Steinway and Sons by Richard K. Lieberman

technology and culture Book Reviews 523 tions concerning gender, class, and capitalist forces into an interpre­ tation of the built environment. Molly W. Berger Ms. Berger is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Technology and Science pro­ gram at Case Western Reserve University. She is writing a history of 19th- and early20th -century American urban luxury hotels. Steinway and Sons. By Richard K. Lieberman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Pp. ix+374; illustrations, notes, index. $35.00 (hardcover). Richard Lieberman’s Steinway and Sons is a great read. This saga of the world’s premier piano-building family—from the 1850 emi­ gration of Heinrich and Julianne Steinweg to the United States to the 1972 sale of the family business to CBS—artfully blends business history with biography, labor history, and the history of musical cul­ ture. Each of these stories—of the business, the family, the workers and the music—is contextualized within the rich panorama ofa cen­ tury of transformations in American society and culture. The result is as virtuosic as the music that Rubenstein, Paderewski, and countless others have brought forth from the family’s pianos over those many years. Lieberman’s book has much to offer to many different kinds of readers, including historians of technology. His account intriguingly yet rigorously introduces many points of intersection between the Steinway story and the kinds of stories that interest readers of Technology and Culture. Much of Steinway and Sons is devoted to the history of the business and technology of piano manufacture, and it thus provides a valu­ able case study ofa kind of manufacturing not often enough treated by historians of technology. Piano manufacture at Steinway and Sons was more a craft than an industry, and it remained so even as count­ less other industries (and other piano manufacturers) underwent the de-skilling and mechanization that characterize our understand­ ing of early-20th-century technology. Throughout the company’s history, the forty thousand pieces of a Steinway piano were built, fitted, adjusted, tuned, regulated, and finished by a workforce of skilled craftsmen (seldom women) who had apprenticed, like their fathers before them, in the factory from an early age. Still, the Steinway plant was no anachronistically preindustrial paradise; unionization, strikes, management attempts at worker control (in­ cluding a factory town of sorts, constructed in Queens to escape the invidious influence of the anarchists and socialists of lower Manhat­ tan), and efforts to rationalize factory practice occurred throughout the company’s history. Liebermann’s portrayal of the social and technical problems and solutions of piano manufacture will interest 524 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE historians who have considered manufacture and labor in other in­ dustries. Mass production of Steinwayswas never achieved (the busiestyear, 1916, saw the production of about sixty-five hundred instruments), nor was it sought. A Steinway grand was a luxury commodity, and it was advertised as such. But, as Liebermann shows, the meaning of “luxury” changed over time, and he charts shifts in marketing as well as in manufacture. In the 19th century, quality was signified by heralding the incorporation of newly patented mechanisms and by displaying blue ribbons from international expositions. By the 1920s, Steinway was selling not innovation, but tradition—a lasting, “old world” quality that transcended the plethora of “new and im­ proved” products with which consumers were inundated. This shift is not simply one of rhetoric; in fact, Henry SteinwayJr. introduced a series of radical changes to the instrument’s design around 1860, and the result of his labor, which was known as the “Steinway sys­ tem,” remains the basis ofthe modern instrument upon which musi­ cians continue to play today. This story of the piano itselfwill prove of great interest to readers concerned with the relations between technology and culture. Hen­ ry’s piano was designed not for the 18th-century salon but for the 19th-century concert hall. It recognized and contributed to changes in musical culture, including both the social conditions under which music was performed and the style ofmusic being performed. A cast iron frame allowed heavier strings to be strung under greater ten­ sion, increasing the range and volume of sound. A

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