Alfresco site key to genius
OUR Ida Valley mudbrick hotel had a neat old piano in the lounge, a lounge which once housed bareknuckle boxing contests in a makeshift ring. But in the mid’80s, it was taken away by the original owner.
It isn’t easy to replace a piano in such a desolate spot, but a friend over in the next valley picked one up in a local auction filled with useless objects and broken furniture, whanged $5 down under the auctioneer’s hammer, and had it delivered. The piano didn’t look much, but the inscription Made In Paris on the headboard gave it a whisper of class, even if subsequent research revealed it was more likely to have been made in Palmerston North. A very cheap cruise ship piano, the expert told us, form winning over content, even though it had virtually no form. Mr Strang, the piano tuner, then had a shoofty at it for me and said it was completely stuffed. He did a bit of tuning on the keys that still worked, but the piano was worthless.
I nevertheless played it at every opportunity. Some notes were a couple of tones away from concert pitch, others more. A really skilful pianist with a fine memory could have played a song tunefully on this piano by simply remembering how far away from intune each key was, then playing a song with hundreds of instant transcriptions and the reflexes of a panther. I could remember the F above middle C was A flat, but that was about it.
At the end of last year, I spied a very kitschy early ’80s Yamaha twin keyboard analogue organ at Restore for an impossibly reasonable price, and even though it was the weight of an elephant and I had seemingly no way of getting it to the Ida Valley, I bought it.
Men with a trailer, enormous strength and no interest in money, then came to the rescue. One of the Ida Valley lounge keyboards now had to go, and while I respect pianos infinitely as the lion in the jungle of musical instruments, that was the one I pointed at when enough people to move it came together there three weeks ago.
But what or where for this piano? Part of me said axe it into 1000 pieces, we could use the wood. But that seemed messy and insensitive. A far finer idea was to move it into long grass out in front of the hotel and leave it there as an example of extreme folk art, the stuff you find in the open country of West Texas. New Zealand has occasionally tried this, brassieres or boots crawling along a farm fence, but rural West Texas and its urban pop culture sensibilities, indeed, America, do it much better. I felt our Paris piano with grass growing right up to the keys would be just the thing, a photo opportunity to end all photo opportunities. Perhaps our oncenamed Railway Hotel would become The Piano Hotel.
To prove the potential of this, an artistic installation Creative New Zealand would have been held back with barbed wire from funding, a Bienneale Exhibition natural, I photoshopped the piano in the appropriate spot and put the image on Facebook.
Instant acclaim from hundreds of aesthetes.
So that was where the lifters lifted it to, and by hokey, it looked magnificent. How we had kept this poor piano trapped inside for so long was beyond belief. How could we have not realised its natural amphitheatre? This was a piano meant to be played outside. Only there would its atonal quonking complement the surrounding orchestra of rustling hedgehogs, sniffing ferrets, barking dogs, foraging rats, shrieking feral cats and the occasional whining of a disorientated turkey.
Playing this piano outside was a revelation. Not only did it sound perfectly in tune, but its melodies resonated right down the valley as if wind chimes hung on every tree. Cows turned their heads, magpies cawed. I myself, a less than mediocre pianist, sounded like Richter with Horowitz’s glass hands as I flung famous Beatles tunes and parts of Fur Elise into the yawning Central Otago sky.
I think the accompanying photo says it all.
❛ How we had kept this poor piano trapped inside for so long was beyond belief❜