John Anderson, my great-great grandfather, was a Swedish immigrant and an American piano manufacturer. I spent my childhood practicing scales and arpeggios on two pianos that he designed, the Anderson upright and the Everett grand. Above one of the “Anderson” upright piano are sketches of John Anderson a la Johannes Brahms, passionately playing the piano over a hefty belly. There is also a photograph of him sitting nobly in a carved wooden chair, dressed in a woolen gray suit and floral tie. Although the photography is black-and-white, my grandfather’s blonde hair and blue eyes reveal his Swedish heritage. His gaze is proud, but soft. My grandfather strikes me as someone with great business savvy, but he is also an unabashed romantic. Somehow, he was able to synthesize his Victorian sentiments with the consumer trends developing during World War I.
John Anderson, born April 16, 1859 in Drottingham, spent his childhood working in the Royal Gardens of Sweden. This detail was continually referenced throughout biographies, as if my grandfather’s deep sensual love of natural beauty is what eventually led him to piano design. By 14, Anderson began his apprenticeship with the Royal cabinet-maker. After five years, the Society of Mechanics of Stockholm awarded him for his work. He then received a stipend from the Swedish Chamber of Commerce to study with the great cabinet-makers abroad. He traveled to Vienna, Munich, Zurich, and Paris. Through his travels, Anderson mastered furniture building and design. In 1884, he immigrated to New York. While designing cabinets, he also received his first assignments to design piano cases. He studied this craft with Decker Brothers and later with Albert Weber and Steinway & Sons. Anderson drew his first piano scale for the Shaw Piano while working for the Shaw Company in Erie, Pennsylvania. In 1892, Anderson moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota to work for the Century Piano Company, where he designed the Anderson piano. Impressed with Anderson’s design, the Everett Piano Company of Boston, MA invited the piano maker to take over all manufacturing for their company. Beginning in 1899, Everett gave Anderson unlimited funds to remodel the entire factory system, including the addition of a piano actions and hammers department. Anderson felt a responsibility to personally employ every man, an action that Alfred Dodge in his book Pianos and their Makers suggests was indicative of Anderson’s deep conviction for design integrity. Anderson designed the Everett concert grand piano, favored by piano virtuosos such as Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Maria Teresa Carreño, and Otto Neitzel. Anderson was well known and financially successful until his death on July 9, 1936.
Publications that feature John Anderson either portray the man as an artist or a businessman. Alfred Dodge wishes to depict Anderson as the epitome of Victorian ideals. In an attempt to connect Anderson’s childhood with his later career, Dodge writes,
He had fully taken in the beautiful forms and colors of flowers, become intoxicated with their aroma, and feasted his eyes and mind on the beautiful forms of artistic furniture and classic and decorative architecture, but the world of tone had been an unknown realm to him, although it was fully as strong in his soul as the knowledge, inspiration and appreciation for the beautiful in its various other forms and phases. [1]
This sensual world that Dodge envisions for Anderson seems to explain why Anderson became a superior piano designer, and it seems that Anderson would be in compliance with such an assumption. In a letter written to Dodge, Anderson exclaims,
I had long ago formed an idea for the beautiful in life, and although neither musician nor singer, also for the beautiful in sound. The roar of the ocean, the whisper of the leaves, the murmur of the brook, the mighty sound of storm in the woods, always had a charm for me, but when I heard men discuss piano tone, at first I hardly knew much about it. But as time went on it became perfectly clear to me that tone, color, shade and light in a beautiful painting, the delicate molding in a statue, and the harmony produced by perfect piano tones are practically the same thing, for the reason that the whole must result in a harmonious perfection.[2]
From an entirely different perspective, “Adapting Selling Talk to Circumstances: An Interview with John Anderson” from the March 18th 1916 issue of Music Trade Indicator is a front page article that discusses John Anderson’s advertising strategies and his subsequent success as a salesman. The article gives anecdotes about various customers of the Everett piano company, and how John Anderson catered his salesmanship to suit their life experience. In this article there is no mention of Anderson’s childhood or his Victorian fascination with perfect tone. In contrast, the article presents Anderson as a quick-witted businessman.
