The following famous figures have something important in common: Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Ludwig van Beethoven — and you.
Know what it is? All are (or were) masters of the piano keyboard.
OK, you can decide whether that’s pitching it a little fortissimo in your case — but over the next 10 days pianists at every level, including absolute beginners, are totally welcome to make music on any number of uniquely decorated instruments that are scattered around town. If you’ve never touched a piano before in your life, now’s a great time to try out one — or, heck, make it all 15.
Today marks the start of the fourth annual “Keys to the City” festival, a sponsored fundraiser for Vancouver’s School of Piano Technology for the Blind. That’s a nonprofit educational institution that teaches tuning and maintenance to sight-impaired students. The school was founded by Emil Fries, an instructor at the nearby Washington State School for the Blind, in 1949. Keys to the City aims to raise the school’s profile and gather some always-needed funds, according to executive director Cheri Martin — and put smiles on the faces of anybody who wants to take a piano for a test run.
“We want to spread the word about the school and we want to spread the joy of music, of course,” said Martin, who added that she’s pleased at the way the annual musical outing keeps growing. “This year we have the wonderful problem of more sponsors than pianos,” she said. “Each year, more keep getting added.”
Pianos chosen to hit the streets are fine on the inside but start out not so beautiful on the outside, Martin said; local artists make them into masterpieces of, for example, Northwest landscapes, sea creatures and abstract stained-glass-style lighting effects.
A timely addition this year is a piano named “City Escape” by painter by Natalie Andrzejeski, and it’s actually escaped over to Terminal D of Portland International Airport, where its light blue color and beloved crisscross carpet pattern may well elicit nostalgic performances of “Memories” — or maybe “Magic Carpet Ride”?
Another addition this year is a piano painted by three of the art club members at Larch Corrections Center. Melville Tangen, Bryan McGee and Antonio Ruiz decked out a piano with a deeper blue background and the faces of those piano heroes from recent and Romantic times — Wonder, Charles and Ludwig van (which sounds like the supergroup that should have been). The artists called their creation “Ebony and Ivory,” and it’s now stationed inside the Mill Plain New Seasons Market in east Vancouver.
Nancy Simmons, the community partnerships coordinator at Larch, said the art club and its connection with the so-called Piano Hospital has provided a healthy, “pro-social” way for offenders to express their passion for art, develop some marketable skills and contribute to the community. Martin added that getting the piano all the way up to Larch for painting presented a different sort of logistical challenge in terms of background checks for piano movers and careful inspections of every nook and cranny of the instrument itself.
