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Thomas Edison’s Piano

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’m here today with the piano owned by Thomas Edison! This piano was purchased by Thomas Edison in 1890 for $725! It’s a Steinway Model B with 85 keys, which is the last year Steinway offered pianos with less than 88 keys. This piano has had some restoration, but is largely original. There are other artifacts about it that are so fascinating, you’re not going to believe it!

This instrument was one of the first pianos ever recorded!

Everybody knows that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he also invented the phonograph two years earlier in 1877. I have here a recording made, perhaps on this piano, from the late 1800s. It’s played on an original Edison phonograph which used wax cylinders instead of familiar discs. You can hear quite a difference in the recording quality compared to modern recording. But it is remarkable that recordings could be made so long ago. I have the original invoice here from 1890 from Steinway, and a letter Thomas Edison wrote to Steinway from his laboratory.

From the Laboratory
of
Thomas A. Edison

Orange, New Jersey, June 2nd, 90-

Steinway and Sons,

Gents,

I have decided to keep your grand piano.
For some reason unknown to me It gives
better results than any so far tried.
Please send bill with lowest price.

Yours,

Thomas A. Edison

Thomas Edison's Letter to Steinway

Isn’t that unbelievable? Well, you might wonder where this piano came from.

I’m very pleased to introduce to you someone who you may have seen before here at LivingPianos.com, The Steinway Hunter: Bob Friedman who located this piano and whose home in upstate New York I am in right now.

Robert Estrin:
Bob, it’s a pleasure to be with you here.

Bob Friedman:
Well, thank you. It’s nice that you came to visit me.

Robert Estrin:
A lot of people might not know that you are The Steinway Hunter.

You have perhaps found and sold more Steinway pianos than anyone ever!

I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s arguably true, wouldn’t you say?

Bob Friedman:
I’d say that I haven’t stopped for close to 50 years now. So if I get up to bat every day and do this until the big leagues close, then maybe that will be true!

Robert Estrin:
I know there are so many great stories in The Steinway Hunter, your book, which is a fabulous read. But tell us about how you came upon this piano.

Bob Friedman:
Interestingly enough, it was put up for sale on EstateSale.com in Huntington, Long Island.

Robert Estrin:
Did they even know what they had?

Bob Friedman:
They knew what they had, but they didn’t know the value in the history of the instrument. After all the research was done and all the paperwork confirmed that it was Thomas Edison’s piano, the one that was in his laboratory music room from 1890 when he purchased it new from Steinway until 1929. I bought the piano.

Robert Estrin:

What are your plans for this piano?

I know here it is in your living room, which is awesome. But you have so many pianos coming and going. This should be in a museum or something, shouldn’t it?

Bob Friedman:
We’re hoping to do a Smithsonian documentary, and then to try and find a home for it in a museum that would like to house the piano.

Robert Estrin:
That would be great! I understand The New York Times was here to do a write up on the piano.

Bob Friedman:
We made some discoveries about the instrument.

Thomas Edison was nearly 100% deaf, and the only way he could hear his instruments and his music boxes was to bite into them.

It just so happens that Edmund Morris, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer who did the last biography on Thomas Edison, completed in 2019, wrote in his book that Edison would bite his piano. The proof was really not out there. It was information that he’d researched over his life and he put it in his book. Well, we made that discovery! A very good associate of mine, who is a historian for Edison, found the bite marks on the piano right there. So, I called up James Barron, who’s a staff writer for The New York Times, and the minute he heard that he said, “I’d like to do a story on the piece.”

Robert Estrin:
People may be thinking, “Why would he bite his piano and his phonograph?” It seems kind of crazy. But it’s because sound travels through solid much more readily than through the air. So your teeth are a fantastic conductor of sound.

Bob Friedman:
The sound goes up into your head. Your head feels like a tuning fork. That’s how Edison heard his piano.

Robert Estrin:
Thank you so much for inviting me into your home and allowing me to play this historical piano. I appreciate it.

Bob Friedman:
And I appreciate it!

Robert Estrin:
We also have here today a wonderful historian who knows a tremendous amount about Thomas Edison. He’s a musician and he’s a piano technician. He also has an incredible collection of early phonographs going back to the 1800s! He can tell us a little bit about the technology. And because he has the unique perspective of being a piano technician and also an Edison historian, he’s going to shed a lot of light on this subject for you.

I’m really pleased to introduce to you, Charles Frommer. Charles, thanks so much for joining us today.

 

Charles Frommer:
Thanks for having me!

Robert Estrin:
You prepped this piano and I’m loving what you did with it. It sounds amazing for an instrument from 1890! It is pretty incredible.

