Thursday, June 21, 2012

Caleb's Piano Trek 2012

Salt Lake City has done this awesome thing!  
As part of this "Street Pianos" program, they have put out 10 pianos around downtown SLC in this "Play Me; I'm Yours" experiment.  

Each piano has been uniquely painted by different artists and have been placed in several locations around town.  Most of them are in walking distance of each other.  Some are on street corners, some up on porches, some in community centers, some in front of museums.  

This was only going to be for a couple of weeks, and when we found out about it, we knew Caleb had to be a part of it.  If there is anything else that Caleb loves beside piano, it is maps.  If he hasn't been asking for pianos or sheet music, he has been asking for maps and atlases.  He loves to study maps, draw maps, and look at street guides.  

Street Pianos even had a website with a map of all the piano locations that you could print out.
So, we printed it out and gave it to Caleb.  He goes to piano lessons downtown, so we figured after piano lessons we would go on an adventure with the map in a quest to find every piano and play a different song on each one!  

At each piano we took a picture and Caleb held up the number of which piano it was.  They were all beautiful.  Some played better than others.  Some had sticky keys, and a few were out of tune, but he still played them all.  It proved to be a little too windy for sheet music, so mostly he played his memorized pieces.

There were 10 pianos in all, but we ended up only going to 9 of them, as the last one was in front of a bar, and it was getting dark, so we didn't think being out in front of a bar was the best situation for a young boy and also his 4 year old sister who had tagged along.  

Caleb had so much fun!  He met a lot of new people and we heard some other little concerts.  At one piano he had people pass by on horse and carriage who clapped for him.  Some pianos were at locations that were just too noisy, either by too much traffic, or at the last piano, there was a very loud street "musician" on guitar  only a few feet away.  At the last piano, Caleb had taken his hat off and a few people came by to give him tips!  

We created a little video of Caleb's experience playing around town;



This was almost better than Christmas for Caleb!  Wouldn't it be awesome if this wasn't just an experiment, but they could have pianos around town all the time to play?  Well, I would worry about the rain or snow hurting them, and maybe it would get annoying if people who didn't really know how to play started messing around with them, but what a wonderful thing it was!  

Caleb wants to find the last one by the pub next week after piano lessons.  Maybe we can get to it if we go just a little bit earlier.  We shall see!  

No comments: