Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s subject is: What WAS Living Piano? I recently made videos, “What IS Living Pianos?” and “What ARE Living Pianos?” But What WAS Living Piano? Well, Living Piano actually predates Living Pianos by a number of years. It was a live show that I performed throughout the state of California dozens of times at universities, colleges, art centers, conventions, and even on a cruise in which I presented a historic concert experience showing the entire lineage of the invention of the piano, starting with the harpsichord, going through to the earliest piano of Mozart, the fortepiano, to the modern piano and beyond with cutting-edge technologies including my modular piano system prototypes.
I would dress up in period costumes and play the period styles on the instruments they were actually written for!
What was remarkable about the show is that I performed it for so many different people, from senior citizens to preschoolers, and everybody was fascinated. The piano is so ubiquitous, but most people never have actually experienced the development of the piano that took thousands of people over hundreds of years to achieve. Living Piano allowed people to hear how the piano evolved and what the music written for it at different times sounded like on these instruments. Not only that, but I gave the audience a chance to come up afterwards and inspect the instruments and try them out for themselves. People loved the show!
It was an incredibly impractical show.
When you become an early instrument specialist, you not only have to learn how to play the instruments and transport them, but you also have to learn how to service them. Every time you play a harpsichord, you have to tune it! It doesn’t hold its tuning very well at all. You wouldn’t even believe the complexity of what it takes to do a show like this. But I’m glad I experienced it. It was the impetus for Living Pianos. It gave me a chance to perform in so many different places including annual conventions of the Piano Technicians Guild and the Piano Teachers Association. It was really quite a show. If you’re interested in learning more, you can watch the Short documentary about the Living Piano live show! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
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2 thoughts on “What WAS Living Piano?”
Robert: I understand that Bach, shortly before his death, listened to Christiforte’s new grand piano invention, the double let-off action. This was new to the harpsichord that Bach played. I have heard Bach was not impressed with Christiforte’s new action invention. Can you do a video on this fascinating topic.
There is scant information on this subject. I’ll see if I can possibly offer some insights in a video!