Piano Smashing Contests
May 25, 2017 7:35 AM   Subscribe

How many ways can you destroy a piano? Piano smashing contests were a UK fad in the 1960s, eventually crossing over to the US. Teams used sledgehammers to destroy an upright piano to the point where pieces of the piano could be passed through a 9-inch diameter hole. Infrequent piano smashing contests have been held in recent years although Guinness World Records has retired the category from active competition. Using sledgehammers is one thing, but composer Annea Lockwood has several creative ways to dispose of pianos.
posted by achmorrison (36 comments total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I really had a hard time finding any articles about these events. Was hoping for more text, less video. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by achmorrison at 7:36 AM on May 25, 2017


I think the Art of Noise tried a few of them.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:47 AM on May 25, 2017 [6 favorites]


Was the Art of Noise video inspired by this 1960s trend? I loved that video, never knew "smashing pianos" was a thing.
posted by jeff-o-matic at 8:06 AM on May 25, 2017


This just seems kind of sad.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:13 AM on May 25, 2017 [11 favorites]


It does seem a little sad. But after seeing the time and effort it took my buddy to sell or even donate(!) their baby grand piano, sledgehammer seems to be the only guaranteed way to divest ownership interest in one. Apparently, nobody buys pianos anymore.
posted by scottatdrake at 8:18 AM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah admittedly the premise of this made me throw up a little in my mouth but the silver lining is that ANNEA LOCKWOOD IS SO COOL.
posted by Mooseli at 8:20 AM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I can't help but think the timing of the fad is related to the ubiquity of canned music. A piano was once the easy way to provide cheap background music. With record players, I'm sure many of those pianos started to look like clumsy furniture in the way.
posted by idiopath at 8:21 AM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


In college, my music fraternity would raise money during finals week by taking a to-be-retired upright piano from the music department and letting people smash it with a sledgehammer for $1 a swing. You got to keep what you knocked off. Music majors lined up to take out their frustrations on the poor piano, but it was surprisingly popular with students in general.

I still have the black key I knocked off one piano as a trophy.
posted by sgranade at 8:23 AM on May 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


Previously
posted by Lucinda at 8:36 AM on May 25, 2017




About the only thing I remember of Northern Exposure.
posted by nubs at 8:42 AM on May 25, 2017 [2 favorites]




They need to make piano smashing into a new Street Fighter bonus round game. "OH MY PIANO!"
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:05 AM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


This has been a performance art cliché for fifty years. Time to retire it. Its attractions are obvious: take an instrument designed to create beautiful music--which happens to be difficult to destroy, unlike, say, a viola--and set it on fire, attack it with sledgehammers, drop it off a building, etc. As mentioned above, it's hard to give them away these days, so they end often end their days in the most ignominious way possible: in a landfill.

(There are a few of us, though, still, who are intimately involved with a piano they bought years ago, fresh from the showroom floor. After decades of playing dicey pianos in clubs, it is a pleasure to have one's own piano. Please leave your Molotov cocktails at the door.)
posted by kozad at 9:11 AM on May 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


Don't forget the MIT Baker House Piano Drop, a more than 40-year tradition. As it says on the box. Piano is dropped from the roof of a six-story dormitory building.
posted by beagle at 9:17 AM on May 25, 2017 [2 favorites]


I went by the yearly piano sale at the university where I worked, a few years ago. I thought it was just the uprights from the music dept that are rotated out on contract, as new ones arrive. No, it was like a whole showroom deal set up. It was like walking onto a car lot. The guy sized me up and came over. I noodled around on a piano and he tried to flatter me for knowing how to play inversions of chords (I am a terrible piano player). Then he softened me up by taking me to see a $75,000 Steinway reissue of some famous model they made for Vienna or something. Very nice, but I can't take out a motgage on a piano now. Then, he took me to the one he was actually trying to sell to me: a Steinway upright friom about 1974. I hadn't even known they made uprights. Only $6000! A bargain compared to the first one we looked at! If my credit cards were all paid down I probably would have bought it, the guy was good.
posted by thelonius at 9:25 AM on May 25, 2017 [3 favorites]


"A guy don't even walk on the lot unless he wants to buy a piano. Convert the motherfucker. Make him sign the check."
posted by thelonius at 9:28 AM on May 25, 2017 [5 favorites]


Every spring the pianos explode.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 9:55 AM on May 25, 2017


Beck's grandfather Al Hansen dropped a piano off a roof in Germany in the later 1940s.

2013: Smashed Piano From 1960s Performance Art On View At Tate Britain as part of "Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm."
posted by larrybob at 10:04 AM on May 25, 2017


On fire from a trebuchet or GTFO II: Electric Boogaloo.
I was hearing Koyaanisqatsi/Prophecies while watching that.

