Pubs and brewing group Marston's, which owns the Pitcher and Piano chain, has suffered a slump in trading – but has outperformed rivals.
In June the company - which currently runs 2,200 pubs including the Pitcher & Piano chain - raised £165.6m from shareholders, and it intends to use the bulk of this money to build 60 large, food-led pubs over the next three years.
Sheila McKenzie, who had founded the female-friendly Pitcher & Piano chain, was enlisted to enact these changes, and the Slug and Lettuce concept has been described as her "brainchild".
Donald F. Mardak, 71, founded what is now International Monetary Systems in 1985 after building a chain of piano and organ retail stores in Milwaukee and other cities.
In one section it is played on Japanese taiko drums, metal bell plates, and piano strings beaten with chains.
Alas, even artsy design can't guarantee domestic couth, as we see in a short film by Kai Althoff and Isa Genzken, which finds a chain-smoking piano teacher (Ms. Genzken) gleefully asphyxiating an asthmatic pupil in a classically elegant music room.
Less glamorously (though this isn't in the literature) it was more recently a branch of the naff pub chain Pitcher and Piano.
Dressed in black, with a glinting nose stud and a terse yet thoughtful manner, he suggested less a Libeskind or a Piano than someone who might chain himself to a fence at a work site.
In chamber works for just two instrumentalists the scope for aleatory counterpoint and dense harmonies is significantly less than for orchestra, but these developments also influenced his orchestral style in late works including the Piano Concerto, Chantefleurs et Chantefables, Chain 2 and the Fourth Symphony, which require mostly conventional coordination.
While its revenues trailed those of the big Madison Avenue agencies when Ms. Beber and Ms. Silverstein were running the firm, it was noted for the quality of its accounts, among them Humana hospitals and insurance, Steinway pianos, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain and the National Education Association.
The drinks industry reconfigured again in March 1989 when, to head off complaints of a brewing monopoly, the Department of Trade and Industry forced the sale of thousands of tied pubs to a fledgling independent drinks sector (Wetherspoons, Firkin pubs, and Pitcher & Piano among the many new chains).
