Play Every Town: 251 Community Concerts for a Cooler Climate: Everybody Wants To Be Somebody, or, The Piano Jet Set

I’m getting ready to play at the Calvin Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth next weekend, where I’ll perform on the Grace Coolidge Piano, a Baldwin grand originally installed in the White House in 1923. I’ll include a set of pieces composed or published that year, ranging from music by ultramodernists Josef Hauer (Atonale Musik no. 9) and Henry Cowell (The Harp of Life) to a novelty number by Zez Confrey (Dizzy Fingers) and maybe the Charleston, the James P. Johnson song that ignited the dance craze.

Since the piano arrived at the White House in December, my September concert falls within the piano’s centenary year. The piano is reputed to have been played played by Rachmaninoff. And—wonderfully apt for my project, which has as its starting point my decision not to fly to concerts—it’s said to be the first piano ever flown on an airplane!

Only the thing is, it wasn’t. Flown on an airplane, that is. Or played by Rachmaninoff.

As I was thinking about programming and promotion for this concert, I did my usual mostly online research about the town and the venue. I noticed that every reference to the piano being airborne circled back to the Coolidge Homestead, and I didn’t see any sort of historical citation. I even dug up a contemporaneous article about the piano from the February 2 1924 edition of Presto magazine, which said nothing about an airplane. Clearly, if it was flown from the factory to DC in the era when the railways ruled and most airplanes had a total payload less than the weight of a grand piano, it must have been a publicity stunt. So it struck me as especially odd that the plane went unmentioned.

I reached out to the Coolidge Historic Site Administrator, the fabulously named Rejoice Scherry, to ask what she knew about the piano. Rejoice had already researched this at length, and had learned that two baby grands did in fact fly in the Sikorsky S-29-A from NY to DC, piloted by Igor Sikorsky himself…in 1925, 16 months after the “Coolidge Piano” arrived. The flying pianos were Brambachs, not Baldwins. One was consigned to the First Lady, but its destination was a community center she was interested in, not the White House. And the blows from Rejoice kept coming: “Unless Rachmaninoff entered the president’s private apartments, he didn’t play the Grace Coolidge piano. He performed on three occasions through the Coolidge Administration and used the golden Steinway now in the Smithsonian collections.”

There’s a meta-story here, I think. The Coolidge piano is plenty special: it belonged to the First Lady, lived in the White House, and is maintained for concerts at the historic Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth, Vermont, pop. 641. But somewhere along the line, someone—a family member? a tour guide?—must have felt that wasn’t special enough, and, intentionally or unintentionally, conflated it with pianos flown in an airplane and played by Rachmaninoff.

And I see exactly how this could happen, because a similar thing came up in connection with my Brandon concert a couple of weeks ago. Through friends of friends, a party of four gravel bikers ended up as our houseguests for a few days in mid-August at the end of their cross-Vermont bike trip. One of them was the great pianist Brad Mehldau. My very next concert was in Brandon, at the Barn Opera. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a barn refitted as an opera house that puts on shoestring but musically first-rate opera productions. And it has a first-rate piano: a 1981 Steinway D numbered CD 486, a designation that indicates it was specially selected to be one of the instruments in the Steinway Concert and Artist Department for use by touring Steinway artists. CD 486 was a favorite of the Newport Jazz Festival—where Brad first played in 1993.

So, a beautiful coincidence: I was about to perform on a piano that had been played 40-odd years earlier by my illustrious guest when he was just hitting the big time.

Except I wasn’t. It turns out that CD 486 was retired from the Concert Department in 1992. It’d been played by Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Michel Petrucciani, Ray Charles, Ivan Moravec, Shura Cherkassky, and John Browning—but not by Brad Mehldau. It missed him by a year, just as the Brambach pianos took to the skies a year after the Coolidge Baldwin was delivered. And sort of like the way Rachmaninoff played the Steinway in the next room over.

But the Brandon Steinway was still a great piano. And that’s enough! I’m looking forward to playing Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s Baldwin too, even if it’s ungraced by the gorilline fingers of Rachmaninoff. And is earthbound. Like me. Good enough.

(Edited to add: This is too on the nose. I just found out that Rachmaninoff personally bankrolled Sikorsky in 1923, the year the Coolidge Baldwin was delivered, so that Sikorsky could complete development of the S-29-A, the plane that would soon carry the Brombach pianos. He even agreed to be VP of the company, to lend his name recognition to the then obscure Sikorsky. More at the link, including a photo of the two Russian expats in front of the plane, the same one in the pics below.)

Enjoy some pictures of flying pianos!

Brambach baby grands being loaded/unloaded at the airfield