gilgai

000   At volcanic mud baths . . . an old stained piano   [1] 000   Once a certain idea of landscape . . . of the scenery   [2]

000   Drag pianos out onto the streets . . . they fall to pieces   [3] 000   Until about 1770 pianos were . . . uncertain in status   [4]

000   We made our plans this way . . . not being able to do it   [5] 000   An orchestra was founded . . . five foreign languages   [6]

000   scribbled on pieces of paper . . . sometimes in less than thirty minutes   [7] 000   In matters of translation . . . the equivalent of infidelities   [8]

— Selected extracts from Sophy Roberts’ source notes, in The Lost Pianos of Siberia: In Search of Russia’s Remarkable Survivors. Uncorrected proof copy (London: Doubleday, 2019)

1. Elim Denidoff, A Shooting Trip to Kamchatka (London: Rowland Ward, 1904) 2. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996) 3. Vladimer Mayakovsky, 'Battle-order to the Army of Art' in Vladimer Mayakovsky and Other Poems, trans. James Womack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2016) 4. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 5. John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (London: Penguin, 2001) 6. Janet M. Hartley, Siberia:  A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 7. Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslov Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber & Faber, 2001) 8. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861-1886 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)

In a Melbourne street, a T-Model Ford truck precedes a procession of horse drawn wagons piled up with old pianos, which are on their way to West Melbourne Swamp to be burnt. At the swamp a man plays a piano on top of a pile of the old pianos, before they are doused with kerosene and set on fire. 

Still image from ‘A Collection of Worn Out Pianos Committed to the Flames at West Melbourne Swamp’, newsreel, c. 1915. National Film & Sound Archive of Australia,  Title No. 76719. Reproduced in David Sorning, The Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp (Brunswick, Victoria: Scribe Publications, 2018).

‘Silenced at Last: Worn-Out Pianos Burnt’, Leader, Orange, 3 April 1914, p.4

A dense pall of vapor from the monster bedwork drifted with the wind, and became absorbed in the evening; flames burst forth, and when the noise decreased of the cracking timber, a purring sound accompanied their flicker, and — shades of Chopin, Strauss, and Spohr! was it their swan song? — those dim echoes of the old, old airs! —’Fifty Pianos Burnt: A Musical Bonfire — Derelicts of the Past’, Advertiser, S.A., 3 April 1914, p. 4

Newspaper extracts from The Leader and The Advertiser, 3 April 1914, on the burning of old pianos at the West Melbourne tip. Both cited in David Sorning, The Blue Lake : Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp (Brunswick, Victoria: Scribe Publications, 2018)