Music Trade Review

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WESTERN COMMENT
Back to the Home
REVIEW OFFICE, REPUBLIC BUILDING, CHICAGO, I I I . , APRIL 2,
the matter of buying good pianos without prompting, although piano
merchants have themselves to blame for having complacently re-
fused to see that plain fact. For it is notoriously true that the
steady pressure on the professional musicians which is necessary to
build up a large piano business among them has been undertaken
by but few retail houses. These, though, have reaped and reap a
great reward. The total possible professional demand nevertheless
is not large enough to give us that annual output of from 300,000
upwards which we have the right to expect. The backbone of piano
trade prosperity is domestic sales, and this is a fact even more basic
than the musical values of the piano.
1928
IT is very pleasant to have dignified and influential magazines say-
ing nice things about the piano. And when we read that the chief
among our periodicals for the intelligent minority
On
believes that the piano is the basic musical instru-
Being
ment, naturally we feel very much bucked up.
Basic
That is a lovely word, that "basic." So much
comfort can be extracted out of the thought that an idea, a policy
or a thing is "basic." Basic patents are extremely desirable, albeit
hard to obtain. Basic policies are highly dignified and impressive,
albeit sometimes more impressive than wise. Basic trends, which
inhabit the stock market and visit periodically the pages of financial
journals, are stranger birds of which the habits can only be under-
standed of the few. But a basic musical instrument, on the other hand,
is something which any one can understand and with which every one
surely ought by this time to be familiar. To learn, then, on high
authority outside the piano industry, that what we have been calling
the basic musical instrument is really all that, and that it is the
piano, no less, is very encouraging. In these days some piano men
seem to be in need of all the encouragement they can get, if not
indeed a good deal more than they have been getting. At the same
time, however, the incurably skeptical mind which the present Com-
mentator is so unfortunate as to possess, or be possessed by, is
unable to help wondering just how much better off we all shall be
when we have learned that the piano is the basic musical instrument.
Of course, it is just this; namely, the only musical instrument that is
really and practically indispensable to the practice and performance
of music, professional or amateur, commercial or artistic. More
or less easily the world of music could get along without any one
of the other stringed, wind and percussion instruments; but to get
along without the piano would be impossible in the absence of an
immediate and adequate substitute. Such a substitute does not exist.
The piano is therefore the basic musical instrument. Therefore,
until it shall have been displaced by something as good or better, it
will survive. The piano, again, is the basic instrument. Now, know-
ing this, realizing it, appreciating the full flavor of it, we take the
liberty of asking, "Well, now what are we supposed to do about it?"
is truth whether it be palatable or no. Over and over again
some of us have been saying that the piano industry has lived too
long upon a domestic demand which had nothing
Horrible,
t o j o w ^ n ^ j i e p j a n o a s a musical instrument, but
T rue
everything to do with the piano as an outward and
visible sign of prosperity and respectability. For
a generation and more the piano industry, on its large-scale produc-
tion side at least, has lived upon the monopoly it lias enjoyed of in-
stalment selling, until it has lost all desire, and finally all ability, to
make a fight, in case of need, against any sort of formidable competi-
tion. Free for years from the menace of dangerous competition, the
piano industry came to believe that pianos would always be wanted in
respectable families. And then arose the cheap motor-car, followed
by the amazingly powerful and efficient phonograph, the mysterious-
ly attractive radio; and heaven only know what else . . .
all at
once. It was a case of knocked to the ropes when one was looking
the other way and suspecting no harm. Horrible, but whose fault
was it?
TRUTH
YES, in fact, what are we supposed to do about it? The basicality of
the piano, unhappily, does not appear to have saved the industry
concerned in piano manufacture and sale from
The
running into a slough of despond from which it is
Real
only now slowly working itself free. It appears,
Base
upon consideration, in fact, that just as it is pos-
sible for millions to give a thought to music, without giving any
thought at all to spending money in music stores, so also it is pos-
sible for the piano to serve fully all purposes called for by its posi-
tion as the basic musical instrument without thereby accounting for
anything like the number of manufactured piano units required to
bring the annual output up to prosperous figures. The number of
pianos required to act the part of musical bases in orchestras, music
schools, churches, and wherever else music is made on a scale larger
than the domestic, is of course quite large. If the piano retailers
were really alive to their opportunities, it would be very much
larger; but, at that, nothing like large enough. Granted that the
concert grand, which has never been more than a luxury, like a club
car on a limited express train, has built up the prosperity of the
piano industry by exhibiting these very basic musical qualities in
conditions of almost complete perfection; granted that in no cir-
cumstance's could we get along without the demand from music
schools, and from professional musicians, still the fact remains that
it is the domestic sale of pianos which makes the prosperity of the
piano industry. Musicians are not much better than the laity in
12
So for us it is plainly a case of back to the home. Let no jackass,
though, lift up his head to bray about the decline of the American
home. That has been a wail and an excuse for
Turn
ten years now, ever since the war, and some of us
„
are old and wicked enough to believe that it was
riome
°
heard almost as much twenty years ago as it has
been lately. Home changes, of course, but home never dies. The
family is what holds the world together and the family is just as
important at this day as it ever has been. Now every one of the
millions of homes in this broad land is controlled and administered
by some woman. Of the millions of mothers enthroned in these
millions of homes, what one is without social and aesthetic am-
bitions for her little brood? Every mother who has a little boy or
a little girl would like to have him or her (or both of them) ac-
complished. No matter how poorly the children may in most cases
measure up to mother's ambition, the fact of that ambition is not
to be gainsaid. Every mother would like little Mary or little Jack
to be able to play the piano, because every mother knows just how
valuable a social accomplishment such an ability is. The ingenious
persons who advertise correspondence courses in piano playing are
awake to the facts, too. With such a state of affairs in being, why
should the piano industry feel upset about its future? All it needs
is to mobilize its forces, go after the home again, link up its powers
with all the existing agencies for promoting the teaching of piano
playing along popular lines; and reap the reward. Certainly, as A.
G. Gulbransen persistently says, the retail end of the business is
seriously undermanned. Thousands of young men now trying to
perform the impossible task of fitting square pegs into round holes
can find in piano selling prestige, pleasure and profit. Is the piano
basic? It is. But it is just as much home-basic as it is art-basic.
And the sooner we all see that point, the better it will be for us.
Turn Homeward, Wanderers.
OCCIDENS.