During World War II, Steinway Produced Special Pianos for American Troops | Hacker News Reader

During World War II, Steinway Produced Special Pianos for American Troops

steinway.com

140 pointscurtis47 comments

The really interesting story about Steinway is that there are actually two Steinways.

Steinway in Queens, NY, and Steinway in Hamburg, Germany.

It was two branches of the family that ran them, and got separated by the war.

Before they unified, they did do cultural exchanges of techniques, methods, etc.

Today they are one company, but the pianos they produce have individual characteristics owing to distinctive methods, techniques, and materials used by each factory.

During the war, Steinway Hamburg was also forced to become an arms factory, so there are German weapons out there made from tonewood that would have been great pianos

https://www.chuppspianos.com/steinway-sons-pianos/history/

I think it's one of the great cultural integration stories, that people can get separated and come back together even after war and terror.

The story is even more interesting in that there supposedly once was a company called Steinweg (Weg = German for way). I believe they came from the Braunschweig (Brunswik) area which had, and still has, a long tradition of making musical instruments (for example, Schimmel is still there and producing pianos, though not quite as expensive as Steinway's). So supposedly Steinweg/Steinway migrated to US, then founded a piano factory in Hamburg when they were already an US-based company. Now why they changed weg into way, but didn't change Stein into Stone is yet another question.

And then there is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotrian-Steinweg

Having grown up and learned music on a Schimmel they are excellent instruments. Steinways are also fabulous pianos (undisputed by everyone), but I would actually argue that Schimmel makes a better upright.

From a branding perspective, I guess Steinway has a better ring to it than Stoneway (which sounds somewhat less... musical?)

Fanta too. As in Coco-cola Fanta.

Also beer Budweiser; originally Czech, is still produced there under that name. It's imported into the US under the name of Czechvar.

And then there is vodka Smirnoff, originally Russian and also kinda still produced there under its original name.

As an amateur pianist, it’s worth adding that there’s a status hierarchy.

Pre-war (WWII) Hamburg Steinways are supposed to unparalleled, followed by Hamburg post, then New York in general.

It's interesting that this was sufficient to entertain the troops. There were enough GIs who played and enough who could sing and a book of songs they all knew from memory.

I was raised that way, but many people my age and younger can't carry a tune, let alone agree on common songs. My parents were musicians, though, so there's that. Momm played the piano and even sold pianos at one point, including a lot of Steinways. Their best market was in the Midwest 25 years ago when she was selling them.

Back when recorded music was still nascent, live amateur music was much more commonplace.

Also a drafted army tends to have people with a wider range of skills.

This is in my opinion the main reason why current music is problematic: Without the tradition of playing for, and connecting with a small live audience with a honest and heartfelt musical performance all everyone can do is imitate, from the bedroom or practice room straight in front of cameras or put in front of a manufactured audience.

Playing a song straight up is no longer possible, so performers conjure a magical moment of connection with the audience (mixing the vocals to make them sound as if an audience was singing in unison, or Maroon 5 taking the shirt off at the Superbowl halftime show) or skipping any attempt at authenticity (at the same Superbowl, the rapper driving a car around the stage, just portraying an image).

My guitar skills are quite limited, but lately I found a potential audience: should my neighbors recruit me as a babysitter for their little child, I'm going to see how my children's songs are going to work out for her. I can't imagine anything but the wildest success :-)

> current music is problematic

The piano and guitar are still alive and well, as are things like the following:

https://teenage.engineering/products/po

https://www.apple.com/ios/garageband/

https://www.wwbw.com/Hohner-32B-Instructor-Melodica-H71932.w...

You really should edit "current music" to "current mainstream music"

There are fantastic things going on all over, people really trying to reach out & put about their own little niche scenes all over the place. In fact I had a psych band from Japan stay at mine just the other week, as they were trying to keep the costs down.

It really isn't hard to find these local scenes or the smaller more intement gigs with sites like bandcamp.

