Zenph Studios Marc Wienert piano voicer Yamaha Steinway preparation Mott Music

Interview with Marc Wienert

Marc Wienert and his work are featured in the new book by Perri Knize, Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey, published by Scribner in January 2008. Order a copy by clicking on the store link on the right.

An exclusive interview with piano voicer Marc Wienert, by Dr. Constance E. Barrett, on September 1, 2006.
The topic: Zenph® Studios’ new recordings of Glenn Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations album
CEB: You’re described as a voicer. What does a piano voicer do?
MW: Piano voicing occurs at different levels. One part of voicing is keeping evenness from note to note and section to section, so that there are no surprises as you craft a color or the colors that you’re looking for in the line that you’re playing. Another aspect of voicing is creating a personality for a piano that may already have one that is not appreciated, or maybe it’s a restoration that has a new set of hammers and needs a point of reference to be applied. A piano that is in service and already has a personality, a lot of times you’re just evening out or making some minor adjustments from section to section, but not redefining the color or the voice of the instrument.
CEB: And with the Yamaha that you voiced for this Glenn Gould recording - did you have to rework the personality for it? What was the purpose of voicing that particular instrument? What was your goal there?
MW: This is no new relationship between this particular Yamaha and me. We’ve already been through some changes and explorations together. In fact, so much so, that the focus of my voicing job was to recapture days past, in other words, the hammers had been used enough that they were ready for some freshening up, so I filed the hammers and refit them to the strings and then worked on the general character of the piano and then did some fine tuning and evening out of the voicing. So, the purpose of this voicing this time was not to reinvent, because we had already done that years ago with this piano, but to focus on the moment of the Gould recording and freshen things up so that it’s optimal for its debut in Toronto. I want the sound to have a supported sound throughout, with a dynamic range that can sound sparkly and full, so this Yamaha is voiced in a way that will bring Gould’s artistry to life.
CEB: Did you choose to voice this piano based on the Gould recording to match it 100 percent completely?
MW: Well, there were some serendipitous aspects to the job, really. What we had been seeking out from the beginning with this piano seemed to be at the core of Gould’s own personal journey. Gould had been known to play both Steinways and Yamahas in his recording career, and this particular Yamaha is our seeking to bring a bit of a Steinway personality (if I dare say) to this Yamaha. We had desired to do that anyway, as just a journey and an exploration; then we realized along the way that it was perfect for this particular project. We have a Yamaha here and [Gould’s] 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations is made on a Steinway, and Gould was a Yamaha Artist at the end of his life and this is a Yamaha that we’ve endeavored to bring a Steinway flavor to its personality, all the while letting it be the fantastic Yamaha piano that it is.
CEB: What is the difference between the Yamaha and the Steinway voices?
MW: Sometimes the Steinway voice can sound somewhat muted or unclear while the Yamaha delivers a beautiful bell-like clarity almost always. Conversely, the Steinway can give up some deeper tone sometimes that the Yamaha doesn’t lend itself to as natively as it comes to the Steinway.
CEB: So there’s a richer quality to the Steinway, is that what you’re saying?
MW: I would say deeper more than richer, because both pianos have a rich sound in different ways, one leaning towards clarity, the other leaning towards complexity.
CEB: So the Steinway is more complex or the Yamaha is more complex?
MW: I’d say that’s in the ear of the listener to decide.
CEB: But what’s in your ear?
MW: It’s not about what I’m thinking or what I’m hearing. I do have an opportunity in my practice to express my own point of reference to some extent, although it’s metered out in the commercial sector, I have a latitude, because there needs to be a variety of voices available for people to purchase. But most of my practice is to deliver what is desired. In this case, it’s clear that we were hoping to give a voice back to a recording from yesteryear, not taking anything away from it, not really turning it into something it isn’t, but letting it be everything it would be if it were being made for the first time today. So that’s a rather unusual and specific request for me as a voicer. I don’t get many requests like that, but that’s one of the things that makes collaborating with Zenph Studios such an engaging parallel to my normal practice.
CEB: How did you get involved with Zenph Studios to begin with? How did you get involved in this project?
MW: The only way I ever get involved with anything is through pianos, so you can be sure there’s a piano story behind that question’s answer. My original relationship started as a service to a Faust-Harrison Steinway that launched the beginning of the Zenph saga. I traveled down from New York to North Carolina to tune and voice that piano.
CEB: Was it a new Steinway, or a remanufactured Steinway?
MW: It was an older Steinway, but still a modern Steinway, every bit a modern D2, at the beginning of what that piano became. It was made in the late 1880’s, just after what is called the Centennial era.
