The Ongoing Saga of My Baldwin Piano

I love everything about my Baldwin, from the brass hardware to the little scratches on the fallboard from previous owners’ fingernails.

If you have followed my blog at all over the past few years, you know that a) I own a magnificent 1912 Baldwin piano that I chanced upon for fairly cheap and shepherded into loving restoration by one of the Pacific Northwest’s top piano technicians, and b) when I moved to New York, I no longer had room for my beloved, and I had to figure out a place to house her indefinitely.

Now that I live in Los Angeles, again I find myself in a situation where I have a big grand piano and I don’t know what to do with it. I am putting the word out, through this post and conversations with friends and with piano people, that it is time to find a new situation for me and my piano.

In my rather desperate post from August 2016, “Other People’s Pianos,” written during a transient period, I maintained my practice on friends’ pianos, and cried to my counselor about how not having my piano was like having my musical/emotional safety blanket ripped away from me (I’m a Cancer). Looking back over the post, I realized that I also decreed exactly what would end up happening there in my writing: “I’m hoping to find a school, venue, church, or private residence where a piano would be welcome, and where I could also come practice. A mutually-beneficial piano-sharing scenario. Better that than having it wrapped in blankets and going unused in a warehouse.”

And that is PRECISELY what happened. I put feelers out with my musician friends in New York, and one of them very promptly connected me with a church that needed a piano for their music program. They just happened to be in Sheepshead Bay, only a few miles south of my apartment Brooklyn.

For the brief time I lived in New York, I enjoyed a lovely piano-sharing arrangement. I would hop on the Q train and ride down to Sheepshead Bay, and walk through the (extraordinarily) long blocks until I got to the church, where I had specific hours for practice. On dry days, I could just hop on my bike and ride all the way down Avenue R. I recorded some songs for The Dreamer & The Dream at the church, and the church has benefited greatly from having a nice piano for their services and music concerts.

But then I was seized by a wild impulse to abruptly move to Los Angeles. I had realized that, after spending most of my life in Puddletown, and then living in New York, I had lost my patience for crappy weather. I wanted to live in a big city again, and so, the natural math of my various requirements of place suddenly became obvious: Big City + Needs to be a Music Town = Los Angeles. Also, having my parents a tad closer (they’re both still on the West Coast) made much more sense than going south to somewhere like Nashville or Austin. (Although recently I’ve been hearing Denver has a great music scene, and dry sunny weather, and maybe a tad less traffic…)

So, I cast my fate to the wind and landed in a fantastic little bungalow apartment in Mid City L.A. I love it, and I have a nice little music studio set up in the dining room (which is, as far as I am concerned, the best use for formal dining rooms).

But now my piano is all the way on the other side of the country.

One of my first side jobs when I landed in L.A. was working for a piano store, where I tried all the possible avenues available for trying to figure out how to bring my grand piano back from New York. In fact, while working at the piano store, I happened upon a donated piano that is a distant cousin of my Baldwin grand, a mid-60’s Acrosonic. For a free piano that hadn’t been tuned in forty years, it ain’t so bad, and it satisfied the need for having an acoustic piano in my space. However, I play it far less than I used to play my Baldwin; once you drive a Mercedes, it’s hard to go back to a Hyundai.

I have determined that, if I could get it out here, there is room for the Baldwin here at my place. (Being that I am a person who has moved grand pianos so, so many times, I am in possession of a piano cutout, which is a large piece of butcher paper with renderings of various piano sizes, drawn to scale, that you can arrange amongst your furniture for assessment. Based on my calculations with this tool, I could technically fit my piano in my current place provided I am okay with blocking access to the kitchen when the piano bench is out. I think, all things considered, that I’m okay with that.)

And so, considering that a piano’s purpose in life is to be loved, maintained, and played, I am temporarily okay with things as they are but also constantly brainstorming in the back of my mind trying to figure this situation out. Considering that it worked the last time I made this declaration through my blog, I figured I should again put the word and the feelers out for a new piano situation: The ideal scenario is a music studio, either a recording or teaching studio, where a grand piano of this style and sound is appreciated (no, adored) and where I have a similar timeshare arrangement where the house gets to use the piano for their purposes and I get to come in and use it for mine. This place is close enough to Mid City Los Angeles that it does not lower my quality of life by increasing my time in traffic too significantly, so I can get to play it fairly regularly (and I could even BIKE there!) This piano timeshare is be a mutually beneficial arrangement for everyone involved.

OR: I drum up the $2,000 or so needed to move the Baldwin back across the country and relocate her here to my place in Mid City, where I will selfishly keep her acoustic charms all to myself.

Here’s to manifesting what we need through speaking it and putting it into the Universe. That’s how this magical piano first came to me–by searching desperately for the right sound until I had pretty much given up, deflated and certain all beautiful pianos would be hopelessly and forever beyond my price reach, when my then-boyfriend happened across an ad for the Baldwin, which was patiently awaiting discovery at a small town piano shop that I never would have gone to in person.

Patience and trust, y’all. Patience and trust.