Cunningham Piano Company and Factory

Enriching lives through music.
By Brenda Lange

About 100 years ago, more than 350,000 pianos were sold annually in the United States. In those days, the piano was a piece of furniture that provided hours of entertainment for the family and served as a centerpiece for parties. Back then, the piano was where the television is today.

Just after the turn of the 20th century, Cunningham Piano Company on Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia was one of 350 piano manufacturers in this country; one of 12 in Philadelphia alone. Today, they take pianos that were built then and restore them; refurbish, renovate and rebuild graceful old instruments created in an earlier time.

“We are one of the largest piano rebuilding shops in the country,” said Tim Oliver, a co-owner of Cunningham. “We take 100-year old high-quality pianos, refinish them, and they will play, sound and look the way they did when they were new. We bring them back to life.”

Sometimes they sound even better after Cunningham technicians work their magic, as Monica Polowy Winter found out when the company rebuilt her 1923 Kurtzmann baby grand, a wedding present from her mother to her father in 1949.

“This piano had great sentimental value, but it became hard to practice on as the action (the interior moving parts) deteriorated,” said Winter. “The moment I had it back and started playing, it was magical. The action is uniform and responsive and the tone is vibrant. It was a total transformation.”

Up until WWII, piano manufacturing thrived in this country. But during the war, Cunningham closed its doors, and when they reopened around 1946, interest in pianos had changed, so they reinvented themselves and became a restorer of pianos.

“Demand declined, but it never went away,” said Oliver. “Today there are only five piano builders in the whole country.”

And Cunningham is once again one of them. Through their years of restoration work, the company had connections to the best parts suppliers. Using their own design, a new generation of Cunningham pianos was born, filling a niche in the mid-priced piano market.

Cunningham works with some of the top names in the industry—Steinway, Bösendorfer, Kohler & Campbell, Knabe, Baldwin and others. It can take from five months to a year to fully refurbish a baby grand in their 12,000 square-foot factory. Around the corner, the 25,000 square-foot showroom holds gleaming examples of their workmanship. This showroom is often opened to school groups on tour, as part of the company’s outreach-to-the arts program.

Cunningham is owned and operated today by Oliver, who’s worked there since 1997, and Rich Galassini, who has been at Cunningham for 23 years. Staff longevity and quality are hallmarks at Cunningham, which hires people from around the world to work there.

“Some of our people have been through Steinway and Bösendorfer training. “We send our people around the world to learn and bring back the best techniques in piano construction, reconstruction and technology,” said Galassini.

Specialized craftsmen work with the keys, strings, and technology of the inner workings of the complex instruments, known as the action. They work on the pin blocks and the strings, doing the “belly work” on the soundboard and bridges. Then, skilled woodworkers build the cabinets for the pianos. Top piano technicians can work with all four of the fields involved in piano reconstruction, including the top tier known as concretization, where minute changes are made that make a piano great.

“People don’t realize how complicated this work is,” explained Galassini. “It can take two years to hand build a piano.”

It took nearly a year to rebuild Nora Frank’s 1920 Duo-art-pianola, a Steinway parlor grand. A piano teacher for 30 years, she taught Galassini, and had often brought students to visit the shop over the years when they needed to buy a piano.

When her piano tuner told her he could no longer tune the heirloom, she felt as if she was losing a member of the family. “They respected my feelings at Cunningham as they completely restored it from top to bottom,” remembered Frank. “Almost all the parts were replaced and they recaptured the tone I can remember from when I was a teenager. It’s back in all its glory.”

Cunningham Piano Company is located at 5427 Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia. For more information, call (215) 438-3200 or visit www.cunninghampiano.com.

Brenda Lange is a Doylestown-based freelance writer (www.brendalange.com).