The Rebirth of a Piano

Story by Diane Melton | Photo by Michael Kodas

My mother walked into the Steinway showroom on 57th street in New York City on a bright June day in 1943 and bought a piano. It was a black lacquered 5-foot 1-inch baby grand, tropically treated and destined for South America, but the order had been cancelled. The man gave her a deal: She could have the piano for $1,340.48. “I bought a Steinway,” she announced broadly to my father later that day.

When it was delivered, my father tickled the keys. Over the years, he crooned to all four of his daughters, doodling on that piano. My three sisters and I all took the requisite lessons, of course, sitting straight-backed and long-haired and positioning our fingers like igloos on the keyboard. We were taught to revere the piano, to handle it with respect, as if it were a giant talisman.

I inherited the piano. My son grew up studying music on this piano, shaping his fingers, shaping his passion. Now, after all these years, it requires complete restoration, though at great expense. It has suffered water damage from a leaky skylight. The ivory keys are chipped and yellowed. The soundboard is shot. The hammers are beat. The cabinet is scuffed and scarred. Some think I am foolish not to just, well, unload it somewhere, and buy a brand new piano. I suppose this is what it means for a piano to have sentimental value: I cannot part with it.

“When I am finished restoring your piano,” Shawn Hoar of Shawn’s Piano in West Hartford assures me, “it will be better than new. Your piano will be screaming. And how sweet she shall be.” That is Hoar’s lingo for a piano’s responsiveness to touch, for the control a pianist will have in producing sounds that resonate with thunder or tinkle like raindrops. Hoar has been repairing and restoring pianos for over thirty years, with a special affection for Steinways. In fact, he has an entire warehouse devoted to vintage pianos, dozens of them, a unique inventory – mostly Steinways, some Masons & Hamlins, a prized Bosendorfer, many lined up legless on their sides like dusty books in the stacks of a library; others positioned lids wide-open, courting players.

In his workshop – part of a triple-building site that also includes a warehouse and a showroom – Hoar hones his craft. Piano restoration is a vocation requiring patience and sensitivity – a devotion to an art form in its own right. There are over 12,000 parts to a piano, fashioned from a variety of pure and natural materials – hard and cured spruce and maple, sugar pine, Gaboon ebony, steel, wool, glue from the hoofs of horses. It has evolved over the centuries from earlier string instruments: the clavichord, on which Bach composed his Inventions and fugues, and the harpsichord and early Viennese pianos, upon which Mozart masterminded his sonatas and concertos. Emergent versions of the current day piano range from ponderously square pianos of the Victorian era, to efficient and accommodating uprights, to the sensuously curved piano grands spanning from 5-foot babies to 9-foot concerts. They have evolved from secrets possessively guarded in European piano houses.

As Hoar prepares to refit all new action parts of my original piano, virtually remaking it by hand, he walks me through his workshop. “A piano needs love,” he tells me. “Most pianos aren’t what they could be, or should be. Yours will be equal to or better than the original.” In a corner, an exquisite 9-foot 1933 concert grand Steinway D, which Hoar purchased from the Carnegie Institute, rests majestically. It is dethroned for now, but once replenished, at the cost of $90,000, it is destined to grace the performance halls of MGM Grand at Foxwoods’ new hotel in Mashantucket, Conn., where it will be played by the greatest of artists.

A piano’s insides are a mechanical marvel of the physics of its parts, chiseled and intricate and complicated as any machine, as the human anatomy – and no surprise that various parts are called the belly, ribs, and knuckles, as a piano assumes a life and personality of its own. A piano restorer must be a master woodworker and mechanic of sorts, dexterous in the sawing, shaping, polishing, gluing and rubbing that goes into the restoration of a piano.

Hoar shows me the inner workings for my piano: a new Steinway rail; newly fashioned dampers; new hammer key felts ordered from top-of-the-line German manufacturer, Abel – they’re made of pure wool felt wrapped in layers and reglued around the delicate hammer molding. Ideally, the action of a refurbished piano should enable all eighty-eight keys once again to respond to the finger’s touch five times a second, so that a pianist can perform plucky staccatos or trill to his heart’s satisfaction.

Schubert is playing on the radio in the action room where Chris Pilon, an action specialist, hunches over his work daylong, meticulously and painstakingly cleaning and reassembling parts. Here the dampers are reshaped, the steel wires polished, the keys cleaned and restored. A tinge of ammonia, used to clean the strings, burns the nostrils, and the musk of stinky-smelling animal glue (the finest available and never epoxy), fills the air. The glue must be water soluble, so that future generations of owners can dismantle a piano for repair. But, conversely, water can work to a piano’s detriment; water damage can violate the instrument, as is the case with my piano. Or, if flooded, a piano can be breached irreparably.

