by Marie T. Sullivan

Worried about AI? Consider taking up the piano.

I harbor no conspiracy theories about AI. No doubt it has excellent uses. But surely in some ways it will make us stupid: by doing our writing for us, for example. How I love this line from Evelyn Waugh’s Helena:

    He [Lactanius] delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric.

How will a student encounter this joy if Chat GPT is writing for him? Words and writing and music make us human.

We have entered a time in which any ordinary task for which you have to take pains is intolerable. Why bother spelling correctly? Auto-correct will take care of it.

Piano playing is real. It requires effort and practice. There is no auto-correct. It also offers huge rewards down the line. Even if you don’t wind up at Carnegie Hall, you will for the rest of your life grasp the skill of a good player. Playing the piano also develops the brain, more than most other instruments because you can see the intervals before you. It’s math as well as music.

Sit at a piano, and you have real power. There, under your very hands, lies all of Western harmony. These are keystrokes no one can harvest. In recommending piano playing as a form of resistance to the techno-tyranny that surrounds us, I am not talking about an electronic keyboard. These are useful on occasion, but far from the real thing.

I mean a real instrument, with personality and unique tone quality and moods that shift with the temperature and humidity, just as those of humans do. Pianists (I am not one) report that a fine instrument whispers back to you as you play, like a lover. “You cannot interact with an electronic keyboard,” says Rich Keylard, whose family has been in the piano business for seven generations.

Piano means “soft” in Italian. The instrument was born in Italy around the year 1700, invented by one Bartolomeo Cristofori. Keyboards at that time were harpsichords and the player could not vary the dynamics. Cristofori’s revolutionary invention allowed the player to control the volume of play. He named the instrument gravicembalo col piano e forte, or a harpsichord with soft and loud.” Mercifully the name was abbreviated to pianoforte and later, piano for short. No one understands the piano business more than Rich Keylard, whose family has built, restored, sold, tuned and moved pianos since the nineteenth century under the name A.G. Keylard & Sons.

Alex Keylard’s vehicle for delivering pianos, taken in Jakarta in 1952. His wife, mother of Rich and Jerry Keylard, sits in front.

It’s a Dutch name, originally spelled Keijlard. Rich learned the business from his father. “My brother Jerry, now retired, and father were like rocks,” he says. “They felt no pain, no cold. My dad was strong as an ox. Jerry could bench-press 430 pounds. Everything in the piano business is heavy, you see.” Rich has himself been in the business for fifty-five years. “We did all of our own re-building, so the quality was consistent. We did not farm out jobs. We even used to make our own sounding boards and strings.” Rich and Jerry closed the shop and downsized in 2018, mostly for economic reasons. “Cook County taxes were definitely a factor,” Rich says. He continues the work from his garage. No longer is advertising necessary; word of mouth suffices. The firm continues to restore and sell pianos around the country.

It began in Holland. Rich’s grandfather later took it to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where plenty of aristocrats owned fine pianos.

An illustration of Alex Keylard (Rich’s father) rendered by a talented fellow prisoner in prison camp in 1942.

A brother maintained a shop in Amsterdam. After the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies and declared martial law in 1942, Rich’s father and grandfather were taken to an internment camp for more than three years. “‘Hell on earth’ is how my father described it,” he says. “My grandfather survived only because my father was with him.” Rich’s dad met his mother in an air raid shelter. The family moved to Amsterdam when Rich was four years old.

He faintly remembers the voyage and even the ship’s name: the Somersetshire. There were too many piano tuners in Amsterdam, though, so the family applied for a visa to the U.S. and landed in Chicago.

