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Hi, Everyone,
I was cleaning out some files when I found this artical from the
N.Y.Times back in May. Maybe many of you have seen it. For those who
haven't, I thought it was good reading, and you might learn something
you didn't know before. .............. Enjoy !!
Danny Tassin, RPT
DLTassinpiano@Juno.com'
School Tech at
Jackson State Comm. College
======================================================
This article from NYTimes.com
--------------------
How Does a Piano Get to Carnegie Hall?
May 11, 2003
By JAMES BARRON
The contest was between a giant sandwich of wood - 18 strips of maple,
each about half as long as a city bus - and half a dozen workers with
muscles, a pneumatic wrench and a time-conscious foreman. The workers
were supposed to bend and shove those 18 strips into a familiar-looking
shape, and beat the clock. "We're allotted 20 minutes," the foreman,
Joseph Gurrado, muttered.
After 14 minutes of pushing and pulling and flexing and grunting that
another boss standing nearby called "the Fred Flintstone part of the
operation," the wood was forced into a curve. And, in the too-warm
basement of a gritty factory that opened when Ulysses S. Grant was
president, piano No.
K0862 was born.
Like other newborns, it came with hopes for greatness and fears that it
might not measure up despite a distinguished family name, Steinway.
Or that it would be grumbled about by Steinway's customers -
temperamental, obsessive, finicky pianists whose love-hate relationship
with the company and its products is as complicated and emotional as
anything in Chekhov. Yes,
pianists grouse that Steinways are not what they used to be. Yes,
pianists ascribe whatever faults they found in whatever Steinway they
just played to every Steinway. And no, the majority would never play
anything but.
Steinway knows all this. Like No. K0862, every new piano that rolls out
of the Steinway & Sons factory - in Astoria, Queens, next to oil tanks
that block the view of the Rikers Island jails - is an attempt to refute
the notion that the
only good Steinway is an old Steinway.
So how good will No. K0862 be? Will it sound like "a squadron of dive
bombers," as the pianist Gary Graffman said of a Steinway he hated on
first hearing but came to love? Or will it begin life with the enormous
bass and
sweet-singing treble that pianists prize the way wine lovers prize a 1989
Romanée-Conti? Will it be good enough for Steinway's concert division,
which supplies pianos to big-name artists?
No one can say. Not yet.
It will take about eight months to finish No. K0862, an 8-foot 11
3/8-inch concert grand. Along the way, the rim will be aged in a room as
dim as a wine cellar. It will be sprayed with lacquer, rubbed and sprayed
again.
Its 340-pound iron plate will be lowered in and lifted out 10 or 12
times. It will spend time in rooms where workers wear oxygen masks to
avoid getting headaches (or getting high) from smelly glues. It will be
broken in by a machine that plays scales without complaint, unlike a
student.
Someone walking through the factory, following the progress of No. K0862,
could forget a basic fact about what goes on there: Every Steinway is
made the same way from the same materials by the same workers. Yet every
Steinway ends up being different from every other - not in appearance,
perhaps, but in ways that are not easily put into words: colorations of
sound, nuances of strength or delicacy, what some pianists call
personality. Some Steinways end up sounding small or mellow, fine for
chamber music. Some are so percussive a full-strength orchestra cannot
drown them out. On some, the keys move with little effort. On others, the
pianist's hands and arms get a workout.
Why? No one at Steinway can really say.
Perhaps it is the wood. No matter how carefully Steinway selects or
prepares
each batch, some trees get more sunlight than others in the forest, and
some get more water. Certain piano technicians say uncontrollable factors
make the difference.
Perhaps, in a plant where everyone is an expert craftsman, some are
great, others merely good.
Someday, if its personality turns out to be extroverted but not strident,
if its key action turns out to be loose but not mushy, No. K0862 may be
pounded or caressed in public by someone like Alfred Brendel or Maurizio
Pollini at
Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. First, though, No. K0862 will be pounded
and caressed in the factory by woodworkers with tattoos on their burly
arms, by technicians known as bellymen, by tuners confident that they can
improve it, no matter how good it sounds at first.
There is Anthony Biondi, 31, who was hired nine years ago as a veneer
cutter, someone who selects wood for rims. His tools include the oldest
machine still used in the factory, a 130-year-old cutter, and the newest,
a million-dollar
trimmer that arrived in January.