Charles Frommer:
It was a pleasure to work on it. The story goes that Bob Friedman had me come in to tune Thomas Edison’s piano. I was very excited. I’ve been a fan of recording history since I was a kid.

Robert Estrin:
And you have quite a collection of phonographs. What’s the oldest recording gear you own?

Charles Frommer:

My oldest piece of recording equipment is an 1898 Berliner Gramophone, which was sort of the competitor to the cylinder phonograph at the time.

 

Robert Estrin:
A lot of people don’t know that the precursor to the disc was the cylinder. And the reason why discs won out is that you could store them more easily. But was there any sonic advantage to the disc initially?

Charles Frommer:
The discs were more convenient. They were easier to manufacture because you could press them like pancakes, and they were easier to store. They were also a little louder. But Edison was correct in noting that the surface speed was constant on a cylinder, whereas on a disc, as it gets towards the inside, if the rotation is steady, you have less surface per time and the quality reduces. Edison was fairly stubborn in his resistance to using disc technology. I think it was only in 1911 or thereabouts that Edison yielded and made discs. His discs were still different in that he continued his vertical cut technology.

Robert Estrin:

Another interesting thing about Edison is that he chose artists based on how well they reproduced on his technology.

 

He was less interested in the musical content. On many of his cylinders, he wouldn’t even put the names of the artists. He was more concerned with how they sounded. Which is why you have mentioned that he recorded a lot of banjo, because the transients could cut through.

Charles Frommer:
Banjos and woodblocks. Things with a very quick decay. There was actually a diaphragm that vibrated, much like the surface of a banjo. It was connected directly to the cutter, which would cut the wax. That made the groove. There was no electronic interface in between until about 1925. What I find interesting is that there’s a picture of Edison later in life listening to his assistant who’s playing music. He was actually somewhat controlling of the music that he had on his label. He liked to choose what bands would record and what tunes would be recorded. I think his favorite song was I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen. But he would sit and listen while somebody played.

Robert Estrin:
So a dental professional confirmed that these are indeed teeth marks. Is that right?

Charles Frommer:
Yes. I didn’t know what they were. Personally, I was just here to tune. I was halfway through tuning it and I noticed these marks on the top. Usually when a piano has been played by a professional, you will see marks on the fallboard. So I was puzzled by this. And suddenly, I remembered having read somewhere that Edison, being almost completely deaf, would sink his teeth into the wood of his phonograph to listen to records. It was then that I realized that’s what these marks are!

Robert Estrin:
What’s really remarkable is that although this piano has had some restoration along the way with a new sound board, new strings, hammers, and damper felt, that nobody got rid of these marks. And thank goodness for that! It has tremendous historic significance. It is a wonderful instrument and I just want to thank both you and Bob for sharing this instrument with everybody out there.

Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

You can find Bob Friedman’s book, The Steinway Hunter HERE!

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Why You Play Too Fast

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Why do you play too fast?”. Most people try to play faster than they’re comfortable. Sometimes you will have a piece you can play just fine, but when you try to play it slower, you can’t even figure out where you are! There’s a great deal of motor memory or muscle memory that is involved in piano playing. Your fingers just seem to know where to go. So you want to go fast enough that you won’t forget where to go next. The problem with this is, unless the music is really secure, your tempo will fluctuate. You’ll make accommodations to the parts you don’t know quite as well, going a little slower. Then you’ll speed up again so you don’t forget where you are.

Motor memory on the piano is akin to touch typing.

I took a typing class in high school. I learned how to touch-type, so I don’t have to look at the keys. Little did I know, that would be probably the most important course I had in high school! In the computer age, it’s so great to be able to type without looking at your hands. But the funny thing is, if I stop and think where a letter is on the keyboard, for example, the letter “W”, I don’t even know! I have to look at the keyboard. If I have to type on a screen, where the keyboard is smaller, and you have to just touch the letters on the screen with your finger, I can’t even find them! Yet on a keyboard, I can type almost as fast as I can speak. I’m a really fast typist. I was the fastest in my class in high school. I guess all those years of piano paid off in my typing class!

Playing the piano too fast is a rampant problem among many piano students.

What you must do is take the time to slow down your playing and figure out what is there. This can be a painstaking process. I’ve talked a little bit about how sometimes when you want to start in the middle of a piece, you may have to speed up just to figure out what fingers to start with. When you’re playing slowly, you might want to play faster just a little bit at first, just to see where you are, and what fingers are on which notes as a starting point of a section.

Every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly, incessantly.

There are three things that every accomplished pianist does: practice slowly, practice with a metronome, and practice without the pedal. I’ll also add to that, practice with the music! When you memorize a piece, that doesn’t mean you don’t use the score anymore. As a matter of fact, it’s the opposite. I like to memorize a piece first and then do all my practicing with the score, reinforcing the memory, practicing slowly with the metronome with no pedal and really solidifying.

