Quietloud

Sarah Small at the Granton Pianodrome watercolour by Tim Vincent-Smith

Pianoforte (Italian) = Quietloud (English)

Cycle touring viola-da-gamba player Sarah Small played at the Pianodrome in Granton last night and the experience was quite extraordinary for its so quiet, humble delivery of such a loud and powerful message.

Sarah asked me how the Pianodrome came about and I told her the story of how, ten years ago I was playing in my band, S!nk, and we used to do improvised acoustic gigs in-the-round in interesting sonic spaces, art galleries, parks, churches, oil tanks. I was also making furniture from found materials, driftwood, stuff I found in skips and so on. I made a window seat for a musician friend from an upright piano I found in Sam Burns’ junkyard and then I got a commission from another musician friend for a mezzanine bed and staircase which I made entirely from two upright pianos. I was inspired to address unsustainable attitudes to the use of materials and to ‘waste’. As a musician and carpenter the idea of throwing pianos into landfill seemed crazy to me.

Around this time my partner and I moved to a third floor flat in Abbeyhill and by chance employed Gerry Love of Edinburgh Piano Moves to transport our wonderful Challen Grand Piano, gifted to my partner by a family friend, up the three flights of tennament stairs. I asked Gerry if he ever had any spare pianos? He showed me three uprights he had in his van destined for the dump. Could he possibly drop them off at my studio at St. Margarets House? He did so the next day free of charge and over the coming months more upright pianos kept arriving in the stairwell there. As they were deemed a fire hazard I kept snaffling them away until I had 12 or so in a room in a circle. I took off my shoes and ran round the keyboards in my socks.

Pling, Plong, Plang!

I sat down on top of a piano and looked at the central stage space with raked piano seating all around. The idea for the Pianodrome was born.

Also around this time my good freind and bandmate Matt (Leon) Wright started The Forge, an open community metal and wood workshop on a brownfield site in Fountainbridge. With our hard-earned gig money S!nk bought a 40ft shipping container, plonked it down at The Forge and gave Gerry Love the keys. Within a month the container was filled with pianos. We started pulling them apart and prototyping curved tiered seating structures with a bucket of fire burning piano offcuts in the middle to keep us warm.

Leon worked for the Science Festival at the time and had considerable energy and experience towards large scale, big budget, community engagement projects. He pegged Pianodrome as a winner and set about gathering funding, partnerships, musicians and community around the idea. The story of how together we made the first Pianodrome at Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh is beautifully told in a short documentary film by Melt the Fly called ‘Instruments in the Architecture’.

Why am I writing all this?

Because Sarah’s gig last night reconnected me with the fire that drove me to invent the Pianodrome. Hearing her play so quietly and beautifully I felt that the Pianodrome was quite literally made for this. It struck me that ‘piano’ litterally means ‘quiet’. I was painting a watercolour and at one point I suddenly felt that the almost inaudible sound of my brush on the paper was too loud. The Quietdrome. And the quieter she played the closer we listened, journeying together into the intimacy and inifinty at the centre of which is the gift of silence so rare in our modern age.

As a touring musician concerned for the environment Sarah refuses to compromise. Instead of belching tonnes of CO2 travelling to big cities to play for big audiences many of whom will also have travelled in from areas where concerts are more rare, also belching CO2 in the process, Sarah cycles between gigs, offering to play free of charge, playing in places where concerts are rare, helping audiences travel less and more sustainably (we never had so many bikes - including a tandem - on the rack at Pianodrome). Again, this is what the Pianodrome is about. Built by and for the local community using only pianos saved from landfill we hope to offer a path towards more sustainable and inclusive creative community.

As a vegan Sarah used to be embarrassed to admit to playing Viola-da-gamba, a six stringed ancestor of the modern Cello, whose strings are traditionally made from the guts of a cow or sheep. Not vegan. She was overjoyed to discover new copper wound vegan strings. Old pianos are often stuck together with hide glue made by boling the bones, skins, muscles, and intestines of fish, goats and horses. Leather, felt and ivory especially in old pianos are of course also very much non-vegan though modern pianos use synthetic alternatives. Is it better for these materials to go to landfill rather than Pianodromes?

And Sarah is overjoyed to have found cycling. She finds the places in-between destinations to be fascinating, the act of cycling ‘zen’. She is so into the journey that she can sometimes even be disappointed to arrive early. Sarah cycled 1300km to play for us yesterday. Her tour continues over the coming weeks through the Western Isles to Durness and back and we very much hope to catch her again on her return. In future she has been offered a gig in Australia and is seriously thinking of cycling round the world to play it! What started as an idea of how to pursue her musical passion sustainably and open important and difficult conversations about the current music industry model has become her whole life and she is evidently thriving. Almost wth a sense of surprise at having found a way of being that so completely suits her sense of self and ideals she says “I could just keep going forever”.

Thank you Sarah for sharing your journey, for your vision and determination and for delivering your powerfully inspiring message of change so beautifully softly.

Find out where Sarah is playing next on her website here.