Piano shop

A dip into two sides of a strange economy

I have been coming to New York pretty regularly since I was a kid. My mom was from there, and wanted to show me things in the city now and then. I’m grateful for it. We came there in the seventies and eighties. We took the train from Providence, or a bus, and stayed a bit above midtown in a not-fancy hotel. It all seemed very doable for a social worker and her son back then, if you weren’t intimidated by the city, as she wasn’t.

I kept coming sporadically into my adulthood. At some point I realized that one could go to the old Steinway Hall, near Central Park South, sign in at the front, and wander around the rooms trying out pianos. It felt grand old-NY: the place was basically a mansion, with tall ceilings, and the decor seemed fancy but fading.

Then one year I came to the city and that place was closed. It has taken several years for me to find where they ended up, in a modern, gleaming space where the pianos are mostly below ground. The vibe has changed, that is, but there is still an openness to getting an experience of playing a Steinway for those interested. My memory is that the old hall had a real hodgepodge of pianos, but I feel like the concert instruments, the Bs and Ds, were somewhere else, away from random young amateur visitors.

Now in the more serious space, I ask for the serious pianos—and twice I’ve had the chance to hang out by myself for a while in a room of six Model Bs right off the line. This is the 7-foot concert instrument. My college had one of these—a newer one—and an older, but meticulously cared for 9-foot D. There is no question that my access to these instruments as a young person shaped my sense of what pianos were and what they were capable of from then on.

What I remembered in the old Steinway hall was how different they were from each other (a point of pride at Steinway), and how, without even trying, I would in time find my way to one or two that really spoke to me, or spoke for me. It’s an experience that is hard to describe but it seems most like what people mean when they refer to “chemistry” in social relations. What I hear, what I’m going for, just gets expressed, except better than I could have imagined. And when things are really good, emotional depths open up like a cathedral before me. Ideas transform from interesting or tantalizing to profound. The instrument just wants to sing or bellow or roar or dance or all of these right on top of each other.

It’s an experience like this that I have in my 20-minute unleashing in a room with six new Bs. It takes me about 5 minutes to find the one for me—at least that’s been the case with n = 2. Then there’s just $150k (plus tax and shipping) between me and continuing that newly-formed, fiery relationship.

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Last week I visited another side of the piano economy in a suburb of Saint Paul. It’s called Keys 4/4 Kids, and it’s a nonprofit dedicated to providing pianos, especially to kids, as the name implies, but also to other people. They have more than 50 pianos in their showroom at any one time available for purchase, and one can also apply to get a piano for an individual or organization with demonstrated need. As in, providing pianos for free to kids, to schools, to churches, to after school programs, and so on. When I was there, there were about 25 grand pianos that topped out around $2,500. Which is to say, two orders of magnitude below the Steinway store. Many of the uprights were under $500. And—I also found my way to an instrument that spoke my language, a somewhat upscale Chinese/Korean baby grand. The store also has a huge shelf of donated piano music that is available for free. I picked up some Schumann and Scarlatti.

"My" B, now someone else's, perhaps? At Keys 4/4 Kids, and a visual depiction of my piano chemistry—just kidding, that's Romain Collin playing in EC last year.

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I was once in New York with a friend who had never been there before who stopped in their tracks seeing a mother and son in a doorway, asking for money for food. How, they asked me, could these skyscrapers stand next to a child, hungry, in the cold? And how could no one walking by not be enraged or grief-stricken at the sight?

Still a good question after these many years.

I guess the thing to say about the pianos is that it’s a version less stark, less grounded in human suffering, of what my friend was seeing: there are enough people with an extra $150k lying around for Steinway to operate as it does (my minimal research suggests that the instruments lose close to half their value at the moment of purchase, though they do hold it pretty well after that, if well maintained; so that means that people are ready to light $70,000 on fire for the pleasure of owning a new instrument). In the larger world, people are offloading their family pianos at a tremendous pace, along with any accumulated sheet music.

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Rather unrelatedly, I was happy to find the other day, in my reading of Ted Gioia’s brilliant History of Jazz, a passage that spoke of something I’d been searching for a way to speak to here for a long time. While tracing the early career of Dizzy Gillespie, Gioia allows a brief excursus on “accounts of jam-session disgraces.” He wonders aloud about how jazz would sound if there had been less “hazing and humiliation” of players in jam sessions in these early years, and in later years. I also wonder about that.¹

I have nothing but respect for the hard work and achievements of successful musicians, but I also feel persuaded that music’s power inheres in how it has been more generally given, like gentle rain from heaven, broadly and widely among human beings. The great off-loading and redistributing of pianos I witnessed in the Twin Cities—I hope it is an exchange that bodes well for the future, that as one generation gives them up, another will take them up; that one generation that acquired them for vain reasons, or just expired reasons, will pass them to a generation that makes room for them, that has room for them.

1. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2021), 249.