2,150,000
pianos
Benny Green
The recent discovery that there are at large in this country no fewer than 2,150,000 pianos reminds me that, had it not been for the wilfully percussive nature of my juvenile piano style, there would almost certainly be 2,150,001.
I don't suppose I have altogether consciously thought about my grandfather's piano in twenty-five years, but on the morning last week when I came across that dramatic statistic in my morning newspaper, I experienced a sudden flush of retrospective indignation at the thought that nobody in my grandfather's house had ever been willing to grant me permission to play that piano. However, it is wonderful what childhood ingenuity can achieve even without permission, and I soon discovered that by weighing down the soft pedal with a pressing iron and restricting my rhapsodisings to the lower octaves, I could render myself inaudible to the rest of the household. Or rather, nearly inaudible, for I have it from an unimpeachable source that sometimes my grandfather would slap his ear, look up at the sky and tell everybody there was a thunderstorm coming. One day during the last war the soft pedal fell off, and a general deterioration followed. In the end one of my aunts, the least musical one, gave the corporation dustmen twenty-five shillings to take the remains away, at which point I turned my attention to the saxophone, an instrument whose all-metal construction was much better suited than any piano could ever be to the rugged demands of my musical personality.
As I was sitting there with the newspaper in my hand recollecting all this, another thought came into my mind. It was all very well announcing that there were 2,150,000 pianos in the land, but how many pianists were there? Hardly enough to go round, judging from the evidence I have collected over the years. That is the trouble with all statistics, that being literally true they are all utterly misleading. In the same paper that told me there are 2,150,000 pianos in Britain, there was an item announcing that the figures for the sale of men's shirts rose between 1960 and 1971 from 53,000,000 to 105,000,000. Very well, but what does it mean? Take the piano figures. It would seem that out of that 2,150,000 there are many thousands who own a piano because they find it an indispensable repository for wedding photographs and cracked ashtrays; many thousands more who possess one because they regard it as an invaluable gesture of cultural snobbery with which to confound their philistine friends; many thousands again who cling to their piano in the hope that their child will turn out to be Andre Previn; and many thousands yet again who have a piano inside their homes because nobody has ever discovered any way of getting it outside, except by demolishing the building. I have heard at least one apocryphal story of an eccentric Victorian (you mean there's another kind?) who bought the largest piano he could find, dumped it in the largest field he could find, and then hired the drunkest architect he could find to build a house round it.
Then again, I suppose there must be many cases like my grandfather's, where the piano is given house room because to do so seems the course of least resistance, nobody being able to remember how it got there in the first place. I assume that once upon a time, in the dim unfathomable past, probably in the mysterious prehistory of before-my-time, one of my aunts or uncles expressed a desire to be Paderewski or Liszt, or at any rate Carroll Gibbons, that an instrument was promptly conjured up accordingly, that the fit of aspiration quickly died, and that by that time the piano had taken root in my grandmother's parlour, next to the polar bearskin rug with the minatory head and the baleful eyes. No doubt its presence should have helped me to become a proficient pianist myself (the piano, not the bear), but it never worked out that way. To this very day my piano playing sounds like a bad day in an iron foundry, but it does not prevent me from owning one of the 2,150,000.
All this new information gave me the feeling that for once I was integrated with statistics, a sensation only confirmed by the fact that not only was I proprietor of one of Britain's 2,150,000 pianos, but was at this very moment wearing one of the 105,000,000 shirts purchased in Britain last year. Perhaps it meant nothing, but perhaps also there was something to be said for being in the main stream of civilisation instead of forever sulking in some unmathematical backwater where nobody ever takes a census of your shirts or your pianos. All of which reminded me, for some obscure reason, of America, where things are very much worse, as usual. Of 180,000,000 Americans, 41,600,000 play either a musical instrument or a mouth organ, and of these 23,000,000. or 12.8 per cent of the population, play pianos. This makes our 2,150,000, or 4.1 per cent look pretty feeble. However, America has its own troubles, including ten million guitarists and four and a half million organists. Worse is to come. In the United States there are 1,436 symphony orchestras, every one of which persists in playing the 1812 overture whether it dislikes the audience or not; finally, there are in that otherwise admirable land 918 operatic groups. What the bel canto can any reasonable man do in the face of such horrifying facts except plug his ears and run?
Thinking all these macabre thoughts, I suddenly remembered that it waS months since I had seen my own keyboard, so, taking my newspaper with me, I went into the drawing room and sat at my piano. The newspaper report said that of our 2,150,000 pianos, 1,700,000 are untuned. Dolefully I struck a C minor chord, The newspaper report was absolutely right. It said also that 69 per cent of all British pianos were purchased before 1965. Right again. Also that by 1982 the shortage of piano tuners will have become so acute, or sharp, that our musical life will be deflated, or flat. Right yet again. Sadly I closed the piano and looked through the newspaper in search of further statistical clues to the riddle of the universe.
Sure enough, there on the paper's Business Page was an item announcing that between 1967 and 1971 British production of textile machinery rose from £113 million to £170 million. This was pretty fascinating stuff, so I read on, only to be shocked by the claim that this rise was due to devaluation. "Garbage and filth," I shouted with characteristic urbanity, " it has nothing to do with devaluation. It was all those modest, self-effacing, piano-owning, shirtbuying people like me who never get any credit for anything," with which observation I went into the kitchen laughing at the thought that for every resident of Greater London, the United States of America has a guitarist.
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