Music Trade Review

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WESTERN COMMENT
About Believing in Ourselves
REVIEW OFFICE, CHICAGO, I I I . , DECEMBER 26,
1928.
1 am sure, never really liked her role. To have to pre-
dict disaster is bad enough without one's having any obligation to
feel happy over the position of prognosticator.
An
No one likes the job, least of all he who sees, or
Unhappy
believes that he sees long before others, the ap-
Job
proach of inevitable difficulties, obstacles and
dangers to some group of friends and associates with whom it has
been long his pleasure to work in amity. Thus, then, no trade paper
observer can have felt happy over the fulfilment of predictions
which some among his group had long made in private and to
which*a few of them had had the temerity to give public utterance.
Nevertheless, it is the manifest duty of a trade paper to make public
whatever it sees or learns apparently useful to its constituency. The
painful duty must be done; but at least there is the consolation of
knowing that a statement of truth is in itself a stepping-stone to
present remedy and future renaissance, for it definitely clarifies
the situation if nothing more.
CASSANDRA,
T H E end of 1928 has come and most of us must feel rather glad
that the calendar is about to change its annual number. And at
the end of it the duty comes to every conscientious
'
observer, the rather strong temptation to say what
_,
'
he thinks to be the principal feature of the past
Gloomest
.
..
. ,
, •
twelve months, to moralize somewhat upon his
findings and to predict, if he can, the directions of future progress.
In the present case, the duties of the trade prophet, as of the trade
seer, have been very much those of that unhappy lady whose name
forms the first word of the first sentence in this Comment. In a
word it has been a case of recording Gloom, registering Gloom, and
predicting causes for more Gloom. None of this sort of thing is
cheering, but at least it is much better to admit that the skies are
dark and to take one's measures accordingly, than to refuse to look
at them at all. For in truth the policy of looking steadily at the
trade skies, even when they have been darkest, may now be said to
have justified itself; for every observer who has pursued, in spite
of all temptation to the contrary, this healthy policy, is now saying
with a certain quiet assurance that the blackness shows signs of
a red glow around the edges, that the first faint streaks of light,
which herald the coming of the rising sun, are plainly to be dis-
cerned. In a word, it is the general and almost unanimous belief
that the piano industry has seen the worst, has touched bottom.
The darkest hour, the hour just before dawn, has been reached
and is rapidly passing. Such is the general belief to-day among
those whose opinions are most worth recording arid who have
studied the facts of the situation.
IT is not that these observers believe the industry to be on the way
immediately to a great era of prosperity. On the contrary, it is
pretty generally held that bad merchandising,
Past
apathy in technical development and all the rest
and
of the train of ills to which the industry has so
Future
long been a victim, will continue for some time
yet to come to practice their malignant wizardries. An industry
does not pass from sickness to complete health in a moment. On
the other hand, what is most clearly meant by those whose opinions
on the state of the trade are worth most, is that the period of de-
pression as such, of the temptation to believe that the piano has
seen its .days, of despair over the possibility of rebuilding the
broken merchandising structure, has passed and is gone. The trade
as a whole finds its collective head again above water, finds itself
in a position from which it can see both what has happened and
what is rnost likely to happen. It is no longer necessary to keep
silence lest one gives vent to opinions which a few days' events
will probably show to have been absurd. It is now possible, as I
said, to see both what has happened and what is going to happen;
and to see these things with some clearness, some assurance, even
with some certitude, this being the first step in solving the prob-
lems that are presented.
W H A T has happened should no longer form the subject of con-
troversy. The facts are surely plain enough. It was what always
rp.
happens to an industry which becomes more or
p. .
less dormant. Every industry which fails to keep
p
itself abreast of the developments going on in
other lines of effort sooner or later has cause to
regret its apathy. Ask the textile people: they know. But no indus-
try which has a real significance, which produces something needed
by society ever is obliged to remain prone, even though it has slipped
and fallen. When an industry which has gone to sleep wakes to
discover that it has fallen out of the industrial joy-riding car and
is now lying in the road ten miles from anywhere, its first effort
must be to collect its senses. Its second effort must be to find out
how it stands, whether its pockets have been picked and what the
chances are of getting a lift to the nearest town. The piano indus-
try can have no great difficulty in answering' all these question?.
And in answer to the first one, which naturally is "what has hap-
pened," it is only necessary to say that in the present state of the
business world, resting quietly is a dangerous pastime. The piano
industry has refused to improve the piano to any radical extent.
It has said that the public does not buy pianos for musical instru-
ments but for furniture in all too many cases. It has said, in effect,
that it really does not believe in its own stuff. And the public,
beguiled by a thousand and one formidably competing, new and
aggressive industries, has turned from an industry which does not
nelieve in itself to industries which most certainly and clamantly
believe in themselves, in their own present and in their own future,
and which consistently and steadily take the public into their con-
fidence upon that point.
IN SO stating, baldly and cruelly but perfectly truly, the fact of
what has happened, the fact as to what may be brought to happen,
given the will and the skill, conies clearly to view.
The
The piano industry, then, ought to take for its
New
1929 motto, "Let us believe in ourselves." Nothing
Slogan
is more important than this apparently abstract
idea. The piano industry must once more begin to believe in itself.
And to do that, to accomplish that mental feat, it must first of all
improve its own product. A new and an improved piano, a piano
tonally and mechanically better, much better, is the first great and
needed attainment. I do not say that all this can be managed in
the course of a year. I say only that it must be managed in due
course; which means that it should be set about now. And I say
further that a much better piano is actually, here and now, a prac-
tical possibility, involving neither vast expense nor revolutionary
changes in form. A new and improved piano, then, must be backed
up by new and improved merchandising. Now the backbone, the
base, of any such merchandising must be the recognition that the
piano is a musical instrument which has to be played. Consequently
the construction of a merchandising policy to fit the new times in-
volves necessarily the formation of a musical basis. The new mer-
chandising must be built on music, on piano music, piano instruc-
tion, piano playing. Thus let the piano industry once more begin
to believe in itself, (n that sign it shall again conquer and never
in any other.
—W. B. W,