12"

"The Keeper of the Sound"

A 2007 Interview of Robert Paiste by Fritz Steger
"An obituary for Robert Paiste"

The origins of the Paiste company lie in Estonia. The word Paiste means " shine ", a symbol that continues today in various logos of the cymbal series.
The Estonian born musician and composer Michail Toomas Paiste founded a publishing house and a music shop in Saint Petersburg in 1901, where musical instruments were also manufactured and repaired.
The business flourished until the upheaval in Russia in 1916, when the October Revolution forced him to return to Estonia. In Tallinn, he and his son Mikhail M. Paiste began to design and manufacture cymbals for concert and marching bands.
They made cymbals according to the Turkish design, which they preferred to the Chinese versions. During this time, he also developed the first gongs.
The resulting instruments received awards and recognition and he began to export them to Europe, USA and overseas. Due to World War II, Mikhail M. Paiste was forced to leave Estonia in 1940 and rebuild the family business in German occupied Poland.
The company struggled with the shortage of raw materials caused by the war and the difficulty of maintaining international contacts. Towards the end of the war, Paiste and his family left Poland as refugees.
He then rebuilt his business in Brunsbüttel (Schleswig Holstein), Germany. The third generation, his sons Robert and Toomas, then led the company to the top of the world in cymbal making.
While Toomas (b 1939 - d 2003) drove sales and was very present in public, Robert (b 1932 - d 2016) was the mastermind behind many of the developments and patents that gave Paiste its outstanding reputation.
He was considered an introvert and lived a very reclusive life. In 2007, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Robert Paiste that lasted several hours.
I met a good humored friendly senior citizen at the Paiste headquarters in Sursee, Switzerland. He spoke slowly and deliberately, in a sonorous, rasping voice with long pauses, constantly clarifying his own words: (Fritz Steger 2007.)

Mr. Paiste, you were born in 1932. Can you remember when you first became aware of the cymbal making craft?
RP: From the beginning, it was always there: I first noticed the rhythmic sound of hammering. It started in Estonia, when I was eight. Then we came to Poland, which was German occupied and it was already war at that time.
In Estonia the school began as late as 8 years. Before that you went to a kindergarten, there one had already learned the first letters and numbers, but it was rather a kind of preschool.
Because of the lack (of schooling) I spoke only Estonian, at home we spoke mainly Russian, my father (Michail M.) was born in St. Petersburg and later came to Estonia with his father (Michail T.). The first class with 6-year-olds was then not so much fun.
I didn't know German well either and was torn out of my childhood, the first thing I learned while living in Germany was to shout "Heil Hitler"! At that time, one was not allowed to speak Estonian or Russian, but those were my native languages.
That was forbidden by my parents because it was dangerous: If I wanted to say something spontaneously, they would say: "shhhhh, you're not allowed to, speak in German!"
That somehow became ingrained in me, a kind of language inhibition that accompanied me my whole life, at school I eventually got caught up.
At that time Dad only made brass cymbals, these materials were classified as important for the war effort, from time to time he was allocated some material, of course, it was difficult to plan anything.
Then came the escape from Krakow Poland, that was at the same time as the Wilhelm-Gustloff* was sunk, we came to northern Germany (Jan 1945).
(*)MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating German civilian refugees from East Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Estonia and military personnel from Gotenhafen as the Russian Red Army advanced.
There was nothing there at first, the capitulation (German surrender, May 1945) came pretty soon, and then there was still nothing. You couldn't buy anything anyway, then in 1948 came the currency reform: everybody got 150.00 marks.
That was the initial business capital (for restarting his business) from which Dad then bought the first brass metal and made the first cymbals, those were Stambul and Zilko. At that point, Dad became ill and was in the hospital for a long time, the doctors gave him little chance of a full recovery. That's when I dropped out of school and learned the cymbal making trade, I was 17 and from then on I've been making cymbals.

Paiste was the first manufacturer to assign cymbals to to specific specific purposes, how did it come about?
R.P.: Before the war there wasn't much going on with cymbals, there was the orchestral music but the musicians didn't really appreciate the cymbals. That really started after the war, with jazz and other styles of music.
I remember that the Turkish cymbals were sold by weight, So 10 kilos of cymbals cost a certain amount. The cymbals were as they as they came: sometimes thick, sometimes thin, sometimes light, and sometimes heavy.
We found that orchestra people tended to prefer longer decaying cymbals, which we called "gong cymbals", while dance orchestras, such as for the Charleston style, wanted sibilant sounds, that's how the "sizzle cymbals" (with rivets) came about, they also wanted "Charleston cymbals" (at that time the Hi-Hats were called that). That was in the beginning, later came other styles through jazz and other names like medium, heavy, thin, and paper thin.

Did you do all this hammering by hand?
R.P.: Everything, including the bell was hammered out.

At what point did you start using hydraulic hammers?
R.P.: I reckon in 1952 we got the first hammering machine, Dad had organized that, he wanted that.
When I was learning to do cymbals, Dad said, "Look how I do it and do it the same way." I thought "Yeah , that's good, but it can be even better", he was the guide, and that's the way it is with hand craftsmanship: craftsmanship is never 100 percent accurate no matter how precise you want to hammer, no matter how exact you want to make it, some kind of deviation always creeps in. When the mistakes add up, it's just too much, hand craftsmanship is never final.
He then set up the hammering machine and told us to work with it, but my colleagues said : "I won't touch that machine!" But I was interested, so I started to try. At the beginning it didn't really work, then I slowly got into it and learned how to use it, the others saw that I was much faster with the cymbal and it was hammered much cleaner, that's how it grew.
That was good about my father: he gave you the input, the hint, he didn't push, but left it up to you to figure it out!

You then went to Switzerland in 1957, how did that happen?
R.P.: That was a very important step for us, we had originally been “settled” in Germany.
We were fleeing from communism and we were afraid that communism would advance further, we wanted to go to the USA at that time but they were working with quotas and the quota for Estonian refugees had been filled.
So, we were stuck in Germany for the time being, and we quickly had to make something by ourselves in the post war period, but Germany was not our choice.
We then thought of Sweden or Switzerland, at that point they were considered safe countries, from what I knew Switzerland was democratic, neutral, and centrally located in Europe.
So in 1957 I went to Switzerland alone, my brother Toomas was 7 years younger and still in school so he couldn't go so I started to build cymbals on my own in a single room.
What our family learned during this time was to build something new from nothing.

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