Friday, December 26. 2008
'Twas the night after Christmas ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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10:16
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… and I’m still in one piece, thankfully, given what was initially a very busy but ultimately a very rewarding day.
Our mass went off very well, although once again someone had got the sound balance wrong for the keyboard so I had to be very careful, and everyone sang, played and directed (David, of course) very well. A nice round of applause at the end from a full church was much appreciated. My niece, ably assisted by other members of the family, put on a very good meal and afterwards an impromptu jam session involving keyboard, tenor sax, guitars and cahon with all sorts of music, Christmas and non-Christmas ensued. After what has been a somewhat difficult year for me medically it was good and very much appreciated to have something that was not only uplifting in its own right but was also very much a promise of improvements next year. I haven’t quite decided on my New Year’s Resolutions yet – normally I don’t make any but I think this time I need to push myself in a number of musical areas that perhaps I haven’t really focused on this year as much as I should. For the last three years since I acquired the piano, I’ve been very grateful for the musical pleasure it has given me and others, and for the friendships I have made through it, and I will look to capitalise on that as best my limited abilities will allow me. I’ve had the opportunity to develop the core of a network of people who have both the interest and the means to progress music on the Stuart piano much further than has been done before, and I suspect that will begin to take up more of my time in the future. But that is the future – today is still a holiday for all and I will take advantage of that with the family. Wednesday, December 24. 2008
'Twas the night before Christmas ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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14:46
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… and I suspect a few creatures will be stirring other than mice around our house, not that there are any of those of course, at least not that I’ve seen recently.
Tomorrow will be a busy day. David and I will do a mass at a local church in the morning, together with around 20-30 of his friends with assorted voices, guitars and the like. A packed church is likely. I won’t be playing at St Peter Julian’s this year since the church has yet to reopen – the refurbishment is taking longer than expected. We will then visit my niece’s house for an extended booze-up, er sorry, Christmas dinner. Should be good. It has been an interesting year musically and given my visual travails I suspect I’ve come out of it pretty well. Piano-wise I really must get back into some serious practice. I’ve been too lazy, to be truthful, and I have sufficient material now for the two CDs I’ve been planning, so that is going to have to be a new year’s resolution. But that is next year… Happy Christmas etc to all. Monday, December 22. 2008Something of a global view …
… of the world economic downturn as it relates to the piano industry does not paint a pretty picture. The general view is that piano sales overall are down as might be expected, but this has resulted in more excess production capacity in companies that were already feeling the pinch due to competition from Japan, Korea and now China. It appears as though Steinway and Bosendorfer may be feeling much more than just the pinch here, although both companies are big enough with sufficient financial backing to survive longer term, although in what form remains to be seen. Yamaha are making the right noises about continuing the ‘Bosendorfer tradition’, whatever that may be and whatever significance it now has, but it does appear that Baldwin, an American manufacturer of high quality pianos with historically a very good reputation up to this point of time, is either on the verge of collapse or else has collapsed with the majority of its manufacturing going to China. What effect this will have on their overall quality and thus ‘reputation’ remains to be seen.
All of which suggests that price competition between manufacturers and their dealers is going to increase and this will inevitably lead to lesser profits overall and further shakeouts in the industry – this is not just a piano industry thing but will affect many other industries overall as well. So those manufacturers that are in the dealer model for piano sales are in for, and indeed are probably having, a very rough ride. When you add in the pressures to manufacture more pianos at a cheaper cost (ie. more ‘efficiently’) it is no surprise that something has to give – and that quite often is the quality of the piano as evidenced by the following quote: “I bought an Essex piano recently. It is the upright UP123E. It looks great. Big and shiny. It sounded good in the showroom. I liked it as it was bright and loud. Alas, showroom acoustics can be deceiving! It was delivered a week later into my music room. It sounds terrible! It is overloud and very harsh with some of the mid bass strings sounding dead! Especially at both ends of the treble and bass bridges. B below middle C sounds really sick. Also the main problem I have with this piano is the soundboard resonation buzzing AFTER the notes are played and after the dampers are against the strings. The dampers are firm against the strings but the soundboard continues to vibrate and sound sympathetic noise! It's so annoying - I can't stand it. I have decided this piano is going back to the showroom and to be swapped over for something else.” Now Essex pianos are ‘designed’ by Steinway and manufactured in China, and this piano was purchased in Melbourne, Australia. • Pianos always sound different in the home than they do in the showroom. • Pianos need careful voicing and tuning all the time. • When you are dealing with pianos that are built down to a price rather than up to a quality level then it really is buyer beware with a vengeance. Which makes it all the more imperative that pianos such as the Stuart do not conform in any way to the norm when it comes to piano manufacture. • Fully handcrafted • Quality maximised, not price minimised • Dealers are not part of the deal There will always be a ‘niche’ market for top-end pianos like the Stuart which are sufficiently ‘different’ to the rest to be able to marketed independently of the normal retail channels, and all of this reinforces the need for Wayne to keep out of them. Sunday, December 21. 2008
Sometimes it takes a long time ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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12:26
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… for something to come together in a really satisfying way, but that is what happened yesterday at the Stuart & Sons factory in Newcastle where, for the first time, I was able to hear a very competent and mature pianist get sounds out of a Stuart piano that, as well as other people including myself, a very experienced and well equipped recording engineer told me he’d never either heard before or ever imagined a piano could produce.
