The Schureck Collection

Description: Restored by David Hunt, Willingham, Cambs., England

Identical to Clinkscote I.p.166.3

Nameboard: “Jacobus et Abraham Kirckman Londini fecerunt 1778”

Number: none apparent
Compass: 5 octaves FF-f3 ; FF# omitted, 60 notes
Keyboard materials: doubly incised and arcaded ivory, ebony sharps
Pitch: A415Hz
Tuning: equal tempered
Action: simple upstriking English action
Hammer coverings: leather
Bridge : single
Strings:

• bichord brass FF-C#(8 notes)
• bichord brass D-d (13 notes)
• bichord iron d#-f3(39 notes)

Dampers: whalebone-tensioned overdampers
Wrestpins: inside R side of case
Hitchpins: inside rear of case
Pedal: none
Handstops: three inside L side of case; treble damper lift, bass damper lift, buff stop
Frame : timber
Case: mahongany with diagonal stringing on nameboard, simple ebony stringing elsewhere
Lid: external: as for case; internal: plain mahogany

Music desk:
Legs: four untapered square section legs attached to simple detachable stretcher
Dimensions(mm): 1510w x 486d x 178h with legs 630l
Repertoire: T.A.Arne,  J.C.Bach, Mozart, solo English sonatas and works with strings only from 1770-1785 by S.Arnold, J.Ganth, J.Harris, M.Hawsdown, P.Hayes, J.Shanky

Provenance: purchased David Hunt, Willingham, Cambr.

Condition category : I

Rectification Required: none

Concert date: 22.10.88 : programme available

Commentary:

According to Charles Burney, Samuel Crisp in the early 1740s imported the first piano seen in England, an instrument made in Rome by an expatriate English priest. On 27 June 1755 the Rev. William Mason wrote to the poet Thomas Gray “I bought at Hamburg such a piano forte and so cheap – won’t you buy my Kirkman (harpsichord)?”, and Frederick Neubauer’s advertisement of “pianofortes, lyrichords and claffichords” in the “Universal Director” of 1763 indicates that pianos had become commercially available in England at this stage.

The first public appearance of the fortepiano in England seems to have been on 16 May 1767 when Charles Dibdin accompanied a Miss Brickler on “a new instrument call’d the pianoforte”. Solo performances soon followed, by Dublin on 19 May 1768, and by Johann Christian Bach in London two weeks later, on 2 Hune. In 1770, The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, appointed a pianist as continuo player.

The pianos used are likely to have been modelled on the small “square” German domestic piano, made by Johannes Zumpe (whose earliest surviving instrument is dated 1766) or others of the “Twelve Apostles”, a group of German builders, some of whom had spent some time with Shudi after fleeing to England to escape the Seven Year’s War (1756-1763). By the 1770’s, Kirckman and his nephew Abraham, Shudi and his son-in-law John Broadwood, Joseph Haxby of York, and others were also building square pianos.

This instrument is very little larger than the earliest surviving English domestic piano, of which it is a typical example. Its antiquity may best be grasped by considering that it was made ten years earlier that the First Fleet, thirty years earlier than Kirckman’s last harpsichord, and when Mozart was aged 22 and Beethoven 8. It has a very primitive and somewhat unpredictable single action, and is almost certainly Australia’s oldest piano.