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. His pianos were modeled on instruments made by historical builders, particularly Johann Andreas Stein and Anton Walter. 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.
Life Sources for Belt's life and work include a brief web-posted autobiography from 1996,Belt (1996) 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. A brief article about Belt by Sanchez appears in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Early life Belt grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Hagerstown, Indiana,Sanchez (2011) a town of about 2,000 people. In his family there were two younger sisters and an older brother, who was killed in the Second World War. While young Belt showed a mechanical bent; starting at age 11 he built hundreds of model airplanes; eventually not from kits, but from scratch.O'Donnell (1996) According to O'Donnell, "In high school he took four years of metal shop, and even made a working one-cylinder engine." Sheeley continues, "His first job after graduating from Hagerstown High School in 1945 was to deliver cattle and horses to war-torn Poland. Back home, he began working in a New Castle music store."Sheeley (2015) He first repaired band instruments, then learned the craft of piano tuning from a local tuner, then moved into maintenance and repair of pianos. His curiosity then led him to experiment with pianos, trying "with various kinds of wire and soundboard modifications to learn what he could about things that might affect a piano's sound" (O'Donnell).
Finding his métier His career as builder was launched by accident (Sheeley): "It was during Belt’s tenure with the ... music storeIt appears that if Belt's association with the same music store lasted until 1959, it probably was not continuous; newspaper advertisements indicate that in 1954 Belt was running his own piano tuning and repair business in Elwood, Indiana, about 50 miles northwest of Hagerstown. See , . that he was assigned to tune a piano in the [nearby] Cambridge City home of a childhood sweetheart. On that day in 1959, his former sweetheart showed him a family treasure, an antique German square piano brought to America by the family in the 1700s". The piano had been made by the German builder Christian Ernst Frederici in 1758.Date from Sanchez (n.d.). In the late 1960s Belt purchased it from the family and donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Sanchez (2011). O'Donnell writes: "He made drawings, learned what he could about its origin, and decided to build a piano using it as the model: 'Something just clicked in my mind -- that's what I'd like to do.'"
Belt in the meantime left his home town and changed jobs, working in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in a wood shop making fine cabinetry. It was in Oak Ridge in the early 1960sDate from Belt (1996) that he succeeded in making a copy of the Frederici instrument.Source: O'Donnell. Belt kept his Frederici copy for most of his life, donating it in his last years to the Hagerstown Arts Place and Museum. (Sheeley). 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.Sanchez 2011. At the time the piano it was thought to have been built by Johann Andreas Stein, due to a misleading label on its soundboard. When Belt later took up production of replica instruments, the Dulcken provided the detailed measurements that he needed to serve as his first model.
Later in 1965, Belt moved with his family to Waltham, Massachusetts, where he served apprenticeships with two pioneers of historical harpsichord construction, first briefly with William Dowd, then for two years with Frank Hubbard.Harpsichord training was highly relevant to Belt's purpose, since fortepianos are far more similar to historical harpsichords in their essential elements (for example, framing, bridges, soundboard) than they are to modern pianos. Belt built a number of harpsichords under Hubbard's direction,Source: Zuckermann (1969) but he also "moonlighted", setting up a workshop in his basement to work on fortepianos.
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." The barn became his workshop, where he produced several fortepianos, all based on the Smithsonian Dulcken. 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. He always seemed to find something that we could do. 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. We entertained many types, from those in suits to the hippies of the day. Of all of them, I preferred the hippies, because they were the most fun.Source: blog posting, .
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." The process of restoration provided an intimate look at a historical instrument from a leading maker and the foundation for an accurate replica.
Belt's pianos achieve success
Soon, Belt's instruments were being purchased by prominent scholars and performers. 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. This performance on a replica was unprecedented in the United States; Belt had broken ground in what would become a new era in historical keyboard performance.Sanchez (n.d.)
In 1968 Belt loaded his second Dulcken copy into his hearse (Belt's vehicle of choice for transport) and showed it, receiving expert approval, at universities in the Midwest. The following year, he loaned the Dulcken copy 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.) Bilson clearly found his encounter with the fortepiano to be gripping; that same year he bought his own Dulcken replica from BeltSanchez (2011). Dulcken #2 was eventually purchased by the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. and launched a new career focusing on the fortepiano.Bilson narrates his encounter with the Belt piano in an article by Andrew Willis (2006) Jouez le Fortepiano! An Interview with Malcolm Bilson”, Early Music America, 12(3), 28-32. On line at . Bilson's (quite successful) career raised the prominence of the fortepiano in the musical world, as well as the reputation of Belt's instruments. Bilson later said of Belt:
There were several builders both here and in Europe engaged in trying to build these instruments, but Philip Belt stands out as the only one at that time to build a totally convincing, well-balanced instrument. It was in no case a curiosity, but a piano as perfect in its own way as any modern piano.
Bilson also became an articulate advocate of the fortepiano in his writings and demonstration videos, arguing that historical pianos are often better suited to the performance of the music of their own time (for Belt's instruments this would include the works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), and permit a more complete fulfillment of the music's potential.
Another fortepianist influenced by Belt was Steven Lubin, who in the 1960s visited Belt's Center Conway workshop to learn about the fortepiano. 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.
Thomas Kunkel, writing a brief biography of Belt, also provided an intuitive assessment of the aesthetic contributions of the revival fortepiano:
Not long after I first met Philip Belt, I fished out a tape he had given me and popped it into my dashboard cassette player. It was a recording of acclaimed pianist Malcolm Bilson performing the majestic Mozart piano concerto No. 13 in C Major (K. 415) on one of Belt's fortepianos. The sound seemed extraordinarily bright. Toward the end of the opening allegro, for instance, the notes in the cadenza come in dazzling torrents. Yet, despite the speed with which Bilson played, every note was clear and distinct. To feel the difference, I dusted off an old LP of the same piece, record by another world-famous performer on a modern concert grand. The playing was beautiful but, compared to the fortepiano, the sound seems almost muted, the rapid passages of the allegro slurred. It was like listening to Bilson's version with earmuffs on.Kunkel (1996: 57)
Replicas vs. historical instruments Belt's replicas were not the first historically styled pianos used in 20th-century performance of earlier music; earlier efforts had employed actual historical instruments, restored by technicians to playing condition. 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."
Beebe goes on to say that it was the introduction of pristine-condition replica instruments, as made by Belt and others, that enabled a far more successful revival of historical practice.Source: Beebe's web site Similar remarks were made earlier by the musicologist Robert Winter, who like Carey criticizes Badura-Skoda and Demus's use of dilapidated old instruments. Winter also lavished praise on an early recording of Mozart's music (Golden Crest CRS 4097) that Bilson made with the Dulcken replica he purchased from Belt: