Music: Invention

Tired pianists who have practiced all day until their fingers are fagots of bruised nerves and the sound of their instrument echoes as hollowly to their ears as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal, dream, when asleep, of the perfect piano. They seat themselves before a suave and sable instrument that is pliant to their will as none that mortal hands have ever fingered; it speaks for them with a mighty organ voice; notes, at the command of their subconscious will, sing with the pomp of trumpets or the tenderness of fiddles, yet it is no pipe organ that they play, but a crisp, living, leaping engine of wire strings and felted hammers. Such a dream-piano may have been made incarnate by InventorJohn Hays Hammond Jr., “smart son of a smart father”, (TIME, Aug. 17, AERONAUTICS). Last week he gave his name to a pedal.

Inventor Hammond has perfected for the piano a device which enables the player to have control over notes after he has struck them. It is operated by a fourth pedal, the “Hammond Pedal”, which opens and closes an arrangement of parallel revolving slats on the roof of the soundproof case much as the old-fashioned window-shutter was manipulated by its spindle. Since the case is soundproof, the tone can be built up within the pianoforte, its volume depending on the angle of the shutter) and allowed to escape at the will of the player. Again, the reflector can return to the strings a large part of the energy imparted by the player’s fingers. Inventor Hammond held, at his home in Gloucester, Mass., a demonstration of a regulation instrument fitted with his invention. Famed musicians composers, expressed their wonder. Said Pianist Josef Hofmann:

“I have just returned from a week-end visit . . . where I heard a piano demonstrated whose tones grow or die as the performer chooses. I heard the volume in creased after the tone had been struck … all this without in any degree altering the characteristics or the piano tone.”