John Anderson

While discussing in class Solie’s essay “ ‘Girling’ at the parlor piano,” it dawned on me that my great-great grandfather was a piano manufacturer in the Victorian Era. His name was John Anderson.  Throughout my childhood I did a couple school projects inspired by/about him. In 4^th grade I played a Swedish immigrant in our Ellis Island unit, inspired by John Anderson, my only Swedish ancestor. In eighth grade, I wrote a paper on John Anderson and my other famous relative Peter Smith (Mayflower pioneer!). I studied piano for 12 years, until I was a senior in high school. During that time I practiced on two instruments that my great-great grandfather designed. At my family’s summer home on Lake Winnepesaukee we have sketches of John Anderson a la Johannes Brahms, passionately playing the piano over a hefty belly. When I googled “John Anderson piano manufacturer” this past week, the first item to appear was a google book entitled Pianos and their Makers: Development of the piano industry in America since the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia 1876 by Alfred Dodge. Upon browsing the book online I found an entire section devoted to my great-great grandfather.

John Anderson spent his childhood working in the Royal Gardens of Sweden among the flowers. This point kept coming up throughout the chapter, 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. 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 Steinway & Sons.  Anderson then moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota to work for the Century Piano Company, where he designed the “Anderson” piano. (My family actually owns an “Anderson” piano. It is nestled in a corner of our summer home living room below the sketches and portraits of the man himself.) The Everett Piano Company of Boston, MA was so impressed with his work that in 1899 they invited him to take over all manufacturing for their company. While at Everett, Anderson felt a responsibility to employ every man personally, an action that Dodge suggested was because of his deep love for the integrity of piano design. Anderson designed the Everett concert grand piano (one of which sits in my family’s living room in Boston).

            Included in this chapter was a quote from a letter that my great-great grandfather had written to Alfred Dodge. From this quote I gathered not only a little bit of Anderson’s personality, but the great romantic beauty that men attached to the piano. It was Wagnerian almost, to relish in an instrument as if it were the summation of everything musical that had come before. The letter reads,

            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.”[1]

---

[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), 85-6.