with me in creating compositions using the Stuart piano sound. The music we composed has enhanced my awareness of ‘place’, the place of this piano’s creation, this place, my place. The experiences of studying and describing the qualities of this instrumental sound have inturn inspired me to use the sound in composition and improvisation that informs me about the place of its making. The sound has moved me to act in this particular artistic and cultural manner.My artistic creativity, the outcome of my investigations, is therefore discussed as being a consequence of the Stuart piano design and sound.
Throughout the six chapters of this thesis, I write about the science of sound, historic piano design, social opinion of the Stuart sound, my perceptions of the Stuart piano tone, and its sonic capacities to enable my collaborations in Australian Aboriginal music practices. How the Stuart & Sons piano has been utilised in the contemporary music scene by various artists in Australia since 1995 is also examined.
I describe the Stuart piano as a piano of this time and place. The design implementation of the bridge agraffe in combination with the most recent developments in hybrid steel drawing of piano wire and the elimination of the traditional piano string down-bearing, are indicative of very recent, even controversial developments in piano design. There is a general sense that this is a modern Australian piano that presents a new soundscape of projection and tone. My application of the Stuart piano sound with Aboriginal music practice is also indicative of a contemporary approach. Each of the inter-cultural collaborative compositions produced by this research are indicative of the cultural developments in the Australian Arts where Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists producers, writers, composers and funding corporations work together to produce symphonies, popular songs, rock bands, schools of modern art, arts festivals, novels, plays and film.
In a sense this research asks, does instrumental design influence musical composition, or is it the reverse? Both questions are answered here in the affirmative. The sound of the Stuart piano sound has influenced, even instigated the compositions, and later in this introduction, Wayne Stuart the maker of the Stuart piano, describes his motivation to create the new piano design as being directly related to specific musical styles of the 19th Century.2 So we have music being created because of an instrumental sound and the impetus for the design being born out of the maker’s reaction to specific musical style.
The very concept of the first piano in the early 1700s, a keyboard instrument with a more responsive keyboard action and than the harpsichord, is reportedly associated with the characteristics of the musical style of that period which emphasised the performer’s individual musical expression.3 To support the notion that piano design and musical style are creatively and historically linked, I have listed and illustrated piano designs in the ‘Early Piano Design Associated With New Musical Style’ section of this introduction, emphasising the expanding range of the piano keyboard compass and its deployment by the influential composers, pianists and musical styles of the day.
2See ‘Vertical Colour and Sound’ section of this introduction, where Stuart says it was dervived from the incapacity of the standardised modern piano, in his view, to produce the clarity of complex sound quality instigated by the Impressionists composers of the early 19th Century and Electronic music composition later that same century.
3Athur Loesser. Men, Women and Piano : A Social History(Dover Publications,1954), 24.
