PIANOWORKS: Imagining the R.S. Williams Piano Factory by Gil McElroy, independent curator, writer, poet
The R.S. Williams Piano Factory was a commercial and architectural fixture in Oshawa through the latter half of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. Built in 1852 by the Oshawa Manufacturing Company, the factory—a large complex of buildings in the city’s downtown— had been the home of the Joseph Hall Machine Works until 1888, when it was purchased by the R.S. Williams Company of Toronto, manufacturer of and dealer in musical instruments. The company undertook extensive renovations, added new buildings to the complex, and turned it into what was, for its time, the largest piano manufacturing plant in Canada.
Such are some of the prosaic facts of the matter. The poetry is to be found in the photographs taken of and in the Williams factory and gathered by Thomas Bouckley, the late archivist for Oshawa whose enormous collection of images documenting Oshawa’s history is now housed at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Bouckley was the son of an employee at the factory, and while he may have had a special place in his heart for the facility (his collection includes photographs depicting virtually every aspect of the company, from its front office to its factory floor), what is of significance for us today is how these black & white things of historical import might resonate for us.
For the exhibition Piano Works: Imagining the R.S. Williams Piano Factory, a selection from Bouckley’s collection of photographs of the Williams piano factory are used in a contextualizing capacity, providing a direct frame of reference for our experience of the work of four contemporary Canadian artists: Ryan Legassicke, Alexander Graham, Murray Favro, and Carl Zimmerman. Exhibited alongside the contemporary works of art, the historical images circumscribe our consideration of them. But in a process of aesthetic feedback, the contemporary sculpture and photo-based art of the exhibition afford us the opportunity to re-engage a small sliver of the past—via those select photographic images of a factory in which pianos were once produced — as perhaps something other than grainy shadows of an era long since passed. It is an imagining that starts with wood.
The piano was the automobile of its day. By the twentieth century, piano manufacturers would (correctly) see in the car one of the greatest threats to their industry because of its newly acquired significance as the primary symbol of consumer affluence, having displaced the parlour piano from that role1.
The piano obviously pre-dates the automobile by quite some time. It is, in fact, a product of the late seventeenth century, the invention of the Florentine instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori. Called in an early description an “Arpicembalo ... di nuova inventione, che fa’il piano, e il forte” (“a harpsichord, of new invention, that plays soft and loud”),2 the piano was a major technological breakthrough that radically altered the path that music would thereafter take. But as sophisticated as was this engineering feat, the piano was still very much a product of its time:
Cristofori’s piano is one of the most impressive examples of machine design and construction from its age, but it was a machine built largely of wood and leather parts that needed to be cut and shaped and joined with hand tools by a skilled artisan.3
For all their technological complexity, the seventeenth and eighteenth century pianos of Cristofori were each one-of-a-kind artefacts, products of artisanship, of master craftsmen (and I do intend the gender reference) who headed hierarchically structured workshops staffed with the apprentices and journeymen who produced the goods that kept the whole system working.
A century and a half later, not a great deal had changed. Richard Sugden Williams, the founder of R.S. Williams Company, was very much a part of that same artisan tradition. Born in 1834, Williams spent the first four years of his life growing up in London, England, before his family emigrated to Canada. Settling in Toronto where his father found work as a cook, the young Williams was apprenticed at the age of twelve to William Townsend, maker of musical instruments, to “learn the piano, organ, and melodeon industries.”4 During the seven years of his apprenticeship, Williams learned every aspect of a highly skilled trade in which raw materials —timber and brass stock—were worked into the structural members and ornamental veneers of keyboard instruments, and the hinges for piano lids or the reeds for melodeons.
It is this artisanal origin of the piano which reverberates powerfully in Ryan Legassicke’s This is Wood (1999). It’s a deceptively simple piece, comprised in the main of two long boards of raw wood, lateral slices—each over four metres in length— of a maple tree. At one end of the work, Legassicke has joined together the two pieces at right angles using a simple half-lap joint, and inserted a smaller vertical board to stabilize the structure. In the end, Legassicke has created what looks to all the world like a bench.
It is, in fact, a bench. But This is Wood is not so narrowly reduced to such singularity of function, for what Legassicke has created resonates, both literally and metaphorically, with the stuff of pianos. His choice of material—soft maple—is also that of the piano maker5, and the joinery that holds the structure together—however simple—is the fundamental element of any wooden artefact. As a bench, the work is a functional piece of furniture appropriate to the playing of a piano. And as the horizontal maple board that forms the seat is structurally connected to the other two elements at just one end of the work, and which therefore could (with sufficient applied force) be set to vibrating in its own right, what we have here is, in effect, a primitive musical instrument — a somewhat oversized version of the wood rulers that many of us, as children, held along the edge of a school desk and set to twanging.
