The Seattle Early Keyboard Museum

Belonging to the Edmonds Music Teacher's Association allows me to find out about many fascinating local musical events and opportunities. One of the more unusual opportunities that recently presented itself was a chance to visit The Seattle Early Keyboard Museum with my student.

The Seattle Early Keyboard Museum is currently located in the quiet and unassuming home of George Bozarth and Tamara Friedman, just north of Ballard. George is a music history professor at the University of Washington and an internationally renown Brahms scholar with many well-respected articles to his credit. (He just completed editing a new Henle edition of Brahms complete organ works.) His partner,  Tamara is a professional concert pianist specializing in performing on early keyboards. Their home and museum houses nearly two dozen original and replica historical instruments – a virginal, a harpsichord, a Lautenwerck, two clavichords, and fortepianos (1780—1869), both square and grand. The lineage of Viennese fortepianos is well represented, with instruments for each decade, 1780–1830, and contrasted with three original English pianos by Broadwood (1805, 1820) and Clementi (1810). Other makers represented include Erard, Kirkman, and Chickering, all three of their grand pianos from the 1860s.

I attended the museum with one of my adult students along with another teacher and her younger students. After getting our nametags and making a small donation to the museum, we went downstairs to where all the fabulous early pianos were located "cheek by jowl" in the lower level of their home. Tamara demonstrated almost all of the instruments with works appropriate to their individual tonalities and George regaled us with stories of the instruments along with other interesting anecdotes.

We had been asked to bring some appropriate baroque and/or classical pieces and after the pianos were demonstrated to us, everyone was given a chance to play on the pianos. It was a marvellous and absolutely unique opportunity to play on period instruments. I was astonished by the tone quality and variety of the various instruments. George and Tamara were very respectful of our students and made everyone give performers their full attention as an audience while people tried the different instruments.

One of the most surprising instruments was the Lautenwerck (also known as a Lute Harpsichord). This photo shows Tamara playing the Lautenwerck. This instrument was a favorite of J.S. Bach and in its original form the strings were made of gut. Their replica instrument used some sort of plastic or nylon strings and had a really interesting resonant quality.There were a number of levers that could be moved to change the tone quality. I tried out my Bach later on the Lautenwerck and found it to be a bit too resonant for my liking. The keys were also exceptionally "springy" which was an interesting sensation. However, the Laurenwerck was one of my favorite pianos because of its unusual tone quality.

Being a Mozart lover, I was excited to try their replica of "Mozart's piano" known in this museum as an Anton Walter Grand Fortepiano (Vienna, 1795; built by Rodney Regier, Freeport, ME). I found the piano very difficult to play for the uninitiated like myself. The key depth was quite shallow and the keys had a very light action. I found it quite difficult to achieve dynamic differences. The loudest dynamic was about a soft "mf" and then you had to play "featherlight" to get a softer dynamic. The sound was very clean and crisp and had that "antique piano" quality. The strings on this piano don't cross-over like on modern pianos, so there isn't much sympathetic vibration which gives it  an exceptional crispness of sound. There was the knee pedal, that was a little weird to try and coordinate. I had always envisioned a knee pedal being on the side of the leg of the piano (I'm not sure why), but this knee pedal was on the bottom of the keyboard for the left knee. However, the hardest part for me of attempting to play this piano was that the keys were reverse coloring. I had my music on the stand and then whenever I sneeked a peak at the keyboard to get my fingers on the right keys, I couldn't figure out which key was what. I realized that on a modern keyboard where most of the keys are white, there are dark lines between the keys which help you tell them apart. On "Mozart's piano",   the keys were a jumble of black, so it took my eyes a bit to figure out where my target key was located. So, my attempt to play my music failed pretty spectacularly, but it was so much fun trying to perform. If I had more time, I would have loved to try their square piano, which had a beautiful intimate sound. Tamara demonstrated this piano wonderfully well and it was easy to imagine a piano like this being played by one of the characters in Jane Austen's novels.

The second downstairs room was full of the larger fortepianos. There were all kinds of pedal variations: knee pedals, four pedals, two pedals, etc.  Some of the pedals were originally intended to rustle parchment to give a "buzzing" sound like a John Cage prepared piano. Amazing. The pianos also had wildly different sorts of sounds, so playing the same piece on a different piano would give it a very different tonal quality.
I think everyone really enjoyed going to the museum and not just because our hosts made cookies for all their younger guests. I know I could spend endless hours here exploring different pianos if given the chance. Unfortunately this museum is moving to La Connor, Washington at the end of the month which is about an hour north of Seattle. However, it may be worth the occasional trip.
For more information on George and Tamara's local Seattle concerts that they organize, they have a Musique Du Jour Presents website.