Pianos Are Their Forte

(Yeah, sorry about that. But I couldn't think of a good title.)

I have a bad habit of buying books at a faster rate than I read them. So my book list gets longer and longer. And worse, when I know I have good things to read, it weakens my resolve to stay with something that doesn't quite grab me. Consequently, I have given up on probably five or six books in the last two years, which is not my normal mode. Another consequence of failing to practice just-in-time book purchasing is that I will often begin a book before my current one is finished. This leaves me with two and sometimes three books underway at the same time. That just seems like a bad idea. But occasionally it works out, and I am just finishing my current two books simultaneously. In that they're both quite interesting, I guess I'll give each its own review.

I'm just finished now with James Barron's book Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand. This 2006 book, as its title implies, follows the path thru Steinway's manufacturing process from the selection of raw wood thru the year-long process of creating a concert grand piano, and then a couple years beyond, following the piano's history and seasoning.

I think I would find the story of the crafting of any musical instrument fascinating, both from the machinery geek angle and also because I'm intrigued by this interface between the mundanely physical and the mysterious higher-brain world of musical sound. But the piano and the organ hold special places for me. I worked for a while in my 20s as an apprentice at a pipe organ shop in Minneapolis, and I have always had a child's fascination with the grand piano. Of course it's that latter fascination that gets the sensory overload with this book. While mechanically fairly straightforward (apart from the little Rube Goldberg dance of the action's interior parts), a piano is massive and unwieldy and buzzes with vitality, a strange mixture of beautiful, fine furniture and the mechanical brute force necessary to withstand tons and tons of internal pressure from the strings. Since earliest memory, even the most mundane piano has seemed something with an aura of magic about it to me.

Barron's book follows a single piano from start to finish, talking in some detail about each of the many steps involved in its manufacture. It takes about a year from the carefully-choreographed brutality of the bending of the piano's rim on a crisp March Morning in Queens to the delivery of the finished instrument at the basement of Steinway Hall in Manhattan, where this instrument will live out its first decade, having been selected for service in the firm's concert pool. Much of that year is spent with the partially-finished instrument sitting quietly in a corner of the factory, the wood curing and getting used to life in its new configuration. This and many other things have been shown to be necessary over the firm's century-plus of making pianos. By the time the instrument is played on by (quite an amazing list of) pianists, you feel like you're watching your kid's college graduation.



I accept that this story may not have universal appeal, but I have an excuse. I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere that I have a nine foot concert grand piano in my basement, a 1300 lb. behemoth that I've been lugging around now from place to place for over 20 years. My piano was made in Boston by Chickering and Sons, and dates, per its serial number, from 1934 / 1935--the middle of the Great Depression. I bought it after seeing an ad in the paper from a little piano shop in Shakopee, MN in (I think) about 1986. The story went that the piano's owners, a husband and wife who both played, had been bequeathed a seven foot Steinway from a death in the family, and they were split as to which piano to keep. A coin was flipped, and the Chickering lost. The story's probably total bullshit, but that's the only information I had at the time of purchase. The shop had it priced at $7,500, and I did some calling around to piano dealers to inquire about its pedigree and subsequently hired someone from the Piano Technician's Guild to give it a going-over for me and to estimate its value. His figure of $10,000 made it seem like a bargain, and, absurd though it was for me to have a concert grand (after all, though I was very passionate about music even then, I am only a hack who plays just a bit by ear), I bought it and had it moved into my house. From that moment, it has been quite a challenge to keep it, as it absolutely dominates any room it's in, and house purchases must be made to accommodate it; if you put it in your living room, you'd better have another room to live in. I've moved it six times, four of them myself (well, with a lot of help).