The elemental piano is everywhere evident in the photographs taken within the Williams factory: in the stacks of raw wood sitting on the floor awaiting cutting, planing and shaping; in the racks of prepared boards and veneers prepared for use; in the jigs ready and waiting to bend steamed boards into the curves of a grand piano, etc. In Ryan Legassicke’s This is Wood, its tectonic fundamentals find their aesthetic voice.
Though the establishment of a large factory in Oshawa was primarily oriented toward producing pianos, it had the secondary outcome of permitting the Williams Company to make forays into an entirely new, and possibly lucrative, market: pipe organs for large and prosperous churches. Richard Sugden Williams had gotten his start producing simple reed organs—melodeons and harmoniums —for use in small churches and the parlours of well-to-do homes, but once his company became well established and confidently able to venture into production of far more complex mechanisms like pianos, the opportunity arose to branch out into the manufacture of the musical behemoths that are pipe organs. In a building at the west end of the Oshawa factory, a vast two-storey high space was established in which the work of building pipe organs—complicated devices of multiple keyboards, bellows and wind reservoirs, intricately interconnected mechanical trackers, stickers and rollers, and the pipes themselves, some enormously long, arranged in cases— could be done. Photographs from the Bouckley collection include images showing factory workers assembling the pipes in their cases, the in-house organist testing a just-completed instrument, and a view of the finished product assembled on site at the factory prior to disassembly and shipment out.
The production of pipe organs was a short-lived experiment for the Williams Company, ending in 1902 after only about seven years. The Oshawa factory would be thereafter be devoted exclusively to the making of pianos.
At a number of levels, Alexander Graham’s sculpture A Cord (2002) evokes the era of the Williams pipe organs. All of them are, however, aesthetically accidental. The work—a rectangular steel framework holding in place hundreds of sections of stainless steel pipes stacked atop one another— actually replicates on a 1:1 scale basis the volumetric measurement of a cord of wood. But to experience the work as no more than a purely literal iteration of quantity—as nothing more than an clever expression of mass and magnitude— is to entirely miss the metaphors that envelop it. They start at the titular level: A Cord can of course be read as a play on “A Chord” and its obvious musical reference, or even the word “accord,” which can also meaningfully function at a musical level.
But beyond the puns, A Cord invokes the very heart and soul of the pipe organ: the pipes themselves, those precisely shaped and carefully tuned vessels in which the wind produced by the organ’s bellows is set to resonating in an aurally pleasing way. In any pipe organ, it is these tubular chambers that visually dominate, their sheer size, scale, and number immediately drawing the eye. And so in virtually any organ installation it is the ornamental arrangement of the pipes within their architectural setting—be it in a church or large hall— that is visually dominant and aesthetically satisfying. And as with the musical instrument, so too the sculpture: in Alexander Graham’s A Cord, we respond to the aesthetic of repetition it expresses, to the beauty of that grid of gleaming galvanized steel tubes stacked atop one another and rising up until they form an imposing wall, and not first to the quantification the piece literally represents.
The man who invented the technology that is the piano is not the same man who, upon his death, was called “The Father of the Pianoforte”. Muzio Clementi lived a century after Bartolomeo Cristofori, and it was he who took this new and complex musical mechanism and
figured out how to link instrument sales, printed music, journal subscriptions, concert ticket, piano lessons, musical keepsakes—and dreams—so that they all promoted one another. 6
Clementi laid the path that others—and of particular interest for us, a young Richard Sugden Williams —were to follow. The R.S. Williams Company may have gotten its start producing reed organs for the homes of the rising middle class, but as it grew it would branch out and involve itself in virtually every aspect of the music industry. The company bought and sold rare musical instruments, it published sheet music, and, of course, it manufactured pianos and pipe organs. It also produced smaller stringed instruments like mandolins and guitars.
In the Bouckley collection of photographs are a number of images that depict some of the people who worked at the Williams factory. There are, of course, group shots of employees (that include a surprising number of children). Others images depict individuals, sometimes posing for the camera in the corner of a room, sometimes in front of an R.S. Williams & Sons Co. upright piano. In a few of those latter photographs, workers are posed with instruments that they hold and are apparently playing: a banjo, a mandolin, a guitar (all presumably of Williams manufacture).
Artist Murray Favro is a maker of stringed instruments. And jet aircraft (Sabre Jet, 55% Size, 1979-83). And diesel locomotives ( SD40 Diesel Engine, 2000). In much of his work, Favro has sought to replicate the machined products and sophisticated technologies part and parcel of industrial processes entirely by hand, enacting a kind of aesthetically motivated U-turn in the historical evolution from craft-based to industrial methods of production. Favro’s work, in short, constitutes a deep, profound, and lasting engagement with the artefacts that give shape to our world. “Children have no problem understanding what I do,” he has been quoted as saying. “Nor do people who work in factories, or anybody who makes anything.”7
Favro’s guitars (which he began building back in the 1960s and which are working instruments he plays in ensembles like the Nihilist Spasm Band) teeter along the edge separating the industrial from the artisanal. Guitar #1 (1993) seems to fit the latter bill perfectly. An acoustic instrument of wood cut to shape or carefully steamed and bent on a forming jig to establish the familiar hourglass contours of the guitar, it speaks clearly of the handmade.