Tonya Lemoh - Concert at Stuart & Sons 20th December 2008 Wayne, of course, has been in the piano business all of his life and has spent the majority of it designing and building pianos. Margaret Lemoh, like all dedicated mothers, has spent many years raising children, in this case by the name of Tonya. After all of that effort (!) we had the unique experience of a sensitive and mature artist bringing the best out of a sensitive and mature piano in a programme which did not include Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart etc etc, but nonetheless was a very well chosen and balanced programme including the music of: • Margaret Sutherland • Miriam Hyde • Claude Debussy • Joseph Marx • Elena Kats-Chernin • Alberto Ginastera • Johannes Brahms … and each piece was selected to really show how in the hands of a competent pianist the music can be enhanced by the extra capabilities of the Stuart piano. I doubt that, in particular, the Kats-Chernin (Variations on a Serious Black Dress, which incidentally she played from a hand-written score by the composer) has received a better performance – it brought the house down and for a piece of ‘modern’ classical music that is an achievement in itself. As a side note, Tonya recorded it again after the audience had gone but unfortunately one of the pages turned out to be upside down and when turned to, chaos ensued. A more cynical person than me would have said it didn’t make any difference… But of course it did – and it was a marvelous exposé of how to use the entire range of the piano to bring out the resonance, harmonics and overall vertical quality of the instrument – and in that it succeeded brilliantly. There is no doubt that this will be the definitive recording of this piece – it could not, repeat not, be played nearly as effectively on any other make of piano now matter what the quality of that piano. This is what makes the Stuart piano unique, and for the audience yesterday, the experience was unique. At the end I gave an all too brief (in my view, I could have covered much more) introduction to the piano and its features and related all of that to what Tonya had just performed. It was well received (I am quite a fluent public speaker and I know the piano well now of course), and I think everyone went away with a much better view of what the piano can do and what it means to music overall. That was why I viewed this whole event as being very important and it succeeded in what I knew it could achieve. Now we have to continue the process. A few ideas for next year are beginning to take shape – even though the shapes are somewhat amoeba-like at the moment and need much more thought. The recording of this event should be very high quality both in terms of performance and sound. It was a great event, at all levels and we all learnt a great deal. Even though I didn’t get home until 11.30pm after a two and a half hour drive (fortunately mainly on the freeway – cruise control is very, very useful) it was well worth it. Now when can we do it again? Friday, December 12. 2008I have a problem ...
… well, not so much a problem as something I have to think about and come up with a reasonable solution in a relatively short space of time.
At Tonya’s recital on the 20th December, I will have the privilege of introducing her to the audience gathered to hear her play. That is not a problem – I’ve done this on quite a few occasions over the years and certainly know how to do this in the right way – and there is a right and wrong way, believe me. But I have another task. As well as introducing Tonya, I will spend about five (hopefully!) minutes explaining to the audience the whys and wherefors of the Stuart piano. Most of the audience will not have visited the factory before, and certainly very few of them will know much if anything at all about the pianos and why they are different to what has come before. I have to try to get across why this recital is different, why the Stuart piano in the right hands (or fingers in this case) can add so much over and above the accepted norm for recitals and what they can listen for in order to appreciate both the piano and the pianiste. As I have posted before, the Stuart piano has the following advantages over a ‘normal’ piano: 1) The clarity of sound 2) The long and powerful sustain 3) The dynamic range - how easy it is to play very soft and then to follow with a thunderous volume. 4) The dynamic possibilities enabled by the two left pedals - the dolce and the una corda with the option of depressing the two simultaneously. 5) The unique behaviour of the attack and decay transients of the sound. 6) The almost total lack of low frequency masking which is the tendency of the lower frequencies to obscure or over power the upper frequencies producing the thick dull sound common in the average acoustic piano. 7) The additional keys to facilitate the performance of repertoire written since around 1840 for 8 octaves and more. The piano's practical frequency range is 102 keys, subcontra C to f above the traditional top c. In addition, there are the features of the Stuart piano which make it ideal to experience the vertical colour of the sound. In most conventional Western composition, tone colour had been regarded as a secondary element of musical expression and to counter this, musical instruments were designed to give off a specific tone colour or character bias e.g. Bosendorfer, Steinway etc. Tone colour represents the harmonic and phasing interactions within a sound envelope that enliven and highlight the musical structure – the sounds architecture. 20th century music invites us to walk in, look around and move through, it encourages us to listen for the fine-tuning of the harmonic series, the attack and decay transients of the sound envelope, balance between tone and noise, the perpetual play of shifting hues. If in most traditional Western art music tone colour may be said to adorn the structure, then in minimalist music the structure often adorns the tone colour. The vertical dimension, the physiology or architecture of sound, is concerned with space and tone colour. The horizontal dimension, the written notation or score is concerned with time and content – conceptual aesthetics and ideologies. Five minutes? More like five hours … Help!!! Thursday, December 11. 2008
What is the most important quality ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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11:40
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… to be confident that he or she will be able to get the most out of a Stuart piano?
