… some of the technical advances in the Stuart piano over and above what may be called the status quo. But in talking about these, many people lose sight of the fact that the driving force behind these changes was not technical but musical.
Take the agraffe for instance. This modifies the termination of the strings so that they are terminated vertically, not horizontally as in all other grand pianos. Whilst this has received the most publicity (i.e. marketing) over the years, it has to seen in the context of many other advances in piano design present in each and every Stuart piano.
This hasn’t stopped other people from jumping on the bandwagon and by implication or otherwise trying to convince others that they had an important role to play in the development of the agraffe principle. This recently occurred in one of the PianoWorld fora where it was claimed by a technician who had developed his own agraffe about twenty years ago for Baldwin (it was never taken up by that company) that :
“An almost identical bridge agraffe is now being used by Stuart (Australia). The bridge agraffe developed by Steingraeber is similar to this.”
Now this seems an innocent enough statement except that:
1) I doubt that he’s even seen a Stuart agraffe
2) The Steingraeber agraffe (actually designed by Richard Dain from Hurstwood Farm in England) is quite different to the Stuart agraffe in both its design and application.
3) It could be construed from the wording that somehow the Stuart agraffe is based upon or draws upon the Baldwin work.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In my view the statement at best ambiguous and at worst dishonest.
The Stuart agraffe was initially trialed in 1974, refined over about a decade to its first stage implementation and then further refined over a further decade to its present form. There can, of course, be no specific claim on this concept as similar devices have been around for well over 150 years. It should be noted that Wayne Stuart developed his device in isolation of any contemporary efforts. His focus was never on the agraffe per se but rather, the principle of vertical coupling such a device could achieve. This was driven, not by any perception that the bridge pin system is primitive and inadequate, but to take advantage of the need to change the soundscape from the old lineal, two dimensional, time based notation and ideology that essentially ended with the rise of Impressionism.
Since that time essential musical ethos and motifs have required a three dimensional soundscape to be effectively communicated. This important driving force in contemporary music seems to have passed by the traditionally focused piano makers and technicians who are bogged down in 19th century ideologies and fashions in sound. Stuart’s work is not about better bridge coupling/agraffes but about the exploration of the vertical colour of sound which readers might be better informed on if they read the Dr. Erik Tamm work, Brian Eno - His Music and the Vertical Colour of Sound. – a free download on the Brian Eno website and a subject which I have already covered in this blog.