A Coveted Possession: The Rise and Fall of the Piano in Australia

Published by La Trobe University Press

in conjunction with Black Inc.

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

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Copyright © 2018 Michael Atherton

Michael Atherton asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781863959919 (paperback)

9781743820520 (ebook)

Cover design by Nanette Backhouse

Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro

Cover image: The Keynote by William Arthur Chase (1915) courtesy of The Tate London

For Emily, Marc and Jared

CONTENTS

GLOSSARY

PREFACE

Introduction

1

Collectively Designed and Constructed

2

Flooding the Colonies

3

Crossing Social Boundaries

4

Advancing Australia

5

Free Trade, Protection and Patriotism

6

Going to War

7

Challenges from Every Direction

8

In Virtuoso Hands

9

Rejected, Recycled, Revived

CODA

Where Do Old Pianos Go to Die?

PICTURE SECTION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PICTURE CREDITS

ENDNOTES

INDEX

GLOSSARY

PREFACE

To Australians of all classes music seems an absolute necessity … In the bush or in the town, in every grade of society, one finds some musical instrument, ranging, certainly, from the grand piano of South Yarra to the mouth organ of Little Bourke Street, or the wheezy concertina of the back blocks.

—THE HORSHAM TIMES, 1888

What has lived with us, entertained us, travelled with us and embodied Australian values and aspirations, only to end up at the tip? It’s not the sewing machine, the car, nor the hills hoist … It’s the piano! Before the radio, the gramophone and talking pictures, it was the piano that brought Australians across the continent together for recreation.

On remote stations, the piano was both a solace and a joy, comforting and educating the lonely and isolated, frequently women. The piano was essential for weddings, dances and parties. It entertained us on ships and trains, in hospitals and prisons. In its golden period of popularity between 1870 and 1930, the piano was a staple of education, summoning memories of nuns brandishing rulers, ready to discipline a wrong note. The piano was steadfast in peacetime and fearless in war, accompanying servicemen and women to the fronts of World War I and II, and to the jungles of New Guinea and Vietnam. The grand piano, or more often the old upright thumper, served the social bonds of family, community and national life.

So important was the piano in Australia that it contributed to nation building, through local manufacturing. Superb piano factories built by Beale in Sydney and Wertheim in Melbourne presented a challenge to importers by producing fine instruments suited to local conditions. The use of leading-edge technology and meticulous craftsmanship were hallmarks of local production. ‘Australian made’ became a catchcry in local piano making, as were native timbers and carved floral motifs.

Carted by bullocks and splashed with beer in goldfields tents, harbouring mice, dusted in classroom chalk, missing a string at the local church hall, or serving as a mantelpiece for family photos and flowers – the piano became our constant companion. This is the story of Australia’s passionate relationship with an instrument that rose to the status of family member, albeit often to become a neglected and unwanted heirloom sent to the tip.

INTRODUCTION

The former Beale & Company piano factory at Annandale, Sydney.

In 2011 I went walking in Annandale, a quiet tree-lined Sydney suburb. I was searching for an Australian manufacturing icon, the Beale & Company piano factory. I found a superbly constructed, four-storey Federation-era brick building in Trafalgar Street, with intricately designed wrought-iron fences and gates, rows of windows and a decoratively tiled walkway leading to wide double-panelled entrance doors. Today the building is a residential complex. Its occupants know they inhabit a former piano factory because the signage includes the names of different piano models, including the ‘Bijou’, the ‘Mignon’ and the ‘Vader.’ The foyer displays black-and-white photos of the working factory taken in the 1920s.

