Beethoven Pianos Featured in Short Documentary: The Final Note
The Final Note is a portrait of our Beethoven Piano's Warehouse in the South Bronx. Beethoven Pianos has roughly 400 pianos stored there, where eccentric yet passionate piano technicians work hard to restore them. This short documentary directed and filmed by Mayeta Clark, touches on the decline of a once majestic industry and depicts the remaining few that hold on to the high craft of piano restoration.
The Piano Mover by Brendan Spiegel: Thirty-nine years and 50,000 instruments later, Carl Demler has been wrong exactly twice.
Chau-Giang Thi Nguyen, a concert pianist and artist who goes by “Coco,” moved into a new Soho duplex this spring that offers a dream layout for any New York City musician. At the front of the apartment, a row of double-length bay windows stretches the height of both stories, pouring light into a hardwood-floor alcove just wide enough to accommodate Nguyen’s sleek black Steinway Model B grand piano—the perfect spot to sit and practice for her Carnegie Hall solo debut this fall.
However, as in so many seemingly perfect New York City apartments, there was one rather daunting hurdle standing in the way of her grand vision: stairs.
Many moving companies refuse to handle pianos altogether, afraid of being blamed for damaging an expensive instrument as it twists and turns through doors and across hallways, up and down creaky stairways, its hundreds of tiny, ancient parts jumping and jiggling around inside. Instead, movers will often decline to even touch a piano, simply instructing clients to “call the piano guy.”
The piano guy is Carl Demler, a 76-year-old German immigrant who is one of the last remaining New Yorkers practicing a once common trade: the delicate, and perhaps unenviable, craft of piano moving. At Nguyen's home last spring, Demler amounted to an unlikely sight –a thin, white-haired chief quietly but firmly directing his crew of burly men as they struggled to coax the Steinway into cooperation.
A Short Documentary Features Our Fellow Piano Tuner
The short documentary called "The Piano Tuner" directed and filmed by Columbia graduate Mayeta Clark, features one of our piano tuners Elizabeth Corday working executing her craft Beethoven Pianos.
Carl Demler & Beethoven Pianos Featured in Sundance Documentary: Mott Music
This documentary is about the marvelous discovery of a Piano Factory in the South Bronx and the characters that dwell within. Once a part of Mott's Iron Works in the 1880's, the largest producer of cast iron tubs of its time, now Beethoven Pianos is a place of piano restoration. Once inside, explore the synchronous lives of a piano voicer, a piano dealer, and a piano technician.