Mar 1, 2022
Lowell Mason was Medfield’s most famous and accomplished native son, and it’s somehow fitting that his piano is the biggest artifact in the historical society’s collection.
Lowell Mason (1792-1872) was born in Medfield. He is known as the father of public school music education in the United States, and he wrote upwards of 2000 hymns. His name lives on today, as the National Association for Music Education honors outstanding achievers as Lowell Mason Fellows.
Most people wouldn’t get the point of it today, but there’s a corny riddle that dates from the 19th century: Q – Why are the very best people like pianos? A – Because they’re grand, upright, and square.
Grand pianos and uprights are still in common use, though only about 20,000 new acoustic pianos are sold each year, compared to a total of around 1 million new electronic keyboards. The highwater mark for new acoustic piano sales was over a century ago: 364,500 in 1909.
So what’s a square piano?
A square piano is what Lowell Mason bought about 1850. It was made by J. De Huff of Boston, and Mason paid $150 for it. Several years ago I Googled “De Huff,” and I believe it said the firm had made only a handful of pianos before going out of business…but today I find no mention of De Huff from any search engine.
The strings on square pianos were strung horizontally, behind and more or less parallel to the keyboard and perpendicular to the line of sight of the person playing it.
This “square” piano measures about 3’ x 3’ x 6’ long – about the size of a refrigerator laid on its back. It has only half the footprint of my grand piano. It has 77 keys, compared to 88 on a modern piano. It has but one foot pedal, which would allow it to play louder, though not as loudly as a modern piano. Some of the notes sound when the key is struck, but the piano is not in playable condition. If it were restored – at a cost of many thousands of dollars – it would have a thin, unappealing sound.
Square pianos were big sellers from the late 18th to the late 19th century. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned them. But as piano technology advanced, square pianos were displaced by uprights, which took up less space and sounded better.
Greater Boston as a Center for Pianos and Music Reproduction
Although De Huff was short-lived, Boston was a leading center of piano manufacturing from the mid-19th century into the 20th. In 1854 Lowell’s son Henry and Emmons Hamlin formed Mason and Hamlin to make reed organs and then, in 1884, upright pianos, and in 1900, under new ownership, world-class concert grands. Two other top-quality pianos made in Boston were Chickering and Ivers & Pond; others included Emerson, Everett, Hallet & Davis, and Vose.
Here’s a must-see for people interested in historic pianos: the Frederick Collection in Ashburnham, Mass. There are some 20 historic pianos in playable condition, used in concerts there. It offers listeners the chance to hear and experience, for example, a more authentic Beethoven recital – played on a piano like one Beethoven would have written for and used, rather than on a modern piano, which is quite different.
On another music-related subject, 50-60 years ago the Boston area was a major center of the music-reproduction industry, with dozens of innovative small loudspeaker and other audio equipment manufacturers catering to legions of hobbyists. Among them: Acoustic Research (AR), KLH, Advent, Kloss Video, Cambridge Soundworks – in all of which Henry Kloss had a leadership role. Also, H.H. Scott, ADS, Allison, Boston Acoustics, dbx, Acoustech, Apogee, Snell, Kloss, Burhoe, and dbSystems. These companies have all disappeared, though some of the names have resurfaced from time to time. Consumers now seem more interested in convenience than sound quality.
The only Boston-area company from that era that survives is Bose, which has grown to over $3 billion selling to modern lifestyle consumers, but generally not to hard-core audiophiles.
When were musical instruments invented?*
- A flute made from a bone, estimated at 43,000 years old, is the earliest known musical instrument.
- The earliest stringed instrument (~2500 BC) is a lyre (ancestor of a guitar).
- The earliest instrument that was played by striking the strings (~1000 BC) was a santour, the ancestor of the hammer dulcimer and the harpsichord.
- The earliest keyboard (~300 BC) instrument was the hydraulis, a water-powered organ.
- The earliest keyboard-activated (~1500 CE) stringed instruments were the clavichord and the harpsichord.
- The first pianoforte was made about 1720 by Bartolomeo Cristofori; it looks like a grand piano, and the instruments we are familiar with are its direct descendants.
*Source: Wikipedia articles