Buried in a recent press release under the innocuous headline “CBS Announces Euromarket Debt Offering” there was some interesting news for the music public. After a cursory summary of financing plans incidental to a raft of new acquisitions in magazines and cable television, the December 3 release got to its main business: CBS has decided to sell its properties in the musical instrument field. The release didn’t say which properties were involved, but it did announce that they would be disposed of at a loss, and that the adviser to CBS in the disposition process would be James D. Wolfensohn, Inc., the investment banking firm led by, and named for, a man who is powerful in the financial community and an advisory director of the Metropolitan Opera, chairman of the board of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, and a close associate of violinist Isaac Stern and other musical notables.

As both the next day’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal properly printed, CBS’s musical holdings include such varied properties as Fender guitars, Gulbransen organs, Rogers drums, Rhodes electronic pianos, Gemeinhardt flutes and piccolos, Lyon & Healy harps, Rodgers organs—and Steinway pianos. The first six trademarks, with the possible exception of Lyon & Healy harps, seem like little more than the flotsam and jetsam of the band and pop worlds, monuments to corporate shoppers’ insatiable appetite for last year’s marketing successes. But Steinway & Sons, the 132-year-old piano maker, is a commercial and artistic horse of another