The problem that I'm describing is affecing all music: performers don't get to try out their songs in a 'natural' setting nearly as often as they used to. Music is done in the basement or in the practice room, not in the living room. Music is performed in niche scenes, not bars or dance venues with the general public attending.

I briefly googled 'psych band from japan' and saw a certain kind of photography: jaded, melancholic people on artsy album covers. The kind that I see on many event posters or in music magazines. Not terrible, but showing how disconnected music is from the real world, living in art-space.

By all means I'm not saying it's bad, and I might give it a listen.

Still, I'm going to polish up my guitar chords and maybe compose a song for my little neighbor. The way it's been done throughout human history.

Outside of a few big names and events like the superbowl, that's alive and well. I can go to small local concerts more nights of the year than I care for, lots of people play in bands or instruments on their own for fun, ...

Not so surprising when you throw in enough boredom. This is the days when a pub had a dart board, pack of cards and a piano. Not a Steinway though, probably in dubious tune. Now add all that waiting on base or in camp for the mission to start, or the squadron scramble call to come. Add enough beer figure the entertainment out for yourself, then carrying the tune doesn't matter much any more. :)

There was a whole organisation devoted to entertaining personnel - ENSA in the UK - who produced shows, theatre, concerts etc, and often travelled to surprisingly near front lines everywhere the forces were, and included many famous names of the era. Course there were plenty of entertainers and stars conscripted too. There's still a modern equivalent that's organised live entertainment in the Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.

I know the US has (or had) something similar, but I forget the name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainments_National_Servic...

The US equivalent is the USO: https://www.uso.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Service_Organizations

Both Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe I believe entertained the troops, With Spike commenting in his autobiography on how hard the American Sides (arrangements) where.

It wasn't just songs they all knew from memory. There was a widely issued monthly publication, the Army/Navy Hit Kit, later the Armed Forces Song Folio, that provided them with eight pop songs and one four-part chorus arrangement per issue, with additional booklets of song lyrics for singalongs.

Bear in mind that we had so many pianos in the UK that in the 50s and 60's you'd regularly get piano smashing parties.

I shudder at the thought, but it was no surprise that a large swathe of the populous could either play or sing along.

Playing an instrument or being able to sing half-decently used to be a lot more common, because it was more valuable, and in any group of people you could depend on all of them knowing at least a few of the same songs from a set of traditional and more recent pop tunes.

For all the benefits of recorded music and film and such, it's all but killed small-scale culture. Being a 3rd-rate pianist, for instance, has gone from "fairly valuable" (not monetarily, but in a social-capital sense) to "no value at all". It's a topic Vonnegut treated a few times in his novels, notably in Bluebeard where he just digresses at the beginning of a chapter to give us his views on it more-or-less directly, through his author stand-in character (the central protagonist, in fact—that book's a kind of whirlwind tour of all Vonnegut's major topics and themes). I'd say it's akin to alienation in the Marxian sense. Probably some communication theorists have covered the territory well, but that whole field's writing's so damned (and deliberately) impenetrable that I can't say for sure.

Card and parlor games, lawn games, reading aloud from books on long winter evenings, sing-alongs around the piano, all used to be way more common than they are now. Imagine, no TV, radio's just getting started, the only films are silent and you have to go somewhere to see them, and you've got five wax cylinder recordings and can maybe borrow a few more from friends. What are you gonna do for leisure?

One of the great losses since the late 20th century (probably ending at roughly 50s or early 60s) is that due to the limited selection of radio and TV programs, even large nations like the US pretty much shared a common musical heritage. I used to be that hymns and popular songs (e.g., "the great American songbook") were shared nearly universally in the US. Today, there are ever fewer songs that are even possible for a wide cross-section of society to join in on. And the Yankees just yanked "God Bless America" based on complaints from the whiniest of racists...

>There were enough GIs who played

Generally speaking, as far as rural entertainment goes, many houses had pianos and people played for entertainment and etc.

