Hands-On

Puff piece this may have been, but the subject was one of great interest—

For 160 years, the pianos made by Steinway & Sons have been considered the finest in the world. So when hedge fund billionaire John Paulson recently bought the company, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians: Would the famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? Paulson, who owns several Steinways himself, says nothing will change.

[music]*

Great pianists need great pianos. Vladimir Horowitz, the famous Russian pianist, used to travel with his own personal Steinway when he concertized around the world...

*Seque here was a Horowitz clip: the opening notes of Mozart's C major Sonata (K330). It's music that always takes me back to the first time I heard it: played by the fine pianist who taught my keyboard literature course in college.

Classes were memorable, both musically and in Dr. T's use of sometimes corny jokes as teaching aids. The jokes worked: quite a few years later, I remember them well, as I do the musical points they illustrated.

Memorable, too, was the class trip organized by Dr. T.: a charter bus ride through several states to Astoria, Queens, and a tour of Steinway factory.

Here's a transcript of the NPR piece, describing the many hand crafting processes in use, and quoting veterans of 30, 40, 50 years at the factory. Some workers' families were employed there for generations before them; other workers just happened to grow up in the neighborhood and get interested in the place. Despite use of newer technologies, much of the hand crafting (and the generally good job security) is a throwback to old modes of work. The factory's atmosphere was a focus of the documentary filmed a few years ago, and it's something I remember from touring the place (even if that was... ummm... about 40 years ago).

We visited rooms where small groups worked on different stages of piano making, and they were enthusiastic about showing us what they were doing. People really seemed to enjoy their work and appreciate meeting a class of interested music students. A woman cutting leather (for key action dampening) offered us scraps to take home. We were puzzled, so she tried again—"Do you do crafts?"—until she had a taker. In other areas, other workers looked around their discarded materials for some possible souvenir to share.

In the room where a tester played a finished instrument, he ended the piece, spun his stool around to face us, then said, "Ya like Goishwin?!" Not waiting for a reply, he spun back to the keyboard. We listened to some spirited playing, from someone who was likely a former kid from the neighborhood.

The tour ended at an instrument showroom, where the guide invited our professor to play. He chose the first movement of the Mozart K330, one of the loveliest pieces we had studied. We all were fans of Dr T's playing and approach to teaching music history; our group's applause at the end was very heartfelt.

I'm no musician, but I've never forgotten the keyboard course, the class members, or Dr. T. And I haven't forgotten the high school music ed experiences that later led me to look for more.

The key was my year of singing in the H.S. choir. It was very much a group of average kids who listened to pop music most of the time. But we were the raw material for an ambitious plan of our director's: that we would learn the choral parts of the Bach "Magnificat" and perform them with professional soloists.

At that age (16 or so) I liked some classical music, but thought of Baroque as a repetitious, tinny harpsichord sound. Learning and rehearsing Bach's choral writing opened a new world, though. It was a revelation, just encountering the beauty of individual parts as we learned them. But when the vocal sections later combined to rehearse an entire chorus, the results were new and awe-inspiring.

All these decades later, I remember an afternoon after rehearsal. As the group walked through an empty hallway outside the gym, someone began singing his choral part; soon, everyone else joined in with their respective parts. The acoustics were pretty damn good, and I'll never forget that moment and the rush of feelings it inspired: awe at the music's beauty, as well as the powerful physical sensation of sound reverberating through my body; thrill at the possibilities that seemed ahead of us all; the sheer joy of spontaneously creating this together—and of doing something so out of the ordinary as impromptu mass singing in a school corridor.

It's a scene that always comes to mind in recent years, as arts education has been the first thing cut.

But, my school experience was in another century...

This is the 21st, after all, and art is meant for the elite. If the public deserves a look or a listen, surely a benevolent hedge fund manager will be willing to endow it. Maybe he even won't fire (for now) the craftspeople who contribute to his hobby.