Artisanal spirit in sound hands. By BASIL LAWRENCE.

I DON’T know about you, but whenever I see a Steinway grand piano – whether it be on the stage of the hallowed Carnegie Hall or in the corner of an alleyway bar –, it impresses of having always existed in its finished state; an instrument so stately one struggles to imagine it as a composite of specialised parts and labour, let alone a log fished from Alaskan waters. After viewing this down-to-earth documentary, however, it would be difficult to ignore the intricate artistry that goes into making what, musically-speaking, is much more than the sum of its parts.

Chronicling the yearlong assemblage of ‘L1037’ (an amusingly sci-fi sounding name for such an organically built instrument), much of the focus and admiration is directed towards Steinway’s multi-ethnic, blue collar factory employees and their interdependent hand-crafting of grand pianos within a nondescript Queens, N.Y. building. Playing up some of their idiosyncratic yet everyday appearances (a burly football jersey-wearing family man; a tie-dye tee-shirted Deadhead) alongside the nuanced skills required to maintain the Steinway template, first-time filmmaker Ben Niles attempts to re-establish the artisans as equals of the artistes – helped along the way by several cross-cuts with famous and not-so-famous pianists –, and in so doing ground the rarefied atmosphere surrounding the Steinway brand.

Vital to the film’s open-armed esoterica is an absence of jargonistic exposition; instead the approach is mostly one of show don’t tell, with the camera honing in on minute details of craftsmanship through close-ups of hands wielding tools and fingers finding faults. There’s a certain reverie about the way the camera lingers on the planing, tuning, nailing and tweaking; at times it gets so close to the handiwork it borders on object fetishism. Yet for all the intimacy with tools and tasks, details elsewhere are disappointingly sketchy: the history of the Steinway business is barely touched on (with such an emphasis on traditional methods, one might reasonably expect more historical context to be provided); while the absence of a brief rundown of how these pianos make the sounds they do may disappoint the uninitiated.

Ultimately the film becomes less about the piano itself than a teardrop for dwindling artisanship in the face of mechanised excess; and while there’s immense and enduring value to be gained from using artisanal methods, at times the thematic sentiments lean toward inferred piety. It is not a fortiori that organic artisanship trumps synthetic methods, since, in several cases, both processes require incremental symbiosis between people and raw materials. One need only view the documentary Moog to appreciate the complexities of human/electronic interaction involved in the making of some non-acoustic instruments. That said, the numerous qualities of the Steinway – not least its oft-cited anthropomorphism – evidently instil such love and dedication to craft that many workers stay on for decades at the factory. There’s a perfectionist streak running through each worker, yet to consistently achieve ‘perfection’ would entail homogenisation, which is antithetical to Steinway’s ethos. The feel of the human hand may be irreplaceable with regard to correcting imperfections, yet it is the traces of those very imperfections that guarantee why each piano ends up sui generis.