I’m borrowing the name of a great tune by the icelandic band Mum for this post, not because its about them but because it is about the piano…. On Sunday I’m going to a film at the NZ Film festival called “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037″ and it looks incredibly intriguing – my mind buzzes thinking about what a talented film maker & cinematographer could do with this subject matter!
Borrowing the blurb from the Festival Catalogue: “There is no more engrossing subject than man at work. The proof… is in [this] chronicle of the production of a single Steinway concert grand – a nine-foot beast that requires a plank the length of an anaconda, a year of assembly, and a small army of blue-collar technicians whose skills are as minutely focused and compartmentalized as a safecracker‘s… Testimonials from a variety of pianists… describe and demonstrate the variances of sound inimical to each Steinway, among the last of the hand-crafted pianos. But they‘re distractions from the drama in Steinway‘s Queens factory, where a single slip of a ‘pizza wheel‘ wire stretcher or an imbalance of a few thousandths of an inch could ruin a $25,000 instrument. Director Ben Niles and cinematographer Ben Wolf scrutinize each step… offering moments of fixated strangeness and wonder… As a study of stubborn artisanal tradition in the ProTools age, Note by Note is a stirring symphony of specialized labor.” — Jim Ridley, Village Voice

Check out the movie website and/or watch the trailer:

Ok and just to continue the confusion, heres a live video of Mum playing aforementioned track at the Liquid Room in Shinjuku:

ah the restraint, beautiful!