When did the word technician replace the word artisan? Or, what is the difference between the two words?
These are questions that come to me as I watch Note By Note, a feature-length documentary by Ben Niles about the making of a Steinway L1037. The documentary follows the entire process of the making of a grand piano (the L1037 is a 9-foot concert grand) at Steinway from the time that a person goes out to Alaska to procure wood to the time that it is delivered to a downtown New York City showroom.
We spend a year at the Steinway factory in New York from December 2003, when the wood is initially bent into the grand piano shape, to almost the end of 2004 when it undergoes its final fine-tuning. From the very opening shots at the factory, the movie draws the viewer into this world of pianos and piano-making. Interspersed with the making of the piano itself, we have various pianists ranging from Hank Jones, to Lang Lang, to Hélene Grimaud who speak about what different pianos are like, what it feels to play on different pianos and the process of making music. They speak as if each piano was its own person with a distinct personality, and as with people, they find some pianos appealing and others not so much.
Their feelings about a piano’s personality are echoed by the workmen at the factory, who talk about, among other things, what they do and how important their task is to the making of the piano. What is most striking about these interviews with the workmen, in addition to their sense of humor, is how much they enjoy the work that they are doing. And here is where the movie becomes really engaging. The subject is interesting in itself and one watches this entire process take place – something that in real life takes about a year, as I’ve said – with complete awe and wonder. But this other facet of it, the life of the human beings that are behind this piano’s creation, is fascinating. Throughout, there is also the sense that Steinway is one of the last piano-makers (and I am avoiding the use of the word manufacturer) who still does most things by hand. The craftsmen (and the pianists) make us believe that this is what essentially lends a soul to each piano and prevents it from being the same as every other piano out there. As we watch and we listen, we begin to understand the film-maker’s buried theme, which is that of the essential colorlessness of mass-production — and by extension, humanity’s rush towards sameness. We are all alike but we must not become the same.
The film is also an argument for hand-crafting a thing such as a musical instrument (we are reminded time and again that no electronic tuning is used in the entire piano-making process, aural tuning is used instead) and that therefore, under the weight of mass-production, this essential piece of culture is dying; because it seems that sooner or later Steinway will have to go the path of other piano-makers or face closure (many other piano-makers are mentioned as having gone out of business over the decades). The film then serves as a document of this valuable process. Perhaps, it argues, some hundreds of years in the future someone will pick it up and discover something amazing. There is also a hint in Niles’s lingering on the musicians, that somewhere in this new century Classical music is also slowly but surely dying a silent death.
These are all compelling arguments, no doubt. But I am not sure that I agree fully with all of them—which is okay. What is not okay is that in this haze of trying to say too many things at the same time, Niles has lost some of the power that he could have achieved if he had kept it simpler.
Consider, for example, the closing scene: after the Steinway L1037 has been completed, it is delivered to the showroom – this would have served as the perfect ending with credits rolling at that time – but no, we are given Grimaud playing the piano and telling us that she liked it. This is totally unnecessary. The audience clearly understands what a Steinway piano is worth, and if it’s fresh-made out of the factory, it must be a very fine instrument indeed. Then why is this footnote necessary? This makes the entire sequence become a little bit like trying to make things painfully obvious, and I’ll tell you, I for one, hate having points hammered into me. It would have been much better if the film-maker had trusted our intelligence.
There are similarly unnecessary scenes of people (and children) coming in to buy pianos (although the scene with a Steinway being delivered to a Jewish family is affecting). All the musicians’ interviews, though interesting, end up distracting from the central theme of the making of the piano and the story of the craftsmen.
However, having said all that, I should add that this is Ben Niles’s first foray into feature-length film-making, and as it stands it is an applaudable effort. I saw this film first in February at the Gene Siskel Film Center and certainly was more affected by it and less aware of its flaws than when I saw it last week at the Symphony center. And at that second screening, perhaps all the chit-chat that went on before and after the movie made it more demanding on my senses. It is definitely worth the experience of watching it for the first time, for any music lover and otherwise.
So, returning now to that question at the beginning: given the fact that Steinway relies so much on hand-crafting, it was strange to see the workmen referred to as technicians. That is an artifact of this century as well. I suppose, in a seemingly invisible way, life of this century has already encroached on life within the Steinway factory – which in many ways is like traveling back in time to the period at the turn of the 19th to 20th Centuries. The word artisan implies the word art embedded within it: these people who have worked at their respective roles for years have in some way mastered their respective arts and contribute in no small way to the world of art-making.
*The film is a little hard to find and information about future screenings and purchasing can be found at: http://www.notebynotethemovie.com/
*This article first appeared on Illinois Institute of Technology's student magazine TechNews: http://technews.iit.edu/index.php?id=1161
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