Print edition: 
This is not the age of pianos. This is the age of the economic meltdown, recession, shrinking retirement savings, catastrophic budget cuts and government bailouts, followed by public outrage at bailouts.
Pianos?
No.
But at the music department at Wichita State University on Thursday, the piano fleet arrived. Ten new Yamaha P22s.
Music students and teachers stared at them happily. Sterling Gray, a guitarist and a teacher, caressed the keys.
"This is so great," he said.
At a time when education budgets are being gutted, a time when pianos look like quaint luxuries, a group of small-gift donors banded together in the past three years. They bought or pledged to buy 21 new Yamaha pianos to replace 26 exhausted, half-century-old pianos in the music department at WSU that have been played morning, noon and night since the 1950s.
They hope to replace the other five played-out pianos soon.
How they did it and why is a story that ought to have a soundtrack put to it.
About three years ago, WSU music alums including Denny Senseney — a tuba player who had to play those old pianos in Duerksen Fine Arts Center to get his music degree back in the 1960s — found out that the 26 pianos were wearing out; it was embarrassing how sour they sounded.
There are 350 music students there now; semester after semester every student had to play to pass. Even if they played tuba, they had to take piano classes to get their music degrees.
They played Beethoven and Gershwin to pass, played Beatles for pleasure; they played all day and night, hundreds of students every semester going into soundproof rooms and stroking keys.
One keyboard was missing six keys. The pianos all sounded tinny; most of them couldn't be tuned anymore.
Senseney and other friends of WSU got their heads together. Kelly Callen, a co-owner of Edmiston Oil Co., wasn't a music major.
"I was more fine arts; but I had volunteered at the zoo where we'd done some good by asking donors to adopt an animal,'' she said. "So I said why not try to get people to adopt a piano, and see whether we could get 26 pianos."
They've almost done it; John Paul Johnson, the director of the music department, put 10 new Yamahas on display in the hallway at Duerksen Fine Arts Center on Thursday. They already had received a shipment of five; pledges will bring the total of new pianos to 21.
"I almost can't believe this is happening," he said, as Gray played a few quiet notes beside him.
Senseney, who is retired from Senseney Music, said Callen's idea worked well. Most of the donors, he said, are patrons of the arts in Wichita, some of them graduates of WSU's school of music.
One pair of names on one of the adopted pianos on display Thursday: WSU president Don Beggs and his wife, Shirley, a voice major in her college days.
Other donors include a family who donated to honor their mother and another family who donated to honor a family member and WSU music major killed in Vietnam.
Senseney, Callen, Johnson and others arranged a price for the pianos that they hoped would help attract donors; Yamaha, the manufacturer, and Senseney Music agreed to sell the pianos for half of their usual $10,000 price.
What this means, Johnson said, is that the music department that has given the world thousands of music teachers and musicians and music lovers is going to continue to do so, while sounding a lot sweeter in those soundproof rooms.
