My Pleyel-Moor during some serious regulating and maintenance

Apologies to Klavier-Moor fans who have been waiting for me to post more.   I’ve added two pages – one with some downloadable pdfs taken from Herbert Shead’s book, The History of the Emanuel Moor Double Keyboard Piano which is the Moor piano bible, certainly for enthusiasts in the UK.  Herbert Shead died recently, but he was a driving force behind the Trust which owns several Moor pianos in the UK, including mine.  You can find this page here.

Secondly there are galleries of images from the book, and also of my own Pleyel-Moor upright, here.

Note that book is still in copyright, and these extracts are published for private study purposes only, to further the cause of the Moor piano.  I am delighted that after so many years people are interested.  Please comment or email if you would like more.

For those who missed the original post:

My secret weapon – the Moor double keyboard piano

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Carey Beebe – Australian harpsichord maker, restorer and maintainer      /pic Ron Jones

Carey Beebe is a globe-trotting harpsichord maker, based in Sydney Australia, and I recommend his website to organists if they really, really want to get to grips with tuning and temperaments.   He explains the Pythagorean comma before launching into a discussion of no fewer than 18 different temperaments, with instructions of how to tune each one.

So now I understand Pythagorean, Kirnberger and Werckmeister and Valotti – the latter a popular temperament for late Baroque and early Classical ensemble music apparently, though considered a little down-market by some musicians because of its all-purpose nature.   Temperament snobbery isn’t new –  Johann Georg Neidhardt, a early 18th century German temperament freak, went so far as to name which were suitable for a village, a small city, a large city, or the Court itself (the latter apparently favouring Equal Temperament).

The link to the temperaments FAQ and more on Carey Beebe’s website is here.

On the way, you might get diverted by the Mould Gallery (very worrying pictures for instrument owners in the tropics), or his Klop continuo organ for hire complete with its own wooden flight case.

You can follow Carey Beebe on Twitter as he sets off on his international maintenance tours – next up is one of his regular trips around Asia/Pacific coast.  CBH Carey Beebe @hpschdnu

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I have no excuse for feeling uncomfortable about manual hopping on the organ, with this piano to practice on.

This splendid instrument belongs to a trust, but lives with me. The keyboards are essentially an 8′ and a 4′ working on a single set of strings – on the upper keyboard a linkage operates the hammer an octave higher than the key you have depressed.  You can even couple the two keyboards together, like a harpsichord.

The idea is that octave passages, 10ths and so on can be spread between the two keyboards, making Rachmaninov, Chopin and the like much easier to play.

The system was invented by Emmanuel Moor in the 1920s and 30s.  He was a Hungarian composer and  pianist (had lessons from Liszt), who developed strong ideas on the reformation of the piano.

Winifred Christie-Moor

His wife, concert pianist Winifred Christie-Moor, promoted the instrument tirelessly across Europe and America, and it was taken seriously enough for Pleyel, Bosendorfer, Bechstein and Steinway all to produce examples – the trust also looks after several Moor double keyboard grand pianos.

As pianists would need to relearn their whole repertoire to play on it (and pianists, I suspect, also like using thunderous octave passages to show off), the idea was probably doomed from the start, and once the European piano manufacturers had picked themselves up from the destruction of WW2, no one was interested any more.

Mine is probably the only upright Moor piano to survive.  It’s got a lovely sonorous tone, particularly in the bass.  Quite a heavy action because of all the coupling inside – but good practice for surviving on a tracker organ!

I have loads more information about Moor pianos.  If you are interested, make a comment, and I’ll post some more.

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