How to Make a Piano

On my brother’s infallible recommendation, I watched a documentary the other night called Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037. It’s about the factory in Queens where they make Steinway pianos — the Cadillacs of the piano world.

This movie was sincerely one of the most moving and riveting things I have ever seen. The filmmaker chose, at random, a grand piano whose birth and fate was tracked from the logging mill in Alaska where the wood was born to its final destination in Carnegie Hall. The process of making a Steinway takes almost a year, and is an intricate and elaborate affair. Steinway is one of the last piano companies to survive the falling-out-of-favor of pianos, and they still make every single piano entirely by hand in the exact same way they did a hundred years ago. The piano is an incredibly complex instrument with many parts, and every single part is created and attached by hand. Each person who works in the factory has exactly one job — a job they do perfectly and over and over.

There’s a guy who’s spent the last 40 years of his life hand-chiseling divets into the part that holds the pin that holds the piano wire.  Someone else hand-shapes each key. Another person strings it.There are three different people who tune the piano in different ways. The thing spends a month just being tuned. Every inch of it — even the parts you’ll never see — is perfectly handcrafted and designed.

Every person that works in that factory has reverence for their job and the artwork they are creating. The love and care and perfection and artistry that goes into each piano is breathtaking. That’s why Steinways are so expensive and why they are considered the best concert and parlor pianos in the world. Each piano, because it’s made by hand, has its own sound and its own disposition. So musicians are very particular about which one they play.

Back in the day, everyone had a piano in their parlor. But now, it seems, only the very rich and classical-inclined bother. So the piano business is sort of a dying art. However, it’s a rarified art that should not be allowed to go extinct. That would be a very sad day indeed.

I don’t play piano, although I once thought I could.

When I was little, my mom, who worked nights as a waitress, one day brought home a piano. My Great Aunt Beatrice was a one-room-schoolteacher in rural Vermont, and I think it was through these school connections that my mom got her hands on a free piano that no one wanted anymore.

It was really not a great piano. It was an upright, and it had been painted sea foam green. It was never tuned. It was ugly, and no one in my house even knew how to play piano (although my mother once did, rumor has it — she is probably going to read this and protest that she still does, in theory).

I took a mild interest in this piano for a period of time. I learned to play the requisite Chopsticks and maybe a few Christmas carols. I liked the idea of being able to play the piano. But, like many things in my life, rather than actually do the thing, I read about it instead. When I should have been practicing, I would curl up in a corner with the enormous hardcover collection of books about classical composers that my mother had also brought home one day. I became riveted by stories of Chopin and Mozart and Beethoven. I was stoked when that movie Amadeus came out, because I already knew the debaucherous story by the time I was ten.

I never really did learn to play that piano, and neither did Elia. Eventually it turned into another flat surface for us to pile books on. I think that piano is probably still in my mom’s foyer. It’s never been tuned, as far as I know, and the thing probably hasn’t been played in 20 years. But I will say this: I still love Classical music, and particularly when it’s heavy on the piano.

When I watched Note By Note last night, I felt sad for the old piano languishing away in my mom’s “parlor.” But it made me realize how much my mom prioritized creativity in her children. Which, as far as I am concerned, is the singular most important thing a parent can do.

Oh and if you are into parlor pianos and things old people do that are super cool, please check out the new creative project I just launched with Leslie Munday: Elderchic!