Anthony Burgess
The Pianoplayers
The novel describes the story of a young girl in Manchester. Her father
works there as a pianoplayer in the cinema Star. When in 1929 the sound
film turned up, he tries to make money in a piano marathon over thirty
days. She describes the piano and his way of playing as follows:
The piano that my father had to play on at the Star was a broken down
old thing that never got tuned, but my dad never complained. He showed
me on Saturday afternoon once just before the matinee, with the kids
screaming at the door wanting to be let in, just how a man of resource,
as he called himself, could do big things even with a lousy piano.
"All those notes down there in the bass is just a lot of noise, but
that's very useful for drums and thunder and so on. And that D there is
gone, but it's fine for someone tapping at the window. And that E flat
up there near the top has dropped down so it's the same as D flat, and
that means I can do a trill on one note very fast. Faster than what
Paderooski could do on a proper piano." My father had stripped all the
wooden panels off the piano, so that he could bang the wires with a
coalhammer that he'd pinched to make the effect of bells and zithers. As
he said himself, he was more than a pianoplayer when it came to films,
he was an effects man too.
He took pride in having all sorts of little odds and ends he'd picked up
or nicked to give what he called greater reality. He had a little
clockwork bell for when somebody rang at the door on the screen. If a
shepherd played a flute to his sheep in the meadows then he'd come in
with a tin whistle. For rain he used to rattle dried peas in a biscuit
tin. He once got himself a sheet of aluminium to shake for thunder, but
he'd pinched it off a man who was trying to build his own racing car out
in the street and there was a row about that. When there was a
gramophone playing on the screen he had a real old portable with a
record of Pretty Redwing. Somebody pinched this, though he'd pinched it
himself.
They were a pretty mean lot of customers at the Star, and they never
appreciated what my poor dad did for their entertainment and
enlightenment. Most of the music he played he made up as he went along.
As he used to say, the buggers were getting Original Compositions for
their lousy threepence.
from: Anthony Burgess, The Pianoplayers, Arrow Books, London 1986
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