$1 Million Steinway Gift

In August 2005, James Madison University's School of Music will earn the same designation held by such top-of-the-scale music conservatories as Juilliard, Oberlin, the Cleveland Institute and Philadelphia's Curtis Institute.

Thanks to a $1 million gift from a music-loving, but anonymous, donor, JMU's music school will join other distinguished schools of music displaying the seal of an All-Steinway School, a designation awarded by the Long Island City, N.Y.-based firm of Steinway & Sons to schools of music that exclusively use its pianos as concert and practice instruments.

Every serious school of music has acquired this designation," said Professor Jeffrey Showell, director of the JMU School of Music.

Adding to 28 Steinways already owned by JMU that are available to faculty and students from practice room to recital hall, Madison will eventually own about 112 Steinway pianos.

The first 12 new Steinways — all grands — are scheduled for delivery in Harrisonburg the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 10. Another 53 upright pianos, also purchased with the private donation, are to be delivered to the school in late August.

The instruments will serve JMU's 40-50 piano majors, three full-time and one part-time professors of piano, other music faculty, about 1,000 music majors and non-majors taking music classes in JMU's Music Building, as well as concert audiences.

Another 23 pianos will be purchased later for JMU's planned fine arts center, slated to open in 2009. The new facility will house a concert hall with seating for 600 and a recital hall for 200, a theater with full orchestra pit, rehearsal rooms for JMU's marching band and other ensembles, and performance and production space for the JMU School of Theatre and Dance.

The new pianos will replace the school's non-Steinways, most of which are in poor condition — which was the impetus for the anonymous donor's million-dollar gift. A few salvageable pianos will be sold, but most will "get hauled off to wherever old pianos go," Showell said. "Some will wind up in the dumpster, they're that bad."

The donor "looked in the practice rooms and saw some of the junkers we had in there," the director said. The donor "wanted to see the students have the best preparation possible," he said, adding that the donor had studied piano as a child, then, later in life, renewed a passion for the keyboard.

The donor joined Showell and three faculty — Eric Ruple, Gabe Dobner and Lori Piitz — last June for a trip to the Steinway & Sons factory in New York to select the grands for JMU's Music Building. The faculty as well as the donor did test drives of the pianos at the factory.

Steinway & Sons, which was founded in 1853 in New York, is the largest manufacturing firm left in New York City with about 400 employees, many of whom are third-generation workers, said Showell, who considers the company's handmade instruments the best to be bought, as do most artists, as attests the "Artist Roster" on Steinway's Web site.

"Steinways are more expensive than other pianos," Showell said, "but, after you tour through the factory and see the amount of human labor that goes into them, you wonder how they can sell them so cheaply.

"Anybody who's anybody uses Steinway, period. This is one piece of hype that is absolutely true."

The head of Steinway is to be a special guest at a JMU concert gala Sept. 28 at Washington's Kennedy Center that will celebrate the $1 million gift. The event will be the first concert of a three-year, nine-concert series of JMU artists performing at the Kennedy Center.