As grand piano No. K0862 was being wheeled from workbench to workbench at the Steinway & Sons factory in Queens in late September, the workers had two schedules in mind: the one that they did not talk about much, and the one that had them buzzing.þþThe first was the schedule for finishing No. K0862, which was just another piano making its way through a factory with a quota of 10 a day. The second schedule, talked about at lunchtime and on coffee breaks, was the one for negotiating a union contract.þþTime was running out on the old contract, which was set to expire on Oct. 1. By mid-September, officials from the union representing Steinway's 425 factory employees were meeting with Steinway executives. The workers wondered about the company's balance sheet in a year when executives concerned about slower sales scheduled six weeks of shutdowns between January and September. Some workers had heard that in April, Standard & Poor's placed Steinway on credit watch with negative implications.þþÿIt's a bad time to be negotiating,ÿ said Harry Boot, who worked at Steinway for 30 years before he was elected president of the Steinway union, Local 102 of the International Union of Electronic Workers-Communications Workers of America. ÿI understand that when a business is slow, it's slow.ÿþþBut lagging piano sales were not the only headache for Steinway's principal owners, Kyle R. Kirkland and Dana D. Messina. The company's other unit, which makes everything from trumpets and saxophones to drums, was losing ground to foreign competitors. Thus the credit rating problems — on Oct. 8, S. & P. downgraded Steinway's corporate credit rating, a move Mr. Messina angrily dismissed. ÿThey're irrelevant as an institution and as a group of analysts,ÿ he said of S. & P. ÿThey don't understand our business, they don't understand how we operate, they don't understand how to judge our performance.ÿþþSteinway prides itself on the quality of its product. But its product is just that, a product. To pay the workers and buy the lumber for pianos they will build in future years, today's pianos must be sold.þþNo. K0862 is being built by workers in an industry whose best days were long ago.þþIn 1909, 364,545 pianos were sold in the United States, according to the National Association of Music Merchants. By 1995, when Mr. Kirkland and Mr. Messina took over, the national total had fallen to 94,044.þþSteinway was Mr. Kirkland's and Mr. Messina's second music-related company. They were investment bankers who had worked with Michael R. Milken when he led Drexel Burnham Lambert's junk bond operation, and in 1993, they arranged a leveraged buyout of Selmer, the No. 1 band-instrument maker in the United States. In 2001, they bought one of Selmer's main competitors, the No. 3 company, United Musical Instruments. Since then, they have closed two of the combined company's nine factories.þþIt was Selmer's difficulty in competing against foreign manufacturers that Standard & Poor's cited when it issued the credit watch in April. ÿLower-priced band instruments from Asia are taking market share,ÿ an S. & P. analyst, Martin S. Kounitz, said in a statement.þþBy contrast, Steinway had a strategy for competing with foreign manufacturers like Yamaha and Kawai before Mr. Kirkland and Mr. Messina bought the company: not by mass-producing less-expensive Steinways, but by starting two lower-priced brands, Boston and Essex. They were the first pianos in Steinway's history that it did not build itself — Boston pianos are made in Japan by Kawai, and the Essex pianos in Korea by Young Chang.þþAnalysts who follow Steinway say the new brands have paid off. ÿThe Boston piano, in essence, shoved Yamaha out of the distribution network,ÿ said Joseph B. Lassiter III, a professor at the Harvard Business School, in part because Steinway dropped retailers who wanted to sell both Steinways and Yamahas.þþSteinway now sells about as many Boston and Essex pianos as it sells Steinways. ÿWe could sell four times the Boston pianos than we do if we wanted to,ÿ said Bruce A. Stevens, the company president, ÿbut we don't, because everything is designed around Steinway. That's our core business.ÿþþBut Steinway has also tried to go upmarket, introducing a ÿcrown jewel collectionÿ — more expensive Steinways with more exotic cases than the one on No. K0862, which will sell for $92,800. As a crown jewel piano with a finish of real ebony — not black lacquer sprayed on maple — No. K0862 would go for $141,000. And Steinway has revived art case pianos — instruments with fancy decorated cases. One, copied from an 1880's Steinway painted by the extravagant Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, sold for $675,000.