Welcome to the website of Peter Favant, an acoustic and digital piano technician, and software engineer based in New York City, USA.
I completed a two-year Advanced Piano Technology program at North Bennett Street School in Boston MA to attain my basic piano technology skills which consist of piano tuning, piano action regulation and complete acoustic piano restoration.

When I completed my training at North Bennett Street I worked at Steinway and Sons piano factory in Long Island City NY in the Belly and String Department where pianos in the process of manufacture receive their iron frame, soundboard and strings before proceeding to the next major manufacturing aspect of receiving their piano action.

How did the Piano come into existence?
The Piano is a hybrid stringed musical instrument, its initial development in Europe combining several other stringed musical instruments. The two stringed keyboard instruments that are the parents of the Piano are the Clavichord and the Harpsichord and the parent of the Clavichord and the Harpsichord is the Lute. The Hammered Dulcimer is also a parent of the Piano.

An acoustic stringed instrument uses a musical string stretched between two termination points as a vibrating object whose vibrations are amplified by a soundboard. The strings are set in motion either by plucking in the case of the lute, harp, and harpsichord, striking in the case of the clavichord, hammered dulcimer, and piano, or bowed in the case of the violin, cello, bass, and hurdy-gurdy. A stringed keyboard instrument employs a keyboard activated mechanism to set its strings in motion. In the case of the harpsichord the keyboard mechanism plucks the strings and in the case of the clavichord and piano the keyboard mechanism strikes the strings.

The Lute enables a musician to play harmonies with one instrument since lutes have multiple strings. Renaissance Lutes had 6 courses of strings, a course being a pair of strings, late Renaissance and early Baroque Lutes had 6 to 10 courses of strings, the later Archlute had 14 courses of strings, and the Theorbo had 14 to 19 courses of strings. The Theorbo has multiple necks with a bass to treble range and enables full harmonies which require practice to gain expertise on the part of the musician. The Theorbo music of Alessandro Piccinini is a great example of full harmony and bass to treble range Theorbo music.

The western chromatic keyboard is a wonderful invention which makes playing harmonies very accessible as it is symmetrical over its range of multiple octaves and is also a graphic representation of musical intervals making harmony both tactile and visual. In a way, the keyboard layout which is pitch ascendant from left to right matches the way music notation appears on a page pitch ascendant from lowest to highest notes on the staff. Western musical chromatic keyboard layout has been in existence for many years, having been developed during the 14th Century. These keyboards were associated with various forms of the Organ and were chromatic having a 12-note range of C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, although in practice, the modern 12-note chromatic keyboard we have today went through a number of transformations such as "split sharp keys" where the tempered scale tuning of the day treated notes such as D# and Eb as two different pitches, where in modern equal temperament tuning D# and Eb are considered to be the same note, but notated differently. In any event, the favorable attributes of the western chromatic keyboard led musical instrument makers to invent a way to use a keyboard activated mechanism to set the strings of a lute-like stringed instrument in motion yielding the family of stringed keyboard instruments.

The Role of Metal Wire in the Development of Stringed Keyboard Instruments:
The word string with reference to stringed instruments is referring to a musical string and there are many forms of musical strings. The word string in the term stringed keyboard instrument refers to metal music wire. The ancestors of the piano, the clavichord and harpsichord use metal music wire, not gut strings found in the lute.

When I attended North Bennett Street Industrial School for Piano Technology, the course began with some historical background of the piano. Our instructor William Garlick began the course with an interesting statement: The same technology that made the Brooklyn Bridge possible made the modern piano possible. Bill, as he preferred to be called, went on to explain that advances in metallurgical manufacturing were important for the development of the modern piano in several ways. The reference to the Brooklyn Bridge alludes to advances in the manufacture of steel and this includes the steel wire that is needed to make suspension bridge cables. Another aspect is the ability to make high precision wood milling machines capable of mass-producing piano mechanism parts.

The types of wire used in the clavichord and harpsichord are yellow brass, red brass, phosphor bronze, and soft iron. All these types of wire are used at much lower tensions than the tensions found in the steel wires of modern piano. In the 14th Century when the clavichord and harpsichord were invented, they emulated the lute in that they were keyboard activated versions of the lute's voice and this is especially true of the harpsichord which plucks the wires to set them in motion. What is very distinct though is that both clavichord and harpsichord used metal music wire. That is important in the development of the piano because what caused the modern piano to evolve was the ability of piano makers to steadily increase the tension on the piano's music wires.

Harpsichord with soft and loud (Gravicembalo col piano e forte)
It's worth noting that people invent objects such as tools to fulfill a need, for example, the Loom to weave cloth, the Plow to loosen and turn soil prior to planting seeds, or a musical instrument such as the Harp to create music. In Europe the 17th Century was a time of remarkable invention and innovation and as art reflects life, it was also a time of invention and innovation in music and in musical instruments. In a broad sense what transpired musically through and by the end of the 17th Century was the adoption of musical expressiveness, that is, the use of loud and soft dynamics. Musically, one of the most influential forms of a shift towards expressiveness in music was opera which utilized more expressive vocal styles. Harpsichord makers were also seeking ways to make harpsichords more expressive which led Bartolemeo Cristofori, a harpsichord maker of Padua Italy, then in Venice, to invent a hammer mechanism for the harpsichord. The result was an instrument called Harpsichord with soft and loud.

In the book Pianos and Their Makers written by Alfred Dolge in 1909, published by Covina Publishing Company, Covina CA in 1911, and republished by Dover Publications Inc. New York, NY in 1972, the author points out that two harpsichord makers, Cristofori of Venice and Marius of Paris, along with a German organist Schröter arrived at the same idea of a hammer mechanism for the harpsichord around the same time, although Cristofori is credited with producing the first complete instrument ^[1].

In the book The Piano-Forte, It's History Traced to the Great Exhibition of 1851 written by Rosamond E. Harding, published by Cambridge University Press in 1933 and in a paperback edition in 2014, the author points out the importance of changing musical styles in the 17th Century influencing harpsichord makers to pursue the musically expressive invention of the piano.

Both books lay out in detail, aspects of the history of the piano. Alfred Dolge's book concentrates on the advances in the modern piano through the beginning of the 20th Century, where Rosamond Harding's book concentrates on the development of the Piano-Forte up to the Great Exhibition of 1851 where the first square grand piano with a full iron frame was exhibited.