A melancholy chord

A store with a 47-year tradition of tickling the ivories is closing its doors on Saturday.

Davis & Hosch Music Inc. is liquidating pianos after losing its lease. Gonzaga University purchased the building at 124 E. Sinto and plans to use half of it for the school’s inventory of merchandise it sells online.

Storeowner Kevin Rindlisbacher, a Salt Lake City native who owns Davis & Hosch with his wife, Jami Rindlisbacher, said fewer kids are playing piano and that’s hurting the industry.

“We compete with Xbox and the Internet,” said Rindlisbacher, who still owns several music stores in Utah.

Over the years, manufacturers and retailers have closed as they vie for a shrinking piece of the pie, he said.

Twenty-five years ago, more than 300,000 pianos were sold in the United States, he said. Last year Americans bought just 85,000 pianos.

Rindlisbacher purchased the business nearly two years ago from Jack and Normalu Cooper. The Coopers, who’d bought the store from original owners Howard Davis and Kermit Hosch, had operated it for about 15 years and were ready to retire.

Normalu Cooper, now 65, recalls that industry started reversing as early as 1978 when, as a music store employee, she noticed that “nine out of ten” customers were older adults purchasing easy-play organs.

“For $2,000 back then you could get a whale of a big organ,” Cooper recalls.

Keyboards came along a few years later and wiped out the demand for organs, she said. Pianos started being purchased primarily by schools, teachers and some students.

Six years ago, the Coopers moved the store from Maxwell Avenue and Monroe Street to its current location, on Sinto. They were working at the time with colleges, including Gonzaga, so moving to the area made sense.

In the past few weeks, Rindlisbacher has marked down inventory, which has boosted sales. Most of the pianos are being purchased by people who were thinking about buying, and were encouraged by the bargains, he said.

While there’s no quick path to mastering the ivories, Rindlisbacher, who has played for most of his life, hopes that a future generation of kids and parents might give the music form a second look.

“There’s not a lot of instant gratification in playing a piano,” he said. “But there’s an incredible amount of long-term value that one acquires from learning to play the piano.”