þþAdding New StoresþþSteinway has also concentrated on improving sales close to home. Frank Mazurco, the company's executive vice president, said that Steinway does about $25 million in sales annually at its showroom on West 57th Street in Manhattan, long its only store in the New York area. But he cited market research that said Steinway could sell $40 million a year in the metropolitan region.þþThat was why Steinway opened its first suburban store, in Paramus, N.J. In 2000, a good year for Steinway, Paramus rang up $5.8 million in sales, Mr. Mazurco said. Even in a slower year like 2003, Mr. Mazurco expects $5 million from the Paramus showroom, which was a Jiffy Lube service center before Steinway moved in.þþMr. Mazurco hopes for sales of $6 million a year from a new store in Westport, Conn., and between $7 million and $8 million a year from one in Westbury, on Long Island.þþOf the company's top officials, only Mr. Mazurco has a degree in music (not in piano but in organ). Mr. Messina, the chief executive, said that he can play but that Mr. Kirkland, the chairman, is the one who practices. Mr. Kirkland is self effacing about his playing. ÿI think you can recognize the things I'm playing,ÿ he said. ÿI'm not sure you'd buy a ticket, but after a couple of glasses of red wine, it sounds pretty good.ÿþþAnd the music business is more than ever a primary focus. In 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission barred Mr. Kirkland from the securities business for three years and fined him $30,000 after concluding that he had violated antifraud regulations. The agency said that he and a portfolio manager had ÿmisrepresentedÿ their methodology and overstated the value of a mutual fund and an offshore fund they managed.þþThe S.E.C. also found that they arranged a refinancing deal to cover the difference between the artificially high prices listed in the fund's records and the actual values.þþÿTheyÿ — S.E.C. officials — ÿhad their way of describing it,ÿ Mr. Kirkland said. ÿWe had a disagreement. I felt like it made the most sense to settle it and move on. It had nothing to do with Steinway.ÿþþThe next steps in the birth of No. K0862 involved parts that would turn it from a frame of lacquered wood into a musical instrument with its own particular sound.þþThe iron plate for No. K0862, painted gold after being cast in a foundry in Ohio, was ready. So were the keys, 52 white and 36 black, made by a subcontractor in Germany. (All 88 are plastic. Concert grands like No. K0862 had ivory keys — which many concert pianists preferred to plastic — until 1989.)þþBefore those parts could be installed, though, workers at the Queens factory needed to do something they do not leave to outsiders: make the hammers and other parts that would soon be attached to the keys.þþTogether, these pieces of wood, cloth and metal — trimmed to almost impossibly tiny tolerances — form a mechanism known as the action, a maddeningly complex arrangement of parts that rub against, slide into or pivot around each other. And it is the action that will give No. K0862 an important element of its personality — the part a pianist can actually feel. If the action is sluggish, a pianist will have to pound No. K0862. If the action is too light, a carefully fingered fast passage or a trill could fall apart. The idea is to respond to the slightest pressure on the keys.þþHow slight? At the heart of the action is the hammershank, a pencil-size piece with a hingelike tail an inch and a half long, the hammershank flange.þþÿThe amount of force needed to move that is supposed to be two grams, plus or minus a gram,ÿ said John A. Marek, 51, the supervisor in the action department. ÿNot much at all. The amazing thing to me, not being a piano player, is people can tell the difference, high or low.ÿþþThere are 54 such parts for each note on the piano — 4,752 in all. And all of them are made in Mr. Marek's room, one of the few places at Steinway that is as pressured as a conventional factory, with clattering machinery turning out dozens of parts hour after hour.þþMost action parts have names pianists have never heard of — the fly, the tender, the backcheck, the underlever. But Mr. Marek is responsible for a very visible part of every note: the hammer that will strike the strings — pear-shaped for the bass notes, bullet-shaped for the treble.þþEleven workers make hammers at Steinway, starting with a sheet of wool that Anthony Rios slices into long strips. Each strip is wrapped around a core that contains two elements: a layer of felt, and 88 finger-size pieces of wood that will become the tails of the hammers. The package looked like a little loaf of bread. Emilio Lareo glued it together and ran it through a press that firmed it up.