Lift Up Your Hearts!

Beer, bread, cheese...and now musical instruments.   Jan Swafford's recent Slate article, In Search of Lost Sounds, mentions that in Europe, artisanal craftsmen are creating reproductions of period instruments for those interested in more flavors than the standardized, homogenized, modern sound.  This comes as no surprise, since Janet owns at least three such instruments.

The article is long, and some of my readers will be tempted to skip it, but please don't.  Skip the text if you wish, but don't miss the recorded excerpts, which are Flash objects that I can't reproduce here.  Hear Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy on the pianos of their day, and compare the sound to the same music on today's instruments.  Whichever you like best, you'll agree that the older instruments have a different and often exciting flavor.  (They also occasionally sound out of tune to me, and I'm wondering if it's my ears, the recording, or a different tuning of the pianos—though I thought equal temperament tuning was common by Beethoven's time.)

The end of the article resonates especially well with one who mourns the lost days when orange juice did not all taste the same, but varied with the season and the fruit, when cider did not have a bland "apple juice" flavor, and when the taste of milk depended on what was growing in the fields in which the cows grazed.

Why should everything be the same? Why should three or four piano makers, however splendid, especially the Steinways that inhabit the majority of concert halls, dominate the scene? It's like the beer situation 30 years ago, when you had about a half-dozen standard brands to choose from. Now we have myriad brews flowing around the land—the way it was in the 19^th century.

In music, the situation works something like this. In classical as in other varieties, most of the time people hear music in recordings. When people go to a live concert, they tend to want it to sound like a recording. When you're a classical pianist, you get ahead by winning competitions, where they tend to want you to play as perfectly, and as impersonally, as a recording. And they want you to sound pretty much like everybody else, which means you play a Steinway, as in most recordings. And Steinways are voiced to an even, velvety sound from top to bottom. The number of companies making a dent in Steinway's supremacy—these days mainly Bösendorfer, Baldwin, Bechstein—have receded steadily (except for home sales, where cheaper Korean pianos rule). The standardization of pianos and of piano performing are two sides of the same coin, and the main culprit is recordings.

To be sure, Steinways are tremendous instruments and have earned their glory. But should any one brand be that dominant? A modern piano is a matter of iron and steel and high-tech and some degree of assembly line. In the days of Beethoven and Schubert, it was a matter of one man or woman (such as the legendary Nannette Streicher) with hammers, saws, planes, and chisels, and there were myriad visions of what a piano could be.