themselves – either way, the musicians ended up tuning the instruments.
However, the setting of temperaments proved more difficult, particularly Equal Temperament: the Pythagorean comma meaning that pure intervals alone being used would result in a ‘wolf’ interval, wherein the beats ‘left over’ from tuning the pure intervals accumulated in one very discordant interval—generally that between F# and B. Equal temperament took over from mean tone tuning, making all keys pleasant to play in rather than a restricted number, but was more difficult for the amateur to tune, and as more and more amateurs were beginning to own instruments, tuning was becoming a task carried out by professionals. Rimbault mentions the tuning of equal temperament in the chapter ‘On Tuning’ in his 1860 history of the Pianoforte that equal temperament:
‘is now universally adopted throughout Europe. Its inestimable advantage is that it enables us to employ all the 12 major and minor scales with equal freedom, and without a fear of offending the ear in any of them more than in another; thus giving unlimited room of play to all the wonders of modern harmony.’
Read more here...
https://pianotuner.org.uk/2022/07/16/the-history-of-piano-tuning-part-2/