Working Art

With a flick of a switch on a modern electronic keyboard, a player can change the sound from a honky-tonk piano to a concert grand, from a harpsichord to a flute. Even a rock drum set.

Big deal.

The means may be new, but the idea is a venerable one.

Take the grand piano made in Vienna in 1815 by Anton Martin Thym, on view at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana as part of the “Beethoven: Musical Treasures from the Age of Revolution and Romance” exhibit, on display through March 21.

This instrument offered a musician seven pedals to modify the sound, each in a different way. Only two survive on our modern instruments: the una corda (or soft) and damper (sustaining or often mislabeled the “loud” pedal).

But what about the others: the buff, bassoon, strong moderator, medium moderator and Janissary pedals? They added special bells and whistles and, having fulfilled their function of the day, went the way of the dodo.

The Janissary pedal created the sound of bells and drums, which the Viennese of the 18th and early 19th centuries felt appropriate for a Turkish-style sound. Mozart did, too. You can hear his version in the overture to his opera “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail” (The Abduction From the Seraglio).

Why would they be interested in that? It hadn’t been that long ago--in 1683--that the Viennese had beaten Turkish armies back from the walls of their city. Maybe they wanted to commemorate their triumph by turning an enemy sound into a decorative tone color. Maybe they could still hear it. At any rate, by Mozart’s time, it had become a fad.

The other pedals also changed the instrument’s sound in other ways by interposing a varying thickness of leather or parchment between the hammers and the strings. Why? For the same reason a modern keyboard player wants an instrument to sound like a flute or a drum set: for the extended musical possibilities it provides, and for fun.

Visual Complement to Concert Series

Technological modifications would extend musical possibilities through the ensuing years. They made instruments louder and easier to play. But there would be trade-offs. And that’s what the Bowers exhibit shows. Drawing from some of the 7,000 instruments housed in America’s Shrine to Music Museum in South Dakota, the Santa Ana museum shows the materials that great composers such as Beethoven actually had to work with.

The exhibit serves as a visual complement to the Beethoven concerts being presented this season by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. The effort, sprinkled throughout the winter and spring, will culminate in a weeklong presentation in May of all nine of the Romantic-era master’s symphonies.

Think of the brass instruments available in that era. In one sense, they were comparatively easy to make. Take a long piece of metal tubing, bend it and wrap it around itself to make it manageable by one person. Blow into a mouthpiece inserted into one end, and with luck and talent--lots of it--you could produce a number of notes of an ascending scale.

By no means did a musician have available every note in every scale available. If he needed to play a note that was not in the harmonic series for that particular length of pipe, he had to change its length by inserting more tubing.

Composers became adept--they had to--at using only the notes available to the player or giving him lots of time to make the necessary changes by inserting those extra crooks of tubing.

Valves and other mechanical devices eventually would render all this work obsolete. But at a price. Yes, playing the thing became easier (it still isn’t really easy), but valves also changed the quality of the sound, robbing it of some of its pristine color.

You can see a natural horn and the additional crooks--those extra pieces of tubing needed for key changes--in the exhibit.

Stringed instruments were far more complicated. Yet they reached a peak of famous development surprisingly early, in the workshops of 17th century masters such as Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Amati.

These instruments were almost always modified later, however, to produce a bigger sound for increasingly larger concert halls. Gut strings gave way to metal. The necks and finger-boards had to be replaced with longer versions, and tilted back to bear the greater tension of stretched metal strings.

Occasionally, the process worked the other way. Violoncellos had been treated as bass instruments. When they began to be used in more virtuosic ways, they had to be cut down in size so they could be played with more speed.

‘Perhaps the Greatest Sound’

At the Bowers, you can see such a modification made to the Amati “King” violoncello in the exhibit. A central horizontal section was simply cut out, and the remaining two parts glued back together. It is clear that something is missing if you look at the design on the back. A scroll that originally must have wound symmetrically around a column now appears to make a sudden, unexpected jump. Similarly, the upper torso of the woman holding a sword is noticeably shortened.

Amazingly, the sound wasn’t ruined.

Indeed, a violin expert who heard it played in 1982 is quoted in the exhibit catalog saying, “I think the sound that came out of that instrument was perhaps the greatest ‘cello sound I have ever heard outside of one or two of the great Strad(ivarius) ‘cellos.”

That design--and others in the exhibition--raise another point. While instruments got louder and easier to play, aesthetically, they tended to become bland.

Almost entirely lost was the notion that an instrument could also be a museum-quality work of art. A teenager today is likely to be delighted with his electronic keyboard, but he’s not likely to see it as beautiful in its own right.

Harpsichord makers sometimes inscribed the motto “Pleasing to ear and eye alike” on the lid of the instrument. And they meant it. There are many examples of such beautiful design and workmanship in the exhibit.

Also on display are manuscripts and first-edition printings of musical scores, as well as a life mask of Beethoven, on loan from the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at California State University at San Jose.

All of this aims to immerse the viewer in the life and times of the great composer in a way that just hearing his music may not. There are also concerts, films, lectures and videos to add to your knowledge. Don’t hesitate to call the Bowers Museum or the Philharmonic Society for information.

* Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Regular hours. (714) 567-3600. Philharmonic Society: (949) 553-2422.