Pianodrome Blog
Piano action in words.
What’s so special about a Writers’ Round at the Pianodrome? by Eve Simpson
A beautifully written essay on why the Writers' Round format matters and why the Pianodrome is its perfect home.
Vamos Pianar
Dear all,
I hope you are doing well.
I wanted to briefly share a project that was directly inspired by the time I spent with you in 2023/2024.
After returning to Brazil, that experience encouraged me to start my own street piano project, Vamos Pianar ( Let's Play Piano?).
Into the Light
A little while back Nigel Shearing, the creator and curator of the Gallery of Piano Curiosities in Weymouth contacted Pianodrome. He had been playing around with some ideas using piano parts; keys, keyslips, slices of lids, interesting parts of the action, arranging them into pleasing geometric formations and illuminating them and he was dreaming big.
Strings Detatched
This is a picture, taken by our very own Ant Ravelo, of almost a decade’s worth of piano strings removed from defunct pianos destined for sculpture and stored on top of an ancient Broadwood which until recently was tucked away behind a wedge in a corner out of sight and out of mind.
CO2
It strikes me as nothing short of miraculous that trees and humans are symbiotic in that we humans breathe in oxygen while trees breathe it out. The opposite is true for Carbon Dioxide (CO2). One species’ waste is another species’ resource. How about that for circular economy? It turns out that chlorophyll – the chemical that allows trees to store sunlight – is very similar to the haemoglobin in our blood. The two chemicals differ in that the iron in haemoglobin makes our blood red and the magnesium in chlorophyll makes the trees’ leaves green.
Familiar things
8 February 2023
So much is so familiar here – I’ve heard the accents a thousand times before, seen the Starbucks and Krispy Kremes on their imperial advance into British culture, we have motorways and car culture back home too. And yet at the same time so much is alien – endless ads on the freeway: ‘WRECK?’ ‘Life is short. Get a divorce.’ ‘There IS evidence for God.’ Who’d have thoughts to call a supermarket ‘Harris Teeter or ‘Food Lion’.
Super Bowl
7 February 2023
Apparently the superbowl is coming up next week. ‘Oh I don’t really pay attention to it – I follow college football’ says Shawn, ‘if you don’t mind which team wins it’s just like watching a ball go back and forth in front of a camera.’ This has always been my experience with trying to watch American Football.
Everything’s bigger in America
Bryan Adams and Meatloaf suddenly make more sense when you’re actually working in a big warehouse with real american guys and power tools. It doesn’t seem so cliched or inauthentic when you’re surrounded by the same accents and the same big-ness that come across in these epic anthems about desire and manly, chivalrous love.
‘Everything’s bigger in America’ - this saying is true – big cars, big meals, big pianos, big skies, big roads… and big problems.
In the Kitsch-en
3 February 2023
I sit at the table – laptop out, an empy packet of crunchy granola ‘raisin bran’ awaits its transport to the recycling pile, reminding me that I don’t yet actually know when the binmen come. I’ve added another cardboard box to the overflowing pile of dry rubbish – and that will be full once the raisin bran goes in.
On the wall of the air BnB bungalow I’m staying in is a clear kitsch instruction - ‘EAT’ - the command is shouted at me in capital letters on a circular backing, made to look like it’s constructed from wooden slats, but also to look like a plate?
The boy in the laundry cupboard
2 February 2023
The boy in the laundry cupboard
We are being put up in a nice, small bungalow, with a handy porch for the car to live in. Driving is everything – my routine is car-based. There aren’t even pavements in the neighbourhood where our airB&B is based. There’s an open kitchen-livingroom and three bedrooms. When I arrived Tim was in one, but now I’m on my own – working in the days and having a few hours every evening to cook dinner, wash, catch up with emails and read or watch a bit of telly.
Two nights ago I was also doing my clothes washing when I got the fright of my life!
The first Pianodrome Charlotte volunteer day
31 January 2023
Today 9 volunteers turned up to get stuck in to taking apart pianos - it was an amazing experience to share what we know so well from back home, and to find such enthusiastic and like-minded people so far away.
