by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

My search, dear readers, for information about the history of my piano (Miller 40603) prior to its appearance in my rehearsal room at Michigan Technological University is, for the moment, stalled. I am here in the Keweenaw Peninsula, where my piano and I met, for another week. Perhaps in that time I will find a clue about its life prior to our first contact. I still believe very much in the potential for this story to be instructive and inspiring. But I have to be ready to accept a dead end. (Please, let it not be so!)

But…if nothing comes of my search for information about this wonderful instrument, I can still go back the 2,000 miles I have traveled away from my piano, stop worrying about where it has been, and just enjoy playing it! It is a wonderful, life-affirming experience to call forth musical sounds from that keyboard, and it feels like a privilege to know that I am only one of perhaps just a few to have shared that joy. Maybe that should be enough. Nevertheless, I would still like to know more about the probably small community of which I am now a part.

If that doesn’t work out, my exploration in the Michigan Technological University Archive has already produced something else that is really intriguing. In 1913, there was a major strike in the Keweenaw peninsula. The Western Federation of Miners had organized in the area, which was economically dominated by the fiercely anti-union Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. The local union members went on strike for better wages and working conditions. It was a time of bitter strife between the workers and the mines. Before its end, it would result in the horrible Italian Hall disaster, during which the still extant ballroom of the Calumet Theater would become a makeshift morgue for the seventy-three fatalities, sixty-two of them children.

During that same tumultuous year, when the social fabric of the Keweenaw seemed to be coming apart at the seams, the Matinee Musicale Club of Calumet was founded and federated. The organization was formed by a group of women in and around Calumet as part of a national movement to organize women around the goal of improving understanding and experience of their musical culture. This movement was built on the traditional expectation for women to develop some musical facility—usually at the piano—as a sign of social cultivation.

One of the interesting aspects of the “yearbooks” of this organization was how the membership lists very quickly changed from Mrs. John Q. So-and-so, to using the women’s own names. This change happened within four years, though it was not a consistent convention for the next few decades.

They began by studying the music of dead white composers from the previous century, but within a short time were exploring women composers from the new world, and the new century.

I don’t yet know who the founding members were, beyond reading their names. Were they only the wives of the mine owners and executives? Or were there some members from outside that circle? I know that some of the members decades later were from working-class families, because I recognize some of them. They were still movers and shakers in the musical community when I came along in the eighties. How long did that democratization take? How did this group and others like it in the area influence the culture of the community in general?

If I continue to find only dead-end streets on my journey to learn about my piano, there is another fascinating story to be explored. It is a story of our American musical culture in an isolated, but once-thriving industrial community. It is possibly a story of how the attention of a group of women to nurturing that culture may have helped create a much more resilient community that enabled it to survive the inevitable decline of its primary industry, and allowed it to remain vibrant into the twenty-first century.