While admiring the solid timber of the entrance doors, I imagined the now lost soundscape of the thousands of pianos made, tuned and tested inside, before being shipped across Australia and overseas. The cacophony of working life at Beale & Company must have been fabulous: a layered composition of molten pig-iron pouring, timber sawing and sanding, steel and brass wire stretching and coiling, frame hoisting, pin hole drilling and lid polishing. The factory walls would have absorbed a plethora of sounds, including conversations and speeches, one of which was an address given by Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, who spoke at the official opening on 23 December 1901. Barton said of founder Octavius Beale that he ‘believed [Beale’s] work, as shown today, was only a fraction of his contribution to the enterprise of Australia.’¹

A week after my walk in Annandale, I travelled to the Melbourne suburb of Richmond in search of a residential complex in Bendigo Street, once the Wertheim Piano Factory, opened in 1908. Wertheim was another pillar of the Federation economy, but this time the officiating dignitary who opened that factory was Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second prime minister.

My pilgrimage to this heritage-listed site was as purposeful as my search for Beale & Company. Why did the piano become Australia’s most popular instrument at this particular time? Why were our earliest governments so keen to associate the idea of the nation as a whole with the production of pianos in the early twentieth century? What fuelled our special preoccupation with this glory of the industrial revolution?

The piano is much more than a sound-producing object or a passive artefact devised by and exchanged among humans. Like all instruments, it exists within overlapping historic, material, social and cultural worlds. Examining the piano may reveal much more to us than simple information concerning its sound production or ostensibly straightforward facts about the lives and works of the composers and performers who used it. To look at the diverse roles of the piano in Australian society is to discover that the history of Australia is not only revealed in written and pictorial texts, but also, and very significantly, in objects or ‘things’. The piano is one such thing. It was part of international trade, imperialism and the industrial revolution; its development in the nineteenth century coincided with these great movements. Through changes in shape, decoration and iconography, the various historical morphologies of the piano reveal the aesthetic, cultural and even political values of the communities that have produced and possessed it in different periods of time and in different places.²

The piano became an object with its own biography, one that shared its life with us in revealing ways. For example, an upright piano in the nineteenth-century home, with its iron frame, candelabra, carvings, polished surfaces and ivory keys, is a machine that conveyed socially constructed meanings; the same observation can be made of a piano taken close to the battlefront during war, or passed between family members intergenerationally. The unique historical circumstances of Australia’s past, together with its isolation from Europe and its diverse physical environments, across which the piano was transported, produced a distinct experience for the instrument in this country.

This book describes the many roles of the piano in Australia as a coveted, necessary and ubiquitous possession, showing how it was woven tightly and intimately into the cultural, social, political and economic life of the nation, particularly during the period of transition from a collection of colonies into a nation-state. It begins with a brief account of the evolution of the piano as an expensive high-society object for the well-to-do and the well-connected prior to its arrival in Australia. The piano migrated with the First Fleet and quickly established its importance to the emerging Australian middle class, who used it to carve out their cultural niche, with England as their cultural touchstone. The gold rush of the 1850s encouraged skilled craftspersons to immigrate to Australia. Some came with cabinet-making skills and tools that enabled them to make and repair pianos.³

There were grand pianos for the professional virtuoso and uprights in the domestic space. The piano in Australia was central to the rise of choral societies such as the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, which championed ‘respectable’ music that embodied English middle-class values. However, the piano also crossed boundaries as a tool of social change that gave people greater access to music and music education. These contexts set the scene for a flourishing piano trade by the end of the 1880s. This led to a hegemonic period for the instrument in Australia, from the 1870s until the 1930s.

What had begun as a cottage industry in small premises developed into a source of manufacturing pride during the Federation period, helping to advance Australia in international markets. Two unsung Australians, Octavius Beale in New South Wales and Hugo Wertheim in Victoria, became powerful makers at this time. Both began as importers who then took risks during the 1890s depression to tool up for large-scale manufacture. They embraced the nationalist fervour of Federation and its emphasis on Australian-made products. The lives and work of Beale and Wertheim illuminate how immigrants quickly engaged in and helped shape Australian enterprise, building modern piano factories that provided work for a range of industries, as well as jobs for skilled Australian workers.

