Piano Serial Numbers Search
Thora Buckner
This page will help you determine the age of your older Kawai acoustic piano. The first step is to find the serial number of your instrument. The serial number identifies the year an instrument was manufactured and is the key to all future warranty service and repair (if needed). Its location varies depending on the type of instrument.
For Kawai upright pianos, the serial number is located in one of two places: (1) the top right side of the iron plate (near the tuning pins) or (2) at the top center of the plate between the bass and treble sections. You can normally find it easily by lifting the piano lid. For Kawai acoustic hybrid pianos (K200- ATX3 and K300 AURES), the serial number is located at the top center of the iron plate under the Kawai logo.
The serial numbers listed are the approximate first number produced for the year shown. Starting letters other than A or F should be disregarded. Serial numbers for different models are not always sequential, so actual dates could vary.
HAMILTON PIANO CO., Est. 1889, with factories at Chicago Heights, Ill. Controlled by the Baldwin Piano Company. Gibson Guitars Guitars acquired the Hamilton name in 2001, when they purchased the Baldwin Piano Co. See Acrosonic or Baldwin for additional numbers. Serial numbers are for the first piano made in year shown.
Piano manufactures place serial numbers in a variety of places. Pianos often have numbers other than serial numbers, such as case and part numbers. Some pianos DO NOT HAVE SERIAL NUMBERS, therefore the exact age can not be determined. Look for a serial number in the locations marked with
If you can't find your piano's serial number or if it doesn't have a serial number, ask your piano tuner or local piano dealer for help. Sometimes the action (piano keys) will have a date of manufacture written on it. This date should be within a few years of the piano's date of manufacture.
Typically, a serial number has 5 to 7 digits, but in some cases, it may have fewer or more and may also include a letter. This is a view of the grand with the lid open and the music desk removed. It may be necessary to clean dust off the harp or soundboard before the serial number can be seen.
Upright or vertical piano serial numbers can usually be found by lifting the lid and looking inside on the gold harp or plate. It is usually not necessary to remove the upper front panel to find the serial number (as in this picture).
By locating the serial number, you can begin your research to know the value of the piano. The first thing the serial number tells you is the age of the piano. Paired with the who made the piano, the age is a key piece of information, and many piano experts can begin to assign a value quickly after assessing the condition and a few other criteria.
Use up to three search boxes and a series of drop-down menus to direct a search to specific indexes. Truncation (*) and searching by phrase (" ") are allowed. The fourth search box is populated by the on-screen piano keyboard. A fifth search box appears after your initial search and it contains the session's previous searches.
This is especially useful for searching the fields not indexed (listed below), such as opus number, role names, cities, tempos, or notes fields. Searching in a specific index (when possible) will result in a more accurate search than searching in All fields. In this field you may use the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT (in capital letters).
Enter the title, genre (for generic titles), title as on source, or text incipit. Use the plural for form/genre terms. Alternate titles are searched automatically. Titles as they appear on the source must be searched in the field "All fields."
Examples:
Music for the royal fireworks
Symphonies
Ich bin nicht gern allein
Names, initials, pseudonyms, etc. of individuals who do not function as composers: arrangers, co-composers, copyists, dedicatees, librettists, performers, previous owners, printers, engravers, etc. Name variants are searched automatically.
Names of people or institutions who had prior ownership of the source. Can also include stamps, bookplates, and signatures.
Examples:
MUZEUM TIFC WARSZAWA
Miss Blair
Ex Bibliotheca Poelchaviana
At the end, there is a section called Authority data which lists RISM's indexed personal names, institutions (organizations), and secondary literature. Results that appear in the RISM indexes will lead to fuller information, for example biographical information and name variants for people, postal addresses for institutions, and bibliographic information for works of secondary literature.
After you select a filter, it appears above the list of results. To remove a search filter, simply click the X next to the filter.
Digitized music includes musical sources that have been scanned by the holding institution and made available online. A direct link to the digitized source is provided in the record. Clicking on the filter for digitized music will display only those records that contain links to digital surrogates.
The phrase In collection near the bottom of the record can describe two different situations. First, it can mean that the work is part of either a collective manuscript (see an example here) or printed edition (example here). Second, it can mean that the piece is part of a composite volume (also known as a binders' volume or a bound-with), which is a volume containing varied material, usually of similar instrumentation, bound together by an individual or sometimes an instiution (example here). Clicking on the blue number will take you to the collection's main entry. From there, you can view the records for the rest of the works in the collection.
If you see the phrase "Initial entry" in a record for a printed music edition, note that the linked record corresponds with the suborder adopted in the printed volumes of series A/I, in which identical titles were indicated with a dash beneath the first printed edition mentioned. This system did not correspond to any hierarchy in a sense of first editions and reprints. However, linking in the catalog is necessary in order to reflect similarities in the content of the titles. Furthermore, since the subsequent entries often lack short and/or diplomatic titles, a link is made to have a clear reference to the title of the first entry.
A Fingerprint identifier is an alphanumeric code that is derived from looking at a certain combination of pages in a historical printed book. It helps identify books that were part of the same print run, and not from a different state or edition.
The IIIF display refers to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) technical standard that allows images to be displayed directly on other websites without needing to upload anything. This means that hundreds of digitized objects, whether a music manuscirpt, a printed edition, or a different element such as a watermark, can be viewed on the catalog entry's page without clicking on an external link or leaving the catalog.
The field Music incipit is an exact search. Selecting the option Music incipit (with transposition) will also search intervals and include incipits that have been transposed from the initial search inquiry.
Underneath the search boxes you will see a five-octave on-screen piano keyboard, which can also be used to enter music incipits. The piano keyboard enables a chromatic search and takes into account exact half steps. You can search either the beginning of the incipit, with or without transposition (Incipit beginning via piano keyboard) or any section of the incipit, with or without transposition (Anywhere in incipit via piano keyboard).
And remember:
The music incipits in RISM are not standardized in any way. Rather, they reflect the incipits as they appear on the sources themselves. Accordingly, there may be slight variations among different copies of what is essentially the same work.
Not every source described in the RISM catalog includes a music incipit. Sometimes incipits consist of only the text incipits or basic information about the movement (such as time signature or tempo marking).
Why can't I find a printed edition using the B/I number?
A good strategy is to do an Advanced Search in the field A/I or B/I number first, and if you don't find what you're looking for, search for the same number (in quotation marks) in the field All fields.
Includes: General abbreviations, additions to any instrument to indicate a range, additions to any instrument to indicate a type, dditions to any wind instrument to indicate a tuning other than standard tuning, unspecified or unknown types or numbers of instruments
Opt-out complete.
Your visits to this website will not be recorded by the Matomo Web Analytics tool. Note that if you clear your cookies, delete the opt-out cookie, or if you change computers or Web browsers, you will need to perform the opt-out procedure again.
Originally founded by piano builder Eduard Seiler in Eastern Europe, Seiler has been producing pianos since 1849. By the 1920s, Seiler was the largest piano manufacturer in all of Eastern Europe. After forced nationalization by the Polish government in 1945, the Seiler family fled Poland and would re-establish Seiler in Denmark by the mid-1950s, before finally settling in Germany in 1962. Seiler soon after developed a strong reputation for quality, German craftsmanship. Seiler continued to produce pianos in German and remained under family control until 2008 when the company was sold to Korean piano manufacturer Samick, who continues to own and operate Seiler today.
The serial numbers on Seiler uprights are located under the lid, stamped onto the metal plate. On Seiler grands, the serial numbers are located at the front of the piano, also stamped on the metal plate.