The Piano Acquires Grace and Beauty
Its Elephantine Legs Have Gone and It Now Fits Into the Scheme of Home Decoration
A grand piano “is now an important piece of home furnishing,” a 1926 New York Times Magazine article wrote. That was not to last: piano sales peaked about three years prior, in 1923, and never reached those heights again.
Radio – and, later, television – came to supplant the piano as the preeminent object in the American living room. This sales chart puts some data on the steep decline, as the grand piano transitioned from middle-class to staple to (mostly) upper-class luxury.
But back in 1926, the journalist Walter Rendell Storey wrote:
The piano in the shape known as the “grand” is now an important piece of home furnishing…
The heavy elephantine legs of the piano of the last century have disappeared and today, even among popular-priced instruments, one may find a piano to suit any scheme of period furnishings or satisfy almost any desire for originality.
…
This all goes to show how important, from the point of view of artistic form, is the piano. In its designing and decorating, it is today being given the serious attention that was lavished on the furniture of the “periods” which we now so much revere.
Any writer who penned the phrase “the piano in the shape known as the ‘grand’” instead of just “grand piano” was clearly getting paid by the word.
The Piano Acquires Grace and Beauty: Its Elephantine Legs Have Gone and It Now Fits Into the Scheme of Home Decoration
Published: Sunday, March 14, 1926