There was a bit of racket outside and I was curious. What I found was a wonderful group of piano movers, readying a beautiful antique studio piano for installation at a nearby apartment.
I of course could not resist talking to the workers because this was one of my earliest jobs, moving pianos up and down many flights of stairs. It was harrowing and exhausting but truly fun too.
How many pianos does this company move? Maybe one per day, depending on the distance they have to travel, but as many as eight when that is possible. The grand pianos are an ordeal, the mini-grands less so. The small spinets are the easiest ones of all. Moving a piano in town will cost about $1,000 plus or minus. But they get the money because no one can really do this without professionals.
These days, these movers are doing a huge business. This is because the price of pianos on the used marketplace—I’m thinking of Facebook Marketplace in particular here—is often zero. You only have to pay the moving costs. We are not yet to the point where the owner will pay for the move but that’s where we might be headed.
The market has of course dramatically changed. Piano skills are dying because several generations have been raised to believe that the child is supposed to be naturally good at something, else the child should stop practicing.
Piano takes years of discipline and focus. There are no shortcuts, and you pretty much have to learn when you are young. The process is painful and requires focus, discipline, and patience. Anyone can learn if you start young enough. Rare is the adult who can learn to play. As a result, piano skills in the general population have atrophied.
Still, I’m thrilled to see that these instruments can still find a home. The piano being moved in this day was a Baldwin, I’m guessing from about 1960 or so, a workhorse for schools, churches, and the like. They are everywhere and still hold up well.
You can add the acoustic piano to the list of industries that the United States lost to foreign competition but this case requires more explanation than merely referring to low-cost foreign labor. That’s because the decline began in the 1930s and was completed by the 1970s.
Of course when I say “completed” I am excluding the globally famous Steinway, still built in the United States with its impossible stability and unity of timbres from lowest to highest notes. Nothing else sounds like a Steinway.
Steinway shows it is possible but it is also paradigmatic of American manufacturing of so many goods: it works but only for high-end customers. This goes for bedspreads, shoes, suits, apparel, leather goods, tools, and so much more. You can still find American-made products but they are marketed mostly as luxury goods and they are, but you will pay the price.
Back to pianos. The years between 1890 and World War II were the golden age of the American piano. They were the biggest-ticket item on every household budget besides the house itself. Everyone had to have one. Those who didn’t have one aspired to have one. It was a prize, an essential part of life, and they sold by the millions and millions.
By 1890, American companies met half the world market for pianos. Between 1890 and 1928, sales ranged from 172,000 to 364,000 per year. It was a case of relentless and astounding growth.
They were used in classrooms everywhere in times when music education was considered to be the foundation of a good education. They were the concert instruments in homes before recorded music and iPods. They were essential for all entertainment. American buyers couldn’t get enough, and private enterprise responded.
New York, Boston, and Chicago were the homes of these companies. There was the great Chickering piano made by a company founded in 1823 and which later led the world in beauty and sound. There was Hallet and Davis in Boston, J. and C. Fischer in New York, as well as Strich and Zeidler, Hazelton, William Knabe, Baldwin, Weber, Mason & Hamlin, Decker & Sons, Wurlitzer, Steck, Kimball in Chicago, and, finally, Steinway.
The American piano industry was the greatest in the world, not because the Americans came up with any new and great manufacturing techniques, though there were some innovations, but because the economic conditions made it most favorable to be manufactured here.
With the rise of this industry came a vast marketing apparatus. Piano ads were everywhere, as a tour of old magazines shows. It was widely believed that spending money on a piano wasn’t really spending. It was an investment. The money you paid would be embedded right there in this beautiful and useful item. You can always sell it for more than you paid for it, and this was generally true. So people would make great sacrifices for these instruments.
With the growth of this manufacturing came an explosion of shops that served the piano market all up and down the industry. Piano tuning was a big-time profession. Retail shops with pianos opened everywhere, and the sheet-music business exploded with them. Ever notice how in big cities the music stores are typically family-owned and established 40, 50, and even 100 years ago? This is a surviving remnant of our industrial past.
All of this changed again in 1933, which was the last great year of the American piano. Sales fell and continued to fall when times were tough. The companies that were beloved by all Americans fell on hard times and began to go belly up one by one. This is because of the high cost, once affordable with sacrifice but suddenly impossible. With the deepening of the Great Depression, these would cost about $8,500 in today’s terms.
That pretty much spelled the end. It wasn’t that the manufacturers were doing anything wrong. It was that the Depression killed discretionary spending. The Wagner Act of 1935 increased labor costs, making it impossible for the industry to adapt. The companies started going out of business. Then the war came with rationing on everything that went into making a piano. Manufacturing became nearly impossible.
During this very period, the German-made pianos (Bechstein, Blüthner, and Schimmel) began to displace the American ones. They were always wonderful products and still are. But early on, the party in control strongly emphasized them and subsidized their production, while blocking imports. German pianos flooded the market. After World War II the trend continued, as ever more pianos began to be made overseas.
In 1960, we began to see the first major international challenge to what was left of the U.S. market position. Japan was already manufacturing half as many pianos as the United States. The U.S. industry in broad terms never recovered from the decade-and-a-half blows of depression and war.
By the mid-1970s, once the dollar emerged as the industrial benefactor to the world, a revolution occurred as Japan’s production outstripped the United States, and it has been straight down ever since. By 1980, Japan made twice as many as the United States. Then production shifted to Korea. Today China is the center of world piano production. You probably see them in your local hotel bar.
And what happened to the once-beloved and irreplaceable American piano industry? Steinway survives to make luxury instruments that few can afford. Baldwin is still around today too. But guess what? Their manufacture is outsourced to China today.
Mason & Hamlin has made a great comeback in the high-end market. The rest moved overseas under new ownership or were completely wiped out.
Does anyone care that much? Not too many. The demand went down and production costs for the pianos that were wanted were much cheaper elsewhere. The story here is the same with all old-style manufacturing in the United States. The United States turned from making things to making debt and exporting it as collateral on which many foreign nations, most famously China, have built a manufacturing base.
I once believed that all of this was merely the free market at work. It turns out that the story is actually more complicated. The New Deal and World War II were not the free market, and neither was the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 which kicked off the great outsourcing and trade-deficit boom, tearing down U.S. manufacturing and building it up around the world. The old monetary settlement mechanisms completely broke down.
Maybe there is no real problem in losing the U.S. piano industry? Well, listen to the sound of an older model Chickering and you can tell the difference. It was warm and wonderful, nearly symphonic. It is mellow and perfect for the best repertoire. By comparison, new Chinese pianos sound harsh, percussive, and pointed, like a marimba.
Well, you can still get that old American sound, even from a piano made in New York or Boston on the used market, and very cheaply if you are willing to pay for it to be moved. Or you can buy a Steinway—still one of the world’s great pianos. Of course you have to pay $50,000+ and even as much as $120,000, but they are there.
The story of the decline of the American piano industry is one of tragedy. We’ll never know what might have happened had history been under different conditions, and I find myself unconvinced that its doom was somehow made necessary by globalization.
At every stage, it could have been otherwise. But the deed is done, and now we have an active market out there in these used treasures. That’s all to the good. The piano movers are making the money. Now if only we could regain the skills. That’s a more arduous task than merely moving a piano.
