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Possession of a piano has all the time had a unfastened connection to wealth and sophistication: they don’t seem to be 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 grew to become the world’s piano manufacturing facility — shopping for up European corporations and producing respectable devices on a large scale.
Even UK makers of high-quality pianos, equivalent to Edelweiss, primarily based simply exterior Cambridge, got here to rely largely on components being shipped from the east Asia — just because the abilities required to make them extra domestically had vanished.
“Going again 100 years or so, the British was fairly 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. “However, now, round 80 per cent of the world’s piano components are sourced within the far east.”
Edelweiss, like different piano makers, got here to depend on the imports. “If the containers of components arrived recurrently, it was a reasonably good system,” Norman says. “We had been about to fly out to China with a view to increasing our relationship [with Chinese factories] when Covid hit. Our flights had been cancelled. We had been fairly glad we didn’t go, as we would by no means have gotten residence once more.”
This was not only a postponed enterprise assembly, nevertheless. China, in impact, stopped exporting throughout that stage of the pandemic, utterly disrupting Edelweiss’s provide chain. “We had been in a lucky place in that we’d simply ordered numerous components and we had been stocked up,” recollects Norman. “But when they shut down for 2 years, or if it occurred once more, what would we do?”
The agency had been frightened about this type of eventuality for numerous years and had contemplated the opportunity of making a piano fully sourced and constructed within the UK. Up till then, Norman had resisted, contemplating it a near-impossible activity.
“The prospect was daunting,” he says. “However we needed to safe a high-quality provide chain that wasn’t going to provide us these issues, and clearly it might be fascinating by way of carbon footprint.”
Whereas a long time spent restoring and constructing pianos to excessive requirements had outfitted Edelweiss with a wealth of expertise, its employees really had little information of methods to make the instrument’s constituent components. The corporate subsequently 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 this planet.
“Edelweiss took on a mission that few corporations — even a lot bigger ones — are keen to contemplate,” says Fandrich. “Constructing any piano is a formidable activity, however constructing one in-house to an all-new design much more so.”
After the design was established, the agency began sounding out potential suppliers. “Initially, we didn’t inform them what the mission was,” says Norman. “We actually wished to see how passionate they had been, as we consider that, when you’re engaged on an instrument, you aren’t simply doing a job. You’re making a piano, it’s important to go the additional mile to make it higher.”
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 important parts was the piano’s body. It’s historically forged in iron — which requires a prolonged strategy 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 might lower it from metal. Then, the makers needed to experiment with welding and bolting to supply a body that would move stringent stress exams. Nevertheless, 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 must do hundreds of exams on every key,” explains Norman. “The event course of and high quality management can be exacting and it might be very, very troublesome to make any cash. So, for this piano we’re utilizing a carbon fibre composite motion from the USA, which could be very good, we’re getting good outcomes from it.”
General, 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 standpoint isn’t too unhealthy, however from one other is fairly quite a bit”.
However regardless of the exact outlay, it has left Edelweiss with a singular product — a lot liked by pianists — and in a a lot stronger place.
“I wouldn’t say we had been bulletproof,” says Norman. “However my father was all the time an innovator and, if he was nonetheless round, I feel he’d be actually happy with what we’ve achieved.”