Today we started
10 January 2023
Today we started pulling pianos apart. After all the years of planning, the months of anticipation, the weeks of preparation and the days of travelling it’s great to finally be here and hands on.
It's a crisp cold bright morning. Blue skys and frost on the grass. Lead builders Shawn and Greg are in early today. After Quinn’s gourmet breakfast of ‘huevos pericos’ – eggs with chopped onions and tomatoes – and my first turn driving the rental car - on the right-hand side, with the steering column on the left and an automatic everything which surprisingly turns out to be almost too easy - we join them. Following the satnav I haven’t a clue where we are. Everything looks similar. Without a car here, nothing is possible. There is just so much space. It’s all eight lane highways, trees, a river and at a junction, large empty parking lots and single storey buildings with big signs; a McDonalds, a gas station, a church; food for your body, your car and your soul. There is a billboard with a grinning moustachioed lawyer and the slogan ‘Hit by a Truck?’.
Already the warehouse filled with festival floats, theatre sets, tools, shelves of boxes of assorted stuff from various past projects and an enormous pumpkin feels a like home from home. Greg and I pose with an outsized lever with the words ‘off / on’. This is going to be fun.
Broadly speaking and to my relief the America pianos are similar in construction to the European pianos that we are used to. This means we won’t have to make any dramatic changes to the designs. They seem to be on average less tall, deeper and of solid construction, in fact quite a few of them are player pianos with pedals and bellows and elaborate steam-punk mechanisms inside.
Shawn starts pulling apart a piano and finds treasure under the keys. As well as old coins, and ephemera, bits of paper, a rubber band, a paper clip he finds, of all things, dog food. Lots of it. How, I ask you, did that get there?
Kibble in a Kimble
Our producer this side of the pond, Kat, arrives and we meet with Matt and Laura and Tom from the Pianodrome back in Scotland via Zoom. We swap jokes and progress reports. How strangely normal it is to chat despite the 4000 miles between us. Then Pete and Steve arrive with a van full of half dismantled pianos. It’s clear that previous attempts at building Pianodrome Charlotte got much further than I had thought. This is great news as it will save us a lot of work this time round. The rest of the as-yet undismantled pianos, two shipping containers worth, collected and stored over the last 3 years, arrive on Friday. We get to see inside the Grace Church earmarked as our venue come spring on Thursday.
Today Kat joined the dismantling crew in the afternoon and it feels just like countless piano dismantling sessions previously with tunes on the stereo, folk swapping stories and helping each other out with tricky corners and heavy lifts, exciting discoveries of small treasures and wonder at these extraordinary constructions; historic objects at the intersection of engineering, craftsmanship and music.
The sun streams in through the big doors open to the fresh air. This feels like it’s going to work.
Greg turns it on for the camera