This is what it sounds like when pianos die
Weathered and degraded, three unsalvageable instruments get the chance to make music again in a concert showcase
Thomas Helton occasionally shares photos on his Facebook page of double basses in sorry shape. Some have endured traumatic damage, others are victims of wear and tear from being played for years. “I just love fixing things,” Helton says. “I enjoy bringing things back from the dead.” Helton’s most recent undertaking is related to that pursuit. Seventeen years ago he and a friend were rehearsing in an art space
on Commerce. There they found the remains of a piano.
“He found a string on the ground and a broom, and he made the piano do so many things,” Helton says of the friend. Helton, a bassist and composer, filed away an idea that will finally come to life this weekend. He searched Houston for three pianos that had turned a corner past the point of being salvaged. He reached out to three composers he knew and commissioned each to write a piece of music specific to that instrument. Their work will be showcased Sunday in a concert called Lost Keys.
“This isn’t really bringing the pianos back from the dead,” he says. “It’s more like giving the dead one more chance to do something. Like a zombie concert.”
Helton’s original idea was to have a series of shows at various degraded pianos that are in restaurants and clubs around town. The benefit was simple: The pianos would already be where they needed to be. But he worried the environment wouldn’t be as attentive. “The idea of somebody whacking on these instruments while somebody was at happy hour or trying to eat dinner just didn’t work,” he says.
So he set about looking for pianos that “were completely unsalvageable. That couldn’t be brought back. Pianos that are too far gone.”
He found one on Craigslist, a piano without its shell. “Just a big brass harp, basically, with strings on it strapped to a piece of wood,” Helton says.
It sat under a tarp in his yard, further eroding. A second piano was found with its keys sheared off. His third piano was found at the venue Super Happy Fun Land, where Helton plans to hold the Lost Keys show.
“I was running around town looking for pianos, and it turns out they have seven of them inside the venue,” he says. “I could have just done the whole thing there.”
So with guidance from Maria Del Carmen Montoya, a friend and innovative artist who teaches at George Washington University, Helton secured a grant for the project from the Houston Arts Alliance. He then paired his three composers — Hsin-Jung Tsai, Chapman Welch and Seth Paynter — with a devastated piano. Each composer was afforded time with the instrument to see what sort of sounds he or she could eke from its bones.
“They all come from different schools of composition,” Helton says. “Chapman works with a lot of electronics. Hsin-Jung is involved in theater. Seth does more free improvisation. So each should be different.”
He’s particularly enamored with the idea of using debris, essentially, to make new art.
“Our society tends to discard rather than fix things,” Helton says. “I like to work on things that are breakable.”
“This isn’t really bringing the pianos back from the dead. It’s more like giving the dead one more chance to do something. Like a zombie concert.” Thomas Helton