The Buffalo News is reporting that Denton, Cottier & Daniels, the world's oldest Steinway dealer, is ceasing its Steinway piano dealership after 2017.  It will attempt to sell-through and then return any remaining inventory to the factory after December 31, 2107.

Denton, Cottier & Daniels have sold Steinway pianos for 157 years, and yet the maker's sales quotas are choking their oldest dealer. That a relationship that is that long-standing would be done in by a supply-sided economic requirement is not merely shocking, but quite disturbing.

Owned by investment management company Paulson & Co. since 2013, headed by billionaire John Paulson, Steinway also owns Conn-Selmer, maker of several iconic brands of brass instruments, including Conn, Holton, and Bach.

Imposing unrealistic sales quotas on dealers is not new, but to do it in such a way as to destroy your dealer relationships is, in my opinion, a sure way to kill your brands.  Certainly, manufacturers want to lift sales, but this is a niche industry facing strong headwinds.  A management that does not understand the dynamic of the instrument market can kill itself by not adapting.  You can only whip the horses pulling the carriage just so hard and just so many times before they fall down dead.

And it's not just that the market isn't there.  According to the article, "Denton, Cottier and Daniels will continue to deal in fine pianos, [Trimper] said. The store will offer historic and restored pianos, as well as digital pianos, and it will pursue relationships with other distinguished piano manufacturers."  Clearly, it isn't that the market doesn't exist.  The problem here is that management has an 'unreasonable' expectation of that market.  One wonders if that extends into the wind instrument market, as well?  One also wonders what this will mean for the holding company if the flagship piano line falters?  It has been opined in this blog that a sale of a division is one way to prop up the main business.  

We will continue to monitor the Steinway situation because it has a direct effect on their brass instrument making division.

 Storied Czech brass instrument maker Josef Lidl has been sold to Arnold Stoelzel GmbH, according to a post on Facebook post by  Vlastimil Jiráček, owner of M. Jiráček and Sons, Czech maker of horns.  The capital invested (which likely means purchase price) is 1,000,000 Czech crowns, which translates currently into approximately US$ 45,000.   

We don't yet have an independent verification of the sale.

ITG 2017 is in the history books, and Terry Warburton takes advantage of being up in the mid-Atlantic/Northeast region to visit some of his dealers' shops, including Chris Cromer's shop, A Minor Tune Up Trumpet and Brasswind Services in Wilmington, DE.  Chris then takes the opportunity to interview Terry about his shop's history and what the future holds for Warburton.

Originally live streamed on our Facebook page, find the interview on our YouTube channel.

$64,554.  
That's what it costs annually to go to the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, according to collegedata.com.  And if you play horn, Denise Tryon, former 4th horn in the Philadelphia Orchestra (ex Detroit Symphony, ex Baltimore Symphony), will be your horn professor.  
So, you can audition and apply and pay over $60,000 to study with Denise.  OR, you can subscribe to her new online service, Low Horns Unite!  LHU is a subscription service and costs $9.97 per month.  

$64,554 per year versus $120 year. 

Of course, it's not the same education.  You can hardly even compare the two, because a Peabody education includes tuition for a complete course of classes, room and board, books and supplies, and so forth, as well as top notch ensemble performance opportunities.  What do you get with Low Horns Unite!?

What you do get is the wisdom and experience of a world-class performer, monthly, and all for less than a single in-person lesson with most top notch performers.

Distance learning is not new in the music world.  Although I cannot remember his name, a renowned bassoonist is known to have given what we now call distance learning lessons over the telephone.  That's right.  Over land line telephones, connected to a wall, without any visual cues, without good audio, and with high long-distance phone charges on top of the cost of lessons.  But if you were a student in a remote area without any bassoon teachers you might have been willing to pay for those lessons.

