Note by Note

Given rapt attention and care in the framing, there is no more engrossing subject than man at work. The proof, yet again, is in director Ben Niles’ chronicle of the production of a single Steinway concert grand—a nine-foot beast that requires a plank the length of an anaconda, a year of assembly, and a small army of blue-collar technicians whose skills are as minutely focused and compartmentalized as a safecracker’s. Niles gathers testimonials from a variety of pianists to describe and demonstrate the variances of sound inherent to each Steinway, among the last of the handcrafted pianos. But they’re distractions from the drama in Steinway’s Queens factory, where a single slip of a “pizza wheel” wire stretcher or an imbalance of a few thousandths of an inch could ruin a $25,000 instrument. Niles and cinematographer Ben Wolf scrutinize each step as if it were Rififi‘s climactic heist, offering moments of fixated strangeness and wonder—as when a burly Croatian “belly man” installs perfect rows of teensy little notches in the bridge, using a swift, unhesitating repetition that seems more magical than robotic. The movie may sell the Steinway supremacy a bit insistently—no wonder a film link turns up on the manufacturer’s Web site—but as a study of stubborn artisanal tradition in the Pro Tools age, Note by Note is a stirring symphony of specialized labor.