1874

A PIANOFORTE FACTORRY

A PIANOFORTE FACTORY. - IF-and probably there are none who will dispute the proposition-the home is the true unit evolving the nation, it follows that in the arts of private, far more than those of public life, the most enduring types of national improvement are to be looked for.

Public institutions, Acts of Parliament, and all the pomp and circumstance of out-door life, do not, in many cases, effect anything like the same changes that a new article of food, a fresh piece of furniture even, or any similar item in the individual economy of home life is sure to produce.

The real difference is, simply, that in one instance there is no chronicle of the influences, and in the other there is. We are sure to be told by ten-thousand newspaperpower of all the advantages resulting from a new fountain, or a fine arcade, or a Gothic town-hall, but we hear nothing of the popular new toy which may warp the disposition of thousands of children this way or that, or the new article of food which may-laugh as some will at the suppositioncompress or relax the brain-fibre of those who eat it, and so have in itself an influence to which that of the Legislature even may be altogether insignificant.

Be this as it may, I have always considered that the systematic improvement and reform of our home life, more especially among the lower strata of the well-to-do classes, was of the first importance to the future health and continued energy of the national career. English home life has, beyond question, hitherto had one capital defect.

It is too exclusively solid; the pillars on which it rests are uncarved, so to speak: there is too generally a tendency to practise the severest utilitarianism and it is only of late that the nation has very generally seen the wisdom for exercising a selective discretion, and borrowing from the Continent all that is most desirable and unobjectionable among the graces of private life.

From this view-point indeed, the continued culture of music, in its absolutely domestic application, is, I think, a most hopeful symptom, and in this the purest form of artistic pleasure-there is surely an abundance of good wholly without alloy.

Feeling thus, it was naturally to me very agreeable to find an opportunity for closely inspecting Messrs. Strohmenger & Sons' pianoforte factory, 169, Goswellroad, E.C., London, where pianos are made from beginning to end, and that at a rate which in many cases places those directly purchasing of the manufacturer in the possession of instruments capable of lasting a lifetime, and yielding all the while everything that can be desired to import the best music of the concert into the private home.

The factory in question is unpretending enough, viewed from the outside. I first entered a very long room with a perspective of carpenters' benches below, and for several feet between your head and the ceiling methodicallyordered stacks of seasoned timber; this, in fact, is quite an exhibition of woods, some rare, many beautiful, and all costly. It is a study in geography.

There is beautifully grained sycamore, and choice lime-tree wood from England. North America contributes its iron-like birch, its substantial oak, and fine-grained pine. From the Southern continent comes cedar.

So much for the interior. Cuba contributes mahogany; Brazil, rosewood; Italy, walnut; and Ceylon, ebony for the cases. This by no means exhausts the department of necessary stores for the production from beginning to end of even the smallest piano. Brass, copper, iron, steel, and zinc, in metals; green baize, box cloth, and felts, in woollen fabrics; buffalo, calf, doe-skin, and fawn, in leathers; besides a miscellaneous assortment of ivory, glue, French chalk, glass papers, polishes, and even black lead, are all to be found here.

A piano, as everybody knows, is, although in construction the most elaborate, in principle the simplest of musical instruments.

Its strings, which are put in motion by striking the keys, extend over harmoniously constructed bridges, rising on to the sounding-board, the necessary vibration arising from the action of the hammers which connect the keys with the strings themselves. As with most other things, the foundation is all important.

By the foundation is meant the back of the piano. When one reflects on the constant action of an ordinary piano-for in some cases a lifetime and remembers that in nature there is no force more irresistible than a harmonic vibration, of course, relatively considered, it is easy to perceive that in such an instrument absolute solidity is essential to the three necessary conditions of a really good piano-sweetness, power and durability.

The first thing you see is the back. It looks like a bit of barricade for an elephant's stable. Nine vertical beams are set in two transverse ones, eight being, as I was told, the ordinary complement. Immense strength is here the one object in view.

On the Continent, I hear, iron is greatly employed-compared to wood a most defective sound-conductor. These great timber braces, fit to bear one of our naval armour plates, are carefully seasoned, and secured with powerful nuts and exquisite glueing, bringing corresponding parts together with the precision of atmospheric pressure.

