I am reading …
The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts. Roberts is a journalist and travel writer who writes about people, places and journeys through immersive, reporting. Whilst Roberts describes her approach as an on-the-ground search for oral memory1, NDR Germany praises her “completely new sound in an over-travelled world”. It is a very fitting description of her first book, published in 2020.
Hunting down the lost pianos of Siberia, she digs deep into two centuries of European and Russian history, the 19th and the 20th, while immersing herself in the present. She travells thousands of kilometres, searching for the instruments and seeking out many witnesses along the way. She takes her time talking to the people who safeguard, play and remember these instruments and their former owners, more often than not under the most extreme political, economic, cultural and climatic conditions.
You can come to The Lost Pianos of Siberia with an interest in history, politics, geography or music, and you won’t be disappointed. What pulls you in is Roberts’s storytelling, combined with her non-judgemental journalistic eye.
When I read the book, I had just finished working with a client, a piano tuner and technician, and had immersed myself in his world: tuning and temperament, the history and construction of instruments, and the effects of temperature, humidity and transport. So it struck me that many of those who helped Roberts on her search were tuners, technicians and teachers - the backbone of musical life.
Coming from inside the music world, I find Roberts’s unapologetically non-musical approach wonderfully refreshing. A pianist or technician would look at a Blüthner and think about its action, voicing and condition; Roberts sees a life story, a journey, a political history. Where I might see an instrument first, Roberts sees witnesses: the pianos themselves, and the people who guard them.
Her book is a reminder that these pianos are never just wood, felt and steel. They carry the hands that made and played them, the journeys that took them across Siberia and the people who would not let them fall silent.
I am listening …
to Glacier, by Dai Fujikura5, who describes his piece as being “like a plume of cold air which is floating silently between the peaks of a very icy cold landscape, slowly but cutting like a knife...”
Perhaps the Siberian landscape inspired me to choose this piece today, or perhaps it is the prospect of switching on the heating (creature comforts). In truth, though, it may have been my summer in the Alps, where once again I experienced first-hand the slow disappearance of mighty landscapes that show us so strikingly the power and awe of nature. The glaciers’ frightening retreat is a reminder of what might come if we don’t act more decisively.
Fujikura’s piece is beautiful and unsettling, and that is what the arts can do: they can hold wonder and warning in equal measure.
Stay warm, and keep listening
Kirsten