Musical mice

Three decades ago, I worked for some years as an administrator in the Musicology department of the University here in Oslo. We had about a dozen rehearsal rooms equipped with pianos, and one of my duties was to check that they were in reasonable working order. (Students being students, they took a lot of abuse.) Those familiar with the workings of an upright piano will know that the keys actually go on for several inches inside the instrument. When you strike a key, the other end goes up and connects with the hammer through the ‘action’, a complicated series of levers, springs and assorted movable bits.

One day I found an abandoned mouse nest on the flat surface that the extended keys make inside the piano. This must have been a very smart mouse, because the nest was placed over the very lowest bass keys, which would seldom be used under normal classical playing. (A budding jazz or rock pianist might give them a bit of a pounding, though.) Even more impressive was the fact that the nest was built entirely from short lengths of cotton thread that had been patiently harvested from each of the 88 or so key actions. Every action is made from several small pieces of wood, felt and leather, and none of these had been touched.

Instead, the mouse had – consciously or not – managed to remove just about the only piece of the action that would not result in mechanical failure. I am not an expert on this, but it seems that the threads in question had some non-essential function, so that removing them made no noticeable difference to the ‘feel’ of the keyboard. I gathered up the beautiful little nest in an empty box and kept it in my office. Stupidly, I forgot to take it with me when I quit the job. Nils Erik Grande Oslo, Norway