Open Writing

"I love a piano, I love a piano … " runs the song by Irving Berlin, and I do! I don't know when I fell in love with the instrument, but for as long as I can remember the piano has been one of my bestest favouritest musical instruments. Perhaps it is its notational and tonal range, its many voices, its versatility, or the way it lends itself to the touch of tyro and genius with equal and cheerful compliance.

I wanted to be a concert pianoforte player since my earliest days, but like many others of my young life’s dreams, that too fell by the wayside and was trampled underfoot of men. Not that I am blaming anyone but myself for failing to reach the standard of Charlie Kunz, Les Dawson, or Daniel Barenboim. My fault, so I’ll take the hit fair and square.

I had my eye on a piano early. I don’t know whether my feeling towards it reached the lofty status of coveting, but I wanted it. It was my Grandmother’s underused and underappreciated Pianola that stood in her Holy of Holies, untouched by anything except a full length white cotton crocheted runner, a petroleum fruit bowl that never harboured fruit, and the occasional yellow duster.

Perhaps I should have told Nanny that I’d appreciate her passing the instrument on to me when she shuffled off her non-musical mortal coil, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you said to my Nanny unless you had lost interest in keeping your teeth in your gums.

I was eating grapes, oranges, and dust in Cyprus when Nanny died, unexpectedly and before her time. The disposal of her stuff was carried out, quite properly, without reference to me. Auntie Nora got the Pianola. When on leave, I did get to pop a roll into its secret ark and pedal my way through classics, barrel house, and all between. Funny, I didn’t think Auntie would ever get rid of it. But, she did.

I was taken aback when I learned that she had traded ‘my heart’s best treasure’ for a China cabinet. It was a very pretty cabinet in mock figured walnut or, perhaps, mock knurled poplar, double-bowed front, and cabriole legs. Nevertheless, despite its apparent beauty, it didn’t know what to make of a Pianola roll!

However, one that on intimate terms with disappointment doesn’t fret for long, and I did find a piano for sale. It had a wooden frame, so it couldn’t rust like the cast iron frame of the Pianola, and it had no cogs, chains, bellows, red and black rubber air tubes, and other mechanical paraphernalia to keep in fettle.

Then a Pianola would have cost several hundred pounds, but the upright best-days-behind-it model I purchased cost a measly and affordable three pounds, and they let pay for it on the drip system. It stood in the best room of 16 Brock Bank and I played the heart out of it when I came home on leave from the Army. I was not particularly skilled, but I was enthusiastic – and loud!

Although no one that knew the rudiments of music would consider me even a fair player, our next door neighbour’s ailing mother thought I was wonderful. So, I played my heart out for Doris Giles’ dying mum through the dividing wall. Perhaps it was a magic wall that filtered out all the wrong notes and harmonised the right ones, or perhaps she had a magic heart that did the same, but whatever it was, she loved it.

After I left Huddersfield to give folks in the South of England a treat for several troubled years I never saw it again. I forgot to ask whither it went, but whitherever it was it whithered to, it provided several more square feet of living space in mother’s house, after that it had whithered.

Several years passed and none of my quick-changing and temporary situations were conducive to my having a piano, for they can be the very devil to move when one moves, and there was still the matter of the abandoned church organ I left in the loft of ‘The Chapel’ at Knapp Road, Cheltenham when I moved out.

I did have the loan of one when John Collier, pianoforte artiste extraordinare, blessed me by being my lodger. That was a boudoir grand piano of good make and tone. John left, and it left soon afterwards because I didn’t keep up the payments.

When I came to settled times I figured that it was piano time again and asked around. It didn’t matter how many people I asked, the answer was always the same: "I smashed ours up a week ago!"

This was a time when all the world and his dog had a piano at home. This was a time when other kinds of entertainment were readily available both inside and outside the home.

In pre-radio days, a home without a piano was like a coffin without a lid: curiously incomplete. People played the piano, children took piano lessons, and many a house had a brass plaque announcing the residence as that of a "Teacher of Pianoforte," as did Miss Moss’s house on Bow Street, just to the right of the ascent to the Springwood footpath. However, times changed.

Cinemas were built in battalions, variety theatres prospered, straight theatre had a faithful following, along came wireless radio, clockwork gramophones, and the poor domestic piano began to be neglected, then forgotten, and was forced down in the amusement scale, losing most of its earlier importance. It was the dreaded ‘Twilight for the piano’ – and after that the dark!

