Stay Connected
Music Department Reaches Crescendo with New Pianos
Hanshaw says that she is thrilled with the two new Boston pianos and their impact on her students. "It's wonderful because they are matched. I teach in the studio with the two pianos, and I use them constantly because I have a great emphasis on sight reading. ... We work on that very intensely, and that takes two pianos, because I'm playing one and the students play another. And that gives them a little push. If you're reading by yourself, it is much less demanding than if someone is right there, keeping that beat going. And students seem to like it very much. ... We've had two pianos that were not unhappy together, but these are relatives--close relatives--and that's just perfect."
"The department should stand for top quality, just as Holy Cross does ... the best quality product in the broadest sense--faculty, facilities," says Bill McCormick.
"I've been very successful in the piano industry," he continues, "and I've been very well rewarded by that success. So I thought it was appropriate to give a part of that back to Holy Cross, to which I can give some credit for that success."
Ana Alvarado, a Holy Cross capital gifts officer who has worked with Bill McCormick on these donations and who also attended the Steinway tour, calls him, "tremendously philanthropic"; she points out that he's involved with many institutions and organizations besides Holy Cross, particularly in the Washington, D.C./Md. area. McCormick lives in Potomac, Md., and his company is based in College Park, Md., with keyboard stores located in several metropolitan areas, including Washington, D.C.
In addition to being a member of the Holy Cross President's Council and the Washington Regional Campaign Committee for the Lift High the Cross Campaign, he is also affiliated with the Washington Performing Arts Society, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and other groups.
In 1983, he became sole owner of Jordan Kitt's Music (JKM), which regularly gives used instruments to inner-city schools in the D.C. area. "We have a pretty liberal budget," he says. "Our charitable giving budget is 18 percent of net income."
The company's endurance and exemplary status within the retail musical instruments industry--it has provided pianos to both the Kennedy Center and the White House--derive from its vision and persistence, according to McCormick. "You couldn't survive for 91 years in any business without a lot of effort to be the best that you can in each category."
Two key components of JKM's success have been its music instruction programs and its attention to cultivating skilled, dedicated employees through encouragement, classes, seminars, bonuses, extra commissions and more.
"We have several employees with over 30 years' tenure, and that is something that you do not see in very many companies today," says Joe McCormick, who notes that some of his co-workers remember the day he was born.
JKM's Keyboard Learning Centers offer private and group piano and keyboard instruction for all ages and ability levels, a program Bill McCormick believes is vital to the company's growth and reputation.
"We really believe in music education as the premise for our whole business," he says. "Obviously, if there were no piano teachers, there would be no piano students, no piano customers. ... And then, going around in a circle, we really believe that the promise we give customers--that they will enjoy playing, that it will be personally rewarding to them--is fulfilled only through music lessons. So all 11 of our stores have recital rooms that seat anywhere from 100 to 120 people, available to local area music teachers at no charge. Steinway grand pianos, of course, are on the recital stage. And in some of our better stores, we do as many as 250 recitals a year."
"It's clearly a way of our contributing to the community, but it's also a self-rewarding investment," he says. Thus, McCormick has found a way of joining some of the Jesuit philosophies he soaked up at Holy Cross with the business acumen he gained at Harvard Business School (M.B.A., 1961) and honed during subsequent years as a consultant for many Fortune 500 companies.
Likewise, Joe McCormick has learned about giving back; he and his father donated a Boston grand piano to the College's St. Joseph Memorial Chapel in 2001.
"The piano that was in that chapel was not up to the standards of the rest of the building," says Joe McCormick. "It was an old vertical piano that really could not efficiently carry the sound throughout the Chapel. We were fortunate enough to be in a position to make a significant improvement to that, so it seemed like the right thing to do."
Joe McCormick has another strong connection to the Chapel. He and his wife, Ann Marie Boole McCormick '95--who is the operations manager and divisional vice president for the Bethesda, Md., branch of UBS PaineWebber--were married there in 2001.
In summarizing the generosity of the McCormicks, Grunstein says, "The gifts that Bill and Joe McCormick have given to Holy Cross are extraordinary, and are a tremendous source of inspiration for music-making among our students and faculty. My hope is that the music department concerts will attract an even greater cross section of the Holy Cross and Worcester communities, so that the inspiration can be all the more far-reaching."
Cadigan is a freelance writer in Stamford, Conn.