CEB: How is working on vintage Steinways different from working on modern Steinways?
MW: Working on pianos is always somewhat individual. Whether or not there is some sort of line of demarcation between vintage and modern Steinways is a debatable issue. Certainly, every Steinway I work on is different even if they’re from the same so-called "vintage." They can be different, one from the other, even if they’re the same model. But there are some ground rules that people - certain segments of piano aficionados - agree upon. Many people believe that the vintage Steinways have a richer, more orchestral voice, but there are also the believers that the new Steinway is the best Steinway, and their version is that the new Steinway is the clearest, most bell-like purest tone, and can’t be beat.
CEB: So is clarity of tone of particular importance to pianists?
MW: Possibly not only pianists. It is certainly easier for a pianist to voice a passage if clarity is available. They may want some darkness, they may want a veiled sound, but hopefully you use the soft pedal to get that "felty" sound. When you’re off the soft pedal, even at the quietest playing, you still have a singing quality that would come with clarity and openness of tone.
CEB: So back to how you got involved with this project at Zenph Studios.
MW: I went down and worked on the piano, the team and I hit it off. We got to know each other, we shared the times and conceptions of the software being developed. In the old days, I used to say, "We’re cracking the piano genome." It’s sort of a non-techie’s version of what’s going on. It continued to evolve, and I continued to be the voicer that Zenph called upon. As the project evolved, I started to indicate to the team my understanding of how critical the voicing of the piano is going to be to this project. Upon reflection, they agreed and our thinking together evolved in some ways as far as the role I needed to play; I certainly had a pretty good idea, and as they developed the software and wrote the code, it became clear that through code and with me working the changing density of the hammer and the bounce characteristic, we were manipulating the same thing, that we had to work with each other, otherwise we would be continuing to get in each other’s way. For example, if I voice the piano and they interpret the piece with the code and everything is perfect and then I re-voice the piano, then everything they were controlling and all the beauty they’ve created is completely alterable through the re-voicing of the piano. And it works the other way around. They could have the code from four voicings ago, and I re-voice the piano and they play back the original code and things don’t sound right, either way, we’re affecting each others’ work. Also, the voicing is constantly changing through use. Very subtly, but the whole thing is about subtlety and so the ideal circumstance is that in order to make the perfect recording, the people involved in the software and the tuner-voicer be together at all times, cajoling the instrument into a snapshot of perfection, something that really doesn’t exist.
CEB: In other words, the software doesn’t interact with the piano in the same way that a human being does who can correct the performance if he hears a note he doesn’t like?
MW: The feed forward, feed back loop that a human is able to engage in doesn’t occur with a machine. However what the machine does do is play it the same way every time. So, on the one hand, you have the human who can react to what they’re hearing and make adjustments to the instrument in real time, which the machine doesn’t have the self-awareness to do. Therefore, I can get the voicing to comply. What’s going to happen, I think, at the moment that we actually start to record is that the roles are going to be reversed. What’s happening right now is that I voice the piano and they write the code. In the heat of the moment, probably, if we’re recording and we hear a note we don’t like, I’m going to re-voice that note rather than go to the code level. The character of the interdependence is going to alter dramatically once we start recording.
CEB: What are your thoughts on Zenph’s technology for Gould?
MW: There are much earlier recordings that may have been much easier first projects because the quality of the recording is so, so poor. Not the quality of playing. To hear those early recordings brought to life with modern quality pianos and modern recording equipment wouldn’t have been nearly so controversial, because it would have been a hero’s rescue, so to speak, recordings from the turn of the century, where there would be an extraordinary change, many magnitudes of change. But Gould is such an engaging persona.
CEB: And there is the question of whether Gould would have approved of the project himself.
MW: From my understanding, from the conversations that John Walker has been having with people that worked with Gould when he was active; their opinion, still not a first-hand opinion, but their opinion is that he would have been all over this, given his desire to exploit the recording techniques available at the time. This would have been a fantastic opportunity to craft a performance. Instead of cutting pieces of tape together, he would be working with the code writers to make the changes. They would capture a fantastic performance, and then they would begin to edit at the code level. And of course there would have to be voicing in there as well, because if any changes they were making, if the voicing contradicts that, then there would have to be adjustments to the voicing along the way.
CEB: What do we know about Gould’s ideas about what made a good voicing?
MW: There are people who worked directly with Gould when he was alive, I’m not one of them, but certainly those people might have something to say about what his taste was, but de facto, we have the carefully crafted recordings that he was willing to sign off on, so we don’t know from what whole array he chose. But he did choose, he was choosing, he wasn’t just accepting, so the original recordings must in some way be representative of a sound of the piano that he believed in.
