Film “Note by Note-The Making of Steinway L1037”
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008I don’t see many movies over the course of a year, but last weekend I went to see a new documentary “Note by Note–The Making of Steinway L1037”. The film follows the assembly of one piano, over the year that it takes. The main focus is on the people who do the work, and on their incredibly dedication and artisanship.
The film opens with a team of workers carrying a long board, then mounting it on the bending mold and pulling it into the shape of the piano frame. The amount of leverage needed to do the bending amazed me. After a lengthy period of relaxing into the new shape, the frame is taken off for several months of resting. Then the various other parts of the piano were brought together.
But the real heart of the film are the people who do the work. They are clearly working class people–one of them grew up blocks from the factory in Queens, New York. This same person talks about the diversity of the workforce–calling it a “real United Nations” right on this team. And it’s quite clear that, whatever the disagreements about life outside the factory, all of the workers respect the dedication and artistry of the whole team.
One of their points of pride is that the whole piano is made by hand–not that power tools are not used, but they are always under the control and eye of a human. One worker talked about the piano factories that use computers to do the work, and he complained that all the pianos sound exactly the same–they have no personality.
Another strand of the film are the concert artists–classical, jazz and pop–who come to the factory to try out pianos for upcoming performances. All of them explained, in one way or another, that pianos have “personalities”…that some of them make it easy for the performer to do what they want to do and others fight back making it hard to get through the performance. In one case, a performer came into a room with a number of pianos and went from one to another playing the first bars of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”. Sometimes, he’d take a good long time; others he’d play three notes and leap up and move on to the next.
At one point, one of the workers talked about going to Carnagie Hall for a performance and saying to the usher “That’s my piano”–explaining that he had made it. The whole film is a wonderful tribute to a group of people who bring hearts and hands and minds to a complicated task.
Bob