The Rise of the Piano - Downtown Street Piano Series 2016

2016 is the Year of Music and Downtown Calgary continues to offer some of the richest, most diverse music programming in the city. Now in it’s second year, The Downtown Street Piano Series once again showcases an amazing selection of Calgary musicians with expanded programming to include three distinct series; the Solo Spotlight Series, The Duets Series and the Sing a long Series. From June 2 to August 25, join us as we relive the centuries old tradition of music making together.

Over the course of the last two centuries you couldn’t step into a public place without being greeted by the presence of piano. Every hotel, every pub, every school held a piano within its walls. And not sequestered to some dusty corner to be banged upon by an accidental passerby, but in a place that facilitated constant and ever present music making. Prior to the appearance of the phonograph in the 1930’s music was not and could not be a passive experience. For most, if you wanted to hear music, you had to perform it yourself.

From the time it was first invented - scholars give Italian inventor Bartolomeo Cristofori’s first piano around 1698/1700 – the piano was the main instrument with which people heard the popular music of the day. Wanted to hear the latest hit from Giuseppe Verdi or Irvin Berlin? You had to go down to your corner music shop, flip through not bins of records or CDs but of scores and scores of sheet music, that you would then bring home to perform yourself. It was a matter of fact that with the piano came the proliferation of homegrown musical abilities within multiple generations of families.

The piano dominated domestic and public life for nearly two centuries. But by the turn of the 20th century, a series of inventions toppled the piano’s reign. First the player piano made its play in 1900 with its pre-punched rolls of popular songs. The phonograph arrived shortly after cutting the piano out of music making all together but it was the introduction of the radio in the 1920s that served the final blow to the piano’s rule.

But here we are in 2016 and it seems that the piano has taken to the streets. Since 2008, more than 1,500 street pianos have been placed in 50 cities. And that’s just a rough estimate. From Vancouver to Singapore to London to Melbourne, pianos are cropping up on street corners, in public squares, in central markets. They’re being played by lawyers, police officers, students, seniors and the odd skateboarder. The piano it seems to making a comeback and nowhere is it more obvious than Calgary.

Here’s a full listing of the upcoming piano performances. Each performance runs from 12pm to 1pm, we suggest bringing your lunch or grab some food at one of the nearby cafes or restaurants.

This has been a blog post by Downtown Street Piano Coordinator Kenna Burima.

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Tagged as: music, street piano