þþAt the next workbench, Michael Cabrera scrubbed off excess glue before Clement Hart sliced the loaf with a guillotinelike cutter. After more trimming, drilling and inspecting, the hammers were taken to a storage room where a meter showed the humidity to be 43.7 percent. The idea was to cure them in a relatively dry place before mating them to the other action parts of No. K0862.þþHow good these hammers are is an open question: some piano technicians say it is impossible to judge a set of hammers without breaking them in, playing them for a while — weeks, maybe months. Their character — their ability to deliver the thunder or the quiet that a pianist wants — certainly cannot be judged in their present condition: they will be rubbed with files and hardened with lacquer before No. K0862 leaves the factory. Some pianists complain that Steinway relies on the lacquer — known around the factory as ÿjuiceÿ — to compensate for ÿcotton-ball hammersÿ made of too-soft material.þþTeflon Approach BackfiresþþThe action would not move without bushings — tiny sleeves that hold even tinier metal pins that function like axles. Nineteenth-century piano makers packed the sleeves with thin cloth.þþBut cloth, like wood, expands and contracts with the weather. And in parts this small — the pins are 0.051 inch in diameter, making the bushings about the size of a lowercase ÿoÿ in regular newspaper type — even tiny changes in temperature and humidity can make the action stick. Steinway's efforts to overcome that problem led to something that pianists of a certain age still shake their heads about: the Teflon bushing fiasco.þþIn 1962, Steinway patented a bushing made of nonstick Teflon. But the Teflon bushings were no panacea: when the wood expanded, it squeezed against the rigid Teflon. That made for actions that were tight and noisy.þþÿThe Teflon made clicking noises and drove everyone crazy — technicians, pianists, everyone,ÿ the pianist Charles Rosen said. He and a number of other performers switched to pianos made at Steinway's other factory, in Hamburg, Germany, which never stopped using felt bushings.þþEven some Steinway employees realized that Teflon was trouble. Mr. Rosen remembers an encounter with Franz Mohr, who was the company's head tuner until his retirement in 1992 and oversaw the grands the company sets aside for concert artists to try out in the basement at 57th Street. ÿFranz said softly, so that no one else could hear him, `I've just taken all the Teflon out of all the concert pianos down here,' ÿ Mr. Rosen recalled.þþThe Queens plant went back to woven wool bushings in 1982. But it still considers Teflon an antidote to heat and humidity — so much so that workers soak the wool in liquid that contains Teflon. þþÿIt's absorbed in the felt,ÿ said Michael Mohr, Franz Mohr's son and a Steinway manufacturing director. ÿWe think it does make a difference.ÿþþRaises and BenefitsþþAs contract negotiations began in September, Mr. Boot, the union leader, said that most of his members did not want a strike. ÿIf the company's doing good, you can say, `Hey, we want this, we want that,' ÿ he said. ÿThe contract before this, the company was doing good. This time, they showed us that Wall Street dropped their rating. Every time we sat in a meeting, they came up with something. They closed that plant in Indiana. Well, for 1 percent or 2 percent, it's hard to say, `Let's go on strike.' ÿþþThe union agreed to keep working after the old contract ran out on Sept. 30. On Oct. 30, the two sides agreed on a new deal. Mr. Boot said it calls for a $1,000 payment for each worker this year and raises of 2 percent in 2004 and 2005. The company is also increasing health insurance benefits by about $50 a week per worker.þþÿThe older people were happy with it,ÿ Mr. Boot said. ÿThe younger people would rather have the money.ÿþþBut by the time the settlement was announced, the workers were buzzing that the factory was busy again. Piano sales from July to September rose 19 percent compared with a year ago, and sales for 2003 are 8 percent ahead of 2002. After Mr. Stevens, the president, told Wall Street analysts that Steinway was close to selling out of ebonized pianos, the company's stock climbed to what, at the time, was a 52-week high of $22.25. (Yesterday, it closed even higher, at $24.12.)þþStill, Mr. Boot says he has no regrets about the settlement. ÿIt's not something that I'm proud of,ÿ he said, ÿbut it's something that I feel we had to do.ÿ þþþþþþþþ
Source: NY Times