I see a market potential here: tactical piano. There's a whole group of people who would buy this in a heartbeat and perhaps benefit from a little culture. Then again it'll probably wind up buried under last years bug out bags next to the 6x6 luxury military RV in the garage.

Including vertical take-off and landing capability.

> tactical piano

That'll be next to be advertised on some of the cable-TV channels, right up there with tactical flashlights and tactical sunglasses!

below the tactical bagpipes...

For an extra several hundred dollars will you sell me some brackets I can use to mount it on the roof rack of my bro'd out Tacoma?

And the mounts for the 50 Cal and GMPG on an adapted door mouth for the page turner.

I am now imagining the Chieftain reviewing it on youtube :-)

IBM made M1 carbines (short rifles) for the war. They are very collectable now among gun/computer nerds.

http://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticle...

There's also the 1911 pistols made by Remington Rand and Singer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol#World_War_II

I was actually issued a Singer manufactured .45 in the US Army in 1990. It still fired just fine.

We switched to 9mm not too long after though.

I literally learned nothing about what makes their wartime piano different from their usual piano.

It's a luxury brand writing a fluff piece to sell more expensive pianos. Though they have another page with more info:

https://www.steinway.com/news/features/victory-verticals

"identified by their military colors (olive drab, blue and gray), absence of front legs (deemed too delicate for the battlefield), and durable shipping crates."

This link should be the actual article link, much longer than the original and not a fluff piece.

There's also more info there on how they differ from regular pianos, i.e. special wood treatment, different materials, extra handles, etc.

There’s more info here:

https://www.victoryvertical.com/

Perhaps a more interesting story is the Rhodes electric piano - initially invented by Harold Rhodes as a miniature piano to allow wounded servicemen to engage in music therapy lessons at their bedside, it became an iconic sound in jazz, rock and pop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/arts/harold-rhodes-89-inv...

On a somewhat less cheerful note, a large proportion of sound recording and broadcast techniques wee pioneered by the Nazis. Hitler and Goebbels deeply understood the power of radio as a propaganda tool, so the regime invested heavily in technologies that would allow their voices to be heard across the Reich. They developed the first practical tape recorder[1], an extremely low-cost AM radio receiver[2] and an array of improved microphones, amplifiers and loudspeakers. The modern era of sound recording really started in 1945, when seized German technology and emigrant German engineers made their way to Britain and America[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetophon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_recorder#Commercializatio...

The story of post-war magnetic tape recording is really really interesting. It dovetails into the history of silicon valley with the creation of AMPEX and all of the companies and engineers that sprung out of there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampex

Ray Dolby was once an AMPEX engineer, as were Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn (Atari).

Wish this were a real article. I’d love to know how they kept them in tune after being airdropped / jostled around supply lines.

" "Victory Vertical" was dropped by parachute, complete with tuning equipment and instructions."

I wondered the same thing, but the article mentions "[...] dropped by parachute, complete with tuning equipment and instructions", so I'm guessing the soldiers had to tune it themselves using that tuning equipment (and these instructions were probably "how to tune this piano").

> In 1941, the first "Victory Vertical" was dropped by parachute, complete with tuning equipment and instructions.

Above is from the posted article, in a less fluffy piece [0] someone else posted in these comments their transport crates included: "a set of tuning tools, instructions, spare parts, and sheet music consisting of light classics, Protestant hymns, sing-along tunes, and boogie-woogie numbers"

Basically they didn't try, they provided the tools to tune and repair them and counted on the fact that there'd be a number of mechanically minded people where ever these went (for repairing more normal army equipment) that could do a passable job of keeping them working.

Heck, with a drafted army there's a decent chance on bigger bases for there to be someone who's actually who's worked on piano's in some capacity before.

[0] https://www.steinway.com/news/features/victory-verticals

I was thinking they dropped Steinway D's instead of bombs in Looney Toon Wars II

How do you build a piano to be airdropped?

Might be the shipping crate rather than (or in addition to) the piano itself.

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