Earlier in the year, we picked up a nice early 1900s Bluthner grand piano. These lovely older pianos that have a unique hammer action that produces a clearer and light tone than the modern monster pianos... But it is still a transitional instrument between the late Romantic instruments and the modern equivalents. We were thinking that if we wanted to use the modern instruments, we could always go to the university or the concert hall and use the ones there... But to have a nice older instrument in our living room/studio was always going to be a better fit for the space.

Plus, the other thing that sold us was the fact that the casing and the fittings were of the older ornate style and not the modern one size fits all black lacquer.

Unfortunately, when we purchased the instrument, there was some damage to the music stand... nothing terrible, but the repairs that had been done on it were already starting to fail. You can see how the middle section of the ornate music stand had snapped at some point... with visible fractures across the whole section.

Thankfully, it wasn't disasterous... and we could just keep using the stand as normal. It was study enough, but it would need some attention at some point in time. Luckily, over the course of the last year... I was introduced to a amateur instrument maker through our ensemble concerts... and he has some decent woodworking experience, and equally importantly, access to connections and people with quite a great deal of skill in these dying arts and crafts.

So, as the performing year is starting to wind up... and after my wife's crazily busy season of the last month... we are ready to start the process of repairing the stand. The first thing that will be required will be an identification of the wood and then figuring what method will be best of for the repair... and then a possibility for a reinforcing of the fractures on the back side of the stand. This will mean that we will need to give up the stand for a few weeks to a month while all of that is happening... but we are entering a lull period with Christmas and New year!

The current suggestion is to replace, repair, and reinforce with a traditional style... fracturing it again, cleaning, re-gluing with a weaker glue (not epoxy!), then matching and reinforcing. I have a little thought that I might suggest a sort of Kintsugi repair... that the cracks and fractures are repaired with glue... but the beautiful "scars" are highlighted with gold or silver?

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