“(Tyson’s) the shop foreman,” the senior Ford says.
Getting wood on it
Piano restoration is, however, as much a craft as it is an art. And for that you need real woodworking skills. And perhaps, some training with weights. Ford lifts a plank of quarter sawn laminated hard rock maple, which is as heavy as it sounds. This dense wood is used to make the block that holds the 250 tuning pins that in turn anchor 20 tons of pressure from the instrument’s steel strings. The strings – stretched out over a sounding board made of lighter Alaskan sitka spruce – vibrate when you strike any of the 88 keys.
The technology of building pianos has not changed since the 19th-century. It’s no iPhone.
“The piano,” Ford says, “is steeped in tradition.”
And so is he. Ford is the third generation of his family to make and restore the instrument. That story begins with Ford’s grandfather, Janos Fekete (FEH keh tah), a Hungarian immigrant who came to New York City between the 1880s and ’90s and worked as a foreman at Steinway & Sons on 14th Street in the action department, overseeing the keys and the accompanying felt hammers.
In the late 1890s, Fekete struck out on his own, setting up Fekete Piano at 242 E. 74th St. in Manhattan.
“I remember as a kid looking up at the business certificate and it said ‘1914,’” Ford says. “And I said to my father, ‘Aren’t we older than that?’”
It turns out the City of New York had required businesses to get new certificates at the start of World War I. But what the story really illustrates is how Ford belonged to the business even before the business belonged to him.
Family traditions
Hungarians are a profoundly musical people who can claim as their own one of the greatest pianists in the history of keyboard artists – the showman Franz Liszt, who was said to make women faint merely by stripping off his gloves before sounding one rapturous note.
He remains Ford’s favorite composer.
But Hungarian music is also rich in folk melodies, and Ford recalls growing up in the mostly Hungarian community of Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, amid the strains of the gypsy violins and the tinkling of coins that would rain down from the apartments to the appreciative musicians below. His family would dangle a dollar on a clothes pin just to keep the gypsies playing beneath its windows.
Latest Comments