www.geoffreydancer.com Home What makes a Piano Old and New Projects Contact: Geoffrey Dancer Piano Restoration Unit 4 Grant Road Clapham Junction London SW11 2NU Email: geoff@geoffreydancer.com

Article from 'The Pianist' February 2002 One of the few people in the country not wringing his hands in despair at the state of the railways is piano restorer Geoff Dancer. In fact, as far as Dancer is concerned, the fewer trains that pull into platform 2 at Clapham Junction station, the better. Directly beneath, in an industrial unit fashioned from converted railway arches, is Dancer's workshop. When one of two trains an hour comes to a rumbling, sonorous halt overhead, piano tuning is impossible and conversation a shouting match. This lasts barely half a minute, after which the glorious silence that is 21st-century rail travel once again reigns supreme. The workshop looks something like a musical butcher's shop, with about 20 instruments in varying states of evisceration lying helplessly around. After a nervous start, Dancer has been here for the last 13 years. 'At first, when I saw the arches, I thought it was going to be no good,' he says, surveying the complicated architecture of arches and bays. 'I'd wanted an open space. But in fact you can tuck pianos away in the bays, and they isolate the sound slightly, which is good.' Dancer's career got underway after he took a degree in music from Oxford University and went on to his first job as a music and piano teacher at Bedales school. 'When I left there, they gave me a battered grand piano because they didn't want it. I brought it to London and became intrigued as to why one piano sounded better than another. I used to take things to pieces as a child, so I took it to bits. I became totally obsessed with how the sound was made.' His progress has been helped by the fact that he can actually play the instrument (on which he gives occasional concerts), rather than just being a piano nerd. 'The restoration is done from the point of view that I play,' he insists. 'Setting up a piano is done to produce sounds and colours for a pianist, so it helps to empathise with what they're hoping for.' Pianists themselves clearly appreciate Dancer's empathy, and almost all of his work comes via word of mouth recommendations. Pianos have been with us for centuries, but Dancer decided he would only deal with instruments built after 1880, since when the process of manufacture has remained largely unaltered. 'Nowadays they use harder hammers for a brighter sound,' he says. 'And longer strings, to increase the sustain quality. But apart from those few little details the design hasn't changed since then.' Modern pianos set up to project a big sound in a large concert hall may have the edge in terms of sheer volume - thanks to bigger hammers striking strings maintained at a higher tension and supported on a massive iron frame - but Dancer is more sympathetic to the instruments of a hundred years ago, when - unlike now - many of the leading manufacturers were British. 'Before the second world war, and more so before the first, pianos seem to have had much more sensitive soundboards. Some of the nicest pianos I've ever come across have been made between 1900 and 1914. The UK used to be a major centre of piano making. Around 1910 there were 300 firms in both Germany and Britain that competed with each other.' It was a British piano - a Chappell concert grand - that Dancer set up for a Proms centenary concert in 1995 which set out to reproduce the type of sound that would have been common about a hundred years ago. The performance of the Mendelssohn G minor concerto with a period-instrument orchestra proved a revelation. 'The piano turned out to have a huge sound,' Dancer recalls. 'The thing about old pianos not being able to project is a myth. The problem is you're stuck with having to compete with modern orchestras, which have bright woodwind, strings and brass.' The heart of every piano, and the first thing that Dancer checks out when a piano arrives in his workshop, is the soundboard - the wooden board behind the strings which resonates and amplifies the sound. At the mention of the soundboard, Dancer finds it impossible not to wax lyrical. 'The soundboard is the amplifier and the loudspeaker part of the instrument. Sustain quality is everything in a piano. If you put a tuning fork on the soundboard, it will immediately vibrate because it's alive. Cracks don't matter, it's the quality of the wood. If there's a crack, you can open it and put a v-shaped wedge in, plane it and varnish it. The magic's not gone because there's a crack in the soundboard.' Pinewood was used to make soundboards, and not just any old pine either. 'There are all sorts of stories about which side of the hill it should grow on, and the different quality of pine from different parts of Europe. The wood would sit around for ages before it was selected by someone who really knew what they were doing. It has to be dried out naturally, instead of having the sap forced out of it by ovens and kilns as they do nowadays. It was a human decision as to when it was ready. I'm not sure there are those intuitive woodmen around now.' A decent soundboard was the salvation of an instrument that Dancer is currently spending much time on, a Bluthner that used to belong to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. 'I feel like a surgeon,' says Dancer, casting a look at his patient's exposed inner organs. 'The owners wanted to know if it had had its day, or could be brought back to what it was. The felts are completely soggy. The strings had become stiff. The copper becomes oxidised and causes a kind of deadness. But I could tell the soundboard was good. If that's fine, then almost anything is possible.' So off came all the strings (it is a myth, says Dancer, that old strings are in some way superior to modern ones), the new ones being subjected to a lengthy process of stabilisation - they continue stretching and the tension needs to be brought up four or five times. Meanwhile, Dancer will take out the piano action (the hammer mechanisms) in order to replace all the hammer heads. Being a Bluthner, the piano will get Bluthner hammers. 'These hammers are especially soft for a Bluthner. If I put the harder Steinway hammers on it would be like rocks hitting the strings.' Then the dampers will need refelting: the strings have made such deep grooves in the old felt that they no longer damp effectively. Felts have to be ordered from Germany, and the replacement process takes about a day. Replacing the hammer heads takes 3 days for the entire set, or about four an hour. Then comes the fun part. 'The best bit is toning,' says Dancer, 'defining the sound. You use sandpaper on the surface of the hammer head: the part that hits the string has to be free from lumps. To make the sound less bright you have to tone the hammers with needles, releasing the tension in the felt. Many layers are stretched over and there's tremendous tension. It makes an enormous difference to the balance of what comes out. And the strings have to be level. You use hooks to bring them up. And they also have to be spaced evenly.' When toning the hammers, Dancer starts at middle C ('I don't know why'), goes down to the bass notes, then tackles the upper register. 'And then I come back the next day, because your ears change. Sometimes it can take 2 or 3 years periodically going back to the piano until the hammers settle.' After two or three months, the Bluthner will be discharged with a clean bill of health, leaving behind one slightly regretful piano restorer. We pause while a rare train rumbles overhead and Dancer looks down wistfully at the messy box of wires, felt and bits of wood that he will have helped reveal once again as a thing of beauty. 'Each instrument's got its own personality, and you have to find out what it is,' he says. 'You always leave a bit of yourself in the piano.' -- Erica Worth Pianist Magazine