CEB: And we all know Gould’s history in terms of walking away from the concert stage at an early age because he couldn’t stand the inconsistencies.
MW: Well if you’re crafting every note to the nth degree, and the notes themselves are so different that you have a different algorithm for each note in order to get what you want to get out of it, (I don’t know if algorithm is the right word,) but certainly some complex way of controlling each note separately and then in relativity to each other, if the notes are even, it certainly makes that task much more accessible. And if his fine-tuned reflexes and muscle memory is tweaked to a piano that is voiced evenly, to rewire himself in order to play one that is voiced unevenly must be an annoyance.
CEB: Why did Gould, a Steinway artist at one point, become a Yamaha artist at the end of his life?
MW: Other people would know that story better than me. All I know, that in general the way these things tend to work is that there’s personalities involved and deals to be made and negotiated and if someone’s not happy with their deal, they might go to another manufacturer that will give them what they require.
CEB: So you’ve voiced this Yamaha piano to sound somewhat like the Steinway that Gould was playing when he first recorded the Goldberg Variations.
MW: That ended up being the final task, finding a sweet spot between what this individual piano is about and what we were looking for that would also represent what Gould might have wanted if he were playing a Yamaha today. All these ideas or concepts came into play, what a hybrid Yamaha-Steinway would sound like, what the piano itself can pull off, all of that coming together to give us an end result, and of course the final proof in the pudding will be to record the piano and listen to the previous recording and people decide for themselves what they think.
CEB: Of course, one of the things that the Zenph Studios software cannot do is moan along like Gould does.
MW: This is true.
CEB: So of course that would probably make his teacher happy, who thought Gould’s moaning was an affect and under his control. Gould claimed that was not the case; that the moaning was a habit that he could not break.
MW: It’s clear that even if every affect of Gould’s performance were mimicked, part of his performance would be missing from the recording. I’m breathless in anticipation for this recording. In an ideal world, the recording would have to bow its head to Gould’s innate soul, artistry; be utterly authentic, and a bringing alive of Gould’s spirit in today’s world with today’s piano sound and today’s recording technologies.
CEB: How does this differ from PianoDisc or Disklavier? I know that you’re coming at this from a piano junkie viewpoint, not from a computer specialist’s perspective.
MW: Player pianos through the years have had their level of accuracy and this particular system, the Disklavier Pro, offers as much sensitivity as conservatory training would require. That’s the difference, as I understand it, like the difference between normal television and high-definition television, for example, or the number of pixels in your digital camera. To use that metaphor further, originally a digital camera might have had one million pixels, now it has five million. As I understand it, the degree of sensitivity is the same as that needed by any conservatory graduate.
CEB: What is your goal as part of the Zenph team in what is soon to be this historic Gould re-performance?
MW: My goal is the same as it would be if Gould were alive and recording, to keep the piano in original shape throughout the recording process, assuming that it is exactly what is desired at the beginning of the recording, my goal is to keep it at that exact same shape throughout the recording.
CEB: So this is a live broadcast for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on what would have been Gould’s 74th birthday.
MW: Pretty cool, huh?
CEB: Did you have to redo the action as well? Is that part of what you do as a voicer?
MW: I have to make judgments on all of that kind of stuff. If I wasn’t involved originally in the action, but something about the action is standing in the way of what I can do with the voicing, than these are things that can sometimes be addressed to allow for a greater success in voicing.
CEB: How did you give this piano its voice?
MW: Well, Zenph gave me carte blanche to make the piano as beautiful as I knew how to do, using as a point of reference between us in order to be able to communicate about piano beauty, a late nineteenth-century Steinway concert grand.
CEB: And that is the quintessential piano sound that he likes?
MW: Well, it’s a piano whose voice I have carefully crafted to the best of my abilities, so it was a point that we had been able to arrive at with each other. I had free rein to do whatever I would want to do in order to make the Yamaha as beautiful as I knew how to make it, in consonance with the point of reference that had evolved together over the Steinway.
CEB: How did you accomplish this, how did you do it?
MW: Trade secrets? I’ll say what I did, I used my own remanufacturing process, making big changes to the bounce characteristic of the hammers, and then once I have the bounce characteristic between the felt of the hammer and the string that I’m looking for, making changes to the color or the tone comes easily. How it bounces is at the heart of how it sounds.
CEB: How does the rest of the action affect that? Is it all in the felt? Is it all in the hammer?
MW: Oh no, no, no, no. How beautiful a piano is is absolutely a chemistry between every element in the piano. The bridge, the ribs, the soundboard, the plate, the strings themselves, the action, all of it comes together, and if it doesn’t come together the piano can’t be good.
