When I was seven years old, they tell me, I announced one day to my mother and father that I wanted to learn to play the piano. I have a pretty good memory of things back in 1947, actually, but I don't remember any details to the story of how my father located an upright sitting on somebody's back porch they wanted to get rid of for twenty bucks and he, and probably his brother Bill, managed to haul it into our house, where it sat, next to the staircase, for the next half century or so until both my parents were gone and the house went to the State of Connecticut for having sheltered the old man in nursing homes the last several years of his life.
I can't remember the maker. I can pretty much assure you it wasn't a Steinway or a Bösendorfer. It could have been a Baldwin. Japan was only two years beyond Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so Kawai and Yamaha were not yet on the horizon.
I remember a piano tuner coming in and spreading the parts all over the living room floor while he tingled and plunked and hammered it into shape, replacing a couple of the missing ivories and no doubt giving my mother serious second thoughts about indulging her little boy's fantasies - would he stick with it? Or would he move on to his make-believe kingdom in the woods in back of the house where he got to wear a cape and order imaginary subjects around? I started lessons with Marguerite Curtis, the church organist at the Second Congregational Church (we went to the First) for $1.25 an hour, and for a time the elders in my family imagined having a concert pianist in the family, particularly when I got gigs playing for ballet classes and became the organist in the Methodist Church for a year or two at age sixteen.
I've written before how grateful I am for those early years. All children should be so lucky as to have parents willing to imagine great things of their children. I don't remember their faces when I told them I had figured out I didn't have what it takes to become a serious musician. I lacked the discipline to keep up with the Czerny exercises, and even being asked to accompany the summer hymn-sings at the Little Church in the Wildwood couldn't motivate me to work harder. The glass-half-empty story is I burned out by eighteen; the glass-half-full story is I acquired an awareness of what it takes to become a concert-level player and a love of music that gets me through the current lock-down. I have no regrets. I made the right decision.Those who can, do; those who can't, have YouTube.
When my friends Don and Alice had to give up their beautiful Madame Butterfly house in Yokohama, they needed to dispose of the grand piano they had acquired for family entertainment. It so happened I was living in a house that had once been owned by a concert pianist and she had reinforced the floor to hold the weight of her piano, no mean feat in Japanese houses designed to surrender to nature when the winds blow and the earth quakes.
Good Son Stuart managed somehow to expense the move - they had to practically take a wall down to get it in. And when I moved out I simply gave it away to the owner rather than incur the expense of moving it out again. Another chapter in my life when, if my musical talent had sufficed, I might have given it another go. The wife of a German colleague gave concerts and I got her to visit a few times to brighten up the place. But once again, it would be them what can vs. them what must be satisfied with just listening and admiring.
I played for my own entertainment, not to become more proficient, and it used to annoy me when tradespeople came to the door and apologized for interrupting my practice. What is it with these pathologically earnest people, I used to ask myself - always practicing for life, never simply enjoying it.
Eventually, though, I got over my early antagonism about all things Japanese, married one of them, eventually, and came to appreciate this love of excellence and the work it takes to acquire it. I include in my personal history a memory of Ms. Curtis bewailing the fact that her nephew had brought home a Japanese war bride ("I really don't think the races should mix") during the time when "Made in Japan" was another name for shlock. And a memory of the first time I realized what a good car Toyota made and vowed I'd never buy any other make of car. I'm nurturing my '97 Toyota to this day toward 180,000 miles (I'm still at 140,000), and am now convinced it's going to outlive me.
Torakusu Yamaha, of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, began making reed instruments in 1887 and expanded into pianos in 1900. Today Yamaha is the largest manufacturer of musical instruments in the world. At some point Torakusu took in his neighbor, a young man named Koichi Kawai, to work for him, when he spotted him driving a four-wheeled wagon and thought maybe that meant he could build pianos, as well. The piano business faltered in the 20s, but by this time Koichi believed he had developed the know-how to strike out on his own, and suddenly Hamamatsu had not one, but two piano manufacturers. Yamaha recovered and they're both going strong today.
Koichi had a son, Shigeru, who took over when Koichi died. And Shigeru passed on his skills to his son, Hirotaka. Hirotaka continued to build the company, adding robots into the manufacturing process. The love of excellence carried into the third generation, and Hirotaka came out with a piano to beat all pianos, and named it after his father. That means there are Yamaha pianos of extremely high quality, Kawai pianos of extremely high quality. And, move over Steinway, more and more concert halls and artists are choosing to play their concerts on the Shigeru Kawai piano.
If Steinway is the Rolls Royce of pianos, the Shigeru Kawai might be called the Ferrari. I'm getting out ahead of my expertise here, so I won't push the analogies.
But I've been listening to people discussing the relative merits of a Steinway over a Fazioli or a Bechstein. America's Baldwin, like America's Ford and Chevy, seems to have lost its ability to play with the big boys and even Bösendorfer has been bought out by Yamaha, so the Japanese are today known for more than their world-class automobiles and their Nikon Cameras.
We can all work together to build excellence. Russia seems to have chosen to produce child prodigies. Japan is now working hard to provide the instruments for them to play on.
Just a sample.
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