Considering as I said before that it is now almost five years since I acquired my piano I have been thinking about the changes in my playing and attitudes over that time and in particular how I now tackle various pieces of music and, importantly, the music that I play.
I’ve always been interested in unusual and rare classical music and have quite an extensive collection now of quite esoteric but nonetheless extraordinary music courtesy, in particular, to sites like
www.pianophilia.com. What this has done has sharpened my awareness of sounds and feel on the piano, and the unique characteristics of the Stuart piano have really become much clearer and much, much more logical as I have progressed. So much so, that I am finding it very difficult to consider how I would play other pianos, even though I still do, and appreciate their qualities. I have also started going back to some of the more ‘standard’ classical repertoire, and found that for some strange reason I seem to be playing these better, in the sense that my fingers seem to be much more fluent than they’ve been for many a year, and the sounds that are coming back to my ears are much clearer and more precise than I can remember for quite some time.
However, Stuart & Sons were existence for some years before I arrived on the scene, and indeed the development of the Stuart piano has been a very long term project not only from Wayne Stuart’s perspective (piano design has been his life for more years than I suspect he cares to remember) but also for many other organisations who have helped along the way. I don’t intend to go into great detail here, but a couple of thoughts may be relevant.
Stuart pianos #1 and #2 are still housed (and played) at the Newcastle Conservatorium, which was the first organisation to commit to the Stuart ethos and paradigm, and #3 is at the University of NSW. Indeed, without organisational support of this type it is doubtful whether commercial production of Stuart pianos would have been possible, since the amount of capital and developmental work required would have prohibitive for any profit-minded enterprise to consider. Stuart pianos are now housed at many of the major musical establishments in Australia, and their use has contributed enormously to the status of these pianos as now exists.
Stuart piano #4, which was built around 1999, is now housed at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, where it is used quite frequently for recitals of many kinds, and this blog entry was triggered in the main by the fact that I have been asked to give an introductory talk on Stuart pianos at a function there next week which, amongst other things, features a recital by the well known jazz musician Kevin Hunt, who is the current recipient of a Piano Australia scholarship at the Sydney Conservatorium focussing on performance characteristics of Stuart pianos. I’m not sure exactly what I will be saying, but it has been suggested that I look at the links between public support of human endeavour through our institutions, its long term and far reaching implications for the development of Australian society and its cultural mores, with particular reference of course to the Stuart piano. It’s not an area that I have really thought much about, to be truthful I’m just a (very) simple scientist with a modicum of musical ability (or maybe vice versa), but there is no doubt that a small operation such as Stuart & Sons does not exist in isolation to the society in which we live, and it is critical that that society is an integral part of and must understand and accept any cultural development of the type which Stuart has triggered.
There are many boutique piano manufacturers in the world, each which their own particular claim to fame. But Stuart & Sons is unique in being a start-up concern which has designed and built pianos from scratch – for example, major components such as the case and the frame are not imported from other established manufacturers but made here. I think the only other critical parts which are not made here are the piano action and the piano string wire.
I’ve heard it said that all pianos are variations on the same theme. A piano is a piano, obviously, but whilst all other grand pianos built today are variations on the same ~120 or so year old Steinway theme, the Stuart is a completely new theme and has to be treated as such. The old ways are no more.
The piano is dead. Long live the piano.