Public pianos deliver sour note

Public pianos have been installed throughout Montreal and the city is promoting them as a way to “liven up the public domain and create social spaces conducive to outdoor creativity.”

But living as I do a stone’s throw away from the public piano at the corner of Monkland and Harvard, I must strike a different note.

Whether we are out in the garden or indoors with the windows open, we hear the piano whenever it is played. And it is played a lot, all day long, from 7:30 in the morning, even on weekends, to 10 at night. It’s been there since mid-June and will apparently remain for another month.

Occasionally, we are lucky enough to have a true musician play a style of music we enjoy at a time when we’re not trying to concentrate. Instead, most of the time we get small children banging away tunelessly, older kids practising Chopsticks, or pianists going into intolerably long jazz improvisations. It’s much like listening to a dog barking all day long.

Monkland is already a lively street and doesn’t need a public piano to liven it up or create a social space, especially when it is a serious disturbance to nearby residents.

Last year, the piano was at the corner of Oxford, making it virtually impossible for us to sit in our backyard and read. Now we have the noise coming in even louder through our front windows. The only way to get some peace and quiet is to shut all our windows. Why should we have to do that in the middle of our all-too-short summer so passersby can amuse themselves?

I suggest that the piano be put back in N.D.G. Park (where it started out a couple of years ago), which is not only by definition a recreational space, but also at a greater distance from houses. If, for some reason, it has to be on Monkland — and I would like to know why — it should be at a different location every year, preferably more than a block away from the preceding year’s spot.

We have had two summers ruined now by the public piano. There are hundreds of street corners in N.D.G. It’s time to give N.D.G. residents who live near the corners of Harvard and Monkland and Oxford and Monkland some much-needed relief. Karin Montin, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce