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Possession of a piano has all the time had a unfastened connection to wealth and sophistication: they aren’t low cost; they take up worthwhile area in a house; and studying to play requires a lot time and dedication.
So, because the economies of the east Asia grew quickly within the latter half of the twentieth century, home demand for grands, child grands and upright pianos surged. Earlier than lengthy, China turned the world’s piano manufacturing facility — shopping for up European corporations and producing respectable devices on an enormous scale.
Even UK makers of high-quality pianos, reminiscent of Edelweiss, based mostly simply exterior Cambridge, got here to rely largely on elements being shipped from the east Asia — just because the abilities required to make them extra domestically had vanished.
“Going back a hundred years or so, the British used to be quite good at it,” says Edelweiss’s artistic director Mark Norman, whose father based the enterprise as a piano restoration agency within the mid Nineteen Seventies. “But, now, around 80 per cent of the world’s piano parts are sourced in the far east.”
Edelweiss, like different piano makers, got here to depend on the imports. “If the containers of parts arrived regularly, it was a pretty good system,” Norman says. “We were about to fly out to China with a view to expanding our relationship [with Chinese factories] when Covid hit. Our flights were cancelled. We were quite glad we didn’t go, as we might never have got home again.”
This was not only a postponed enterprise assembly, nonetheless. China, in impact, stopped exporting throughout that stage of the pandemic, fully disrupting Edelweiss’s provide chain. “We were in a fortunate position in that we’d just ordered quite a lot of parts and we were stocked up,” remembers Norman. “But if they shut down for two years, or if it happened again, what would we do?”
The agency had been anxious about this sort of eventuality for numerous years and had contemplated the potential for making a piano solely sourced and constructed within the UK. Up till then, Norman had resisted, contemplating it a near-impossible activity.
“The prospect was daunting,” he says. “But we had to secure a high-quality supply chain that wasn’t going to give us these problems, and obviously it would be desirable in terms of carbon footprint.”
Whereas many years spent restoring and constructing pianos to excessive requirements had outfitted Edelweiss with a wealth of expertise, its workers truly had little data of easy methods to make the instrument’s constituent elements. The corporate due to this fact employed a revered American piano designer, Delwin Fandrich, to place collectively drawings for a brand new mannequin, which the agency envisioned as being the smallest grand piano on the planet.
“Edelweiss took on a project that few companies — even much larger ones — are willing to consider,” says Fandrich. “Building any piano is a formidable task, but building one in-house to an all-new design even more so.”
After the design was established, the agency began sounding out potential suppliers. “Initially, we didn’t tell them what the project was,” says Norman. “We really wanted to see how passionate they were, as we believe that, if you’re working on an instrument, you aren’t just doing a job. You’re making a piano, you have to go the extra mile to make it better.”
Enthused by the response, Edelweiss determined to make the leap, sending out authorized non-disclosure agreements to ensure confidentiality, then revealing their full plan to the popular corporations.
One of the vital components was the piano’s body. It’s historically solid in iron — which requires a prolonged means of mould making, adjustment, and but extra mould making. Edelweiss couldn’t discover a foundry in a position to produce the forged iron it wished, however was capable of finding a provider who may reduce it from metal. Then, the makers needed to experiment with welding and bolting to supply a body that would move stringent stress exams. Nonetheless, the motion (the mechanism that brings the hammers into contact with the strings) proved one problem too many; it was just too complicated to make from scratch.
“You have to do thousands of tests on each key,” explains Norman. “The development process and quality control would be exacting and it would be very, very difficult to make any money. So, for this piano we’re using a carbon fibre composite action from the USA, which is very nice, we’re getting good results from it.”
Total, the method from design to the completed piano took three years; Norman estimates the monetary price as someplace between £100,000 and £200,000 “which from one point of view isn’t too bad, but from another is rather a lot”.
However regardless of the exact outlay, it has left Edelweiss with a singular product — a lot cherished by pianists — and in a a lot stronger place.
“I wouldn’t say we were bulletproof,” says Norman. “But my father was always an innovator and, if he was still around, I think he’d be really pleased with what we’ve done.”