The reason why you play too fast is because you’re not really cognizant of the score.

You play too fast because you don’t really have an intellectual understanding of the score. You’re just going through the motions. Your fingers kind of remember on their own without knowing what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s extremely dangerous. It doesn’t have a solid foundation. Things can fall apart if you depend upon that type of playing. Thank goodness we do have motor memory! Piano would be so much more difficult if you couldn’t depend upon it at all. But you want to minimize your reliance upon the feeling of the keys and where your fingers naturally go. Slow, deliberate playing is the way to do it. Refer back to the score.

Try slow, deliberate practicing for yourself!

Take a piece that you can play fast, but you can’t play slowly with security. Take out the score and play slowly. You’re going to discover so many things! You will always find more details than you initially remembered. Your music has so many details in it! Let me know how it works for you here in the comments on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

How To Keep a Piano Piece in Shape

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is about how to keep a piano piece in shape. Sometimes it’s the most difficult thing. You have a performance, and you get everything in good shape. But it can be like a ripe banana. Suddenly the whole bunch is just a disaster and you have to throw them away. Sometimes that happens with your piano music! Everything is going just fine, and then suddenly, you feel like you can’t even play! What can you do about this? It’s a tremendous challenge keeping your music on a high level. Sometimes you can peak early. Everything’s in shape, and then at the performance just two or three days later, everything disintegrates. How can you get things back into shape?

Go back to the score!

One of the most important practice techniques for a piece you have learned, whether it’s a reading piece or a memorized piece, is to go back through the score slowly with no pedal, using the metronome, exaggerating everything. Even if it’s a quiet piece of music, it really doesn’t matter what the piece is, play it with everything over articulated. If everything is fine, great! But suppose you’re playing, and little mistakes are happening. You have insecurity, and the technique isn’t clean. Go back to the score! Go slowly. Take your foot off the pedal, and play incredibly deliberately, almost like you’re practicing scales or arpeggios slowly with raised fingers. By doing this, you reprogram your hands. You also reprogram the sound into your head by playing with the metronome very deliberately with raised fingers.

Play slowly and deliberately.

You’ll instantly know if the piece has gone overly ripe, and has started to show some signs of rot. That’s because when you try to play slowly, suddenly you can’t play it! You’ll be tempted to go back to the beginning and play fast just so you can have the satisfaction of playing through it again. But make sure to take the opportunity to slow down and figure out how to play it slowly and deliberately, whatever the piece is. This is the answer: keep your eyes on the score, play with the metronome, without pedal, and play deliberately. If there are staccatos in the piece, you’ll want to articulate those with the wrist. Exaggerate all the dynamics. Exaggerate every finger that goes up and every finger that goes down so you really feel it. You still have the dynamics, but everything is raised up.

Don’t depend upon motor memory.

You’ll find that anything that’s weak, anything you really don’t know, will become obvious. Your fingers sort of have a memory all their own. But you can’t depend upon that. After a while, like making a copy of a copy of a copy, things degrade. You’ll find that the music will deteriorate over time, and your fingers don’t really know what they’re doing anymore if you just keep playing over and over and over and don’t go back to the original source: the score. Use the metronome, take your foot off the pedal so you can hear what you’re doing, and watch the score carefully. You will learn so much! It will help to revitalize your music so it stays in shape. You can get music back into shape using this same technique. Let me know how it works for you! I love to read your comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

An Essential Wrist Technique

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to give you an important wrist technique. I’ve talked so much about how to utilize the wrist in many of my videos, as well as with my students. The wrists are almost as important as the fingers in piano playing! There’s so much the wrists allow for in phrasing, the way in which notes are connected or detached. Generally speaking, I’ve talked about how the wrists have to be independent from the arms.

If you play with your arms, there’s a limitation to the speed you can achieve compared to playing with your wrists.

The wrist also has a crisper sound. So, for example, in a Bach Minuet, you would use your wrists to articulate the staccatos. The way to practice that is with various exercises where you just use your wrists without using your arms to achieve staccatos. And one simple exercise for this is to utilize thirds, just using your second and fourth fingers. You set the metronome on 60, and play using just your wrists, not going up and down with your arms.

The arms are important in keeping your fingers exactly over the right keys.

You want to move your arms to put your fingers over the correct keys. It seems so simple, and really it is! But playing in a simple manner might be hard if you’ve never done it before. But this enables you to achieve great speed. Once you can identify the wrists separate from the arms, then you can have the speed and power to play advanced repertoire. And it’s rather effortless, because you’re only using a small amount of mass instead of trying to play with your whole body or your arms. But what I’m talking about today is something entirely different. I’ve never brought this up in any video before. It’s a different type of wrist technique.