‘Australian made’ became a galvanising mantra during Federation, when the tension between local and imported products was more sharply in focus than it is today. However, there were obstacles to the progress of local manufacturing, especially a cultural cringe about its capacity to emulate European design and technology. The piano often got caught up in politics, moving to centre stage in an acrimonious stand-off between protectionists and free traders. The lobbying of music merchants such as Allans Music and W.H. Paling was incessant. They could import German-made instruments that were cheaper to manufacture than those made by Beale, Wertheim and other smaller Australian manufacturers. The industrial debate reflected and stirred up patriotic and nationalistic sentiments surrounding Australian-made products, local employment and wages.

Australians needed the piano in their lives during times of crisis. When Gallipoli and the Western Front were in the hearts and minds of Australians, the piano helped reinforce the conviction to fight for a democratic world. When a piano was taken close to the front it became a potent symbol of what soldiers and nurses had left behind them: order and achievement. The interactions of people with the pianos of barrack rooms, troopships, prisoner-of-war camps, ‘cheer-up’ huts, hospitals and asylums were historical practices that presaged the establishment of clinical music therapy and discourses on the art of wellbeing.

World War I had seen the end of imported German pianos and the curtailment of local manufacturing, but leading up to World War II there was a revival of local manufacturing, albeit an uncertain one. Governments believed that music helped maintain social order and wellbeing; it had the potential to help distract the public gaze from revolutionary activities occurring in Europe. There were government-sponsored ‘music weeks’ coupled with an increase in the time allocated to music in Australian state school curriculums. The second-hand piano market strengthened as the supply of new pianos became scarce, as radios emerged in the 1920s, followed by the recession of the 1930s. Just as local piano manufacturers looked to increase production again, World War II was declared in 1939. The government ordered the cessation of piano manufacturing, instructing existing piano factories and workshops to focus on making military equipment, including aeroplane fuselages for the mosquito bomber.

After the war, piano makers recommenced business and concert pianists began to travel more freely again. It was, as it remains now, de rigueur for them to study overseas, enter competitions and give a debut performance at a major concert venue either in Europe or the United States. The piano was at the heart of fascinating lives for those Australian prodigies and virtuosos who achieved international acclaim.

Since the demise of local manufacturing in the 1960s led to a parallel reduction in piano tuner-technicians, pianos in Australia are dumped and destroyed nearly every day. Barely functioning instruments have become heirlooms, part of family history. Australia has thousands of locally made and imported pianos, many of which are in a parlous state. However, sculptors and cabinetmakers also recycle pianos, and some tuner-technicians are restoring and re-manufacturing heritage instruments, in certain cases producing bespoke grand pianos. While the manufacturing of pianos in Europe, the UK and the US is in decline, Chinese factories now surpass Japanese and Korean production, supplying hundreds of thousands of instruments per year to a growing, cashed-up Chinese middle class. The commodity status of the piano and piano playing has created a market for Asian migrants in Australia seeking pianos for their children. Although its place in Australian cultural life might appear diminished, parents still pack kids off to piano lessons, the gifted and talented still aspire to conservatorium studies, and the virtuosos prepare themselves for the international stage. While the rise and fall of the piano is palpable, the instrument is here to stay.

1

COLLECTIVELY DESIGNED AND CONSTRUCTED

An open piano invites one to play it. Depress one of its eighty-eight keys, the now standard number, and it speaks back to you, encouraging you to continue the dialogue. Play a tune with one finger, or use a palm or forearm, and a chord will emerge. The versatile piano covers a great range of frequencies, making it an indispensable tool in a myriad of environments.

The piano is much more intricate on the inside than its outward appearance would indicate. Internally, it is a complex agglomeration of around 12,000 parts. Like the human body it has a defined, limited and finite physical form. But somehow, audibly speaking, the piano seems to go on forever. When all of its strings are allowed to vibrate simultaneously, with the depression of the right pedal releasing the string dampers, it sounds like infinite space – something akin to viewing oneself or an object in a room with walls of mirrors on all sides, as well as above and below.