CEB: Is there a particular sound you’re listening for in every piano, or does each piano have an individual sound?
MW: Each set of hammers is a little different, each action is a little different, each piano is a little different, in its own way, and therefore, there are differences. The point of reference that you seek can stay the same and you can just take a journey with each instrument towards that point of reference, but at some point, inevitably the piano tells you either what it can’t do or what it would like to do or some sort of passive-aggressive or not version. If you’re a good voicer and you have a good relationship with the client that you’re working with, at some point, those realities have to also be discussed, the realities that there may be some things that one might want that particular set of hammers or action or that soundboard to do and maybe it’s just not so happy to do it, so compromises have to be made.
CEB: There was a technician that once disparagingly referred to you as making everything sound like a Steinway. What did he mean by that?
MW: I think that what he was saying was that in my work he noticed something that he considered to be characteristic to the Steinway sound. I’m grateful to the Steinway Company and their product, I have a career thanks to them in the sense that the quality and popularity of their instruments is such that I have been able to follow their instruments throughout the world as a territory for myself as a practicing technician.
CEB: How do you define the characteristic Steinway sound?
MW: It’s an archetypal sound, truly, it’s the sound that everyone else has aspired towards, at least historically, since sometime in the nineteenth century. There are some manufacturers around today who would say, possibly, "We don’t need to sound like Steinway, we have our own sound" and certainly many of them would be bold enough to say that. But Steinway has created the point of reference that everyone has a different version of, the Steinway sound, everyone has an idea of what they think that is, and it’s usually something that they like. Does that make it good, because people like it? That’s a deeper, more philosophical question.
CEB: Describe in your words the color you were trying to achieve in the Yamaha.
MW: Not just one color, but a full pallet of different colors for musical expression. Music is about color and vibration.
CEB: I’ve heard you use the term "creamy." What does that mean, exactly?
MW: Creamy refers to a piano’s ability to have a non-angular, non-percussive sound. Not that the piano can’t have an angular or percussive sound; just that at a particular dynamic range you’re able to get a "feltier" sound.
CEB: So do you mean getting a legato sound?
MW: No, legato has to do with the space between notes, and it doesn’t have anything to do with that, it’s more about the character or the color of the attack, the partial structure as the hammer strikes the string; the harder the hammer, the higher the partials it excites into audible vibration. Too hard, the hammer sounds glassy and/or thin. Too soft, and the sound is dull and uninteresting. In my opinion of an ideal circumstance, a successful hammer is one that can give a range of color through various dynamic markings.
CEB: So how can you alter the character of each note at different dynamic levels by working with the hammers?
MW: Every hammer has a curve. As you apply more and more force, more and more brightness begins to occur and there is a spot at which it sort of sparks, like a mezzo-forte or so, and careful voicing gives you a certain amount of control over how much force is necessary to get that kind of tone. From a pianist’s point of view, it is sort of like the fit of a shoe. They have a certain amount of physicality that they are accustomed to bringing to the piano. If the tone sparks at a point where they have to work harder than they are accustomed to, they are going to say that the piano is dull, or mellow, or difficult to play. Conversely, if the piano gets bright well before the amount of force that they’re used to applying before that occurs, then they’re going to say that the action is "fly away" or difficult to control.
CEB: How do you alter the character of the hammer?
MW: By changing the density of the felt, which gets back to the bounce characteristic of the piano. Using chemicals or needles, you can make the hammer either harder or softer. Needling in different places causes different reactions to the felt.
CEB: Describe how adding felt strips at different places on the string can change the character of the sound.
MW: The piano is a tremendously resonant instrument. The coming together of all those different sources of resonance throughout the piano creates a total sound, normally desirable. But sometimes there are resonances coming from the piano that need to be muted, because they’re interfering with the purity or beauty of the desired sound, so some parts of the piano elements are felted to keep that interference at bay. For example, at the front of the piano, where the duplex scale and controlled string length vibrates sympathetically, I would add felt strips by the tuning pins because sometimes the sympathetic vibration is too successful, becomes too prominent, and takes away from the beauty of the sound, making it have an extra sound that doesn’t belong. The same is true in some of the longer parts of the duplex scale on the other side of the bridge. If there’s too much sustain, or the sympathetic vibration is too loud, then they cloud the native beauty of the piano, so I might add felt there, if necessary.
CEB: Is there anything you’d like to add that I haven’t asked you?
MW: I know from being involved with everyone in this project that there is a desperate seeking after truth. I see an obsession towards perfection, to allow Gould’s voice to re-emerge with the really beautiful piano recording sounds of today.
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Marc Wienert stars in the documentary Mott Music, playing on the Sundance Channel.