I’m sure you’ve heard it said - especially if you’re an old fogey who is actually in possession of some of it – that nobody (other than the Baby Boomers who are stuck with our own, that of our parents, or that of our grandparents) wants “brown furniture.” But last winter, those in the furniture know started putting out the word that Millennials actually might be interested in a piece or two. Just to mix things up with their IKEA.
I do hope this revival lasts a while – at least until I need to divest of my brown: a dining room set and credenza from the 1920’s or 1930’s that my husband and I bought at an antique store during the 1980’s; my grandmother’s quite nice claw foot side table; my grandmother’s not so nice desk and piano chair; my mother’s lyre-backed side chair; the glass-front (1920’s vintage) bookcase I store my CD’s in.
Now that there’s a brown furniture revival of sorts, something else needs to be on the outs. And that something is the piano.
Ah, the piano.
My grandmother had a piano in her parlor, an upright, and Nanny loved to sit there, playing away. The Blackhawk Waltz. Mockingbird Hill. I Wandered Today to the Hills, Maggie. She also played golden oldies from the American Songbook, c. 1930, as we all sang along. Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do.
And then, after we moved out of Nanny’s three-flat into a standalone house, someone gave my family a piano, an old upright that, for lack of better space, ended up in the basement. And then my sister Kath and I were taking piano lessons.
We went weekly to the home of the church’s organist, a widow with two (dreamy) teenaged sons,. Mrs. Baker gave piano lessons for a buck a lesson from her parlor on the second floor of a three-decker next to my school.
We learned from the Schaum Beginners books, A through whatever, with their color-coded covers. Book A was red.
The Schaum course included classics like Wun Long Pan, The Famous Chinese Detective.
Eventually, we graduated to real classics - Schirmer Classics - for a bit of rudimentary Chopin and Für Elise.
Wun Long Pan was, alas, more my speed. I was a terrible piano student. I didn’t practice – who wanted to practice on an out of tune piano in our unfinished basement. There was an old carpet on the floor to define the piano room, but that was about it. In truth, I don’t think I would have practiced much anyway.
The only compliment I ever got was that I had good rhythm. Maybe I should have taken up the drums.
Somewhere along the line, my parents replaced the basement upright with a Baldwin spinet in the living room. (After a large addition was bolted onto the house, we now had room in the living room for a small piano.)
Anyway, I kept at it through eighth grade and ended up being to play a few things.
During high school, I occasionally played, mostly from The Weavers’ Songbook, for fun. That or, for some reason, The Third Man Theme.
Today, I might be able to bang out Chopsticks, Heart and Soul, enough bars of Frankie and Johnny to fantasize that I could swing some boogie-woogie, and a couple of Weavers’ songs, if I had the music in front of me. (Ragupati and Die Gedanken Sind Frei come to mind.)
But I don’t have a piano. Or even a keyboard.
So in truth I might not be able to bang out anything.
If I wanted to get a piano, however, I could probably et one cheap. Maybe even free. Free except for the cost of moving it.
The piano, once the pride of many American living rooms, seems out of tune with a growing number of households...Although this will make music lovers cringe, the reality is that some pianos have become disposable. There are lots of them around, some not in great shape. Although memories of an instrument may spark joy, sometimes circumstances dictate that a piano be let go. Downsizing boomers often don’t have room for them; millennials can’t (or won’t) squeeze them into urban quarters; teens often learn to play on electric keyboards. (Source: WaPo)
I just had a little flash of Nanny playing Mockingbird Hill on an electric keyboard. Yowza.
It can be painful to see a precious family instrument relegated to a dump when all other efforts to rehome it have failed. Mark Rubin, who owns 12 franchises of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, says his employees have seen customers in tears as their pianos are hauled away. “Pianos are something very hard to get rid of. They hold a lot of memories.”
I can’t remember what happened to our old upright-in-the-cellar. Or to Nanny’s parlor upright when she closed up her house and moved in with my aunt. My family’s spinet found a home when my mother sold her house and moved into congregant living. It did feel sad to see it go. Lots of embedded memories. Of me playing poorly. Of my sisters playing somewhat better.
Kath and I both took from Mrs. Baker, but she must have practiced more. And Trish, who came around a lot later, took from the more prestigious (and now, I believe, defunct, as is Mrs. Baker) St. Gabriel’s School of Music, where she was actually taught to play the piano. (I don’t know if she still has it, but at some point in time, Trish had an electric keyboard.)
The most skilled piano player ever to play on that spinet was my Uncle Jack. In from Chicago – it was quite exciting: Kath and I got to drive into Boston to pick Jack up at South Station – Jack spent a few days in Worcester, and my memories of that visit is that he spent the entire time on the piano.
Nanny (my grandmother Rogers) was the musician on her side of the family, but my mothers family (the Wolfs) were pretty much all musical. My mother’s instrument was the violin, but Jack could play piano, accordion, and (maybe) the guitar. He was for a time a professional musician, and had a country and western polka band called Jake Wolf and the Midwesterners. (There must be a couple of publicity stills around somewhere, the very handsome and dashing Uncle Jack in his cowboy hat, cowboy shirt, and kerchief tie.)
The one song Jack played that sticks in my mind is After You’ve Gone.
After you've gone and left me crying
After you've gone there's no denying
You'll feel blue you'll feel sad
You'll miss the dearest pal you've ever had
There'll come a time, now don't forget it
There'll come a time, when you'll regret it
Some day when you'll grow lonely
Your heart will break like mine
And you'll want me only
After you've gone after you've gone away
A hundred years ago, pianos were the middle class rage. These days,
Fewer people are buying pianos. In 2018, 30,516 new pianos were shipped to retailers in the United States, down 3.2 percent from 2017, according to Industry Census of Music Trades, a magazine that covers music products. The postwar peak for the piano industry was 1978, when 282,000 units were shipped, according to Brian T. Majeski, editor of Music Trades. “A piano was part musical instrument and part aspirational item. You can trace this back to Jane Austen novels,” Majeski says. “Now it’s just a musical instrument. The people who buy it are the people who play, and this is a smaller set of the population.”
So now it’s hard to unload one. Even the obvious places for donations – “churches, schools, and senior centers,” where soon it’ll be the Boomers, gathering around the piano while someone who actually learned to play goes through the Beatles catalog for a singalong – have all the pianos they need. Before I plunl myself down in the senior center rec room, I’ll brush up on Ragupati. I’m sure it’ll be a big hit.
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