I was reminded of this yesterday when I had the pleasure of a visit by a family who I have known for a while now and I regard as very special people. Dr Nuli Lemoh is the driving force behind the construction of the Children’s Hopsital in Bo, Sierra Leone – the project for which we were able to raise quite a deal of money back in May this year at my recital. He and his wife Margaret are quite delightful in many ways (in particular Nuli’s national dress is sartorially far superior to anything I have in my wardrobe) and I’ve always said that any offspring they have must also be equally as talented as they are. And, I was right. Their daughter Tonya is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium and has spent the last few years in Denmark, where she has not only developed a very busy schedule as a concert, chamber and recording artiste but also now teaches at the University of Copenhagen. She is visiting family and friends here for the next month or so, and is giving a fundraising concert for the Bo Hospital at, of all places, the Stuart & Sons factory in Newcastle on the 20th of December at 2.00pm. Whilst she has some knowledge of the Stuart piano, obviously throwing her off the deep end as it were at the recital would not allow her to really come to grips with the extraordinary capabilities of these pianos. In all likelihood, she will play one of the two pianos mentioned in the previous posting. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone – invite the family down so that I could see Nuli and Margaret again, and importantly meet Tonya and let her loose to give her some first hand exposure to the Stuart piano. I was not disappointed with either. I explained in some detail about the sonority, pedals, dynamic range, sustain etc and illustrated these with appropriate bits of Debussy, Tan Dun as well as others, with appropriate apologies for my limited level of performance. Tonya then settled down and began to explore. As she progressed I began to realise that I was hearing different sounds to what I was used to hearing on the piano, and that was not necessarily because Tonya was playing music that I don’t play. She was experimenting with all sorts of combinations and it was then that I knew why she was coming to grips with the piano in such a relatively short time. She was listening. Purely and simply, she was listening - and she knew what she was listening for. She was sensitive to the music, to the sounds, to the feel - the most important quality that a pianist can have. At the end of the day, she knew what would work and what would not work as well, and that gave her the information she needed to finalise her programme for the 20th December. It reinforced a couple of the principles that I’ve had in mind for a while now: • Don’t be afraid of the bass. On any other piano, including the Steinways I have played, hitting the bass hard overpowers everything else, not so much in terms of the volume but the ‘murkiness’ of the harmonics interferes with everything else. The Stuart piano, having a very clean bass, does not react in this way and the bass is in fact complementary rather than detrimental to the rest of the piano. • Don’t be afraid of the dynamic range. The Stuart can be loud, but not painfully so as in the case of so many other pianos. As Margaret commented, the piano doesn’t overpower you – it envelops you with sound. Quite unique. I learnt a lot myself, and that is why I know this recital will be very special. Sunday, December 7. 2008
Chipmunks roasting on an open fire… Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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19:40
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… hot sauce dripping from their toes….slurp…
I am reminded about this much more preferable wording to the original (which I’m sure everyone reading this will recognise) when I was playing with my son at his youth group’s Christmas party this afternoon. Our combination of saxophone (he played tenor this time) and keyboard (the new Kurzweil) worked very well, and a number of his friends also helped us to play, which was good. I would have preferred playing the Stuart, but then again, as I’ve said before, portability is an issue and in any case I can’t fit the Stuart into my car. I can fit the maker into my car, however, and that’s what I did when Wayne and I had lunch together yesterday in Newcastle when I was finally able to find to time to visit. We discussed a range of issues as we normally do, but from my perspective I was able to try out two new 2.9 metre grand pianos which have only recently been completed. Indeed one was so new it hadn’t had its final tuning and voicing yet – but nonetheless it sounded extraordinarily good. It had a somewhat softer tone than the other one but this is probably a voicing issue and a result of softer hammers. The interesting thing was that as I played these pianos, with pieces of music that I was quite comfortable with on my piano, that once again I found myself playing them differently, needing to allow for a much ‘wetter’ (= more reverberation) sound and also, believe it or not, longer sustain than even my piano has. Later in the afternoon Wayne was visited by two local music teachers who were interested in the pianos (although as it turned out not to buy one, although undoubtedly if they could they would have done) and after a cook’s tour of the manufacturing facility he and I spent well over an hour with them demonstrating the qualities and sounds that these pianos could produce. It really was an