Philip Belt

The piano had been made by the German builder Christian Ernst Frederici in 1758.

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.

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.

Soon, Belt's instruments were being purchased by prominent scholars and performers.

Of his first sale, Sanchez writes in the New Grove:

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.

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."

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).

His career as builder was launched by accident (Sheeley): "It was during Belt’s tenure with the ... music store 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".

It was in Oak Ridge in the early 1960s that he succeeded in making a copy of the Frederici instrument.

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.

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.

Belt built a number of harpsichords under Hubbard's direction, 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.

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.

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 Belt and launched a new career focusing on the fortepiano.

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:

Sources for Belt's life and work include a brief web-posted autobiography from 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.

Belt grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Hagerstown, Indiana, 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.

According to O'Donnell, "In high school he took four years of metal shop, and even made a working one-cylinder engine."