Spokane piano restorer Ken Eschete touches keys of history from Lincoln’s grand piano to Eleanor Roosevelt’s Steinway

Eleanor Roosevelt’s Steinway baby grand piano returned home on June 4th after a family donated it to the First Lady’s historic collection. To restore their 1936 instrument, the National Park Service curators hired an expert to do the work in July – Ken Eschete from Spokane.

Known in the United States for his piano engineering and conservation work, Eschete has touched many of the famous pianos, including Prince Albert’s Erard concert grand piano from 1854 at the Smithsonian, which he made playable again.

Eschete once assessed the condition of the 1860 Schomacker grand piano that Mary Lincoln ordered for the White House when a museum asked him to stabilize it for an exhibition. With a curator nearby, he voted the Franklin D. Roosevelt grand piano on the Springwood Historic Estate.

In 2001, Eschete also restored the ornate Steinway grand piano at the Vanderbilt Mansion. In 2018 he restored the Blüthner Wing of the Washington State Capitol, which is now used for concerts in the governor’s reception room. Others include the Smithsonian’s Chickering Grand and a piano for a Will Rogers Museum.

“I was very drawn to the conservation stand,” said Eschete, 72, an early scholarship student to study museum technology at the Smithsonian. In his musical instrument department, he learned to use organic chemical methods with natural remedies to restore and preserve antiques without altering them.

There are different approaches to restoring pianos with aging parts, he said.

“There is a restoration where you take an old instrument, completely peel off the finish and replace all the parts and make it look like new,” he said. “Then there is another approach, conservation, where you respect the integrity of the instrument and try to change as little as possible.

“Everything you do is science-based and reversible in some way, hopefully so that everything you do can be taken apart again in the future if necessary.”

He will travel to Hyde Park, New York to work on the Roosevelt Steinway. It has loose tuning pins and must be tuned to be playable. He will focus on creating a way to deal with the wear and tear that is ahead.

The curators plan to have the instrument played around the history of the social events hosted by Eleanor and President Roosevelt, based on detailed records of the food and music provided.

Before the piano is on display at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val-Kill Cottage, the Steinway will be on display next year in the Wallace Center of the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park to showcase the instrument along with stories, photos and history. But it will return to Val-Kill, where Eleanor often stayed during her husband’s presidency, lived and entertained dignitaries after his death.

“We have to do everything we can to get all the original materials,” said Eschete. “The wear and tear of playing the piano is concentrated on the hammer hitting the strings. We will remove the original parts as they can be removed with a screw.

“We’ll put them in acid-free boxes and store them. So if at some point we wanted to put all the original parts back together, we could do that. “

New parts were specially made for the interior, which he will install as a replacement for recording the exhibition shows. “I go with a whole bunch of tools. I should be able to do that in about five days. “

Over the course of his career, Eschete invented two treatments to bring ancient piano parts back to life. In a three-room basement workshop in his north Spokane home, Eschete has everything from woodworking tools to felt ordered in Boston for conservation work. In between he tunes and repairs regional pianos.

A street level back door is big enough to roll a wing upright. Upstairs, Eschete has its own antiques – a 1923 Steinway and a 1790s square piano marked with London’s Broadwood and Son.

He and his wife Christine moved here eight years ago at the invitation of a piano technician and friend in Spokane, Rose Fanger. They wanted to move after working in New Zealand.

Eschete is from New Orleans; his wife is from San Francisco. They met in Chicago, where Eschete worked for 13 years as Director of Keyboard Maintenance at Northwestern University.

Eschete began his career on a different musical path with a different instrument. During the Vietnam War he was accepted as a trumpeter in the Military Academy Band at West Point. He later visited a former bandmate in Boston and attended that friend’s class on the piano technology program at North Bennet Street School.

“I wasn’t interested in pianos,” said Eschete. “I was interested in mechanical things and was able to fix everything. I had a father who was an all-round mechanic, so I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth, I grew up with a 9/16 wrench in my mouth. “

That day, at school, Eschete saw people puzzling over a problem with a piano. “I told them what the solution was,” he said. He eventually applied and the guides remembered his ability. Teacher Bill Garlick brought his antique pianos for students to practice their skills in the mid-1970s.

Eschete also met Fanger, a fellow student and former secretary in the Smithsonian’s musical instrument department. She helped Eschete meet a few curators. After completing this scholarship during his studies, he had acquired technical knowledge at Bennet, then he was fascinated by conservation science.

“I loved finding out what kind of wood it was by taking out a microscope and looking at the cell structure,” he said. “I loved organic chemistry, which I hated in college, but I liked it when they applied to me.”

It could mean mixing two chemicals to make a black stain on oak translucent. “There are many practical uses for organic chemistry, which is widely used in museum preservation,” he said.

In fact, he’s known for translating conservation science into the piano part. The work often means corrections for felting wool hammers that range from tiny to large. Everyone strikes internal strings of different lengths to create a different tone, “depending on how soft the felt or how hard the felt,” he said.

“The problem we always have is that sometimes the hammer is too soft; We don’t get enough sound. One of the options I invented is museum preservation. “

He developed a method of using acrylic beads dissolved in 190-proof-grain alcohol. Small plastic molecules then float in the liquid. When applied to the felt and the solvent evaporates, tiny plastic molecules return to a solid form and give the felt structure.

Eschete experimented with the method for about 15 years while being encouraged to keep it as a trade secret, but word got around. Then two years ago he published his method in a specialist journal that is now international.

His other breakthrough deals with problems with tuning pin planks. The holes were drilled too small for a pin, creating friction and tuning problems. And often the block of wood that holds the tuning pins develops large cracks so that the tuning pins do not stick.

“I invented a way to fix them with a special type of epoxy that mixes like water,” he said. “This is a commercial product that was not designed for that purpose, and it is again something from the museum conservation work.

“When it changes from a liquid to a solid, it is inside and also creates structure. I found if I removed the tuning pins and then flooded the holes with this very watery epoxy I can re-drill the hole.

Sometimes he can put the original tuning pins back in and reuse the original strings. “When you look at it you can’t see any difference, but the big difference is if you tried to tune it it would keep a tune.”

Of all the famous pieces he’s tweaked, one thing stands out. “I think it would be the FDR piano,” said Eschete. The Vanderbilt piano was the most expensive instrument.

“But Cornelius Vanderbilt is not someone I admire,” he said. “When I had the opportunity to walk into the salon of the FDR mansion wearing white gloves while the curator moved all the photos on the piano – all the famous people who had been in the FDR mansion – I was really touched that I could take a look at this instrument and tune it. “

He says the FDR piano and now Eleanor’s grand piano are “national treasures”. “Because of the connection with someone who is incredibly famous or important to a culture like FDR was, the value of this object changes. It turns into something that is considered a cultural asset or a cultural asset, although there is nothing special about it.

“There wasn’t anything special about Lincoln’s piano, either. It is this transcendence of an ordinary, manufactured object that, based on its connection with a person so valued by society and the history of that person, is decided to preserve that object exactly as it is without changing it to be can preserve not only for this life, but for life and life that follows. “