LIEBERMAN, Richard K.

PERSONAL: Male. Education: New York University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of History, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, 31-10 Thomson Ave., Long Island City, NY 11101. Agent—c/o Yale University Press, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, professor and archivist.

WRITINGS:

(With Janet E. Lieberman) City Limits: A Society History of Queens, Kendall/Hunt (Dubuque, IA), 1983.

Steinway & Sons, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1995.

SIDELIGHTS: Richard K. Lieberman is an historian who is probably best known as the author of Steinway & Sons. Eva Hoffman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described the work as an "institutional chronicle" of the piano-building company that began business in Germany in 1835, then moved to the United States in 1850 and enjoyed a long prominence in the piano-making field. Steinway & Sons draws on family and company records preserved in the LaGuardia and Wagner archives of the City University of New York, the institution Lieberman directs. The archives are housed on the campus of LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where the Steinway company has been located since the 1870s.

Lieberman reports on the company's significant prosperity from the 1860s to the 1930s, when other companies finally began to compete with Steinway in the piano market. The book continues with accounts of the company's gradual economic decline due, at least in part, to both the appearance of mass-produced pianos from Japan and a general decline in piano sales. The company's commitment to producing a small number of instruments for elite performers and venues also harmed sales. "The Steinway company actively acquired and nurtured this special position as the instrument upon which the masterworks were to be performed," explained Stuart De Ocampo in American Music. "Indeed, this relationship . . . virtually guaranteed Steinway's ascendancy." According to Ocampo, Steinway & Sons lost business when they hesitated to produce "player-pianos and inexpensive upright pianos." Because of this, Lieberman notes, the company has changed ownership at least three times since the 1970s.

In Steinway & Sons, Lieberman also describes the original and painstaking piano-making process, which involves drying wood for one year, the protracted application of varnishes, and the hand-fitting of more than two hundred small parts. "Few would argue," commented Richard Ratliff in Notes, "that Henry Steinway, Jr. invented the prototype of the modern grand piano." According to Lieberman, one result of the initial sale of the Steinway company in 1972 is that Steinway pianos are now constructed along more modern methods.

In her New York Times Book Review assessment of Steinway & Sons, Hoffman remarked that "a history of the Steinway is also, implicitly, a history of the pianistic tradition." Hoffman praised Lieberman's book as "a revealing, if not always uplifting, perspective," adding that Lieberman "gives us an often fascinating overview of a musical epoch that may, regrettably, be coming to an end."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Music, fall, 1997, Stuart De Ocampo, review of Steinway & Sons, p. 407.

Booklist, November 15, 1995, Alan Hirsch, review of Steinway & Sons, p. 527.

New York Times Book Review, December 10, 1995, Eva Hoffman, review of Steinway & Sons, p. 15.

Notes, September 1996, Richard Ratliff, review of Steinway & Sons, p. 81.

Perspectives, March, 1996, Richard Lieberman, David Osborn, "Historical Archives and the Community College Student" history of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.

Publishers Weekly, October 16, 1995, review of Steinway & Sons, p. 53.*