Philip Belt
Philip Ralph Belt (2 January 1927 - 11 May 2015) was a pioneering builder of pianos in historical style, in particular the 18th century instruments commonly called fortepianos.
Belt's pianos played a role in the revival of performance on historical instruments that was an important trend in classical music in the second half of the 20th century and continues to this day.
Sources for Belt's life and work include a brief web-posted autobiography from 1996,[1] as well as biographical articles prepared by Luis Sanchez (a fortepianist and academic), Peter O'Donnell (a fellow instrument builder), and journalists Thomas Kunkel and Rachel Sheeley.
[2] While young Belt showed a mechanical bent; starting at age 11 he built hundreds of model airplanes;[2] eventually not from kits, but from scratch.
His career as builder was launched by accident (Sheeley): "It was during Belt’s tenure with the ... music store[5] that he was assigned to tune a piano in the [nearby] Cambridge City home of a childhood sweetheart.
Belt in the meantime left his home town and changed jobs, working in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in a wood shop making fine cabinetry.
[8] The Frederici copy led to the next step in Belt's career: in 1965 he was invited by Scott Odell, a curator of musical instruments at the Smithsonian Institution, to disassemble, measure, and make drawings of a fortepiano there, the work of Johann Lodewijk Dulcken.
[2] Later in 1965, Belt moved with his family to Waltham, Massachusetts,[2] where he served apprenticeships with two pioneers of historical harpsichord construction, first briefly with William Dowd, then for two years[3] with Frank Hubbard.
[2] At the end of the apprenticeship (1967) he relocated his family to Center Conway, New Hampshire, where using the proceeds of his first fortepiano sale (see below) he bought "a 3 acre property with a ten room house and a huge barn attached.
[1] His daughter Elizabeth Ross Belt, aged about 7 at the time, later reminisced: My sister and I spent many happy hours in my father’s workshop, ‘helping’ him in his work.
People of all walks of life, curious about his work, would visit us at our rambling old ten room house, where my father set up shop in an attached barn.
[12] O'Donnell continues: "Knowledge of Philip's expertise was growing and he was asked to restore the authentic 1784 Stein piano in the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art.
Of his first sale, Sanchez writes in the New Grove: Harvard University professor Luise Vosgerchian purchased Belt’s first fortepiano in 1967 and used it in a concert with violinist Robert Koff, including works by C. P. E. Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
[2] The following year, he loaned the Dulcken copy[2] to Malcolm Bilson, then an assistant professor at Cornell University, who spent a week in intensive practice preparing for a concert, altering his technique and interpretive approach to match the new instrument.
(Fortepianos pose challenges to performers trained on modern instruments: the touch is extremely light and very sensitive, the decay time of notes is far shorter, and the key spacing is usually narrower.)
Lubin eventually built his own fortepiano replica (with the help of a piano technician friend, Lee Morton, who had served as Belt's apprentice), and pursued a successful solo career with it.
This approach proved problematic, as harpsichord builder Carey Beebe has explained: "Modern interest was aroused in the possibilities of the early piano by European pioneers like Paul Badura-Skoda and Jörg Demus.
The recordings of these players were initially confined to too-often tinny and out of tune original instruments, far past their prime or poorly ‘restored’ or prepared: This was sadly characteristic of the 60s and 70s, and despite the impeccable intentions of the musicians concerned, probably spoilt the concept for many otherwise open-minded listeners."
[17] Similar remarks were made earlier by the musicologist Robert Winter, who like Carey criticizes Badura-Skoda and Demus's use of dilapidated old instruments.
Perhaps the most notable were the set of all of Mozart's piano concertos with Bilson and the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
A stroke of luck paid off for them, as O'Donnell narrates: In the late sixties he had written to the Mozart Museum in Salzburg in hope of gaining access to the instrument.
Her brother had worked with Wernher von Braun (noted German and later American rocket scientist) years before and so had the museum official.
[13] Later on (1975-1979), Belt went to work for Zuckermann Harpsichords, by then under the leadership of David Jacques Way, where he collaborated with Way on a kit based on the Mozart Walter replica.
[24] During this time Belt was living in two locations: Battle Ground, Indiana (1971-1975), to which he moved to escape the cold winters of New Hampshire, then Pawcatuck, Connecticut, a small town not far from Way's headquarters in nearby Stonington.
Again he set up a workshop, this time following local custom by consulting a witch doctor, who obtained the approval of the "unseen people" and offered advice on location and size.
[28] He reestablished his workshop in the farrowing pen of a hog barn on the farm of his sister Lucille,[29] and continued to build instruments for a number of years.
There are now many fine builders, producing copies of virtually all the greatest masters of the past, makers whose pianos were praised and treasured by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt.
I thought that no one could make such a good piano before the mid-1980s!’”[4] Belt was honored in his old age (2007) when the Midwestern Historical Keyboard Society invited him to their conclave in St. Paul and (as reported by Gregory Crowell) "made a special presentation to him in recognition of his pioneering work on the revival of the fortepiano ...
[37] Wolfgang Zuckermann met Belt on a visit to his workshop in Center Conway, part of the research for his book The Modern Harpsichord (1969).
