Dr Sarah Nicolls crossed from performance into engineering to rethink the grand piano around the needs of contemporary musicians.
Sarah Nicolls built an international career as a contemporary concert pianist, performing music that often demanded more from the instrument than its traditional design had anticipated.
Composers increasingly asked her to work directly with the strings. The problem was physical: accessing them meant reaching around a large horizontal instrument designed for a very different repertoire.
Nicolls started asking a deceptively simple question.
What if the strings went upwards instead?
That idea became a vertical grand piano – and eventually First Light Pianos, bringing a performer’s understanding of the instrument into direct conversation with engineers and materials specialists.
With support from Innovate UK, she has led work using carbon-fibre engineering to rethink a structure traditionally dependent on a heavy cast-iron frame.
The departure is unusual because Nicolls never stopped being a pianist. She simply stopped accepting that the instrument was somebody else’s problem to solve.
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