My piano came into being in 1934 in virtually the same fashion as the Steinway of James Barron's book. Around the turn of the 19th-20th Century, Chickering and Steinway were locked in a battle for supremacy, and while Steinway ultimately won that battle, Chickering was making a world-class product at the time my piano was born. Over the years I've learned a bit more about my instrument. It had some work done to it prior to my ownership, as the big iron frame inside the case has been painted. It looks fine, but the Chickering decal on that frame is painted over. Whoever tuned it regularly wrote a date lightly in pencil on this plate just above the keyboard at each tuning, starting in September of '67 and doing their last tuning in 1977. It has two protective rails running along its back, straight side, which technicians have said marks it as a "school piano," or one which was intended for a public place (rather than a private home). So it may have had an institution of some sort somewhere in its past. The keys on my piano have plastic veneers on them, which appear original to me, but which at least two technicians have told me must be a modification from what they feel sure was originally ivory. After that, it seems to be original, with the pinblock--the multi-ply block of maple into which the tuning pins have been screwed--being original (near as the technicians can tell); this implies that whatever work was done to the piano was likely cosmetic in nature and not a wholesale rebuild. The tuning dates imply that the painting occurred when it was a mere 33 years old. When I bought it, it was about 50 years old, which is still awfully young for a grand piano to need serious work. So there is a sense that it may have been beat up a bit cosmetically, and just got a lipstick-and-rouge freshening, maybe prior to one of the sales that occurred in its history.

It has some minor problems, as one might expect after 73 years. The sound board--the sonic heart of the instrument--has some small cracks in it, which is to be expected; but they should be repaired at some point; and the action--the mechanism which connects the keys to the hammers--is in need of a thorough going-over and a regulation. It needs new hammers, and it could probably stand to be restrung. If one went to the trouble to do that much, then that pinblock (which has begun just recently to loosen up a bit, causing the piano to not stay in tune as well as it used to) should probably be replaced, and once it's apart it becomes a legitimate question as to whether the soundboard itself, which will have a finite life, should maybe be replaced. And if we went that far, we may as well put a new finish on it. All these things together would run in the neighborhood of $30,000, but it would result in a virtually new instrument, which, if one actually bought new, would cost in the $90,000-$120,000 range. So it's a hell of a lot of money, but maybe not a bad investment (even the $7,500 I originally paid for it must be quite a bit more than it sold for when new).

James Barron's book causes me to think about all this again, since it reminds us that an instrument like the Steinway grand--and like mine--is a relatively rare and precious commodity (pianos are common enough, but 9-footers are rather special). Steinways are still largely hand-built (as were all pianos when mine was made), and no two are quite the same. My piano has the added poignancy of having sprung from a company which is long gone from the piano world (Baldwin or Wurlitzer still owns the name, but the Chickering factory in Boston closed up shop sometime after, I think, WWII). Barron talks briefly about the history of the piano, and about the role Steinway has played in that history. I suppose he's preaching to the choir with me, but he makes the new Steinway concert grand seem a thing of almost unparalleled aesthetic and conceptual beauty and imbued with a certain intangible mystery. The craft production of the piano makes each one still a bit of a crap-shoot, with everyone at the factory and down the pipeline wondering just what the new piano's character will be, what role its specific characteristics will suit it for, just how good it's going to become in a line of thousands of great pianos. In that sense, the variability of this kind of production, as well as the intensely personal and artistic use to which they will be put, makes them seem almost alive. And while this might be true of any acoustic instrument, the piano is remarkable for the extremity of its evolution. Its couple thousand parts combine to make a machine capable of great volume and a tremendous range of nuance, all without any source of power beyond a pianist's fingers. And while the latest rappers and hip-hop artists have little need for it, it's an instrument which is at the center of almost all of Western music from 1800 to the present day.

Steinway's production protocol has each instrument generating specific documentation about who did what when to build the instrument. I'm left wondering if Chickering also kept such records, and whether I might be able to learn more about exactly when my piano was made, and maybe even to whom it was originally sold (which might of course lead to a record of how long it was at that place and where it was subsequently sold to). After 20 years, I tend to think it's been with me longer than with anyone else. But it would be cool to know.

Anyway, a recommended read to those inclined.