Rich Keylard briefly summarizes piano manufacturing as follows: After the instrument’s birth in Italy, Germany became the hub of fine pianos for some time. The German firms together resolved to keep cheaper Asian products out, but one manufacturer adopted them on the sly, ruining the market. Later the U.K. became a hub, then Holland, and then Austria, home of the celebrated Bosendorfer piano, now owned by Yamaha. Then came the Koreans and the Chinese. We Americans also built pianos, but most manufacturers here did not make the effort to retool and upgrade over time, according to Rich. In the late ‘sixties, the Asian companies began buying up the names of reputable American builders and slapping them on their own pianos, what Rich calls “stencil pianos”—cookie-cutter products. “There were nine piano manufacturers in Chicago in the early ‘fifties,” he says. “All are closed.” Many pianos today are built in Indonesia and China. And some, still back in Italy. The superbly handcrafted Fazioli piano is made in Sacile, near Venice. Faziolis sell for serious prices. Look and see.

Let us turn to the iconic Steinway & Sons, located in Queens, New York and also in Hamburg. Like Faziolis, Steinways are handcrafted with great care. A 2007 documentary titled Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037 tells the story of one particular piano’s manufacture from start to finish. It took a full year. Standards are impeccable. Steinway maintains a selective roster of professional pianists known as Steinway Artists who have played and endorsed their instruments over time. Cole Porter, Arthur Rubinstein and Sergei Rachmaninoff are among them.

The documentary gives us a glimpse of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, from which comes the wood used to make Steinways. It’s old-growth Sitka spruce, also used during World War II to make glider planes. A short growing season gives it a tight grain that results in the signature Steinway resonance. It’s rare, costly, and essential to Steinway’s operation.

On the stage of piano economics, enter the Northern spotted owl, an endangered species that makes its home in the Tongass Forest. It’s a small bird as owls go, but one that’s had a big impact on Steinway. In the 1990s environmentalists sued on the owl’s behalf to curb logging there, using the Endangered Species Act. The timber industry fought back, and the protracted struggle continues. Lawsuits are afoot. Steinway & Sons has no other source of the Sitka spruce.

The conflict presents a dilemma to environmentalists who love Steinways. On another front, there’s the question of elephant ivory, used in making piano keys. Obtaining it is illegal, so a black market has sprung up. Vintage ivory is available legally—from scrimshaw artists and some museums, for example—but supply is extremely limited.

Of course, manufacturers use synthetic substitutes. I asked a pianist of long experience if there’s a difference to the player. His reply: Ivory keys look better—there’s a character to the look of ivory—but are easier on the hands only for sustained, very hard playing. Another player, a Steinway Artist based in the Midwest, prefers to play on ivory keys. They are porous, and so occasionally sweaty fingers grip the keys better. Plastic is slippery, he says. A few manufacturers have developed a third way—a synthetic product that mimics the porosity of ivory.

Gone are the days when most American homes had a spinet in the parlor, as in the late nineteenth century. But civilization is not dead, and there is still a market for pianos. In our country, Rich reports, “kids are starting to play more, but often they are kids whose families are from other countries: India, Asia, Poland. A lot of American kids go for sports. It’s hard to do both.”

There’s another form of economy related to the piano that is not monetary. It’s in the jazz world, with which I am familiar. It’s economy of playing, not unlike the “kitten games” of the writer choosing exactly the right words. Improvising jazz pianists want to choose the best notes in a given moment. Doing so to good effect takes a deep knowledge of harmony and years of training and experience. Humans have ten fingers. Normally only up to eight of them are used at once when playing chordally. You can define a jazz chord with as few as two notes. As with words, sometimes fewer is better. So, using all that experience, the jazz player makes split-second microdecisions as he plays. Which notes of the chord will I choose right now? Which in the right hand and which in the left? At the same time, they decide how to “voice” the progression for smooth movement that is both logical to the hand and pleasing to the ear.

The tuning of the instrument they play affects their split-second choices, too. A fine jazz pianist I know reports that when he is compelled to play an out-of-tune piano, he quickly and unconsciously adapts to avoid the bad notes, like avoiding the mushrooms in a casserole.

So, find an instrument, tune out the world and play something simple to start. Besides, a good piano will outlast you. Its life span is some forty years and then you have it rebuilt, extending its life by another fifty. Would that we could do the same.

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An Ohio native, Marie T. (Terry) Sullivan has lived in Chicagoland for all of her adult life. Her background is in music. For two years she served as culture editor for the now defunct Chicago Daily Observer.