The un-piano bar

It wasn’t what I expected. Bar opened at 5 p.m., piano wasn’t supposed to start playing until 6 p.m., the band wasn’t to start until 9 p.m. or something like that. First two drinks at $1 apiece, free appetizers until 7 p.m. With a setup like that, I knew we would be leaving before the band started, but figured we’d stay until the end of the free appetizers.

This was the after-work happy hour scheduled by our Employee Activities Committee from work. Best I can tell there is another member of the committee who knows all the bars, frequents them frequently, and gets all sorts of discounts, or wins special events. Maybe I am putting pieces together wrong, but I think she got our entry and free drinks in some sort of drawing that she won. Not that I think the bar lost on it — those third and fourth drinks were going down fine for a lot of people.

Betsy and I got there around 5:30. We got our wristbands at the door and our two dollar drink coupons. When we walked in we were asked about our drink orders. Diet coke and Sprite. Apparently those weren’t drinks — they didn’t take a coupon for them. They had canned music going, wasn’t bad, wasn’t special, wasn’t too loud, but I was looking forward to 6 p.m. and the piano bar. They had double pianos on stage.  The possibility of dueling pianos sounded interesting.

And then the pianos began. I never realized pianos could be so non-acoustic. The sound was miked, amplified. By the time I left I could feel parts of my head that I couldn’t usually feel. There was just something wrong with the sound. It had no projection. The sound didn’t travel and then reflect back. It was pushed out and then dropped — like a punch of sound.

I made comments in a blog previously about medieval recorders and how well they projected sound through all sorts of background noise. I cannot help but go back to that in comparison to what was done to the pianos at the bar. The keys were pulled out to insert some sort of electronic interface in the space between them and the keys, and whatever else was inserted had a dampening effect on the natural acoustic of the sounding board, which was replaced by electronic amplification — of the deadened sound.

The music was enjoyable, if the sound hadn’t been so loud, or so lacking in projection.

Some of this is a matter of taste, but much more of it is a question of quality. It seems we haven’t learned, or have forgotten, lessons that medieval recorder players knew.  How much have we truly progressed?