The Dangling Grand Piano

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

One of the things that kept me relatively sane throughout my years traveling in Asia and the Pacific has been my music. I have always had a piano. Well, almost always. Sometimes on some isolated atoll or in a Himalayan monastery I may have done without, but wherever I went, the first thing I did was to get myself a keyboard of some kind or other. I even managed to rent a house in Palembang, Sumatra, ‘with piano’ which was a rare treat. After all, carrying your baby grand round the world is not easy. Why did I not study piccolo?

When I moved back to Port Moresby in 1980 I was privileged to conduct the excellent local choir and a small but competent orchestra. We rehearsed in the country’s teacher training college and performed in several venues, till we built up a following that demanded three or four night runs in a large auditorium, the best of which was the main lecture theater of the University, a fine auditorium with an acoustic well suited to choral performances.

The university decided to buy a concert grand and install it in the theatre in the hope of holding more concerts of a high standard. I was asked to give the inaugural concert. I agreed. Did I mention high standards? Naturally.

The grand piano was due to arrive by ship in early August in 1982.

We had several weeks to prepare. I was going to battle some Beethoven and charge through some revolutionary Chopin. A fine pianist, Ellen Dissaneyeke, was going to lash out at some Liszt.

An excellent violinist, Gudrun Gay, planned to back up with some Bach. I started to rehearse the choir and orchestra for a performance of Carmina Burana. I had arranged it for western orchestra and PNG percussion drums and pipes.

The concert promised to be different.

Our concerts were always well attended and we usually put on a three or four night run. Without fail, the theater was full each night. It never ceased to amaze me that even in some of the most out of the way places you could find artists of excellent quality. Moresby was no exception.

There is often little difference between acceptable professional performances, be they theatre, dance or whatever and an exceptional amateur performance.

Certainly, in Port Moresby, my choir had several excellent soloists, well matched by exceedingly competent instrumentalists.

We practiced for the concert on a perfectly adequate Kawai. I had a Yamaha at home: an upright grand. Yamaha are not my favorite pianos, but hey, we were in Port Moresby. It was better than the clavinova I had in Kiribati or the tiny Casio I managed to find in Kendari. I always found the deeper tone of the Kawai preferable to the treble dominance of a Yamaha.

Publicity was as always handled with aplomb and we had a sold out concert series in front of us. The piano was due to arrive three days before the concert. A piano tuner had set up business in Moresby.

He had been a policeman before retuning himself! He made a good living flying round the country looking after tropically ravaged instruments.

The grand arrival day dawned. I drove to the wharf to watch the unloading. I knew Chris, the head of customs. He sang bass in the choir. We watched as the stevedores swung the cradle into the hold of the MV Pacific Trader. The crane lowered the cradle into the hold. The stevedores wrapped it round the piano.

The crane lifted the piano. It hovered for a moment over the hold. I held my breath. The piano swung over the wharf and twitched as the crane slammed to a stop. Chris frowned.

‘Crane’s jammed!’ he mumbled.

The crane twitched as the operator tried to get it moving. The ropes jerked again. The piano swung more violently. The cradle jerked again. The piano shuddered even more violently. The piano slipped out of the cradle.

Dropping a grand piano onto a wharf from any distance above ten centimeters is not good for a piano: not even a concert grand.

We gazed silently at the mangled mess.

Chris turned to me.

‘That won’t be much use for the concert’.

How astute.

Broken into parts, Chris recycled it as a bar. The ivory keys were turned into souvenirs and the strings and soundboard?  They made a wonderfully modernistic art piece on Chris’s lounge room wall. The concert went ahead. The small Kawai proved adequate, as was the Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Liszt and Orff. (Actually, the Revolutionary sounded more evolutionary: some of those runs needed a grand: at least that was my excuse.)

Musically, Port Moresby was a breakthrough for me. I composed my first choral works there (Cantata Buka and Segaropa) and led the wonderful Port Moresby Choral Society. NBC released my first commercial recording and I was listed in the cultural archives of Papua New Guinea as ‘expatriate composer Lansell Taudevin’. Small puddles?

In 1983 my contract came to an end. I was