Perhaps it is in your living room right now. Perhaps it stands against the wall of a parlor, or in a corner of the den where the light from the window falls across its lid in the late afternoon. Perhaps it was your grandmother’s, and you can still hear her playing hymns on Sunday evenings. Perhaps you found it at an estate sale, or it came with the house, or someone you loved left it to you and you have never quite known what to do with it.
However it came to you, you know the piano we mean. The finish has gone cloudy. A few keys stick, and one or two do not speak at all. The ivories are yellowed and chipped, and the bass rumbles more than it sings. When you sit down to play, the piano answers, but faintly, the way an old friend answers from another room. And still you keep it. You dust it. You run your hand along the curve of the case as you walk by. Some part of you suspects that the beauty is still in there, waiting.
We want to tell you that you are right.
This page tells the story of one such piano, a 1918 Chickering grand that we restored in our Boulder-area workshop over 2012 and 2013, in seven short videos. We have set them along the way like windows in a long hallway, so that you can walk with us from the tired beginning to the singing end. But first, we would like to talk about pianos themselves, because we think they deserve it, and because we suspect you already feel some of what we are about to say.
More Than a Piece of Furniture
A piano is one of the most remarkable objects a family can own, and it is remarkable in more ways than one. Spend enough years with them, as we have, and you begin to see that every piano is really several things at once.
A piano is a timestamp. Look at the legs, the lyre, the music desk, the carving or the absence of carving, and you are looking at a moment in history. The heavy, ornate cases of the Victorian parlor, with their turned legs and fretwork, belong to one world. The cleaner lines that followed belong to another. A piano’s cabinet tells you what its makers and its first owners thought beauty looked like in the year it was built. Every piano that comes through our doors carries the taste of its era the way a letter carries its postmark.
A piano is an engineering marvel. Inside that graceful case, roughly 230 strings are stretched across a cast-iron plate, or harp, under a combined tension of around 36,000 pounds. That is the weight of a loaded truck, held in balance year after year, quietly, in your living room. A grand piano has something on the order of 11,000 parts: keys and hammers, springs and pins, wood and felt and leather and wire, each one shaped and fitted so that the lightest touch of a finger can travel through the whole machine and become sound. And what sound! The same instrument that whispers a lullaby can roar like a storm. Very few machines ever made can be so gentle and so powerful at once.
A piano is a work of industrial design. It is the meeting place of the cabinetmaker, the foundryman, the metalworker, and the engineer. The sweep of a grand’s rim, the spacing of its struts, the way a lid rises on its prop: all of it was designed, argued over, refined, and built by hand and by skilled machine work, in factories that took pride in their names.
A piano is a musical instrument, of course. It may be the most complete one we have. It can play melody and harmony together; it can carry a whole orchestra’s worth of music under two hands. Composers have trusted it with their most private thoughts for more than two hundred years.
And a piano is an oasis. This, perhaps, is the part that matters most to you. At the end of a long day, when the world has asked too much, you can sit down at the keys and pour out your heart. You do not need an audience. You do not even need to play well. The music of the great composers is waiting there to carry you away: to a Paris salon, a Viennese ballroom, a moonlit Polish countryside, a smoky ragtime café. A piano is a door to faraway places, and it is always standing open in the corner of the room.
So when a piano grows tired, it is not just a piece of furniture that is wearing out. It is all of these things fading together.
Where Our Story Begins
Chickering & Sons was founded in Boston in 1823, and for generations the name stood among the finest in American piano building, in the company of houses like Steinway, Mason & Hamlin, and Knabe. We spend much of our working lives with Steinways and Bösendorfers, and we love them dearly. But we love all fine pianos, and a good Chickering grand is a fine piano indeed.
By the time this one came to us, though, it had been through some hard years. It had been sitting in a garage. Swings of heat and cold, dry air and damp, are hard on wood and felt and steel, and a garage is no place for an instrument of this kind. The video below is the honest beginning of our story.
Part 2: Before Restoration. A slow, handheld look across the open piano before we began. The plate is dull and tarnished, the strings rusty and dark, the hammers and dampers worn and dirty, and the case has lost its glow after years of sitting in a garage.