Wendell Rider, Principal Horn of the San Jose Symphony, has been giving distance learning lessons for many years now, mainly over Skype.  In fact, the ubiquitous use of the ostensibly free video phone service has given distance lessons a new moniker:  Skype lessons. As an early adopter of the then-new internet technology Wendell had initial struggles with both hardware and software. Now, as the technology advances those struggles melt away, and the important stuff that was only hindered by distance learning - the knowledge and expertise - is now facilitated by the technology.  Excellent audio and video compression, combined with amazing mobile technology, make Skype lessons more useful every day.  To be sure, the technology is not perfect.  But neither is it land line phones laid upon a nearby table while the student performs her etudes for the week.

As with most useful technology, for a new industry to flourish you need an intersection of two or more technologies to make it truly useful for the mass market. Consider the passenger airline industry. Planes were flying long before passengers were carried en masse. Large-scale passenger service was not feasible until powered flight, radio transmission, AND radar tracking all were in place. Only then did the industry flourish, because planes full of passengers could fly safely and in great numbers.

Distance music education is still finding its footing. The mobile phone and internet technology of today is a large step, because audio and video combine to simulate the in-person lesson experience. Denise Tryon's combined use of YouTube and Slack make her service less of an in-person lesson simulacrum, and more of a master class experience.

The holy grail of the online music experience is the real-time ensemble performance. We are not there, yet. Services such as MusikFusion attempt to get near that experience, stitching together canned accompaniment with solo recordings, but the usefulness and marketability of such services remains to be seen. The experience is not universally accepted as satisfying. The internet is truly an 'information superhighway', and as such has traffic jams. These create latency - the temporary delay of information transmission. And latency kills any hope of a seamless, in-room ensemble experience. It will take a further, as-yet-unknown or unproven technology that will eliminate latency to make the remote ensemble experience possible.  And that means that teacher/pupil duets will have to wait.

For now, as the technology evolves and matures, we will have to content ourselves with incremental improvements in music education as a distance learning activity.  Still, we are a far cry from long-distance land line phone lessons.

Nerd out, my brass friends, at the making of an Alexander 103 double horn!  This documentary (in German, no subtitles) follows a 103 from tube to finished instrument.  It is 45 minutes of ever-loving brass-making fun!

Dave gets a little gem in the shop - a Scherzer rotary D trumpet from circa the 1950s.  Disassembly does not go perfectly easily, as one might expect from a trumpet that has not seen the light of day in many years!

We know that some of the images are mirror image, and for that we apologize.  We will work on that in the future.

Finally!  I returned to live streaming and chatting with a casual lunch-time stream on The Brass Bench page on Facebook.  The subject of the stream is a Shires trombone that required four separate repairs/mods:  A new brace post to replace one that was suspected to be bent; installation of a hand rest; clean up a badly pitted branch; and solder the detachable leadpipe into the inner slide tube.  I only got to the disassembly and discussion of how to proceed in the allotted 90 minutes, but it was productive and hopefully instructive.

Moody's has downgraded the bond status and probability of default of Conn-Selmer's parent company, Steinway which is privately owned by Paulson & Co.   Read a report here at Bankrupt Company News.

In layman's language, this means that Moody's believes that the company will not be able to significantly reduce its debt.  In order to 'relieve' the debt burden either the parent company will have to kick in more cash or they may have to seek other relief such as protection from their creditors, i.e. bankruptcy protection.

And what this all means at the bottom of it is that the company cannot grow by taking on debt.  It may even be possible that it cannot operate at its current level without taking on debt. This spells trouble for the iconic brands that Steinway owns. The company could piece off more profitable divisions (Conn-Selmer is historically one of these) in order to prop up the less profitable divisions, which is likely Steinway pianos. I say all this in terms of probability because since the company went private we no longer get public reports that indicate which divisions are money makers are which are losers (if any).

So, a sale of Conn-Selmer would not be an unexpected turn of events in this situation, especially because it seems the owner has already injected cash into the company at least once since the purchase.

Reports are coming in of the passing of Zig Kanstul, founder of Kanstul Musical Instruments.  

Our thoughts and condolences go out to Mark and Jack Kanstul and the entire Kanstul family.