Piano meets fiery death at birthday celebration
'It symbolizes letting the past go to continue on,' owner says about her mom's piano's fiery end
When a friend asked Tiffany Taylor if she would let someone burn her old grand piano, the answer was no — at first.
"Some people might look at it as blasphemy: 'What is she doing burning a piano?'" Taylor said as she watched the 1930s instrument get consumed by flames this spring.
"That was the hardest part for me. I thought, 'Oh my God, how can you burn a piano? You can't burn a piano.'"
Taylor let a stranger — a friend of a friend — named Rick Unger burn her piano in a fiery piece of performance art he created with friends for his 50th birthday party at a farm just outside of Winnipeg.
The piano was unplayable, but the space it took in Taylor's home was tied up in connections with her childhood and her family — she inherited it from her mother.
"It's cathartic," she said about the piano burn. "Big changes are happening in my life right now, and this is just one small chapter, made huge, actually, by this event and Rick's idea, and I'm thrilled to be part of it. And there is a reason for why this all happened at this time for me."
Taylor's piano isn't the first Unger has burned, although it is the first grand piano he's set ablaze, and it's a far bigger production than the two earlier piano burns.
"In the past, I've had friends give me old pianos that no longer work and they no longer need them, so we figured, well, what are we going to do? We'll burn it," said Unger, a musician and artist whose day job is as a maintenance technician at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.
The last two pianos Unger burned were a small apartment piano and an old upright, both similarly useless and destined for a dump. Because of their shape, they became unplayable shortly after the fire was lit, he said — and that prompted his search for a grand piano.
Unger even bought fire approach suits so that he and Becky Reesor, the composer and his fellow performer, could continue to play while the fire burned around them.
The whole thing cost about $1,600, he estimated, but he crowdfunded the party, so it only ended up putting him out a few hundred dollars.
"I don't feel bad about doing this for my 50th because I've never been married and no one's ever had to pay for any wedding presents for me," he said. "I've got them all wedding gifts and baby shower gifts and stuff like that, so I don't mind a little bit of payback right now."
Pianos have a finite lifespan and many are simply ending up in dumps, Unger said. Taylor was told it would cost $6,000 to fix her piano — more than the instrument is worth even after repairs.
He thinks it's far more appropriate to send a piano to a fiery death than cart it off to a dump.
"I'm not trying to provoke," he said.
"It's fun, it's play, and it's something that we don't experience every day. You know, it's an opportunity to just forget about … everything else that might be either troubling you or just having to think about and just focus on this one crazy thing."
Reesor, a former Canadian Mennonite University student who's currently doing a master's degree in piano performance at McGill University in Montreal, calls the duet she composed Piece for Four Hands and Burning Piano. Unger paid for her plane tickets so she could perform at the party.
"It was much more casual, not as planned, and that was an upright and the wood expanded so that the hammers were no longer able to strike the strings," she said. "That meant that the piano was just unplayable long before anything was dangerous and the piano became very hot very quickly."
She shares a personal connection with Taylor, although they didn't meet until the night of the performance — Reesor's mom's cancer inspired her composition.
"It was the piece that I played just after I got off the phone with my mom one day, learning that she had her fourth cancer, so then it was a celebration of life, it was a celebration of strength and resilience," she said.
"At this point in my life, the most poignant celebration of life was that morning."
Taylor said that was just more evidence she had done the right thing, although it was tough to say goodbye to the piano.
"It symbolizes strength and longevity in my life. It symbolizes my family," Taylor said while the fire burned. "It symbolizes letting the past go to continue on."
But the event was beautiful, satisfying her inner firebug as she watched "the ultimate fire pit" and the changing images in the flames, she said.
"This is beautiful. Beautiful sendoff, beautiful gathering, beautiful welcoming, beautiful celebration," she said as the party wound down.
"Everyone is sharing in this. It's not like the piano went to the dump or somewhere where I'd never know its lifespan. This is its lifespan. This is its lifespan and death span."
Video credit: Matt Veith
Still photo: Dan Dyck