London’s Sunday Times reports on an initiative to place 30 pianos in public locations throughout London, to encourage impromptu sing-alongs among strangers (want to find one? look here). Each piano will be decorated by an artist to relate to its surroundings — much like other public art initiatives featuring cows or pigs or furniture. A piano tuner will be bicycling around to the pianos to keep them maintained and tuned.
The installation is part of the Sing London festival, and is the work of public artist Luke Jerram, who has done similar installations around the world over the past two years.
Like all public art, the installation’s success will be defined by the complete strangers who interact with it. More than most public art, this particular installation demands more responsibility, care, and protection from its public to ensure the pianos aren’t damaged or destroyed.
But on the face of it, it’s an extraordinary public expression of art, and an open invitation for anyone with any measure of talent or courage to perform music in a public space. This is cultural infrastructure, on a different scale than a new concert hall or museum, but with similar intent. Makes me want to fly off to London just to sing along.
I love this idea! It would be great for classical pianists — we would get over our fear of playing in public! But it would never work in Buffalo. We have too big a criminal element and those pianos would be trashed.
tres cool. can it happen in san francisco soon?
Brilliant idea! I hope the hooligans don’t get to them first.
This is so much more fun than the Cow Parade process that was so popular several years ago (I saw in Chicago and recall that it was done in many cities internationally).
What I like about the pianos is the invitation to play/have fun and idea that one person’s response to the invitation would create opprtunities for others around them.
Why shouldn’t life be more like your average R&H musical, where people just break into song?
I wonder how it would work if they put up tvs and Rock Band equipment? Fun to think about.
I was chatting last night to some friends who live very near one of these pianos, and they were telling me they’d had to complain several times because the locks put on the pianos and locked at 11pm kept getting broken off and they were then kept awake by people playing at all hours of the night and early morning. Interestingly enough, the better the playing the more distrubing it was of their sleep. Apart from the odd drunk just banging away, they didn’t seem to have attracted too much vandalism.