The Day the Music Died at the Dump

The Possession Project

There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching a piano being pushed off the back of a truck. The awful shuddering noise as it flies though the air and lands on the garbage pile. And then there’s the silence as it lays there, a hulking carcass, keyboard face down among the rolls of old carpet and the rest of the household trash.
This sad fate awaits many old pianos. I discovered this by accident, while browsing some online buy and sell sites. I was amazed to find almost 200 free pianos (and a few free organs) within driving distance of my home. After a bit more research, it became clear that the final destination for many of these unwanted pianos is usually the dump.

A piano is an ingenious apparatus made up of thousands of intricate pieces bound together under incredible tension yet standing poised and ready, sometimes for decades, to spring into motion with a simple touch. One gentle tap on the key triggers a cascade of kinetic energy with one objective —to create a musical sound.
In this episode of The Possession Project, I investigate the transformation of the piano -- with all of its vitality, prestige, and increasingly-scarce raw materials -- into worthless garbage.