Philip Belt

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.

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." 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". 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.'"

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