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Published: Friday, 10 January 2025 at 11:26 AM
Ouch! Five terrible treatments of the piano
We present four truly unpleasant ways in which pianos have been treated over the years, which have been, alas, filmed for posterity. Here they are… sensitive souls should look away now.
Laurel, Hardy and an unforgiving staircase
In 1931’s The Music Box, Laurel and Hardy famously spend hours trying to get a piano up some very steep stairs, only to be met with a horribly ungrateful recipient:
Up, up and away
The American desert. A large catapult. A piano on fire. And wheeeeeeee! What fun… for those who are easily pleased:
Lunch time
Frightening footage from Japan, in the form of the 1977 horror film Hausu. One to bear in mind next time you sit down to have a little go at a Mozart sonata…
Sacrificed in the name of science
Some of the world’s greatest scientific brains attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the film below, these boffins set out to prove that force equals mass times acceleration – with the aid of a baby grand piano and a very tall building:
Piano destruction as performance art
Pianist and composer Matthew Bourne got an unusual request from the regular London performance night Spatchcock back in 2016. Would he play an old upright piano – and, as part of the performance, would he mind progressively destroying it? Armed with tools from a nearby workshop, Matthew set about the task of a ‘demolition performance’. As you’ll hear, the performance ends with an ‘encore’ performed on another upright, elsewhere in the venue.