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Sure Avery,
Here it is!
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 Roman=E9e-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 Andr=E9-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."
At 10:35 AM 5/11/2003, you wrote:
>John,
>
>Any way to see it without having to "register"????? :-(
>
>Avery
>
>At 05:24 AM 05/11/03 -0300, you wrote:
>>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/nyregion/11PIAN.html?th
>>
>>John M. Ross
>>Windsor, Nova Scotia, Canada
>>jrpiano@win.eastlink.ca
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>pianotech list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives
>
>_______________________________________________
>pianotech list info: https://www.moypiano.com/resources/#archives
>
Greg Newell
Greg's piano Fort=E9
mailto:gnewell@ameritech.net=20
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