Loading ...- Category:
- Soap Box
- Author:
- Phil Scott
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Writers are always told: write about what you know. So I’m going to write about pianos. Don’t worry, there is a point to this.
The piano as we know it has been around for about 250 years. Before that there was the harpsichord, which the famous conductor Thomas Beecham described as sounding like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.
The piano produces sound through wooden hammers, cushioned with felt, striking stretched strings. But that simplifies a very intricate and delicately balanced mechanism.
If they weren’t so complex, pianos would only play at one dynamic level (like the harpsichord): as it is, the piano is touch-sensitive and can sound loud, soft or anything in between.
With a pedalling device, you can make the sounds linger on into the stillness.
Mozart used the piano to capture joy and tender beauty. Beethoven chose it for dramatic conflict. The French loved it: Debussy used it to create the sound of moonlight, Satie to embody a dry wit, and Olivier Messiaen to catalogue three and a half hours of birdsong.
Liberace made it camp; Thelonious Monk made it cool. A hundred years ago every household had one, and it’s been at the centre of popular music, white and black, for most of the last century.
It has starred in many movies. Polanski’s movie The Pianist tells the true story of Wladislaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust simply because he could play the piano.
For the recent Sydney Festival, artist Luke Jerram brought his Play Me I’m Yours collection of street pianos to the city. They were set up in various spots, and anyone was invited to sit down and whack out a tune. The idea had worked brilliantly in Birmingham and Sao Paulo, the point being to encourage people to take notice of their neighbours and community.
Unfortunately, the Sydney Festival people goofed and put one at the bottom end of Oxford St (as in rock bottom), on the steps down to Burton St. As anyone who has suffered -˜the lockout’ knows, that’s near where the thugs hang out drinking, before venturing up the hill to bash poofters in an ice-fuelled homophobic rage, spurred on by a lack of confidence in their own sexuality.
On Australia Day (Bogan Day, I call it) the Burton St piano had 90 percent of its hammers ripped out. A sad end for the symbol of the cultural achievements of Western civilisation.
I don’t carry a gun. Only macho poseurs in the outer suburbs do that.But if I did, and I’d seen that piano being dismembered, I would have killed without mercy or forethought. It would have been like seeing someone cut open your pet dog and pull out the intestines.
Murder is an extreme act, sure. But if we don’t owe it to Liberace, we certainly owe it to Mozart and Debussy.
Tags: Beethoven, Debussy, harpsichord, Liberace, Luke Jerram, Mozart, piano, Sydney Festival, The Pianist, Thelonius Monk, Thomas Beecham