We include this video because we think it is important for you to see where a restoration begins. It is easy to look at a finished piano and imagine it was always that way. It was not. Perhaps your own piano looks something like this. Perhaps it looks much better, or worse. Either way, we hope you can see what we saw: not a ruin, but a beautiful thing waiting under the dust.
The Decision
We know that the decision to restore a piano is rarely a simple one. You may be weighing it right now. You may be wondering whether your piano is “worth it,” whether the bones are good, whether it would be wiser to let it go and start over with something new.
Those are good questions, and we are always glad to help you think them through honestly. Not every piano is a candidate for full restoration, and we will tell you so if yours is not. But we will also tell you this: many of the most treasured instruments in the world are old ones. A well-built piano from the golden age of American and European piano making was made of carefully chosen materials, by people who expected their work to last. When the worn parts are renewed and the rest is restored with care, the result can be an instrument that plays as beautifully as it did on the day it left the factory, and sometimes, we dare say, even better.
There is also something harder to measure. A restored piano keeps its story. The scratches on the music desk from a child’s pencil may be gone, but the piano itself remains the one your family gathered around. It is still the piano your grandmother played. That continuity is part of the romance of restoration, and it is a real thing, not a sentimental one.
For this Chickering, the decision was made. The work could begin.
Inside the Workshop
A full restoration is a long, patient undertaking. For this piano it meant a new soundboard, new bridge caps, and a new pinblock; a re-bronzed harp; redesigned bass strings; a new finish; a custom new action; and, at the end, a player system installed beneath it all. Every one of those words represents weeks of work and thousands of small decisions.
The next two videos take you inside the shop while that work was underway.
Part 5: Highlights of the Restoration Process. Scenes from the work in progress: the plate stripped and prepared, resting pale on sawhorses outdoors; the old, worn, stained keytops; and hands at work on small parts. As the video’s description notes, the process is labor-intensive, and a restored piano can last another 80 to 100 years.
We love that second fact, and we hope you will linger on it a moment. Eighty to a hundred years. The piano you restore today may be played by your grandchildren’s grandchildren. Few things we buy in our lives can make that promise.
Look, too, at the plate lying out in the open air. Stripped of its old finish, it looks almost humble, a pale gray shape on a pair of sawhorses. It is hard to believe that this is the same great iron harp that will hold all those tons of tension, or that it will soon shine like gold. Restoration is full of moments like that, when the piano looks less like itself before it looks more like itself than it has in decades.
Part 6: The Restoration Process, in Depth. A longer look at the shop and the work: a new pinblock and tuning pins, numbered action and key parts laid out in order on a pegboard, and the tools of the trade close at hand. Chopin nocturnes, performed by Elisabeth Leonskaja, are credited as background music on the YouTube page.
If you have ever wondered why piano restoration takes the time it does, those rows of numbered parts are the answer. Each piece must be cleaned, repaired, or replaced, then returned to its own place, and then adjusted in relation to every piece around it. The pinblock, the laminated hardwood block that grips the tuning pins, is what allows a piano to hold its tune; a new one, fitted carefully to the plate, gives the instrument a firm foundation for decades to come.
We find this part of the work deeply satisfying. There is a quiet in a workshop when the hands are busy and the mind is focused. It is the opposite of hurry. Something old is being honored, piece by piece.
The Heart of the Voice
If the plate is the piano’s skeleton, the soundboard is its heart. It is a broad, thin panel of spruce beneath the strings, and it is what turns the vibration of the strings into the rich, warm sound that fills a room. On the underside of the soundboard run the ribs, long strips of spruce that give the board its strength and its subtle crown.
This Chickering received a new soundboard, and the next video is one of our favorites: a small, intimate glimpse of that work.
Part 4: Scalloping the Soundboard Ribs. A close-up of the new spruce ribs as a chisel scallops their ends. A block plane rests nearby, and fresh shavings gather on the bench.
It is only a minute and a half of video, but it holds a great deal. Shaping the ends of the ribs allows the soundboard to flex freely near its edges, and that freedom has everything to do with how the piano will sound. You are watching a voice being carved, curl by curl, out of clean spruce. We never tire of the smell of it, or the sound of a sharp chisel in good wood.
The Reveal
And now, at last, the moment every restoration is working toward. Here is the first video in the series, which shows the Chickering before and after, side by side.
Part 1: Before and After. Before-and-after comparisons of the 1918 Chickering grand, restored in our Boulder-area workshop in 2012 and 2013. The dull “before” gives way to a bronzed gold plate, bright copper-wound bass strings, a new pinblock with red felt, and a deep, figured mahogany case with a mirror finish.
We confess that we still feel a thrill watching it. Look at that mahogany. The figure in the wood was there all along, hidden under years of wear; the new finish simply lets you see it again, deep and glowing, like light falling through a glass of wine. Look at the plate, which only a few videos ago was lying pale and plain on a pair of sawhorses, and now gleams like a gilded altar. Look at the copper of the bass strings, bright as new pennies.
This is what we mean by the romance of restoration. It is not making something new. It is helping something old remember who it was.
The Music Comes Home
But a piano is not a sculpture. All of that beauty would mean very little if the instrument did not sing. And so we come to the part of the story that, for us, is the whole point.
When the Chickering was finished, it was fitted with an LX Live Performance player system, often called the Rolls Royce of player systems, which allows the piano to play recorded performances on its own keys and hammers. In the next video, it plays Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20.
Part 3: Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20. A still view into the open, restored piano: the gold plate, the brass tuning pins, the red felt. No pianist is visible; the LX Live Performance player system plays Chopin’s Scherzo No. 1 in B minor, Op. 20.
We chose to let the camera simply rest and look. There is no one at the keyboard, and so there is nothing to watch but the instrument itself, and nothing to do but listen. Chopin’s first Scherzo is a stormy, passionate piece, full of crashing chords and racing passages, and at its center lies a tender, lullaby-like middle section, drawn from an old Polish Christmas carol. It asks a piano to roar and to whisper, sometimes within a few moments of each other. It is exactly the kind of music this instrument was built for, more than a century ago, and it is exactly the kind of music we wanted to hear it play again.
Close your eyes for a few minutes while it plays, if you can. This is the oasis we spoke of earlier: a door opening onto a faraway place.
And then, because a piano is also meant for joy, we will leave you with something lighter.
Part 7: Zez Confrey’s “Dizzy Fingers”. The restored Chickering plays Zez Confrey’s “Dizzy Fingers” on its LX player system. The polished mahogany, gold plate, and bright copper bass strings shine as the keys dance on their own, with no player in sight.
Zez Confrey was a master of the 1920s “novelty piano” style, and “Dizzy Fingers” lives up to its name. It is a whirlwind of a piece, and watching the keys of a century-old Chickering race through it never fails to make us smile. We hope it makes you smile too. A piano that was sitting in a garage, tarnished and silent, is dancing again.
Your Piano, and Its Next Hundred Years
We have told you the story of one piano. Now we would like to hear about yours.
Maybe you have been carrying a quiet hope for years that your piano could be beautiful again. Maybe you are not sure where to begin, or what is even possible. Maybe you only want someone who knows pianos to take a look and tell you, honestly, what your instrument needs. Wherever you are in your thinking, we would be glad to talk with you. There is no pressure in a conversation, and you will not be rushed.
Our shop is in Lafayette, in the Boulder area. If you live farther away, ship-ins are welcome; a piano can travel to us for restoration and go home singing.
If you would like to learn more, you can read about our piano restoration services, browse our before and after photos, see what goes into piano refinishing, or follow the full story of another instrument in our case study of a 1944 Steinway Model S.
And when you are ready, call us at (303) 521-3722 or send us a note through our contact page. Tell us about your piano: where it came from, who has played it, what you remember about it. We love those stories as much as we love the work itself.
Something once beautiful, grown tired with the years, can be beautiful again. We have seen it happen many times, and it moves us every time. We would be honored to help it happen for you.
With warm regards from all of us at Renaissance Piano Service, Lafayette, Colorado