More scouting notes from the road

Yesterday on my way home from an accordion lesson in Strafford I detoured through the town of Washington to scout for a piano. I’d had an invitation to play at the Unitarian Church, but unfortunately they had no piano, while the other church in the village had a fairly restrictive statement of beliefs on their website which made me think it might not be the ideal PET venue. So I stopped by the Washington Village Elementary School.

Jessica at the front desk buzzed me in. I explained my project to her and aksed if the school had a real piano. She replied “You just walked past it.”

Yes I had, and there it was, a Samick studio upright in the covered walkway outside (!) just before the main entrance—even as I was looking for a piano, I did not register one right next to me in such an unlikely place. Jessica told me “They were going to get rid of it, but I said no, put it out there, the kids will use it. And they love banging around on it!” 

I went back out with appropriately low expectations for an outdoor piano in Vermont’s harsh and variable climate. But the real enemy of pianos is the swing in relative humidity, which can be less extreme outdoors than in a heated environment, and the piano was in surprisingly OK tune. Everything worked except for three keys, but they were pretty important ones, not at the extreme registers as is often the case but in the middle of the keyboard. I tried to open the lid to see what was the matter, but it was screwed shut.

I buzzed back in and said to Jessica I said “I see that the top is screwed shut.” I was waiting to hear something like "Yeah. The kids were messing around on the inside and we didn’t want them to break more stuff.” But Jessica said “Yeah. Someone’s head got stuck inside, so we screwed it shut. Kids!”

I feel like I need to start wearing a body cam, because there's no reenacting these first encounters for video. The photo here will have to do. 

I am now working to schedule my Washington concert at the school.

 

Where’s Waldo, or, A Day in the Life of a Rural Piano Scout

Most concerts originate with an invitation from the venue, prompted by the general publicity around the project or audience word of mouth from prior performances. But I also do a fair amount of scouting, particularly in smaller towns, to identify locations with working pianos and, in essence, invite them to invite me. This may start with internet sleuthing for likely locations (church, town hall, Grange, etc.) and maybe a call to the Town Clerk or other contacts people may have tipped me to, but eventually many hours of on-the-road legwork too, going from village to village all over the state—some of them really ghost villages, yet often with a functional building and ancient but functional piano. This “Where’s Waldo” hunt for small-town piano-appointed public spaces is an ongoing and fascinatingly evocative facet of the project.

Last Thursday, I found myself in central Vermont with time on my hands and decided to tackle the towns of Pittsfield and Chittenden, for which I had no leads yet. In Pittsfield (pop. 504) I determined via Google maps that there was a federated church, a town hall and a library, all in the one village within spitting distance of one another. There was no one in the locked church. As I have done countless times, I peered into the windows along the sides, but they were shaded and there was no view. I wandered over to the Roger Clark Memorial  library, above the town clerk’s office, and asked Lisa, the librarian, if there was a piano in the adjacent Town Hall. She though not, but a trio of women who were planning the next book club meeting thought there was. Two of them, Doreen and Katrina, were on their way there to see if the library wifi signal would reach that far, as they had recently acquired a projector and were preparing to inaugurate a town movie series there. So I tagged along. The door code that the librarian had given them wouldn’t work for us, but Randy, the assistant town clerk, on his way back from the post office, used his own code and got us in.

There was indeed a piano—a Hughes & Son, serial no. 5084, manufactured for the Wade company in 1908, in Maine (the first Maine piano I’ve ever encountered). A grand old upright from the “golden era” of piano manufacture, when there were literally thousands of manufacturers in the U.S. alone. Someone at the factory had taken the trouble to hand-pant some arabesque filigree on the internal plate. The plate also had a record of past tunings, the most recent in 1985. Which, judging from its current sour intonation, may well have been the last time it was tuned. The 1985 tuner had noted that even after that tuning, the pitch was “1/2” (presumably a half-step, or maybe half of a half-step) low, no doubt because it had started so far below pitch that it wasn’t advisable to bring it up all the way in one tuning.

In other words, it was wicked out of tune. So far so, in fact, that some of the unisons (multiple strings tuned to the same note) sounded not like even out-of-tune unisons but rather a full half-step apart. I had to open the lid and check that the hammers were not just out of alignment and striking adjacent strings by mistake.

Even so, the old thing had life in it. Doreen was kind enough to take a couple of short videos of some Joplin and some James P. Johnson—music that is fast and reliant on rhythm for its interest while also harmonically relatively simple, and thus can come across even through deeply troubled intonation. And Doreen and Katrina volunteered on the spot to help facilitate and eventual Town Hall performance in Pittsfield. Assuming the pins and pin black are not faulty, and the strings not too badly rusted, it should be tunable. (The project never collects a performance fee or any other compensation, but we do ask that the piano be tuned. If this is a hardship, we can occasionally use some of our modest grant funds and patron donations to cover tuning costs.)

