Antique Pianos
08.29.06 By Lorraine Newberry
When I was seven years old I inherited a beautiful antique piano from my mother’s aunt. I loved that piano. The wood was inlaid with swirls and designs that had faded in different ways over the decades and inside was a yellowed tuner’s label with the date January 6, 1906 and “tuners to the royal family” (or something like that - I’ve forgotten the exact wording) and I wondered if my piano had stood in a London parlor decades before. It locked with an old fashioned skeleton key that I eventually put on a cord and wore as a necklace. I learned how to play on that piano. The keys had an annoying habit of sticking in summer and the piano was perpetually out of tune, but it was mine.
At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning decades of the twentieth, pianos were very common and most homes that could afford a piano had one. For that reason, there are still many pianos from that era available today and because they are so plentiful they are not particularly valuable. Also, one hundred years ago piano makers were still refining the techniques the used to create the instruments and the majority of pianos made in that era were not of good enough quality that they can still be played today. Player pianos in working order tend to be more valuable because they are harder to find, as are the player piano music rolls to go with them.
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Article Tags: affordable, antique, piano, player piano================
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