Yes and

Last summer my wife and I biked over to the neighboring town of Starksboro. The village had always seemed a little moribund to me on casual drive-throughs. I think it’s partly because the old general store is shuttered. Maybe also because it’s a mostly linear village, that is, the public buildings and most of the residences lie all on one road, without any significant activity on cross streets, which to me always makes a village feel incomplete. 

But you should never trust drive-by impressions. Turns out there are several public buildings of interest. I’d made plans to check out the old pianos in the old community church, which the town has been renovating, and upstairs in the library/town hall building, which some folks are also interested in resuscitating.

Like a lot of big century-old uprights, both pianos have solid bones and rich sounds but plenty of issues. The Meeting House is a humbly awe-inspiring space, the stained-glass windows and striking kerosene chandelier casting an orange-red glow on the roughly square intimate interior. But the piano hammers are bone-hard, allowing for a dynamic range from ff to fff in the acoustically boomy space. The Town Hall’s upstairs has a quaint old stage and similarly venerable piano, which makes some nice sounds but has a few nonworking keys. And the rickety stairs, no ramp or elevator, restrict access. I wanted to support town efforts to revitalize theses traditional gathering places, but neither piano/space was appropriate for a full-fledged concert.

Meanwhile, on an earlier pass through the village I’d snooped (as one does) into the windows of the other church in the village, the First Baptist, looking for pianos. (Were there ever two Baptist churches in Starksboro, I wondered, whose population back in more churchy times never reached 1,500?) I could see there was an upright piano of some sort and made a note to come back and check it later when Jan McCleery popped out the back door and asked if I needed any help. In New England, “Can I help you?”, when asked of a stranger on the property, usually means “go away”, but she asked in a kindly, inviting—I want to say Christian—way, and when I explained my project she proudly showed me the not one, but two old uprights in the church, one in the sanctuary and one in the community room below. Both in much better shape than those in the Town Hall and Meeting House. Jan said the church would be enthusiastic about hosting our concert.

But that wasn’t my first piano inquiry in Starksboro either. About a mile outside the village is Camp Common Ground, a wonderful inclusive family camp. They had a decent Yamaha upright console, though it was a little beaten up. And though the space was not acoustically great, it looked like it would be a mostly flat and not too bumpy shot to wheel it into their gorgeous renovated barn with a piano dolly.

Before I’d thought of Camp Common Ground, and before I realized the village center was not so disused as my casual drive-bys had led me to hastily conclude, I had reached out to the elementary school to ask if they had piano—they did. And before that, I’d been invited by Marijke Niles, proprietor of a perennials greenhouse outside the village, to do my Starksboro concert at her house—on her probably much better maintained Yamaha upright, but a venue that would not allow for much of an audience.

So there I was, with a lot of competing options, all intriguing, none ideal in every way. I was describing the situation to my friend Anya Schwartz, a freethinker who often has great off-center ideas, which must have rubbed off on me because I heard myself say, as if I'd already formed the idea, “I should do a multi-venue Piano Crawl.” 

A series of mini-concerts, maybe 20 minutes each, the repertoire tailored to each piano’s strengths, with the audience moving from place to place, or attending just the program(s) of their choice. My assistant Gideon reached out to all the parties with this idea, and amazingly managed quickly to zero in on a date only a few months away that would work for everyone. So we’re on! October 20, starting with an early matinee at Robinson Elementary, while the kids are still in school, and moving on from there. There’s even talk of a food truck. Watch the email updates for more info as it comes into focus.