Pianos are Totally Steampunk

Have you ever peered curiously into the interior of a piano?  Lifted the lid into the strangely mechanical inside to this outwardly sleek and simplistic musical instrument?   Inside is what looks like an imprisoned and tortured harp, screwed into place, locked into a frame, and hemmed in on every side with dampers and hammers and pins.  Have you ever crawled underneath a grand or baby grand, played with the pedal rods, or stared into the rafters of the underside?  A baby grand piano makes a first rate imaginary cave, ramshackle shack, or place to take a nap.  How much time have you spent contemplating piano keys?  If you get eye-level with them and peer down the row of keys, they resemble a polished and right-angled version of the Cliffs of Dover.  Have you experimented to find the exact amount of weight and speed it takes to make the keys make noise?  If you push the key down slowly and gently, the larger body of the piano remains silent and still, and the only reaction is a muted, intimate clunk, half-perceived through the ear, half through the finger pressing the key.  If you push the key down a little harder and softer, the piano’s regular note sounds, as soft or loud as you like.  But maybe you didn’t know, that if you play a key ever so softly, but ever so slightly more boldly than when you were trying to feel the gentle clunk, you will hear a note, soft and tinny, like a piano being played in a metal room three blocks down.  It’s like the echo of a piano, a whisper, unamplified, from the harp inside the wooden case.  

I can’t change a tire, and a glimpse into an engine is as bewildering and unfamiliar as a look into an alien’s abdominal cavity.  I grew up scared to touch the TV for fear I would mess it up—it seemed a delicate creature.  But not pianos.  Pianos were solid, familiar, and friendly.  I could touch them without being told not to leave fingerprints, and no one ever told me I was sitting “too close” to a piano.  I could explore every inch of a piano, play with it, experiment, and use it as a prop for countless imaginary adventures.  I could never have that kind of familiarity with my mother’s mixer, the television, or my dad’s record or CD players.  But as long as I didn’t scratch it with my toys, bang on the keys, or drop things inside, there was no limit to how intimate I could get with my family’s pianos. 

Pianos, plural.  We had three: my great-grandmother’s baby grand in our living room, a hundred years old with cracked finish from years sitting in front of a sunny window in her house; a honey-colored upright that had the novel feature of a lever on the underside of the keyboard that would dampen the keys so they sounded soft, muffled, and felty; and a dark wood, scratched up, tinny sounding piano we had picked up so Mom could play alongside her students when she taught lessons.  I could the play most roughly with the last piano since it was, in car terms, “a clunker.”  Growing up, we had one television, and it was in a cabinet in the basement family room, but there was a piano in ever common room of the house except for the kitchen.   The baby grand in the living room was a ready-made cave underneath, perfect for wild horses and fleeing princesses, and a natural cliff for my brother’s matchbox cars and GI Joes on top.  When the Easter Bunny came, he hid eggs in cavities underneath the piano peddles and in the crevices in the frame underneath.  When I went to Washington D.C. and later to Germany, and I saw gigantic, sculpted marble columns, they reminded me of the scalloped legs of the grand piano that I had spent so much time staring up at when I was small

Adding to its magic, our porcelain Christmas village is set up every year on top of the piano.

As I got older, and spent more time learning to play the keys of the piano than imagining it as a gigantic rock formation found my exploring dolls, I found a whole new level of enjoyment and friendship with the piano.  I listened to what it had to say, and, around the same time, I started listening to my dad.  My dad understands pianos on a level that I never will.  I would be playing around on the keys, and Dad would come up and tell me some fascinating thing about how a piano worked, what it was made from, its history, or how a certain composer or company innovated its design or construction.  You see, my dad is a piano doctor. 

At least that’s how it seemed to me.  When a key would stick, when one of the pianos stopped sounding right, or when my mom would start dropping hints, my dad would go down into the basement storage room and emerge with a battered tackle box that was 1970s yellow.  When he set it on the ground next to the ailing piano, he would open it from the top and both sides would fold out and the shelves rose out of the inside into terraces.  Inside were the tools of a piano tuner’s trade, and they all looked mysterious to me.  They were smaller than the tools he used for other projects around the house, and they had the look of age.  When the box was open and ready, Dad opened and readied the piano, revealing the inside, a maze of hammers, strings, levers, and bolts that looked both complicated and graceful, mechanical and artistic.  Grease, dust, and dull metal pegs resided in close proximity to red plush and polished wood.  The stiff strings of the captured harp were carefully adjusted in a process that took hours of intense, watchmaker-like concentration and precision.  Each key needs to be listened to carefully, by itself and with its fellows.  After each individual key has received its attention, dad would move on to chords, making final adjustments, then playing again, until he broke into a few measures of a song, satisfied that the piano was once again as it should be.  Then he’d close the piano, pack up the tools, and return the yellow box to the basement for another six months or a year. 

To this day, when we go to visit family, like we did over Christmas, Dad will pack his piano tools.  Getting your piano tuned isn’t cheap, and Dad works for free for his children (or sometimes for pie).  When we went to my oldest brother’s house for Christmas (home of his oldest son, who tends to play loud, and several children who have inherited the tendency), Dad spent an evening giving the piano its check-up.  Not wanting to lose the opportunity, I grabbed my camera and took some pictures, which Dad probably didn’t think I’d post on the internet.  Oops.