A friend of mine was talking about his lodger, a very fine student pianist who often practises on the piano in the house.
My friend said to me, ‘This may sound crazy, but when I play the piano after she’s been practising, I often have the feeling that the piano is easier to play – more responsive somehow. Do you think there could be any truth in this?’
Others at the table started shaking their heads and saying ‘No, there can’t be’. But I knew exactly what he meant, because I’ve often had a similar feeling.
For me it can work both ways – feeling that a piano is easier to play after someone really good has played it, but also feeling (temporarily) slightly dissatisfied with a piano after, let’s say, a less skilful pianist has played it.
What I suspect is happening is that when you hear someone else playing, your own imagination is impacted. The memory lingers on to influence your own playing, whether you realise it or not.
To try the experiment properly, I suppose you’d have to invite players of different abilities to play your piano while you were elsewhere and couldn’t see or hear them. After each person you’d come back and try the piano without knowing who had recently played it or how. If you could still sense a difference, that would be very interesting.
One can easily understand that a string instrument like a violin might be affected by being played by someone other than the owner. The wood vibrates, the soundpost reacts to pressure, and so on.
But although the piano is a mechanical instrument, I don’t rule out the idea that anyone who plays it can affect it in some way. I’ve had the sensation too many times to dismiss it.
I wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences?
I am too cynical about many of these kinds of esoteric claims. It is partly the legacy of having a hyper-rational scientist father, and partly annoyance at the glut of what my brother-in-law calls “woo-woo stuff” in the world today. Gurus encouraging us to “dance away your toxins” (I am not making that one up), and spas peddling expensive and ridiculous ‘treatments’ which (in my view) frequently just make their clients more neurotic. Yet there IS magic in the world, or at least plenty of incredible and inexplicable phenomena. Even Ben Goldacre in his marvellously de-bunking book ‘Bad Science’ finally admits that the placebo effect can achieve such incredible results that in a sense it becomes ‘real’ by default. So as for the memory of instruments, who knows? I’ll keep an open mind. Dad often seemed to believe nothing until it had been written up in The Lancet, yet he loved music and once described it as “bordering on the supernatural”…
It think that it is fascinating that different people can make a mechanical instrument like a piano sound different. It is probably much easier to be individual with a wind instrument , hence the fact that so many jazz saxophonists sound so different or, indeed, classical saxophones deserve Debussy’s swipe at being an “aquatic instrument.
I think that the piano behaving differently after other people have played it has a small degree of truth. Individuality on the piano strikes me as stemming from musical traits such as harmony, use of rhythm and how your voice chords. It is interesting how jazz pianists can sound different due to other issues beyond style and harmony. It is easy to recognise the musical language of Hines, Peterson, Evans or Cecil Taylor. However, I love the way that some pianists make the instrument sound different. For me, Duke Ellington is the prime example. His playing sounds so deep within the keyboard. No other pianist seems to conjure up the sounds which sound like he is pulling them out from the guts of his instrument, I love the “Back to back” album with Johnny Hodges where Ellington makes the piano sound like something else. This is one of the greatest jazz records of the 1950s and I thoroughly recommend it if anyone is not aware. All the musicians are on top of their game yet like the “Money Jungle” album, it sounds like you are listening to an instrument called Duke Ellington as opposed to a piano. Because he was an original and exceptional composer, Ellington is overlooked as a pianist. I feel the same about Thelonious Monk too. Cecil Taylor’s comment about the piano being 88 tuned drums is something that also reveals a pianist considering his instrument as something other than a piano
I am not sure about a piano reflecting on the various people performing it and think that part of this is in the mind. There may be an element of science to support this idea yet I am not sure that it would be noticeable how the action of the keys would be affected. I do feel that there are musicians / composers who can almost make the piano become another instrument and are not overtly pianistic There was a piece my Ligeti on Radio 3 last month which made me think about this again In my opinion, it is often fascinating to hear how non pianist composers write for the instrument and bring a “non piano” approach to the instrument. The two best examples are Janacek and Villa-Lobos. The “Amazonias” is brilliant. They both transform the idea of what classical piano can sound like that goes beyond the notes on the staves. Villa Lobos is so overlooked.