A farmer complains that while the Everett piano only has two pedals, he is able to buy a cheaper piano with three pedals down the road. Why should he buy here? Anderson replies, “ ‘Well, I suppose you always buy cows with three horns? ... I suppose every horse you buy has five legs, and that you wouldn’t have a rooster on the farm unless he had three or four well spurred legs.”[3] When the farmer finally bought an Everett piano, the anonymous magazine writer concludes, “The farmer bought that piano because he had been told about it in a way that was easily understandable to the farmer.”[4]
A minster was doubtful of the Everett piano because of what other salesmen on Boyleston Street had told him. It did not seem in compliance with Anderson’s praise of the Everett piano. Anderson rebutted, “Haven’t you ministers been telling us about heaven and hell for years and years? Do any of you know anything about it? Have any of you ever been there?”[5] Inexplicably this argument convinces the minister of the Everett’s superiority.
John Anderson is not just presented as an authority on pianos, but an authority on people. He sizes up his customers so that he can connect their identities with their desire for the best piano imaginable, which in this case is the Everett piano. This is salesmanship at its finest, a craft that became increasingly pertinent as brand names and standardized factory systems replaced small businesses.
While some writers illuminate Anderson as a traditional Victorian, and others as a 20th century big business man, the most effective advertising combines these paradoxical roles. “The Quest for the Perfect Tone” by F. Burnham McLeary, written in 1915 to document the manufacturing developments of the Everett Piano Company, synthesizes these roles effectively, albeit with a melodramatic flair. “Have you often regretted that the music in your heart could not find its way to your fingers? You need regret it no longer.”[6] The article begins with a brief and general history of the keyboard, beginning with the Grecian god Hermes “…hitting his winged foot against a tortoise shell…vibrating five dried sinews stretched taut across it”[7] to Pythagoras and the keyboard instruments of the 16th and 17th centuries. The author eventually arrives in the early 20th century, and “…we find here and there a man who would rather make something surpassingly well than heap up great riches.”[8] McLeary leaves his readers in suspense. He introduces Frank A. Lee, president of the Everett Piano Company, who is searching for a perfectly harmonious instrument. In a section of the article entitled, “Just at the darkest moment fate appears behind the scenes,” a piano dealer leads Mr. Lee into a private display room that holds this perfect instrument. “He ran a short arpeggio in the middle register. Each note rang out as clear as a cathedral bell.”[9] Finally McLeary reveals that it is the Swedish cabinet-maker John Anderson who has fashioned this piano, whose artistry is then compared to the fine works of Benvenuto Cellini, Della Robbia, and Stradivarius. By creating the perfectly balanced instrument McLeary implies that Anderson, like the great artists, understands the deepest secrets of life.
John Anderson is not only fascinating because of his relevance to my ancestry. The piano maker symbolizes the dramatic culture shift that occurred in the early 20th century. Many piano writers and enthusiasts projected their personal values onto my grandfather. For instance, perhaps Alfred Dodge’s sentimental portrayal of John Anderson is a yearning for a dying way of life, a life that cherishes the carefully crafted piano forte and the musician as artist. With the invention of the player piano and the phonograph, music became more accessible but less inspired. Anderson himself was aware of this trend, and it seems that his business approach simultaneously accepts the fast-paced forward moving American ideology without disconnecting from 19th century piano tradition. A large reason for this synthesis may be that Anderson did not have a choice but to combine his old-fashioned sentiments with American big business. He needed the money. His immigration to America presented the craftsman with numerous struggles. In a personal letter, Anderson wrote, “Then back home doing well, but taking a chance to start for America and start all over with empty hands and no one who knew me after all I already had mastered and overcome. But for all this I feel happy and have something that one only can get that way.”[10] There are many ways in which to construe John Anderson’s life as a piano manufacturer. There is no certain reason for his blending of old and new modes of thought. However his personal story illuminates America’s larger story, a shift from inspiration to production, and the way in which American still desperately tries to balance the paradoxical.
[1] Alfred Dodge, Pianos and their Makers: Development of the piano industry in America since the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia 1876 (Covina, California: Covina Publishing Company, 1913), 85.
[2] Ibid., 85-6.
[3] Anonymous, “Adapting Selling Talk to Circumstances: An Interview with John Anderson.” Music Trade Indicator (Chicago: March 18, 1916), 2.
[4] Ibid., 2.
[5] Ibid., 2.
[6] McLeary, F. Burnham, “The Quest for Perfect Tone,” The World’s Work: A History of our Time Volume XXX May, 1915 to October, 1915 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1915), 285.
[7] McLeary 280.
[8] Ibid., 280.
[9] Ibid. 281.
[10] John Anderson, Personal Correspondence (June 16, 192-), p. 5
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