On Christmas Night, PBS WETA in Washington rebroadcast the one hour documentary “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037,” directed by Ben Pines, link here. The film can be viewed in segments on YouTube here.
Steinway & Sons is probably the most revered piano manufacturer in the world. It has manufacturing plants in Queens, NY (there is a street named after the company), and Hamburg Germany. The film showed the process of manufacturing a piano, which takes about an elapsed year, in Astoria, Queens. Many workers were shown. The company does much more by hand than any other piano manufacturer. There are many highly skilled craft jobs with specialized tools, including “tone regulator.”
Several pianists appear, and these include Helene Grimaud, Harry Connick Jr., Hank Jones, and Marcus Roberts. Music by Mozart, Beethoven (Sonata 4), Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scarlatti, Liszt, and Debussy was excerpted.
Wikipedia attribution link for Steinway Piano number 500000, link here.
Christmas night WETA also showed an Independent Lens documentary by Vanessa Gould, “Between the Folds”, link here. The 50 minute documentary presents the art of origami, the making of art objects merely by folding paper. A mathematics teacher shows how a sequence of square folds leads to a three dimensional object that in space looks like a hyperbolic curve. Various branches of mathematics link together with this topic. So the old kid-stuff of making paper airplanes (or footballs for lunchtime games) has become a real art form. Origama has real applications in biology, as in understand how DNA works, or in tracing certain brain diseases (like kuru) that result from folding of certain cells, and in designing pharmaceuticals.
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