Post about "piano"

I viisted my piano today. A 1930 Mason & Hamlin grand that has been rebuilt over the last four years, ending today when it again played by itself. The piano is a child of the depression, and there is a strange parallelism to its journey that I can’t help myself but share.

It was made at the Mason & Hamlin factory in Boston in early 1930, just months after the Wall Street crash of October 1929. Pianos had been a feature of nearly every parlor in America, first because someone in a family usually played it, and then because pneumatic player actions could turn them into music machines.

Master technician Jerry at Danny's Piano

But the radio the Victrola and then the amplified phonograph started to change the way Americans and music interfaced. We first stopped playing it ourselves, and then we stopped creating it in the home, deciding to import it. By the time the market crashed, pianos were already in decline, and the crash finished off many manufactures.

Mason & Hamlin (because it was a quality name–Serge Rachmaninov insisted on them for concerts) was bought by the Aeolian Piano company, makers of the Ampico pneumatic player system, for $450,000. My piano was probably in that inventory. Aeolian put a player action in it.

I don’t know much about where it traveled until my grandparents bought it for me in the late 1960s. It had been rebuilt and refinished in Downey, California. But by then, pneumatic player actions were popular only with a few collectors and tinkerers, so it was removed and a piece of wood added to cover where the mechanism linked to the hammers.

Since then, my piano has been across the country three times. To Florida from California, back to Las Vegas (where it was baked when a thermostat malfunctioned, breaking the soundboard) and back to Florida, where again it was the victim of the economy. At one point it was discovered abandoned at the back door of a piano dealer in distress.

But somehow it persevered to be rebuilt and to have a new mechanism installed that uses solenoids and microprocessors, not compressed air and rolls of punched paper. No doubt on its way to its first delivery in 1930, it passed newsboys crying of a worsening economy. Today, on our way to inspect it, we got an automated text message from the NYT: “Stock fall sharply on fears of deepening recession…”

In a few weeks, when the special place for it is ready at the house, it will come home again. Maybe the first thing I should play on it, is “Buddy, can you spare a dime.” Its a tune that it probably knows very well.