why the piano? & why the Boat?

ok, so it's time for a wee bit more of the back-story to this crazy pianoboating adventure! The piano: was always there in the livingroom for years, after it was inherited from our 93-year-old Hungarian great-aunt. It was a challenge, a system to be de-coded and re-coded. I loved its walnut paneling and dusty cast-iron interior. So many tuning pegs and so many wound steel and brass strings.

The boat: well, I wasn't getting much better at swimming, and I'd swapped the elemental challenges of sailing Mirrors at the Yacht Club for the simpler Saturday-morning trials of wrestling with my racquet at the local tennis club. After the social bafflement and confusing humiliations of school or tennis, the piano was my daily escape. As the keys became more and more familiar to my fingers, I could slip further and further away from the tawdry human horrors of an isolated small town's melancholy. So it was that the piano, for all of its aged German-made solidity, became a kind of boat. A vessel for an inner life that refused to surrender itself to the fearful trip-lines of spoken words.

The music was exploratory and compelling, guided first by the simple pointers offered by family and friends, and then by intuition. It began very simply, like i was learning the ropes of a boat still in port. Gradually my adventurous fingers charted some kind of a coastline as I gathered some precious compliments and found confidence. The meandering improvised music I surrounded myself with became deeper, and eventually truly oceanic as i sought out the transcendent potentials of the curiously intermingled currents of applied mathematics and pure emotions.

By my late teens I had performed improvisations in front of the entire school at assembly, and for some puppet shows, playback theatre and low-key arthouse gigs. I could still scarcely read sheet-music but badly wanted to share this crazy passion in a way that might do it justice. Conversations with my informal mentors Ross and Sandy prompted the first imaginings of combining a piano with wheels – to reach the public! – and with an artistic theatricality – yes, perhaps even with a maritime theme ...

© Raku Pitt