Big and impossible to ignore, like a member of the family

Hanel Koeck - Piano Music
Robert & Leopold #33

I just read Thad Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank. It's a nifty time-killer for instrument-learners of any variety as they sit in a cramped waiting room, eager for the neophyte with the timeslot before them to finish their lesson. Passages from Carhart's book rolled through my head as I listened to Hanel Koeck's (a pseudonym for Ryan Martin) Piano Music, which is essentially a long-winded obituary to an antique piano.

As his recorder runs, Koeck skillfully molests the instrument, cajoling all sorts of un-piano-like discord out of it; you wonder if the New Yorker is dabbing the tip of his thumb with his tongue and touching the strings or gently flicking the felt-covered hammers or making tiny, imaginary circles with his fingertips on the soundboard and pin block. "Seeing the secret innards of pianos spread out before me," writes Carhart, "made me want to know more about the mechanics, not for the utilitarian aspect but for the poetics of it." So in a sense, that's what we're hearing on Piano Music, Koeck touching and exploring and learning more about this particular instrument's mechanics. Like the piano is a new flame—or an old lover.

The piano was euthanized after Koeck's diddling, chopped up into tiny bits, the pieces mailed along with the cassettes (see the picture above). "Ah, but of course, that's the beauty of a piano,” Carhart's piano salesman, Luc, tells him. "It's not just another instrument like a flute or a violin that you put away in the closet. You live with it and it with you. It's big and impossible to ignore, like a member of the family!" The sounds Koeck produces don't fall into a neat, tiny, seamless line and resemble anything related to music. It's just chopped-up, drawn-out noise. Each year, we rent a summer home with various friends and demons, and almost always, these summer homes contain upright pianos featuring keys that appear to have been chewed on by famished dinosaurs and finished wood scratched so deeply you wonder if black bears are to blame. But always, these assaulted uprights produce a sound that leans toward acceptable (even when the kids are mashing away on the keys with their tiny, pink fists). Not Koeck's piano. I suppose its death was for the best.

"I lifted the fall board with the air of hushed expectation that always came over me," Carhart writes, "as if I were opening the door to another world." No doors are opening on Piano Music. They have all closed.