This page is about my 1914 Farrand Cecilian Duo-Art reproducing piano, and the marvellous music it plays.
Farrand was considered one of the finest pianos being made in America around the turn of the twentieth century.
Begun in 1883 as the Detroit Organ Company, the company was purchased in 1887 by C. J. Whitney and E. S. Votey, who changed the name to Farrand & Votey. In 1897 the company was renamed the Farrand Co. Before player actions were made small enough to be inserted inside the case of a piano, the Farrand Co. achieved renown as a maker of push-up players like the one shown in this early, and rather surrealistic, advertisement.
One famous owner of a Farrand push-up player was Frank Lloyd Wright, who according to the biography written by his son, John Lloyd Wright, acquired one for "Taliesin," his Spring Green, Wisconsin house (whose name, in Welsh, means "Shining Brow").
"One day, without previous warning, at least to me, a Cecilian Piano Player was rolled into our house. Papa pushed it up the keyboard of his Steinway concert grand and pumped Beethoven by the roll. His eyes closed, and his hands swayed over the throttles, I think he imagined he was Beethoven. He looked like Beethoven, and, with the help of the Cecilian, he played like him. As he went at this thing, his motions suggested revenge for the days when he was compelled to pump his father's organ till he collapsed. It seemed to me that he was now hell-bent on pumping this thing till it collapsed. It did!
"The complicated procedure began. Instead of sitting on the bench playing the Beethoven, he now sat on the floor and played with the parts. This went on for days. He finally tinkered it together, but it was never the same."
(From the book, My Father, Frank Lloyd Wright, by John Lloyd Wright)
By 1913, when my Cecilian player was produced, the industry had been producing pianos with the player mechanism inside them for several years. This model Farrand player--the top of the Farrand Cecilian line--is illustrated in a 1910 sales booklet published by the Farrand company, with a caption describing the case as "A Craftsman Design." (The name "Craftsman" was a trademark used by Gustav Stickley's workshop.) Evidently Stickley provided the case design to Farrand, in Detroit, as well as the metal hardware with which this model was equipped. Only two other examples of the Stickley Farrand Cecilian are known today, and ours is the best preserved of the three.
The Cecilian is fitted out with hand-hammered copper lamps (with their original amber glass), hinges, pedals, and other fittings made in the Craftsman Workshops of Gustav Stickley in New York.
The back of the fallboard nameplate is stamped with Gustav Stickley's signature: a joiner's compass and a motto borrowed from the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck: "Als ik kan" ("As I can," or "As well as I can do.")
Underneath the keyslip, on a slab of roughly chiseled softwood, is the pencilled signature of the craftsman who constructed our piano's mission oak case. It reads: "Assembeled [sic] by W. C. Radebaugh at the Farrand Factory March-April 1913 Detroit Mich."
This piano was originally an 88-note player, but when we acquired it several years ago the player action had been discarded. The piano was restored between November 2003 and November 2004 by Craig Brougher, a player piano restorer based in Independence, Missouri, who fitted it out with a Duo-Art reproducing action.
The piano itself required a complete rebuilding. The soundboard was repaired, the pinplank was reglued, and the bass bridge (with no apron--a feature usually found only on very early pianos) was completely rebuilt in Mr. Brougher's shop.
Here Mr. Brougher is restringing and repinning the entire piano. The Farrand Cecilian was known for its rich, warm, and very big tone. This piano now shows how well that reputation was deserved.
This is the inside of the piano after replacement of all the hammers, damper felts, and backcheck felts.
After the piano action was completely rebuilt, Mr. Brougher began the task of replacing the lost player action with one I had salvaged from a junked 1924 Steck Duo-Art upright. One of the biggest challenges in replacing the action was rerouting the keyslip controls. The Cecilian's controls had originally passed through notches in the keybed, but the Duo-Art required that the controls be routed beneath the keybed. The Duo-Art is the only reproducing piano that also allows a pianolist to play standard 88-note rolls with full manual expression (in addition to playing the company's own reproducing rolls with automatic expression).
The Cecilian has a very unusual scale (30 bass notes, 28 tenor, 30 treble), so a new Aeolian stack had to be built from scratch. A pneumatic stack is an extremely complex thing to build; ours required the precision drilling of 2950 holes. The poplar stack parts were sealed airtight with Phenoseal, and the valves were covered with zephyr skin for quick and sprightly response.
Player restoration can be dirty work. Our Duo-Art action had obviously been stored in a barn for many years; a mouse had made the expression box into his personal warehouse for seeds and nuts.
While the restoration of the piano was underway in Missouri, our keys were sent to Massachusetts for recovering with new keytops, hand-sawn from antique trophy ivory. Mike Morvan, who did our key restoration, is is one of the few people keeping alive the very demanding old techniques of ivory key restoration. Mr. Morvan rebushed and repinned the original keys, then removed the molded one-piece plastic keytops installed by a previous owner, replaced missing wood on the tops and fronts of the keys, milled the keys to size, and installed the ivory heads, tails, and fronts. The ebony keytops are antique and come from a technician in Maryland who had salvaged them from an 85-note Kohler and Campbell.
To see and hear Mr. Brougher play a "duet" with the Cecilian,
CLICK HERE
Don't have Real Player? Download it for free
HERE
(Real Player movie)
RESTORING THE STICKLEY FARRAND CECILIAN
