Yesterday marked the end of an important project in the life of the Lakeland Community College Music Department, and the beginning of an era that few if any now at Lakeland will see to its end. We took delivery of our new Steinway Model B grand piano, christened Elby, to become our primary concert instrument for the next fifty years.
I had been to New York in September with our dean, Dr. Erin Fekete, to tour the Steinway factory and select our instrument, with the help of Kim Speiran of the Cleveland Institute of Music. Being in a room with five identical-looking pianos and being told to choose one was daunting, but we listened and quickly learned their unique tones and personalities. The three of us zeroed in on the same instrument, second from the door. I assured the piano–pronouns they/them–that they would be happy with us at Lakeland, and then we were off to prepare for the trip home.
Now, a month later, we got the call that delivery was at hand. Like anxious parents awaiting a newborn, we adjusted our schedules, made final preparations, and alerted the necessary people. Erin was off-campus for the day, but Kim joined us again to supervise Elby’s move-in, conducted by Atlas Moving.
At 1pm, the call came: they were on campus. I dismissed my class early, inviting them to watch professionals do their work, which is always fascinating and enlightening: it was, after all, Music Appreciation, and a proper appreciation acknowledges that the musician is only the tip of the spear, reliant on so many others to be able to perform.
With unsurprising deliberateness and sure-handed strength, they rolled Elby in, attached their legs, and removed the wrappings. For a moment, Elby stood next to their predecessor, and there were two Steinway Bs on the stage of the Rodehorst Performing Arts Center. It was not to last, though, and next the old piano was on its side, legless, and out the door to Elby’s place in the truck. The piano dolly stood empty: relieved of its thousand-pound and forty-year burden.
A few minutes later, Elby claimed the dolly that will preserve their legs and the stage floor, and Kim installed the strike plate for the keyboard lock: like a droid’s restraining bolt, it will limit access to those musicians with prior approval, marking Elby as someone’s property–the property of the Lakeland community, entrusted to the College’s staff and faculty.
Elby then stood before us, sparkling and new. Dr. Laura Barnard, provost, administrative force behind Elby’s coming to Lakeland, and Elby’s eponym, paid a quick visit to the stage, but couldn’t stay long. I promised her I would share a video of the first music to come from Elby on our stage, as well as photos I had been taking through the afternoon.
Now it was time. I had decided that, while I wouldn’t be the first person to play Elby (many hands had already touched their keys), or the first person to play them in “normal” use for a rehearsal or concert (there were two jazz band rehearsals that evening, the first of myriad to come), I would play the first music heard in the new hall, as well as I could.
But what to play? There was for me no equivocation: it would be Bach.
I have written many times in this space about the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and its importance to me as a musician, strange though it be for a trombonist. It is a great sorrow in my life that I can’t do Bach’s work justice as a pianist, but nonetheless anyone who has known me as a musician from my college years forward has seen my enthusiasm for the Leipzig cantor.
In New York, at my request, Kim had played Bach for us on all five pianos before anything else. For luck, I said, but also because Bach’s music, written for smaller eighteenth-century instruments, resides solely in the piano’s most-played middle register. But more, Bach is a talisman for me, as for many musicians. In the compact disc era, when the only music you had on the road was the discs you brought with you, I never left town without Bach.
And so, at this moment, I pulled my battered and well-marked copy of Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier from my bag. Opening it to the first prelude, in C major–one of the few pieces in that collection that I can hope to perform passably well on short notice (or ever)–I handed my phone to Tim Dorman, and asked him to record the moment.
The video shows a version of me older and heavier than I like–this awkward longer and grayer hair that I’ve been wearing, something of a paunch, and a double chin, but I move with certainty, adjusting the bench, addressing myself to Elby, and then a short speech: “The first music on our new piano, the first prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.”
And then to playing. I am not a good pianist, and my performance was far from perfect; a little more practice at home would have been a good idea, but the C-major prelude is forgiving, as was my audience. Elby gave my clumsy fingers fantastic voice, with the middle register that I so admired in them in New York very much in evidence. The simple arpeggios in their repetitive, hypnotic fingerings let me focus on drawing sound from Elby’s keys and strings. Though still shaking off the dust of their recent journey, still growing accustomed to being once again properly supine rather than decubitus, and now feeling the Ohio fall air, Elby made me a better pianist than I probably am, for all my finger slips and hesitant changes of position and outright musical stutters.
I played the final flourish of the prelude, and with a few cheers from those assembled–Kim, Tim, myself, and a few students–the music was over. Elby was again silent and awaiting human touch. Kim had a few more adjustments to make following the shaking and rattling of highways and roads from Queens to Kentucky to Boston Heights to Kirtland, but she was not yet ready to give Elby their first Ohio tuning, allowing them a Sabbath to rest and recuperate before the twisting and stretching of pegs and strings that must be to an instrument like so much acupuncture: setting things right but not without a little pain.
What music will Elby help make? What shows will they accompany? What concerti will they shine through? What pianists–student, faculty, staff, or guest–will sit where I sat yesterday, face to face with seven feet of maple and iron and felt, and draw patterns of sound from Elby’s keys and hammers and strings? What musicians will navigate Elby’s inevitable quirks and foibles as they navigate the quirks and foibles of their fellow humans to practice their craft?
In all likelihood, like my children, Elby will persist after I am gone from Lakeland and from life’s concert, a half-century or more, and leave as much or more of a mark on our community as my own teaching and department chairing.
In that moment, we stood in awe of newly-arrived Elby. I thought of the moment I held my eighteen-hour-old son and sang “You Are My Sunshine” to him in the quiet of his hospital room, lungs unsullied by soot, heart pure and untired, soul pristine. They were perfect, Elby was, like a newborn, and full of the promise and potential of the better part of a century, standing shining in the dawn of a new saeculum, a moment most of us will not see again at Lakeland: the day when an old grand piano left and a new one arrived.