There is his boss, Mr. Gurrado, the foreman. In a company once legendary
for its "lifers," he is a new kind of middle manager. When Steinway hired
him in 2000, he had no experience in woodworking but 15 years of
manufacturing
everything from leather goods to lemonade. He replaced a foreman who
retired after 41 years of making Steinway rims.
And there is Andrew Horbachevsky, the 44-year-old manufacturing director,
who has worked for Steinway for 15 years. "This company kind of sucks you
in," he said. "I've had a dream where my wife turned into a piano."
A Holdout in Queens
Steinway remains one of the last outposts of hand craftsmanship in a
machine-dominated industry in what was once a boomtown for piano makers.
Steinway is now one of the last large manufacturing operations in New
York City, which the State Labor Department says lost 666,400 factory
jobs between 1962 and the end of last year, when 217,000 remained.
Unlike competitors that left for plants in the Sun Belt, Steinway has
stayed put. The factory was originally the centerpiece of a 400-acre
company town where Steinway workers lived in Steinway-built houses and
shopped at
Steinway-owned stores.
By moving everything but their store and their offices out of Manhattan,
the Steinways hoped to elude 19th-century labor turmoil. They succeeded,
for a while.
Eventually, the Steinways sold all but 11 acres, and, in 1972 they sold
the company itself, which was unionized in the 1930's. But their name
remains on Steinway Street, and company officials say that most of the
450 workers at the
plant still live in the neighborhood. Mr. Biondi, the veneer cutter,
bicycles to work in warm weather.
Real Ebony? $50,000
Now as in the past, the products made in the Steinway factory are famous,
and famously expensive. No. K0862 will sell for about the same as one of
the most expensive Mercedes-Benz coupes: $92,800.
No. K0862 will have what Steinway calls an ebonized finish, meaning it
will be painted black. Real ebony is available, for an extra $50,000:
Steinway says it has no effect on the sound. But the guts of every
concert grand - the strings,
the hammers that strike them, the keys to which the hammers are attached
- are identical.
That raises the question of age. Is a brand-new piano ready
the moment it leaves the factory?
Maybe, maybe not. In the 1920's, a golden age for Steinway, there were
probably pianists and tuners who whined that the best pianos were those
made at the end of the 19th century. There are certainly pianists today
with a fondness if not a reverence for Steinways from the 1920's and
1930's. "The
majority of instruments from back then, there's a level of color and
personality that is undeniable," said the pianist Stephen Hough.
As for what comes out of the factory these days, the pianist Erika
Nickrenz said: "The brand-new Steinways tend to be a little blank. They
have all the characteristics, but it takes pianists to play them and
really bring out
what's there." But, in a tryout at Steinway's showroom in Manhattan, she
preferred a concert grand that left the factory on April 27 to four
others, including one from 1962.
"Older is not better, and we can prove it," said Bruce A. Stevens, the
company's president. "Where that started was with people who make their
living rebuilding Steinways, and they tell their customers that. We've
just about given up rebutting it." But not completely. A moment later, he
used the word poppycock.
Determining which pianos are great is terribly subjective. In 1981, The
Atlantic Monthly watched Steinway assemble a concert grand, No. K2571. By
the time the magazine published its 18,000-word article, that piano had
been put before André-Michel Schub, who picked a different instrument for
a recital at the factory. But Richard Goode played No. K2571 at Alice
Tully Hall.
And then, when it was not quite two years old, Rudolf Serkin adopted it.
"He wasn't really happy with the Steinways he had been playing in
concert," recalled the manager of Steinway's dealership in Boston, Paul
Murphy. So Steinway lined up half a dozen grands for Serkin to try.
He chose No. K2571 and had it shipped first to the Marlboro Music
Festival in Vermont and later to his studio nearby. It stayed there
until shortly before his death in 1991, when Mr. Murphy delivered a new
piano, hauled away No.
K2571 and gave it the equivalent of a 100,000-mile tuneup. Mr. Murphy
later sold No. K2571 to a medical student from Japan. She took it to
Kyoto.
Guts of Steel
In the two decades since that piano left the factory, Steinway has done
some modernizing. Computer-generated bar codes now track the parts of a
piano in the making. In 1981, one way that was done was on file cards in
the pocket
of a great-grandson of the company's founder.