But the other instruments shown here—Guitar (1982) or Steel Guitar (1985-86), for instance — are electric, constructed of wood, aluminum, and steel, materials we tend to associate with mass-production and the industrial. And they are equipped with off-the-shelf electric pick-ups (designed to convert the acoustic vibrations of the strings into electrical impulses) manufactured specifically for use in such guitars. Here the distinctions that have come to be established between the industrial and the handmade—between the object of mass production and the artisanal one-of-a-kind, between the artefact and the object of art — utterly break down. And it is here Favro has long found fecund artistic ground.
And it is here, too, where his guitars find a kind of equivalence in the factory-produced pianos of R.S.Williams. While Williams began his career within the artisanal context of the period, the pace of industrialization quickly changed all of that. Photographs of the Williams factory floor in Oshawa show rows of pianos in various stages of completion, and the scene resembles a cross between a large workshop and an assembly line. Those images —like Favro’s mixed media sculptures a century later—exactly capture the blurred transition occurring between the two realms.
The Williams Piano Company prospered through the early twentieth century, exporting pianos as far as Australia and New Zealand, South America, and throughout Asia. But in 1927, bankruptcy afflicted the Toronto-based parent company, R.S. Williams & Sons, and it was sold. With an eye towards growing markets, the new owners began manufacturing radios at the Oshawa factory (and in slow periods even produced canoes and rowboats8). But the Great Depression would be the piano factory’s undoing, and in 1931 it finally closed.
The factory complex itself has long since disappeared, victim to schemes of urban renewal that had no place for the old. “Make it new,” was the dictum the poet Ezra Pound translated from Confucius, and in another context that is exactly what developers and urban planner sought to do in Oshawa as in virtually every other city in mid-twentieth century North America. Like Hamilton, Ontario, birthplace of Carl Zimmerman and the locale for much of his photo-based art. Lost Hamilton Landmarks (1997) comprises a sequence of photographic images depicting architectural structures—inside and out—found in that city. Or actually, within a city of Hamilton that occupies a kind of aesthetic parallel universe, for these photographs are of structures that have never actually existed. Each image is actually of a small, highly detailed maquette Zimmerman painstakingly constructed for the express purpose of photography. The end result are fictional architectural spaces—places that might very well have been had twentieth century North America followed another, perhaps more socially and politically totalitarian, path.
These, then, are images of vast, industrial buildings, immense edifices dwarfing the (very) few people seen in their midst. And like the grandiose architecture of a Berlin that Albert Speer envisaged (though was never able to build) for Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, a city filled with colossal structures that subsumed the individual to das volks as embodied in the Führer, that is exactly what they are meant to do.
Zimmerman’s images depict spare, utilitarian spaces whose form is a pure expression of their function. Photographs in the Bouckley collection show spaces crammed with industrial belts and wheels transmitting power from one location to where it is needed for the job at hand. But in both, the spaces reflect the imperatives of certain efficiencies: in the historical photographs, the needs of production, in Zimmerman, the demands and consequences of a totalitarian social engineering.
The photographs of the R.S.Williams piano factory—of the things made there, and of the people who made them —are images that, in various ways and capacities, obviously matter to us greatly. They are, by way of example, important documentary evidence of an era in the history of Oshawa. And they also tell a key part of the story of the historical development of the music industry in Canada.
But we do need to constantly remind ourselves that they are not inert things, fixed, immutable and silent. Rather, like all images, they carry within them the capacity to shape (or re-shape) our perception of things that are indeed far removed from the dry particulars of what is represented within their borders. So by their situation within the curatorial framework of Piano Works: Imagining the R.S. Williams Piano Factory, these photographic images of almost a hundred years ago can reach forward and impact upon our experience—aesthetic or otherwise— of the contemporary works of art that have been gathered here.
And perhaps more importantly, that art —the sculptures and photo-based pieces by Ryan Legassicke, Alexander Graham, Murray Favro, and Carl Zimmerman— can, in turn, reach back and imagine for us possible new things in old photographs of a long-defunct piano factory gathered and preserved by one Tho. Bouckley.
Gil McElroy, February 2003
Notes
1 James Parakilas, et al. Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 311.
2 Parakilas, p. 7.
3Parakilas, p. 8.
4Ladislav Cselenyi-Granch. Under the Sign of the Big Fiddle: The R.S. Williams Family, Manufacturers and Collectors of Musical Instruments. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 1996, p. 12.
5 Soft maple is typically used for the legs of a piano, hard maple the cabinet, bridge, and action.
6Parakilas, p. 5.
7http://www.cuttsgallery.com/Artists/Favro/Favro-statement.html
8 Cselenyi-Granch, p. 103.
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