The piano’s repertoire can convey surprising messages. In the nineteenth century, the instrument became the revolutionary tool of composition and performance, especially in the works of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. These composers conveyed a vast, complex emotional range. Their works could also be quite iconoclastic, deliberately upsetting the classical status quo. It was this range of emotion and this quality of iconoclasm that propelled the piano’s popularity. Composers began to reflect the individual in society, moving beyond the ambit of aristocrats and the Church. The piano became a liberating pathway for African-American musicians in the twentieth century, with the creation of jazz. It offered free reign to instant music making, as if the growth of the mind could show itself in a chord progression and a sudden additive rhythm.

Since the 1770s the piano has been at the centre of professional and amateur music making, part of a cultural flow that began in Europe, then travelled to America, Asia and Australasia.¹ It is a machine with a central role in music, stimulating the imagination and the intellect, stirring the synapses in the limbic system of the human brain. Although it might often seem like an inert object much like any other piece of furniture, its role in Australian life was once powerful and assertive. It played an active role in the development of bonds between parent and child, husband and wife, employee and employer, performer and listener, buyer and seller. The piano is not a passive device but a demandingly interactive instrument that can satisfy the aesthetic and emotional needs of those who work so hard to master it. There are good historical reasons for this.

*

In the modern iron-framed iteration of the piano, the energy of the vibrating strings is reinforced by a soundboard that is made from fine-grained elastic spruce. The soundboard is prestressed into a cambered shape and strengthened and supported by glued crosspieces known as ribs. This causes the soundboard to respond like the tympanum, or eardrum, in the human ear, preparing it to respond instantly to vibration. When the strings are struck by the hammers, which are activated by the keyboard, their vibration is amplified by the soundboard and releases acoustic energy. The iron-framed piano with its massive string tension is therefore capable of irresistible power. And, by varying the downward force of the keystrokes, a more nuanced expressiveness becomes possible, more like the human voice. This capacity for ‘shaping’ sound is further increased by the use of foot pedals to either sustain or dampen the strings.

The piano came to us through developments and transformations in sound objects and instruments stretching back to antiquity. It evolved from a simple monochord to the hammer dulcimer, and from there to a harpsichord – a keyboard with a mechanism that uses jacks to pluck and sound each string. The iron-framed piano of the nineteenth century, which took the place of the wooden-framed instrument of the eighteenth century, projected more sound than its predecessors. It evolved into ‘square’ and ‘upright’ pianos, and reached its zenith in the ‘concert grand’. It has a long acoustic tonal history, transitioning from the twang of a bow to the clouds of sound billowing from the inside of the modern acoustic piano, an instrument that takes the brute strength of several men to lift it.

The piano as we know it now evolved cumulatively over centuries; it wasn’t invented in a ‘eureka’ moment. Indeed, it is still evolving, and the ongoing creation of such a device reveals a human need: we have created and recreated pianos over the course of centuries just as we have created vehicles, vessels and machines that responde to social change. Nonetheless, there was a historical watershed in the piano’s evolution that occurred in Florence in 1709 when Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori created the gravicembalo col piano e forte, a harpsichord that can produce soft and loud sounds according to the pressure of striking a string. Cristofori was a keeper of musical instruments at the Medici court in Florence. In 1698 he began experimenting with mechanisms to produce soft and loud touch and in 1700 an inventory of the musical instruments kept at the Medici court described in detail an arpicembalo, indicating that Cristofori had already created such an instrument.² The writer Scipione Maffei, a contemporary of Cristofori, tells us that by 1710 Cristofori had made three such piano prototypes and sold two.³

The first piano had bichordal strings with wedge-shaped dampers between them, and by 1726 Cristofori added a stop to allow just one of the strings to be struck. He made around twenty of these instruments before switching back to harpsichords. Maffei named these piano prototypes the gravicembalo col piano e forte, meaning literally ‘harpsichord with soft and loud’, and declared that