eye-opening experience for them, because I’m sure that although they obviously had heard of the pianos, they certainly had no idea about the ‘whys and wherefores’ of the instrument. This raises an interesting point. Giving that the major source of information concerning these pianos is the website, I get the distinct view that the kind of information Wayne and I imparted that afternoon is just not available either there or anywhere else. So it’s a new piano. So it’s a new sound. So what? What can we do with it? What does it mean? This is the information that people need to help them decide whether a Stuart piano is the one for them. If they can’t physically play one (if they are overseas for example) we have to give them the next best thing – a virtual tour of the piano that allows them to see what Wayne and I were able to show these ladies. That is a concern for me, because it does appear as though the message is not getting out the way it should and certainly not getting to the right people. Monday, December 1. 2008
The times are definitely a’changing ... Posted by Dr Christopher Moore
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19:10
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… and the old ways of doing things do not necessarily work any more. Continuing the thought process started off rather ramblingly in the previous post, it occurred to me that this provides further impetus to the thoughts I first espoused in a previous post highlighting the need for a new marketing model for Stuart pianos which did not in any way rely on the need for middlemen or dealers.
Further comments from the fora referenced above: “… there actually is a "cloak of secrecy" around piano pricing. This has nothing to do with consumers and everything to do with the piano business model. I have said it before but here goes again: Nobody benefits when a shopper cannot easily determine the price of the piano he wants to buy. Current pricing policies in the piano business make it more difficult to buy and to sell a piano than it needs to be, probably reducing overall sales volume. This has nothing to do with the actual price and the associated margins. It has to do with difficulty in determining the price, whatever it is. IMHO, the business would benefit from addressing the problem with pricing uncertainty.” The main issue I have with this sort of thing, reasonable though it may sound, is that we are focusing too much on the price rather than the value of the piano – and this latter is a much more complex and to an extent subjective topic than many would recognise. Value in a piano sense has much more to do with the musical and build qualities of a piano than it does with the price, although obviously price is still a major factor when it comes to the final purchase decision. The costs and hassles of a dealer model for Stuart pianos make it impossible in a practical sense for the business to be run in that way. An additional factor is that quite often we have seen that a high quality piano such as a Stuart is used to attract clientele to a dealer, only for that dealer to try to sell a cheaper piano to the customer – the classic ‘bait and switch’ mechanism, which should invoke instant decapitation, draw and quartering, boiling the remains in oil and then deporting to a foreign country, not necessarily in that order. That just grates. So Stuart pianos are normally sold directly through the factory, or, in theory, one (and only one) internet outlet. That means that all relevant information comes from the one source, there is no ambiguity in pricing or margins and the customer knows exactly what he, she or it is getting for how many dollars. But it important to recognise that the price is the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle. Stuart pianos are not, repeat not, commodity items to be priced as low as possible and margins set so as to promote ‘cut throat competition’ between dealers. People who want a Stuart piano for all the right reasons (music, build quality, investment, the challenge of playing one etc) will know that they will need to pay a premium price for such an instrument. This is not a mass produced clone of a Steinway – it’s a hand crafted and individually designed instrument for which the value is paramount. As I stated in a previous post, “The cost of a Stuart piano accurately reflects production, not marketing, advertising or retailing costs. You cannot compare Stuart pianos in a business sense with other ‘mass production’ (including Steinway) instruments because that ignores the fact that so few are made each per year and, of critical importance, totally by hand. Some people do not want mass produced product and actively seek the difference factor and, more to the point, are prepared to pay for it in the full knowledge and understanding that they cannot have such a product for nothing. The Stuart piano does not compete in any market niche – it has created its own.” In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the price should not be seen at all. Obviously, for someone to go through the process and be eventually confronted with an exorbitant price that in no way reflects commercial reality will result in a very quick exit – but most people have a ball park figure and if the price is comfortable in that sense, they will sign on the dotted line. The Price is Right? No, the Value is Right. People who purchase a Stuart piano buy for uncompromised quality, not compromised price. Once again, I know. That’s what I did. |
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