It’s always possible that the situation will be more favorable at the church—I’ll follow up there with calls or emails. But as most of the project concerts are in churches (to paraphrase Willie Sutton “because that’s where the pianos are”), I do enjoy scheduling Grange Halls, Town Halls, schools, and libraries for variety when I can.

This little diary covered half of my 6-hour piano scouting day in Pittsfield and Chittenden (where I also found a likely venue and several helpful friendly potential organizers). Or in other words, less than 1% of the 252 towns total, or just over 1% of towns remaining to be played. (Though I also squeezed in a visit to Ellis Music in Bethel, where I made contact with Tony who it looks will be able to identify locations and local collaborators for several of the adjoining towns.) As the saying goes: Magna patria, vita brevis.

“Jungle Drums” by James P. Johnson

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

Lounge of the Hindenburg, with specially designed lightweight aluminum piano by Blüthner

American Airlines 747 Economy (!) Class “Piano” Bar (with Wurlitzer organ)

...and the earthbound Coolidge Piano, from Presto magazine, Feb. 2 1924:

 
 

Salisbury writeup

...posted.

As I wrote there, this was probably the finest piano on the tour so far...even though I thought that I don’t believe there is such a thing, as instrument quality is not on a one-dimensional scale.

As I did not write there, I was not able to take full advantage of the piano’s crystal sound and exquisite responsiveness due to sleep deprivation. My wife and had been out until 2 am the night before: on returning home from the Ferrisburgh concert Friday evening, already played out but at a reasonable hour, we found that our recently spayed puppy had torn a stitch, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency vet hospital waiting to get her stapled back up. 

But an extraordinary instrument helps make everything sound good, so it was maybe lucky that I had such a fantastic partner to help me along in my dazed state. I just wish I’d been alert enough to really nail the Mozart Sonata K.545 (which I played entire, not just the Rondo as written on the program) because it was the ideal Mozart piano—I would have loved to get that on video. 

I also kind of pawed my way through James Scott’s Frog Legs Rag. I learned it as a gag because the concert beneficiary was the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas. But it turns out it’s a classic for a reason—it’s extraordinarily catchy both to the ear and the fingers, and really merits greater preparation. Well, I’m going to keep working it up, and in fact I have occasion to play it in the Starksboro Piano Crawl this Friday because it was written in a year I needed, as I'm pegging my repertoire to the building construction and piano manufacture years, and I needed a piece from 1906. Two actually, one for the old Town Hall’s Witney piano and one for the Baptist church’s Albrecht. The other will be Charles Johnson’s Dill Pickles, the second rag (after the Maple Leaf) to sell a million copies of sheet music.

Mojo come, mojo go

For much of July and August my energy for this project was faltering, right when I’d imagined it would be picking up because I didn’t have to divide my energies with teaching classes. At least I had the self-awareness to realize it could have something to do with a broken toe (no tragedy, but an extended and frustrating summer debility), anaplasmosis (also no tragedy, but an energy sap), and the ever-worsening local and global news from the climate and biosphere (beyond tragedy, but not a surprise, except in its rapidity). Also I’d always anticipated there would be low points in a project this long and involved. So I allowed myself to feel mildly daunted and unenthusiastic without also worrying about feeling that way, which would only have amplified it.

And then I had an especially energizing concert in little Landgrove, pop. 177, with a great vibe, an old country upright with a great backstory, and our highest audience:population ratio by far— 35%! Plus we had a happy stay in Brandon on the way home—mostly for fun! though we did check out the piano (superb) at the see-it-to-believe-it Barn Opera while we were there. And now I feel excited again.

Bodhisattva Borden

Yesterday’s post brings to mind this story from the start of my teaching career. As a fledgling prof at Centre College of Kentucky, I took it on myself to establish a small electronic music studio. The central instrument was the Korg M1 music station, a 1990s 61-key workhorse and contender for all-time best-selling synthesizer. 

I was trying to learn the instrument enough to teach an introductory class. In those pre-Google days, the most useful tech support resource was the printed manual. Maybe there was a relevant internet forum, but I didn’t know about it. And the M1 manual had issues. 

When I found myself properly stuck I reached out to David Borden, a pioneering composer of minimalist synthesizer music and founder of the first all-synth performance ensemble. David directed the digital music studio at Cornell, where I had done my graduate work. I told him of my frustrations with the sketchy M1 documentation.* Familiar with mass-market synths of all kinds from their very inception—David was “Chief Idiot” in the idiot-proofing of the landmark Moog synthesizer—he gave me privileged information about how synth manuals are created and translated.

Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 12:23:07 -0400

To: FEURZEIG@centre.edu
From: ...@cornell.edu (David Borden)
Subject: Re: Free advice Part II

Hi Dave--

About the manuals; not many people know this, but they're (ALL of them) written in Tibet, and are used there as extended Zen Koans for the most spiritually advanced students.  Then after the students are through with them and have added ideas of their own, they are translated into English and are auctioned off to various synthesizer manufacturers around the world.  The Synth model doesn't matter.  The various companies then sort of tailor the whole thing to their model names, but basically, they're all the same kind of thing.

I think of this every time I deal with an incomprehensible manual, and my heart is made light. 

*A more frank assessment is conveyed by David’s email summary: “Sounds like the Korg is driving you out of your fucking mind.”

 

Focus

There are of course barriers other than self-obsession and judgmentalism to staying focused or giving yourself over to the music. For instance, in my performances I talk a lot between pieces, and sometimes while playing I find myself thinking about what I might say next. This never ends well.

As I mentioned in my Chelsea concert write-up, I was unable to learn anything about how the 1912 Huntington upright came to be there. At one point in the performance, the brand name caught my eye and I said to myself “Huntington. Huh. We live in the town of Huntington!” (This had actually not occurred to me until that moment.) 

My internal dialog continued: “OK, now that you’ve got my attention, do you have any idea what the next note is? Because I have no clue.”

I guess that’s my story about the Chelsea piano.

Transcend the piano, transcend yourself

The United Church of Underhill has three pianos: one in the basement that I did not see, a 1986 Yamaha console upright in the sanctuary, and an old Everett upright grand in the community room behind the altar. The console in the sanctuary, a gift made in memory of an active choir member by her family, is well-maintained and fairly responsive. The big old Everett, a monster from the heyday of the upright grand (roughly a century ago) is less cared-for but still quite stable. It sounds like it would hold a tuning well (it was in decent tune despite its relatively infrequent care) and has a beautiful, rich, evocative sound.

But the concert (#3, May 21, 2022) was on the Yamaha console. It was a good representative of its class, clear, consistent, and in tune. But I struggled to make dynamic contrasts, and the model’s short bass strings couldn’t do justice to the register. While this was sometimes frustrating, it also had paradoxical salutary effects.

Beethoven’s first sonata, dedicated to his sort-of teacher Haydn, is indeed Haydnesque in its lean proportions and thematic economy. But it already evinces the heroic, heaven-storming Beethoven, particularly in the furiously fast finale. 

To put it bluntly, the requisite sounds for Beethoven’s heroic style just weren’t on this piano. In order to approximate the maniacal intensity and dynamic contrasts the piece cries out for, I had (again to be blunt) to play the living hell out of it. This required me to perform with real abandon—and the thing being abandoned was any care or concern about my own abilities. The result was perhaps not a rendition for the ages, but surprisingly strong. The audience was electrified, and my support team, who as musicians were aware of the piano’s limitations, told me they were listening with slack-jawed astonishment.

It reminded me of the time in grad school when I was learning Beethoven’s last sonata. I was practicing it on the Packard* in my basement apartment, one of those grand old uprights like the above-mentioned Everett. It had a big, rich sound, but not as big as demanded by late Beethoven in his full-on chest-beating Titan mode, as in the first movement of op. 111. My friend Justin Davidson, at the time not yet the esteemed music and architecture critic but just some guy with a good ear, opined that the piece sounded in some ways better than on a modern grand, because of how hard I had to struggle to make the piano roar. 

He was right! This wasn’t merely a sentimental romantic conceit, the idea that it is vaguely ennobling to fight to push the machine past its limits. Rather, you play a certain way when you’re sending it, which is very different from how you play when you’re holding back. And Beethoven, even deaf as he was, understood that he was pushing the limits of the small, wood-framed pianos of his time, knew that the passagework and registral leaps and dynamic juxtapositions of his heroic style would require the pianist go all out. Whereas on a modern 9-foot concert grand, the piano simply does what the performer asks, and in places the situation Beethoven had in mind is even inverted: the pianist has to pull back or slow down to keep the piano from overpowering the music.

But right now, in light of my project to become a more present and giving performer, what interests me about this is how having to fight to overcome an instrument’s limitations pulls me out of ego-driven negative thinking into a much purer, more positive frame of mind. Instead of worrying if I am living up to the music, it puts me and Beethoven on the same team: we’re just struggling together to do the best we can with the imperfect instruments we’ve been given. 

*No relation to the car company, though their logos are strikingly similar. I regret that the internet has made it so easy for me to ascertain their non-relation; back in grad school, pre-Google, I assumed the auto manufacturer and instrument maker were the same outfit. (Why not? It’s true for Yamaha and motorcycles.)