After B.F. Miessner put the finishing touches on his Electronic Piano in 1932, he began licensing almost all of the electric piano industry for the next two decades. His patents were the basis of the Minipiano by Hardman, Peck, and Co., the Electone (ca. 1938) manufactured by Krakauer Brothers under the supervision of Maurice K. Bretsfelder, the Dynatone (ca. 1945) by the Ansley Radio Corporation, the Storytone by Story and Clark and the Bernhardt Electronic Piano, a Canadian licensee.
Naturally these pianos shared design features with Miessner’s Electronic Piano of 1932 (see CK, Feb. 78, for details). Each had a standard piano action, strings, and keyboard. However, the soundboard was eliminated and electrostatic pickups, amplifiers, mixers, and loudspeakers provided electrical production of typical percussive tones. In some models additional circuitry allowed alteration of tone characteristics to produce non-percussive sounds.
Many of these pianos were designed for the home market; they included radios and phonographs. Some newspaper announcements emphasized these features—the “furniture” aspect of the instrument. We read about the Dynatone:
The turntable for the phonograph is placed on a sliding tray at one side of the piano. When this is not in use it slides into the piano like a drawer and forms an integral part of the design. The radio controls are concealed behind a panel matching the drawer on the other side. The result is a graceful piece of furniture. No one would guess, to look at it, that it holds so much.
For musicians who like to hear the piece they are trying to perfect played by an expert as they practice this machine should help. One could have a recording of a difficult passage at one’s elbow to play on the phonograph for inspiration at the piano.
While manufacturers aimed their promotion toward the home market, professional musicians provided many actual sales. Electric pianos enjoyed a flurry of use in the late ’30s and ’40s. For instance, the Krakauer Electone was used in Cracraft’s “All Electronic Orchestra” about this time. That’s right—in 1940! Cracraft used this electric piano, the Hammond Novachord (a vacuum-tube polyphonic instrument), and electric violins, guitars, ‘celli, and even kettledrums described as a “small unit not more than a couple of feet square, with the equivalent output and playing flexibility of eight great drums.”
If comments by pioneers in the development of electronic musical instruments seem overstated, one should realize the resistance their then-radical ideas created. During the ’30s Miessner attacked “the barriers of unprogressiveness, of inflexible conservatism and old, unscientific method” with characteristic enthusiasm. In a humorous diatribe he compared “Tradition Versus Progress” in 1937:
In this age of progress in every conceivable field, music and musicians still use the traditional instruments and apparatus of hundreds of years ago.
One musician scrapes the tail of a horse across the intestines of a cat and the older his instrument is, the more he prizes it. Another blows lividly through a brass tube or a wooden pipe; another hammers on the drum of the aborigines made from the hide of a cow. Another, sometimes with terrific physical exertion, pounds on a keyboard to rouse his audience through the physical vibrations of struck strings and huge soundboards. Another with aggregations exceeding 10,000 pipes, some as long and large as a forest log, and with hundreds of other complicated and bulky appurtenances, produces the sound of the organ.
That most of these have reached the limit of their development is amply supported by their almost fixed design for hundreds of years.
Despite the resistance to new ideas, Miessner was optimistic concerning the future of electric musical instruments:
The masses are beginning to hear these new instruments and everywhere react with enthusiasm. The time is drawing near when all of these forces, so silently at work and so rapidly piling up, will break through the barriers, and the renaissance of a very old industry will in truth be accomplished.
The market is tremendous. In every home there is place for an instrument for music-making as well as for music reproduction; in all probability the two will be combined. Make no mistake about this—the renaissance of the musical instrument industry is certainly on its way. Those with imagination and courage will be the new leaders. They will develop not only a new industry for themselves, but also a great cultural contribution to the world.
In a way, Miessner was right; one has only to go to a NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) convention to see how electric instruments are coming to dominate the market. But he was ahead of his time. Also, Miessner and some of his licensees thought that their electric piano would supplant the acoustic—which of course it did not. Everything new in music should be considered an addition, not a replacement. Miessner’s most significant contribution, the development of the struck-reed piano, was still to be made. This instrument also found its own niche; that story will appear in next month’s column.
From our vantage point we can appreciate that electronic musical instruments have a utility; no one can argue with the fact that they are being used by thousands of musicians. But there is still an unfortunate tendency to categorize these instruments as replacements for acoustic instruments. Even today one hears curious comments that acoustic instruments are more “natural.” Bob Moog made some appropriate comments on this notion in a recent article:
Neither is it worthwhile to even consider the question, “Is electronic music less natural than music played on acoustic instruments?” No music is natural! Music is produced only after people invest strenuous and extended effort to gain intimate control over vibrating systems such as vocal cords, a violin, or a synthesizer. Furthermore, all musical instruments, except for the human voice, are highly contrived, technological artifices. They are differentiated not by their degree of “naturalness,” but by the technological periods in which they were developed. The stringed instruments were perfected when woodworking was a flowering technology. Piano designers utilized the processes of a fully industrialized society. And the electronic music medium is being developed now, at a time when electronic technology is dominant and the golden age of manufacturing appears to be yielding to what people are calling the “the post-industrial era.”
Put this way, you might say that you may see the makings of a guitar growing in a tree, but you’ll never see a guitar growing on a tree!
MARCH 1978
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