[UA] Cliomancy Lives! (Fwd: Siena Pianoforte)

[Tom McGrenery]

Hey everyone,

Just had my Trigger Incident.
You may (perhaps) recall a long time ago I posted something about the Siena 
Pianoforte, a piano rumoured to be made out of wood from King Solomon's Temple.

(By the way, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6801/immortal.html 
is a perfect handout on the subject should you choose to use it in a game.)

Now, this evening, I received this rather surprising email. At first glance 
I took it to be spam, but then I saw it was addressed only to me.



>THis admittedly lovely sounding piano was constructed from the beginning
>as a publicity enterprise. It was built up from a Hungarian case made 95
>years after its claimed 1800 birth and achieved its peculiar timbre by
>having been fully strung with single heavy guitar strings from
>commercial spools of various heavy calibers on each note. The whole
>story in the book and the Life magazine article was made up by Avner
>Carmi, though he was indeed a fine piano technician and educator of
>Piano technology. The Siena was the most successful of three ambitions
>piano projects he undertook in the 1950s.
>I am working for a music publisher with the task of recovering its
>current location. It is hoped that new fine music and the full story of
>its
>creation will result from its rediscovery.
>Michael G. Kramer

Interesting. It's informative, but I wonder why Mr. Kramer decided to send it.
Is he a UA list subscriber? I don't know.

But the point is that the story of the Siena Pianoforte is cliomancy in 
action. Unless this Kramer guy's trying to hide the piano's real 
significance from me...


Tom


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