Most concerts originate with an invitation from the venue, prompted by the general publicity around the project or audience word of mouth from prior performances. But I also do a fair amount of scouting, particularly in smaller towns, to identify locations with working pianos and, in essence, invite them to invite me. This may start with internet sleuthing for likely locations (church, town hall, Grange, etc.) and maybe a call to the Town Clerk or other contacts people may have tipped me to, but eventually many hours of on-the-road legwork too, going from village to village all over the state—some of them really ghost villages, yet often with a functional building and ancient but functional piano. This “Where’s Waldo” hunt for small-town piano-appointed public spaces is an ongoing and fascinatingly evocative facet of the project.
Last Thursday, I found myself in central Vermont with time on my hands and decided to tackle the towns of Pittsfield and Chittenden, for which I had no leads yet. In Pittsfield (pop. 504) I determined via Google maps that there was a federated church, a town hall and a library, all in the one village within spitting distance of one another. There was no one in the locked church. As I have done countless times, I peered into the windows along the sides, but they were shaded and there was no view. I wandered over to the Roger Clark Memorial library, above the town clerk’s office, and asked Lisa, the librarian, if there was a piano in the adjacent Town Hall. She though not, but a trio of women who were planning the next book club meeting thought there was. Two of them, Doreen and Katrina, were on their way there to see if the library wifi signal would reach that far, as they had recently acquired a projector and were preparing to inaugurate a town movie series there. So I tagged along. The door code that the librarian had given them wouldn’t work for us, but Randy, the assistant town clerk, on his way back from the post office, used his own code and got us in.
There was indeed a piano—a Hughes & Son, serial no. 5084, manufactured for the Wade company in 1908, in Maine (the first Maine piano I’ve ever encountered). A grand old upright from the “golden era” of piano manufacture, when there were literally thousands of manufacturers in the U.S. alone. Someone at the factory had taken the trouble to hand-pant some arabesque filigree on the internal plate. The plate also had a record of past tunings, the most recent in 1985. Which, judging from its current sour intonation, may well have been the last time it was tuned. The 1985 tuner had noted that even after that tuning, the pitch was “1/2” (presumably a half-step, or maybe half of a half-step) low, no doubt because it had started so far below pitch that it wasn’t advisable to bring it up all the way in one tuning.
In other words, it was wicked out of tune. So far so, in fact, that some of the unisons (multiple strings tuned to the same note) sounded not like even out-of-tune unisons but rather a full half-step apart. I had to open the lid and check that the hammers were not just out of alignment and striking adjacent strings by mistake.
Even so, the old thing had life in it. Doreen was kind enough to take a couple of short videos of some Joplin and some James P. Johnson—music that is fast and reliant on rhythm for its interest while also harmonically relatively simple, and thus can come across even through deeply troubled intonation. And Doreen and Katrina volunteered on the spot to help facilitate and eventual Town Hall performance in Pittsfield. Assuming the pins and pin black are not faulty, and the strings not too badly rusted, it should be tunable. (The project never collects a performance fee or any other compensation, but we do ask that the piano be tuned. If this is a hardship, we can occasionally use some of our modest grant funds and patron donations to cover tuning costs.)
It’s always possible that the situation will be more favorable at the church—I’ll follow up there with calls or emails. But as most of the project concerts are in churches (to paraphrase Willie Sutton “because that’s where the pianos are”), I do enjoy scheduling Grange Halls, Town Halls, schools, and libraries for variety when I can.
This little diary covered half of my 6-hour piano scouting day in Pittsfield and Chittenden (where I also found a likely venue and several helpful friendly potential organizers). Or in other words, less than 1% of the 252 towns total, or just over 1% of towns remaining to be played. (Though I also squeezed in a visit to Ellis Music in Bethel, where I made contact with Tony who it looks will be able to identify locations and local collaborators for several of the adjoining towns.) As the saying goes: Magna patria, vita brevis.