Such strength is indeed needed. Every pianist may not remember that on striking the key there is a pull at once on the frame of over 50 lb., while the seven octaves can develop a strain of five tons. These interior timbers are far beyond anything I have seen in the carcases of the conventional suburban villas of the present day.

Cramps of very great power are used in forcing the timbers into their places. In this great joiners' shop you will see in one place the frames being put together, in another the introduction of the sounding-board, here the process of stringing, there the screwing up of the steel pegs which tighten the chords, and somewhere else a man industriously fashioning the key board itself. The hammers are very carefully made; each piece of wood is cut with mathematical precision, while the necessary covering in felt or leather has to be glued on with perfect nicety. All the woods employed in the construction must not only be, where really good instruments are designed, of excellent quality, but thoroughly seasoned.

The shrinking or expansion of any part, independently of the calculated and harmonious vibration of the whole, is immediately fatal to the excellence of the piano. Not only must the wires be of the best, the sounding-board perfect, the lining thorough, and the performer proficient, for the expression of good music, but the entire and, as I have already shown, heterogeneous collection of materials composiug the whole, must be themselves in the same subordinated concord with respect to each other as that of the written music itself.

It is very pleasant work; there are chips, shavings, and sawdust certainly, but these are of the cleanest.

It is hard to imagine manual labour of a more agreeable and intelligent cast. The atmosphere is, however, of the driest, and if there is any cause for complaint on the part of the workers, it must be that the place has perhaps just a trifle too much of the oven about it.

Of course this is unavoidable; every particle of moisture must be eliminated from the woods in the stacks above before they are fit for use. All the work is careful, but that of the sounding-board is, perhaps the most so.

When this, one might say sympathetic soul of the instrument itself is shaped, and in fact finished, it is rigorously tested in every possible way. The workman will play upon it as on a drum, and he has in fact the first musical promise of the new instrument.

As to the cases, they too are made on the premises. There are collections of legs for instance, fresh turned and only waiting to be polished, and, as one might say, quires of ornamental fronts in a variety of tasteful designs.

These indeed represent patient, careful, and highly artistic work. The plan of placing open wood-work over silk has naturally led to a great elaboration in this department of designing. The floral scrolls and geometrical devices are slowly cut out with a fine saw, and one slip at the last moment may spoil the work of a week or more.

The only thing, I believe, that Messrs. Strohmenger & Sons import, so to speak, into their factory are candle-holders. As might be ex expected where the whole instrument is put together by one body of workmen under one superintendence, many improvements in detail, as well as in principle, are discovered from time to time and introduced. Messrs. Strohmenger & Sons have invented a check-action, which has many advantages to commend it.

For instance, any single note can be withdrawn and repaired, or otherwise dealt with, independently of the rest. As is usual, wherever the whole of an industry is concentrated under one roof, it is curious to see how one set of workmen feed another with work.

From the cramping of the backs to the veneering and final polishing of the cases, there is one motion through all the intermediate and connecting stages, and a fanciful Positivist might possibly tell us that these workmen were playing a capital piece of industrial music with the various metals, woods, leathers, and fabrics, which when adjusted in certain concordant relations, evolve the piano itself.

Even in these days of successful strikes and prosperous times, for all but professional and middle-class workers on fixed incomes, a pianoforte manufactory is, I should judge, somewhat of a haven for even the most exacting artisan.

The earnings, in fact of the men, range from seventy or eighty pounds a year to double that amount; many earn a hundred and fifty, and as the labour is carried on in a well-ventilated workshop where the air is invariably very dry and warm, and as none of the operations are hurried-hurry being incompatible with the patient care which is here indispensable with every detail-the industrial seems, as Conservative grumblers might tell us in these days, to want nothing here to complete his happiness but a good grievance.

A great many of the instruments here made are of a price placing them even within the means of the masses. So far as I could see, the essential parts of the cheaper are fully as good as those of the dearer kinds. Greater compass, intenser power, and superior beauty externally constitute the difference.

I have shown how pianos are built; I have now to speak of the show-rooms, 206, Goswell-road, and the system whereby they are disposed of to the public.

Goswell-road is, as all my readers know, one of the most work-a-day of London thoroughfares, and hardly the place where one would look for a musical gallery; and probably few persons passing by think of the concentration of future concerts-domestic and public-within the dull brick walls, which share in the general dinginess of the not, architecturally speaking, very ornamental road.

