The Piano That Found Me: The Long Story of a Young Chang Grand
When I was fourteen, a grand piano appeared on my family’s lawn. It took me years to understand it was a gift from a whole Spokane community, and now it has a home at Hamilton Studio.
When I was fourteen, I came home to find a grand piano waiting on our front lawn. It gleamed there where it had no business being, and I did the only thing a fourteen-year-old pianist could do: I sat down and played. Neighbors drifted out of their houses to listen. For a little while, an ordinary Spokane street became a concert hall with no walls.
Who leaves a grand piano on a lawn? It took me years to understand that the answer was not one person. It was a whole community.
A century-old upright and a shop full of pianos
I started piano at six with Mary Toy, the Spokane teacher who guided me for the next twelve years, until I was eighteen. (She is still living, now approaching her 104th birthday.) My first instrument was a beloved upright that was already a hundred years old, and I outgrew it quickly.
So I practically moved into the piano shop. Davis & Hosch, owned by Normalu Cooper and her husband Jack, became my second home. I would practice for hours, drifting from instrument to instrument like a bee working a meadow of flowers. I needed the room. Under Mary Toy I was already taking on music like Liszt’s fiendish Mephisto Waltz, repertoire our old upright could not keep up with. While I played, my mother and Normalu would sit and play cards, two friends passing the afternoon to the soundtrack of a kid performing well beyond his years.
A conspiracy of love
Everyone in that shop could hear what was happening: Normalu and Jack; Scott Cowles, the technician who has tuned my pianos since I was eight; and Normalu’s friend Mary Moldenhauer, widow of the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer. A small circle of Spokane’s music community arrived together at the same conclusion. The boy needed a real instrument, and someone should make it happen.
Someone did. What looked like a miracle was really a conspiracy of love: a community deciding, behind the scenes, that this talent would not go unanswered. The gift asked for nothing in return, and I have spent my career trying to live up to it.
The piano that never left
I left Spokane in 1996 to study at Indiana University, and then spent fifteen years in Ireland. The Young Chang stayed in Spokane the whole time, waiting. My family and I came home in 2018, just ahead of the pandemic, and the piano was exactly where I had left it.
Scott never stopped caring for it. Recently he rebuilt it, a six-foot-eight Young Chang, and gave it a German action. I have always loved the instrument’s voice, warm and European and never harsh, and now the action matches the tone. In my words, Scott “hot-rodded” it: a Spokane body with a European heart, at a size made to fill a room.
A home for the whole city
This is where my wife, Rhona Gouldson-Chen, takes up the story. When the two of us set out to launch a piano-centered concert series, Hamilton Studio needed a better instrument, and the pieces fell into place. In her words:
Archie and I wanted to launch a piano-centered concert series, and Hamilton Studio needed a better instrument. I love life’s synchronicities, when everything comes together at the perfect moment. Now the piano that once appeared on Archie’s front lawn has a home where all of Spokane can enjoy it. It’s a beautiful full-circle moment.
Rhona Gouldson-Chen
So the instrument that found a boy has, at last, found its home. It lives at Hamilton Studio now, freshly voiced, with the whole story still running through it, and anyone in Spokane can come and hear it sing. It is the heart of The Living Piano, our concert series built around this one storied grand.
Encore!
On Sunday, November 1, 2026 at 3:00 p.m., Rhona and I will play it together in Encore! An All-French Piano Matinée: Debussy, Fauré, Poulenc, Ravel, and Yann Tiersen, in solo works and at four hands. Two pianists, one piano, and one long story, finally in a room full of people, listening.
The concert is at the Hamilton Studio Listening Room, 1427 W. Dean Ave., Spokane. Doors open at 2:30, and tickets are $40 at hamilton.live. You can read the full event details here.
