“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
So said jazz master Thelonius Monk, and you can hear what he meant in his weirdly discordant, percussive, jokey improvisations. Monk sounds riddled with wrong notes to some ears — and yet the same bizarre instrumentalist gained fame for composing seriously sweet ballads such as “Round Midnight” and “Ruby, My Dear.”
Everyone is invited to explore their own personal intersections of sweetness and wrongness for 10 days starting Aug. 5 on public pianos that have been scattered all around Clark County and beyond by Vancouver’s School of Piano Technology for the Blind.
Don’t worry about showing off. Definitely don’t worry about never having touched a keyboard before. Just sit down and make sound. Get in touch with your inner Thelonius.
The so-called Piano Hospital, a unique nonprofit agency that refurbishes used instruments and teaches sight-impaired people to become piano technicians, launched Keys to the City in 2012 as a way to raise its public profile — and corporate sponsorships. The underfunded school is always struggling, according to executive director Cheri Martin, and it suffered a major setback this year as its incoming lead teacher, a Canadian citizen, couldn’t get authorization to work in the U.S., and eventually returned to Canada.
The school will announce a new hire for the position in August, Martin said. Meanwhile, it’s focusing on Keys to the City, a 10-day celebration of do-it-yourself music and art.
Sixteen donated and decorated pianos have been stationed in public places, indoors and out, from the Vancouver waterfront to Felida Village, from the Vancouver Community Library downtown to New Seasons Market on the east side — even from the Oregon Zoo to Portland International Airport, two of the highest-traffic, highest-visibility sites in the region.
“It’s one thing to be in Vancouver,” administrative manager Julia Liudahl said, “but when you get to the zoo and the airport, you’re really going international.”
Just a couple of the instruments have been placed in local restaurants and reserved for seasoned pianists, playing for tips that go to the Piano Hospital. Battle Ground’s Mill Creek Pub will feature pianists daily from 6 to 8 p.m., and all tips will be matched both by the pub and by DeWils Industries. In downtown Vancouver, Tommy O’s Pacific Rim Bistro is already the home of a “Big Al’s Aloha” piano, played from 8 to 11 p.m. Thursdays, after being painted by the Larch Corrections Center Art Club in honor of Big Al’s Specialty Movers, which does a yeoman’s job of hauling instruments for the Piano Hospital at a deep discount, Martin said.
All pianos have been dolled up by local artists, such as students at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics, whose dreamy “Esther Short Park” piano will sit pretty in the rose garden of that downtown greenspace.
“This is a great people-watching event” because you never know what to expect as passers-by notice the instrument, slow down and screw up their courage to play, Liudahl said. Last year, she said, a disheveled denizen of the park came sidling up looking distinctly not like a maestro and proceeded to play a “beautiful classical piece. We realized how we were prejudging him.”
Four-hands Fridays
OK, now imagine a pair of Theloniuses (Thelonii?) sharing the same 88 ivories. Two musicians, 20 fingers, one crowded keyboard.
“There’s a little Barnum & Bailey involved,” said Timothy Nickel. “You have to meld two people into one and (each player has) only a portion of the keyboard to work with. It’s a little difficult to agree on an interpretation but stay out of each other’s way. It’s an interesting challenge.”
And there’s quite an interesting and extensive repertoire of what’s called “piano four hands” music, Nickel said, going all the way back past Mozart, who grew up playing duets with his sister.
“He was the first important composer of piano duets,” Nickel said. “Most of the great composers since then have contributed something.”
You can get a free primer on the piano-four-hands repertoire on Friday nights in August as Nickel and St. Luke’s-San Lucas Episcopal Church host a TGIF Piano Duet Festival. Nickel, the music director at St. Luke’s, said he wants the music-loving public to check out his church’s awesome acoustics, as well as its 7-foot Steinway grand piano. Since the piano was purchased with gift money, Nickel said, he feels obliged to share that gift with the wider community.
“It’s a big deal for the church, and I want it to be a community resource, as well,” he said.
The weekly concerts get underway at 6 p.m. Aug. 5 with the Portland-based XX Digitus Duo, playing everything from classics and world music to Radiohead. The week after that, Nickel and his wife, Nancy LeRoi Nickel, will tackle Schubert’s “Grand Duo,” an often-overlooked masterpiece. The following weeks will feature Brahms to John Corgliano, a Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary composer.
All of these concerts are free and early — 6 p.m. — on Friday evenings. They’ll last for less than an hour, Nickel said, and listeners will emerge with a list of local restaurants, pubs and wine bars that will extend a little discount when they show their concert program.
“It’ll be a nice way to celebrate the end of the workweek,” Nickel said. “Enjoy a short concert, then go out for dinner or drinks.”
Intense in Texas
Of 72 pianists from around the planet who auditioned into this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, two were from Clark County. Sandra Baumgarten of Brush Prairie and Colleen Adent of Vancouver’s Northwest neighborhood both traveled to Fort Worth, Texas, to play up a storm before a panel of judges in late June.
Adent progressed to the quarterfinals in what is generally considered the world’s top amateur piano playoff.
“Wow, intense, consuming, terrific experience!” she wrote after.
Because performances were live-streamed, and viewers could — and did — comment in real time, Adent said she “felt a bit like the home kid going off to the Olympics, with the sense that a large, unseen community was right there with me.”
That was both delightful and demanding, she said.
