Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

It’s a unitary, streamlined design, black and white as befits a musical instrument with a keyboard. It’s a piano, designed by Peugeot in collaboration with Pleyel. A baby grand, so it will fit nicely in a roomy living room. But some of its features would lend themselves to use in a concert hall, or at least an auditorium.

There’s one thing about concert grands that frustrates many a concert goer: it’s hard to see the pianist’s hands! We see the performer, and flashes of hands. If the performer is one of the dramatic, showy ones, maybe we see the hands waving around in the air frequently.

Liberace liked to flail a lot, the better to show off his rings. But he was nothing if not a showman. I bet he’d want one of these Pleyel pianos, and would not balk at the price of $200,000.

There’s one leg, or maybe a pod. the whole business part of the piano is contained in a fairly conventional upper housing, which is joined to the carbon fiber supporting pod on the left. That pod is fairly massive, all in white. It holds the pedal platform The three pedals have thin metal tubes connecting them to the damper mechanisms.

The rest of the piano is matte black, and shaped as we would expect: curved much like other horizontal pianos, and with a curved lid.

But there is one big difference, in that the keyboard is as high as anything else, so you can see the performer’s hands. The unitary bench, with height adjustment, places the player in the appropriate position. The action housing is deep, and contains the usual components: harp with all its strings, action with it hammers and dampers and straps and such, operated by those levers we call keys and pedals.

Those keyboards are not bounded on the right and the left by wooden continuations of the cabinet’s side pieces. There is no “fallboard” face to the rear of the keyboard,  ready to be pulled forward and lowered over the keys when the instrument is not in use; no vertical wall with the maker’s name emblazoned on it.

It’s hard to think of an angle from which a viewer or camera could not see the pianist’s hands, other than from the floor.

Both Peugeot and Pleyel are more than 200 years old. In fact, Pleyel has been making pianos longer than any other company. It was founded by Ignaz Pleyel, one of Josef Haydn’s students. (So was Beethoven, who had planned to study with Mozart, but Mozart died before Beethoven got to be his student.)

The founding Pleyel was a musician and a prolific composer of symphonies and chamber music. He had a music publishing business, but wanted to create instruments that would enhance the abilities of musicians to perform at their best artistic levels.

Pleyel was the first piano maker to use a metal frame or harp, instead of all wood. That was truly revolutionary. It enabled the addition of some keys beyond the furthest limits of the treble and bass, and allowed for higher gauge strings to be tightened enough to produce the desired pitches, thus producing a stronger, brighter tone.

Once on a time there was a collaboration between Steinway and Daimler. Seems William Steinway (an American,) was on a European junket and got curious about Daimler’s quadricycle, a motorized vehicle. He journeyed to Cannstatt, Germany, and took a trek in or on the quadricycle.

Steinway saw a potential market for motorized four-wheelers, and obtained a license to build motors for Daimler. There were a few Mercedes-Benz cars made in New York City, but a fire in the factory ended that venture.

Only a few years ago, Albrecht, Count Goertz, designer of the BMW 507 and the guy who came up with the Datsun 240Z concept, was commissioned to design a baby grand piano. It was elegant, all black but with a combination of different finish textures. But otherwise it wasn’t innovative. The A-188 Steinway is still available for a mere $77,400.

That was in 2005. Two years later Porsche designed a Bosendorfer, with some technological changes from the standardized grand piano design. For one thing, the lid wasn’t solid wood, but had a reinforced “honeycomb” core.

Grand pianos have had the same form factor since Henry Englehard Steinway began using it in 1875.

Then in 2009 Audi Design came up with a design for Bosendorfer, this one inspired by Bauhaus architecture. The lid was hinged well below the top of the piano.

The new Peugeot-Pleyel’s lid is also of carbon fiber, and does not require a prop to hold it up. It can be opened and locked in place with one hand.

Another blissful marriage of art with technology is utilized in producing one-man male quartets. I guess I should say plural marriage, or ménage à trois.

First there is the track-on-track technology, enabling one amazing singer, Julien Neel, to sing lead, bass, baritone and tenor. He records each part in sequence. He seems to possess the timbre and range appropriate for each part. Videos are combined too, so that we can see all four Juliens, and they glance and mug at each other and the viewer.

On some of the YouTube videos of Julien Neel’s work, billed as A Cappella Trudbol, there are guest performers. One is seen in a stunning “Lida Rose” featuring soprano Elena House.

Coordinating the audio and the video is just part of the technological challenge involved in bringing Trudbol’s “uni-tet” to its wide audience. There are albums that can be purchased, yes, but many of us fans hear these trax on YouTube, or download from there, through the wonders of the World Wide Web.

In this highly interactive medium we can listen and download, and even subscribe so that as all one of the four Julien Neels produce his/their weekly new release, we will get a notice and a link. Will it be doo-wop, or holiday, or old timey, or Broadway, or--?

Technology serves art, and we help ourselves to the result, through modern communications media.