When Lisa Timbs sits down wearing a gown at her 19th-century square piano and plays pieces from Jane Austen’s sheet music collection, the feeling, she said recently, can be “spine-tingling.”
Timbs’s audience for such performances tends to be fellow Austen fans, eager to be transported back to the Regency society that Austen brought to life so evocatively in her novels. Hearing Austen’s favorite music on an instrument similar to one that the author herself would have played is a kind of time travel, Timbs said. The sound of the square piano — the first midsize and affordable keyboard to be widely available in England — was quite different from modern pianos, Timbs added: It is generally tuned lower, with a silvery, bright sound.
In the crowded field of Austen appreciation and scholarship, the novelist’s love of music and its influence on her writing has long been a bit of a fringe topic. But in the last decade, after academics at the University of Southampton in England digitized the sheet music collection of Austen and her family, more and more people are turning to the music for new perspectives on her life and work.
This year, the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, has been the busiest performance year yet for Timbs and her square piano, she said. Timbs — who bought her first handmade, 19th-century piano in 2012 — will play more than a dozen concerts celebrating the writer, including one on Sept. 18 as part of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, southwestern England.
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