Pianists were forced to practice for long hours every day to become more than pedestrianally proficient. Ten hours minimum for concert pianists of any calibre, and when sunshine lured non-musical Philistim outdoors to laugh and play in park, street, and field, going-to-be piano players were obliged to endure intolerable heat thumping out their lives on ivory keys to such an extent that most pianists grew to hate African and Asian elephants and Gaboon ebony trees. What their feelings towards their taskmasters grew into is not recorded in genteel journals.

The unfairness of their situations became evident when effort to reward ratios were computed. Piano players did all the hard work and got none of the acclaim, fame, or wealth of languid crooners, and volume after volume of Victorian piano music was turned to serve purposes other than that for which they had been painstakingly and lovingly created.

Children that took piano lessons became social outsiders, circus freaks, as children with and without talent filled their homes with wonderful and not-so-wonderful music by turning a knob, flipping a lever, or cranking a gramophone handle to bring forth music and song as if the auditors were present in the concert hall, theatre, dance hall, or promenade. Yet, they were not.

Those of us that has no pianos and less talent but that were nonetheless called upon by Saint Cecilia and assorted muses to make music, grasped hold of and became passably proficient on kazoos, called Tommy-Talkers by Northernly Code-Talkers, combs-and-paper, ocarinas, jaws harps that were mistakenly called Jews’ harps, mouth organs, spoons, knick-knacks hewn from of slate or fashioned from bovine rib bones, Swanee whistles, battered Boer War period brass bugles, sans mouthpieces, lengths of gas tubing, and other quaint springs of harmony. No talent needed, you practised as you played, and played as you practised, and whatever it sounded like it sounded good because it was your own.

Pianos became 1000 pound gorillas, white elephants, Berlin Walls, termite tenements, woodworm habitat, Death-watch beetle camp grounds, unnamed obstructions, surplus to requirement, tenuous links to bygone days, and sooner rather than later a musically declining nation asked "Why, since no one plays that thing since Great Aunt Nellie died, does we let it take up the space we could use for another settee so we can all sit down in the same room in comfort after dinner?"

You can make up your own answer, but it always ends with a settee coming in and the piano going out, although the wise move the piano out before attempting to get the settee indoors.

That should have been good news for someone like me that wanted to take a piano in. The problem faced was that people now found pianos as welcome and as useful as Crimean Cannons, but hadn’t figured out what do about their disposal. They wouldn’t fit in Corporation dustbins, and if you threw them in the canal they were hazardous to small boys, steam shipping, horse drawn barges, and escapist fishermen.

If only someone had come up with the notion of putting a big sign in their front windows, "Piano - Free to any kind of home!" I might have got a piano. However, the solution that more than 90% solved the nation’s piano glut had nothing to do with a piano in every piano-lovers’ home. It was much more primitive than that.

Down numberless centuries, and even longer, the British have excelled at inventing games and sports that seem odd, eccentric, even bizarre, to less favoured mortals, and this is what they did with the over-abundance of unused uprights.

How they arrived at the exact size of the hole remains a matter of sub-earnest discussion in sports circles, although it must be said that it rates lower on agendas than discussions on official weights and sizes of knurr and spell equipment. The hole was officially declared to be twelve inches by twelve inches square by the ‘Pianos Gone Now League,’ and at one foot square by the "Say ‘Goodbye’ It’s Going Soon Federation." Thankfully, the difference in hole size did not result in any acrimonious legal struggles, torts, liens, or writs of habeas pianius.

Said holes were cut by master carpenters in old front doors, the doors firmly braced so that they would stand perpendicular, when teams of two, armed with sledge hammers, smashed once-prized pianos into pieces small enough to pass unhindered through the holes without unseemly jostling. The first to get all their piano parts through the hole were the winners. Some serious ale supping, facilitated by the competitions being held, sensibly, outside public houses, marked the end of a tournament, and also the end of two pianos per match.

The sport reached its height in the 1960s, when its popularity rose in inverse proportion to the number of intact domestic pianos in the British Isles.

It is due to the constant operation of malignant karma that my need for a piano always kept in lockstep with the availability of unwanted pianos, but always a week behind. It was this disastrous cosmic control of timing that brought forth without fail to my ardent pleas for a piano, the unfailing response, "Excuse my guffaws, but did you say you wanted a piano?" To which I recurrently replied, "Yes," and that response was invariably met with a much too cheerful, "You should have said. We smashed ours up last week!"

© 2010 – Ronnie "Pianoless" Bray

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