Piano The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand

Prelude By These People, in This Place [Image] Steinway No. K0862 on its way to becoming a concert grand The piano being a creation and plaything of men, its story leads us into innumerable biographies; being a boxful of gadgets, the piano has changed through time and improved at ascertainable moments and places. . . . Indeed, for the last century and a half, the piano has been an institution more characteristic than the bathtubthere were pianos in the log cabins of the frontier, but no tubs. Jacques Barzun Eighty-eight keys, two hundred and forty-some strings, a few pedals, and a case about the size ofyesa bathtub: every piano has pretty much the same curves outside and the same workings under the lid. But the biography of a piano is the story of many stories. It is the story of the fragile instruments from which all pianos are descended. And it is the story of contrasts. It is the story of nineteenth-century immigrants who struck it rich making pianos, and of more recent immigrants from Europe and Central America who are paid by the hour. It is the story of the family that virtually invented the modern grand piano, of brothers and cousins who drank, who hated the United States, or who dabbled in bulletproof vests and subways and land deals and amusement parks and the earliest automobiles. It is the story of a few workers who have exceptionally good ears and many who have never read a note of music or set foot inside Carnegie Hall. It is the story of men with a passion for motorcycles who have taught themselves snippets of Beethoven and Chopin and of others who tack photographs of Frank Zappa above their workbenches. It is the story of workers who have brought in special radios that receive the audio portion of television broadcasts so they won't miss their talk shows while they drill out the bottoms of keys and shove in tiny lead weights. It is the story of the place where they work, of factory floor camaraderie, of pleasant, unhurried work. This book is the biography of one piano that was made by these people in this place. It is a concert grand that was built at the Steinway & Sons factory in New York City in 2003 and 2004. The main character will not make a sound for months. A big supporting castthe most experienced workers in a factory with a payroll of 450will fuss over it and fume at it. Like all Steinways, that main character goes by a number, not a name: K0862. Like all other newborns, K0862 comes with hopes for greatness and with fears that it may not measure up to the distinguished family name it wears, and not bashfully. On its right arm the Steinway name is stenciled in big gold letters that an audience cannot miss; on its cast-iron frame the name is stamped in black letters that a camera closing on the pianist's face cannot miss. There is no mistaking K0862 for a Baldwin or a Yamaha or a Bosendorfer. Yet K0862 looks just like every other Steinway concert grand. It is eight feet, eleven and three-quarters inches long. It contains the same bewildering assortment of moving parts, thousands of tiny pieces of wood and felt and metal that bend and twist and rise and fall on command. Pianists always say that a good piano has "personality," but the workers know that a piano is a machine, or the eighteenth century's idea of one. Talented tinkerers refined it later onimprovisational wizards of hand tools who, little by little, made a good thing stronger, tougher, and, above all, enduring. But the piano remained an invention from an earlier time. Nineteenth-century inventions had mechanized guts and world-changing goals, like doing in an hour what human hands took days to do. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Eli Whitney had invented the coBarron, James is the author of 'Piano The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand', published 2006 under ISBN 9780805078787 and ISBN 0805078789.