The upper, as well as the ground floors, are converted, I may say, into musical cabinets, where it is surprising to me that people do not generally spend spend much more time than they actually do.

There is something exceedingly suggestive in the sight of so many instruments, all mute and awaiting each its special destiny. Every piano that one here sees has its history to come; and while the music of a stray performer, here and there, steals over one, it is difficult to refrain from a reverie on all the varied phases of human life that each piano is some day to be identified with.

You see them here in all woods-mahogany, walnut, ebony, and gold; and it is a curious speculation to a materialistic mind, as to how far the question of what wood and what form a particular piano may be encased in, may influence the lives of those into whose hands it may pass.

Despised and ridiculed as such speculation may be by many, we have but to refer to the trumpet-note that swells the blood to fever-heat, or to the soft, fresh field of rain-washed grass, that gives such repose to the eyes of the wearyminded, to ascertain how potent is the spell of form and colour on human nature even; and to perceive how vast a field for investigating human motives is left unturned by those who would laugh and scorn the notion that whether they slept in a red or green-papered room the result would be the same to them.

However, to my mind, the pleasantest speculation is that which most naturally suggests itself when one finds oneself environed by so many pianos. Each instrument may be the sweet nucleus of a home-life to come, and one thinks involuntarily of

Fairy hands that flitting, pass
Across the ivory keys,
As sweetly as o'er meadow grass
The summer-scented breeze;
Of tender hearts and gentle eyes
That light up home within,
And teach us here the holy guise
Of worlds that know not sin;
Of thoughts too sweet for any tongue
But music's to express,
Of joys that make the aged young;
Give wrinkles loveliness;
Melodious moments glad and bright,
Dear both to soul and sense;
For music can by magic might
Humanity condense
Into the diapason grand
That in itself explains
Why faith in God in every land
Is bound in music's chains!

But, to come into the every-day region of practical life, I cannot but think that a factory like Messrs. Strohmenger & Sons exercises no unimportant influence on social life.

Here, as I have shown, pianos are manufactured of a size and price that bring them immediately within the means of persons unable to purchase of the more expensive makers, and yet unwilling to put up with those inferior instruments which are turned out-unseasoned in their frames and imperfect in their construction-to meet the demand for a cheap article.

Here, as may be anticipated, the system of buying pianos by instalments, and having the use of the instrument during the period, prevails, and the plan is in itself an admirable one.

Many persons thus become possessed of something like property who otherwise would never have more than a trifle beyond their current requirements, and the habit of saving in so tangible and agreeable a manner must per se be of great moral utility.

The sending out of defective and often worthless instruments thus has doubtless prejudiced some persons against a system in itself so good, but it only needs to be widely known that really sound and durable instruments can be obtained thus to aid in a dissemination of pianos among the houses of the people, as well as of the middle classes, that will bring about the happy consummation of making three articles the indispensable condition of every home worthy of the name-a sewing machine, a clock, and a piano.

Just as a well-known firm has of late years, by the strictest adherence to its professed principles of dealing with the public in the supply of sewing machines, won almost the absolute confidence of those who deal with it, so are Messrs. Strohmenger & Sons popularizing a piano at once good, lasting, and, though very cheap, obtainable on terms made still easier by the adoption of a system enabling nearly everybody possessing a home at all, to obtain through a series of insensible efforts an instrument which would do credit to any room in the land, not only for its execution, but for its appearance also.

Certainly these musical savings' banks are attractive things. There is security as absolute as that given by the Post Office Savings Bank, and rather better interest, as those who try the former find to their satisfaction.

During the whole period the purchaser has the full enjoyment of the property he is insensibly acquiring; and the fact that such a system can exist is surely one of the "common things" of our everyday civilized life that, when at all examined, expands into something like a wonder.

It is, indeed, a great fact, that, by means of combination and the original possession of capital on the part of the producers, anyone ameng us should be able to enjoy, from the first moment of commencing the payment of but a few shillings weekly, the full possession of a most wonderfully elaborated instrument, built of costly woods that have been seasoned for years, and put together by the labour of many men better paid than the average of our curates." Leaves from a journalist's note-book, Percy Russell, 1874, p. 49-55

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