Machines now cut the wood for the lids and legs - something done by hand
until about 15 years ago. "This is furniture-making," Mr. Horbachevsky
said. But he added, "There are operations we can't automate because that
would
take the soul out of Steinway."
One of those operations is the one Mr. Gurrado inherited last year,
rim-bending. It had gone unchanged for so long because the piano has gone
unchanged for so long.
What Steinway's original square pianos - or its earliest grands - did not
have were rigid rims. The company's second generation perfected that. One
of the Steinways after the ampersand in the company's name, C.F. Theodore
Steinway, held more than 40 patents and collaborated with the physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz to marry the methodology of science to the making
of pianos. They reasoned that longer and stronger strings would produce a
larger and louder sound but would also put extreme pressure on the rim.
C.F. Theodore Steinway's solution is Mr. Gurrado's: rim lamination. C.F.
Theodore Steinway figured that gluing thin strips of wood together would
create a rim noticeably stronger and more durable than one crafted from
just one or two thick boards. Even the glue would add strength.
Laminating the rim was one of the innovations that made possible an
instrument with a big sound, the grand piano Steinway has manufactured
ever since.
When a Book Is a Sandwich
The eight-month manufacturing schedule for No. K0862 does not include the
morning Mr. Biondi spent slicing the stack of wood for the rim into
pieces 3/16 of an inch thick and roughly eight feet long. Nor the time
he spent taping those pieces into 22-foot-long strips to form the "book,"
as the sandwich of wood that becomes a rim is known at the factory.
Among Steinway's workers, Mr. Horbachevsky says, rim-bending was once
dominated by Italians. No one can say for sure why they were hired for
those jobs more often than for others, but when a job was available,
someone at
Steinway would tell a friend, who would apply.
In the 1980's, Caribbean immigrants began taking the place of Italians
who retired. In the 1990's, the labor pool changed again. Now the crew
includes three Bosnians.
Among them is Nazif Sutrovic, who was a police official in Sarajevo
during the 1984 Winter Olympics and has worked at Steinway since 1997.
Apologizing for his balky English, he says, "I don't have time to go to
school." He has another job, as the superintendent of a Brooklyn
apartment
building.
The Wood Gets Amnesia
On the way to what Steinway calls the rim-bending machine - though it is
essentially a piano-shaped vise perfected by C. F. Theodore Steinway, and
has no motor - Mr. Gurrado's crew made an important stop They fed the
book, layer by layer, through a glue-spreader that looks something like a
washer with a wringer. At the far end, two workers, Tommy Stavrianos and
Jean Robert Laguerre, dipped brushes in glue pots for touch-ups.
Mr. Stavrianos - at 28, the youngest man on the crew - and his colleagues
talk proudly of the pianos they make and the company's traditions. But
they are not the concert-hall regulars that their pianos are. The radios
around the factory play soft rock and jazz, not stations where Steinway
artists are often heard.
The rim-benders use their physical strength in a way that is unusual in a
modern factory. At 9:54 a.m., the crew leader, Eric Lall, is busy shoving
the book into place along the side of the piano where the keys for the
bass notes will be. He begins tightening spindles on the clamps while
Patrick Acosta, 30, uses a long-handled lever to force the rest of the
book toward the big curve at the end.
Mr. Acosta says this is all the exercise he needs, or gets: "I build
pianos. That's my workout." The lever in his hands weighs 80 pounds. The
clamps - "posts," the crew calls them - are 65 pounds each.
At 10:10, with a whack from Mr. Acosta, the rim is done.
"Fourteen minutes," Mr. Gurrado says.
The time allotted for bending a rim is 20 to 25 minutes. As he explains,
"We're working against the glue." It begins to set that fast.
The rim spends its first 24 hours clamped in place. "Wood has a memory,"
Mr. Gurrado says. The day in the clamps is deprogramming time, so the
wood will forget its past and not pop out of its new shape.
After three days across the workroom from where it was bent - Mr. Gurrado
does not want to shock it by moving it out of a by-now-familiar
environment too quickly - it goes to a room that looks like a wine cellar
but is warm and dry and on an upper floor in the factory. It will spend
about 60 days there, with 500 other rims that are awaiting sounding
boards, plates and keys.
"It's going to be whatever it's going to be, good or whatever," Mr.
Stavrianos says after parking it there. "There's nothing you can do now
but wait. It's out of our hands."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/nyregion/11PIAN.html
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