Suppose you want something a little bit more subtle, where the staccatos are not punctuated in such a manner.

With the technique I previously described, every single one of the staccatos are accented. Maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you want it to taper at the end, yet still keep it short. For that, there is an alternative wrist technique where you come up, instead of going down with the wrist. You actually come up with the arm, and allow the wrist to just be lifeless. This way it comes off with a gentle staccato, not an accented staccato. So that’s the tip for today. If you want a gentle staccato, you can come up with the arm and allow the wrist to be floppy. You get the opposite of an accent.

Come up with the arm, and let the wrist just gently bend without any force, and you get a gentle staccato that isn’t accented.

So that’s a new technique for you to try out in your music. I’m interested in how this works for all of you! Try it out where you have staccatos that are on the off-beats, staccatos that are not punctuated, that are not to be accented. This is a way you can achieve that phrasing without accenting the staccatos.

I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

When Music is Off the Beat: What is Hemiola?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about when music is off the beat. Now you might be thinking, “Music that’s off the beat? Maybe it’s jazz or ragtime, like The Entertainer.” But that’s not what this is about at all. This is about hemiola. There are a lot of examples of syncopated rhythms where emphasis is on the weak beats or off the beat entirely on the “ands”, but hemiola is different. There is a great example of hemiola in the Kuhlau Sonatina Opus 55, No. 1. In the second movement there’s a big chromatic scale going up. When it gets to the very top, that’s when the hemiola begins.

You probably have come across hemiola in your music and wondered how to count it, and why composers even utilize it.

Listen to a little bit of the Kuhlau Sonatina. Do you hear the way it comes down after the chromatic scale? The grouping of notes overlap the beats. It’s kind of odd. It’s actually a pattern of two that is superimposed on this piece which is in three. So you don’t have the comfort of the downbeat at the beginning of each pattern. That, in a nutshell, is what hemiola is. It can be a very effective technique for giving a rhythmic accent that you don’t expect in music.

How do you approach hemiola?

You must count and you must count correctly! If you succumb to the hemiola and let it trick you into thinking in a different time signature where the hemiola is, it’ll mess you up. You must maintain the integrity of the time signature in hemiola. You don’t have to accent the beats. You can play it and let it be a flourish that’s off the beat even though you’re counting it correctly. It’s a wonderful compositional technique. I want all of you to check out your scores. Find places you think you might have hemiola. You’re welcome to share them in the comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I hope this is enjoyable for you and provides some insights into your music. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Great Music is Storytelling

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how great music is storytelling. This has many ramifications. For example, a great piece of music sometimes evokes images and emotions that can tell a story. It may not tell a story with words as much as with feeling and direction. Interestingly, this is also true of great improvisations. For example, listen to a great jazz pianist crafting a ballad. As it unfolds, it can remind you of so many things in your life that you can’t even put into words. That’s what’s so great about music!

A performance can sometimes tell a story.

What I’m going to do today is something a little bit different. I thought I’d challenge myself and play the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade. I will play it twice. The first time, I’m going to try to play it absolutely faithfully to the score. The second time I’m going to try to tell a story. I’ll let the notes evoke something to make you feel it’s going somewhere and keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering where it’s going next. Can this really be done? I’m going to see if I can play this absolutely accurately the first time. Then, I’m going to go back and see if I can do something more than that and tell a story with the same exact notes, markings, rhythms, and phrasing. I will add subtlety of emotion that can somehow transcend the notes. Is this possible? This is what this experiment is about today.

It’s just like the lines of a play.

The lines of a play can be read in so many different ways. Everything the playwright wrote is in there, yet each actor has a completely different feeling and tells a different story. That’s what I’m going to attempt to do now. I’ll see if I can take the same passage of music with all the same markings, the same notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression and see if I can tell more than what is on the page.

See video for my performances of the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade.

I wonder, could you hear a difference? I’m really interested in your opinions of these two different performances. They both are accurate from a technical standpoint, all the notes that Chopin wrote were in both of them. I’m wondering what your feelings are about them, if they evoke different senses. Do they tell different stories? That’s what music is all about. It’s telling stories that can’t be told with words – stories of emotion. That’s what I believe. I’m wondering how many of you feel the same way, and what these two different snippets of the Chopin G Minor Ballade did for you. Let me know in the comments, on LivingPianos.com, as well as on YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Supplemental Content:
Chopin Ballade #1 in G-Minor on Steinway Model D Concert Grand