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”…