Unsung icons: The unplayed piano A sentimental keepsake

COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE

Of all the objects that we keep in our homes, none thrum with quite the potential of musical instruments. The sinuous lines of a guitar, for example, not only make music, they also look beautiful. Pop a guitar up on a stand and it functions as an erstwhile corner sculpture that suggests a certain homeowner might be way more bohemian or talented than he or she actually is. Yet for all of the mid-life-crisis chic on offer through a collection of six-strings – “bought it at the five and dime, played it ’till my fingers bled, guess what season and year it was” – nothing was ever quite as elegant, respectable and stolid as having a piano.

These came in a variety of forms. If you were one of those folks who was well enough off to use the word “our” preceding “beach” or “jetty”, had staff who “felt like part of the family”, the choice was a baby grand finished in a black so shiny it verged on the opalescent. With the top hinged open, it sat somewhere between an open-jawed anime monster and Viennese opera house by way of Hans Wegner. Even the accompanying stool was cushioned in a plush jewel-toned velvet and bore the faint imprint of bored bottoms belonging to owners who had to play interminable scales when what they really wanted to be doing instead was playing interminable Scalextrics.

Long before we received our shots of self-esteem via someone we could barely tolerate at school – and have rarely seen since – complimenting our breakfast on Insta, pianos were heavy-hitting status symbols. Their mere presence spoke of refinement, high culture and elegant Mozart-laced evenings where robber barons and their painted wives retired to the library for cigars, port and discussions about “the Palestine problem”. Or at least the upmarket Australian version. So valued were these instruments they virtually required their own staff. Twice a year, a piano tuner would come in to perform his perfectly pitched necromancy and, if you were especially lucky/cursed, there would arrive on your doorstep weekly a worldweary emigre teacher who’d wallow in a funk of passive aggression only broken by outbursts of “I said ‘fortissimo’.”

Like we said, though, the domestic baby grand was a rare beast in suburban Australia. If there was a piano that most of us grew up with, it was the upright variety – a compact set-up of 88 keys in a timber housing that could be easily accommodated under the stairs of the myriad terrace houses that dotted our suburbs. If the baby grands were the Bentleys of the piano world, then the uprights were the Toyota Camrys: tough, boxy and requiring little maintenance to do the job for which they were created. They were also far more democratic in that it didn’t feel the least bit disrespectful banging out the odd festive ‘Chopsticks’ or whatever few notes had lodged in your head during those long afternoons of instructive tedium where your parents reminded you that they “paid good money for these lessons and you were bloody well going to practise.”

Many a piano was purchased with evenings of Von Trapp-style family singalongs in mind. And for a few, these might actually have even eventuated. For the majority, however, two things accumulated: dust and a growing stack of sheet music lying concealed within the stool’s flip-topped recess. This functioned as a repository of a family’s musical pretensions and aspirations, their enthusiasms and follies.

“IF THE BABY GRANDS WERE THE BENTLEYS OF THE piano WORLD, THEN THE UPRIGHTS WERE THE TOYOTA CAMRYS”

Most of the time, however, the family piano simply stood silent, occupying valuable floor space in a still remonstration that it alone would never be able to supply either talent or dedication. And yet, these items over the mute years acquired a sentimental weight that was easily on a par with their physical one.

They became keepsakes, intrinsically tied to the memory of those who purchased or actually played them, which meant that heaven forbid you even suggested getting rid of it when you moved. Pianos, unplayed and unloved, therefore accompanied Aussies from home to home, as we downsized, upgraded, sea changed and tree changed.

Because someday, someone might flip it open and finally, all the money and the schlepping would have been worth it.