“Once we are satisfied with the reworking of the action of the hammers against the strings, we go for the teardown,” Hoar explains. “It’s actually twofold – it gives us time for the new action parts to settle in.” My piano will now be completely dismantled so the belly can be restored. Hoar oversees every aspect of piano restoration in his facility, but his domain is the belly room where he works on the soundboard and its ribs, pin block (around which the strings are secured), bridges, and strings. Hoar is a soundboard craftsman — a skill he acquired back in the ‘80s during an apprenticeship to master soundboard maker Wally Brooks in Old Lyme. A soundboard, Hoar explains, is made of Eastern White Spruce from the Adirondacks or Canada. Spruce is hard, strong, used in the boat building and the construction of early aircrafts. “Spruce is a musical wood,” Hoar says, as his fingers caress a soundboard he is working on.

When fashioning a soundboard, Hoar will literally create a blueprint of the original, much like a dressmaker’s pattern, dependent upon the piano’s proportions. A new soundboard will originate in the cement-floored open garage, where saws, clamps, planes, and drills inhabit the cluttered workspace like people in a crowded room, patiently waiting their turn. The shaped and sanded soundboard, once fitted in the piano, will then progress to a room dominated by a massive gantry – a framed platform that Hoar has designed to hoist the cast iron piano plate that shrouds the soundboard like a golden sculpture. When it’s time to position the casting, which can range from 250 to 400 pounds, Hoar utilizes the electric-generated pulley to suspend the casting over the soundboard. He will then lovingly and meticulously lower and guide the piano plate onto its proper place, like a three dimensional puzzle piece, careful that it never touches — and damages — the rim of the piano.

Hoar is a stout Irishman who wound up in the piano restoration business by a confluence of circumstances. His father divorced his mother when he was 10 and took the piano, and Hoar, the youngest of six, “never got a shot at a lesson.” At 17, in a search of a piano of his own, he sauntered into a showroom in West Hartford Center and met the man who would become his mentor. Eddie DiPillo, owner of what was then Goss Music, allowed the blue-eyed, red-haired kid to “hang around” the repair shop — to help partially pay for a piano. “I could teach you the trade,” DiPillo promised him. And Hoar, a visual learner, hated school. His grandmother, in her wisdom, had point-blank told him, “Get a job with your hands.”

And so began Hoar’s apprenticeship. Five years later, though, DiPillo passed away unexpectedly, and Hoar found himself alone in the workshop with the pianos of four customers disassembled. DiPillo’s lawyer told him he could “put the key in the door and walk.” But something compelled him to stay, perhaps the very qualities that attracted him to the business in the first place — industriousness, a love of tinkering with his hands, fascination with detail, and an ear for the nuance of music. He asked the customers for their trust; he asked the landlord for indulgence (“Hey, kid, if you can pay, you can stay”). His career was launched.

Rich Lindahl is the cabinet refinisher. He seems humble and unassuming, keeping company with pianos. He is slight of stature and taciturn. The cabinet is his main gig —although he, like all the technicians, can work on all parts of the piano. Lindahl will spray-paint or hand-rub the case of each piano in for repair or restoration. He might install electronic devices to control humidity or computers that plug into midis.

Today, Shawn’s Piano has earned national acclaim. Hoar is sought after by the Piano Technician’s Guild for lectures and demonstrations. In addition to his prized inventory of vintage instruments and his dedicated, climate-controlled workshop, he designed a 4,000-square-foot two-story showroom from which he sells predominantly Ritmuller and Pearl River pianos, affordable Chinese-manufactured instruments with, in Hoar’s opinion, uncompromising quality. There is a large brass chandelier suspended in the center like upside-down fireworks. Canvases splatter the walls with subtle color. This is where potential buyers sample the pianos, tasting them like so many chocolates, in a myriad of open and closed spaces to mimic the acoustics in concert halls or private living rooms. Tones, colors, responsiveness, harmonics bounce off the walls. Customers come calling to this mecca of pianos; they are concert pianists, piano teachers, voice teachers, accompanists, jazz musicians, amateur players, parents who want to give their kids lessons. Pianos beckon to be played. “You gotta be a mind reader when you sell pianos,” Hoar says, leveling his eyes. “You’ve got to figure out what the customer wants before he does.”

For Hoar, each piano is as unique as a beautiful woman or a distinctive wine. Hoar celebrates his pianos, both the old and the new. “Perhaps,” he suggests with a mischievous twinkle, “the new Steinways are not as good as the old ones. A piano is worth salvaging based on cost economy. Do you know what Steinway’s biggest competitor is? ...Themselves.”

Keen of ear and eye, Hoar examines each piano in for repair and, using the judgment of a doctor diagnosing a patient, he determines the necessary treatment. It will take several months to completely refurbish my Steinway, as it can take as many as 1,000 hours to restore a piano. My son, the next in line to inherit it someday, will have the chance to try it out in the workshop and have the action customized to his touch. Hoar tells me it will be comparable in price to the new Steinways of similar size being produced today, but perhaps immeasurably better. Although its value is being enhanced by restoration, my black lacquered baby grand will always be, to me, a priceless treasure, a legacy of generations that my mother purchased on a jaunt and a whim.

Diane Melton is a freelance writer in West Hartford and adjunct professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.