I can't help but think the timing of the fad is related to the ubiquity of canned music. A piano was once the easy way to provide cheap background music.
I think that was the first wave of the decline of the upright piano. Nowadays, I think it's more that you can get an inexpensive electronic piano/synth cheaper than what a low-end piano would go for.
I have an old upright that I've had for 40 years that I'm trying to get rid of. No one wants it. A piano tuner looked at it and refused to tune it. Putting it in the pond sounds like an interesting idea.
posted by MtDewd at 10:43 AM on May 25, 2017


A piano tuner looked at it and refused to tune it

Many of the old pianos that people think they can donate or list for free on Craigslist and have hauled away are so badly in need of restoring that they aren't worth the trouble, and it sounds like your 40 year old upright was in this group.
posted by thelonius at 10:52 AM on May 25, 2017


"So, Ms. Lockwood, show me on the doll exactly where the piano touched you."
posted by Samizdata at 10:56 AM on May 25, 2017


"The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth." - classical guitarist Andres Segovia
posted by larrybob at 10:58 AM on May 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


The idea of actually destroying pianos is somewhat upsetting; I'll take Tim Hecker's The Piano Drop any day.
posted by gold-in-green at 11:41 AM on May 25, 2017


When we bought our house the owner tried to include his piano as a freebie. We declined, and the poor guy had to figure out how to haul it away single-handed. I felt bad about that but not so bad that I was willing to adopt a piano.
posted by ardgedee at 12:21 PM on May 25, 2017


“Savinio’s performance techniques included smashing the piano with his fists and dragging a board up and down the keys. The results were predictable but exciting. After one concert André Billy recalls hearing Apollinaire exclaim: ‘He broke the piano! Now that’s what I call a musician!’

Imagine if Beethoven had a Tommygun
posted by clavdivs at 12:31 PM on May 25, 2017


composer Annea Lockwood has several creative ways to dispose of pianos.

Future archaeologists are gonna have a helluva time explaining all these buried pianos.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:57 PM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


If I had a dollar for every time I've said this: Nobody does it like the Marx Brothers.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:00 PM on May 25, 2017


And if I had a dollar for every time I've told the story of picking parts of our piano off the New York State Thruway.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:02 PM on May 25, 2017


So the Fluxus movement was really into "happenings" or "event scores" that destroyed pianos. You can find them in the Fluxus Workbook along with some pretty awesome other pieces. Some of my favorites include:

Robert Bozzi "Choice #5" = "Two pianists sit behind two pianos. They depress the pedals and crash the pianos into each other several times."

Henning Christiansen "Sonate for Piano" = "...Sit before the piano, absorbed in deepest meditation. Now dash to the right around the piano, as quickly as possible. Turn the piano over as you pass it."

Toshi Ichiyanagi "Music for Piano no. 5, Fluxvariation" = "An upright piano is positioned at center stage with its profile toward the audience. The pedal is fixed in a depressed position. A performer, hidden from view in the wings, throws darts into the back of the piano according to the time pattern indicated in the score."

Jackson Mac Low "Piano Suite for David Tudor and John Cage" = "1. Carefully disassemble a piano. Do not break any parts or separate parts joined by gluing or welding (unless welding apparatus and experienced welder are available for second movement). All parts cut or cast or forged as one piece must remain as one piece. 2. Carefully reassemble the piano. 3. Tune the piano. 4. Play something."

There's lots of fun stuff in the Fluxus Workbook, which is a late-generation scholarly compilation of Fluxus writings. But yeah, a lot of them take it out on pianos.
posted by daisystomper at 4:42 PM on May 25, 2017 [6 favorites]


In the UK, at least, there was a huge glut of upright pianos in the 50s and 60s, left over from the days in the 1900s when a piano in the front parlour was a status symbol. They were mostly rather poor quality instruments, but very solidly built. I remember seeing piano-smashing competitions at village fetes in the 60s. The "9" diameter hole" the bits had to be passed through was usually an old wooden toilet seat.

Around the same time, someone gave my father a rather nice upright piano that he taught himself to play. We couldn't find (or afford) anyone to tune it, so it got more and more out of tune until he replaced it with an electronic version. The piano ended up on a bonfire, I think.
posted by Fuchsoid at 7:44 PM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


This

Is

Necessary

posted by Existential Dread at 8:33 PM on May 25, 2017


Since there was a piano mover in the Survival Research Labs circle a lot of trashed old pianos got destroyed. A more Musical piece was composed by Moe!Kestra "Death of a Piano" which was a impressive live performance.
posted by boilermonster at 12:17 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


"I wish Gallagher's brother was here."
posted by BiggerJ at 3:57 AM on May 26, 2017


Jimmy Durante was ahead of all of 'em. Destroying the "pianna" was the basis of his early act.... Hilarious that Guinness had to retire the category....
posted by Empty Planet at 6:02 AM on May 26, 2017


The Human Beinz, best known as a one-hit wonder for their garage rock cover version of The Isley Brothers' "Nobody But Me," got the chance to record a second album in 1968 called Evolutions. In the tradition of other bands who mysteriously found themselves with a hit & took the opportunity to fuck with the suits at the record company (e.g., Nirvana's In Utero, Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's, everything the Flaming Lips did after "She Don't Use Jelly"), the Human Beinz recorded Two of a Kind as the second to last track on Evolutions. The song begins reasonably with some Buffalo Springfield-ish country rock, but then it tacks on the sound of a piano being dismantled that goes on for about two minutes.
posted by jonp72 at 4:42 PM on May 26, 2017


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