Old Piano, New Soul: Greencastle Piano Project takes center stage

Monday, September 28, 2020
Local musician Veronica Pejril plays the new street piano in front of Wasser Brewing Co. on Saturday.
Courtesy photo/JOE FIELDS

Local artist Matt Rees has turned an old piano into a work of playable art for the community to see.

Brought up by Main Street Greencastle, the Greencastle Piano Project brings local art to the community to not just be looked at, but played.

The idea isn’t a brand new one, but Main Street Executive Director Mike Richmond liked its potential in Greencastle.

He called the project a version of “a street piano that has been a hit in big cities such as Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and was brought to us about a year and a half ago to try and do something outside the box.”

On a trip to Brunswick, Maine, to visit his wife’s family, Rees saw the pianos on the street and thought the idea was crazy, seeing the pianos had been painted with “all sorts of crazy stuff,” but after just sitting out in the rain, the pianos were done.

With the piano currently sitting under the awning at Wasser Brewing Co., it will be taken care and sanitized so that people can come and play it.

Displaying a new addition to the Greencastle artistic community, Matt Rees and daughter Jamaica stand next to the street piano they designed for display in front of Wasser Brewing Co.
Courtesy photo/JOE FIELDS

The piano was donated from a local resident and handed over to Rees.

“J.D. Grove suggested Matt Rees to us and he is already well known here in the county and has works up at Wasser’s and we trusted his judgment on the design and what was good for the piano,” Richmond said. “We had little conversations on the overall design of the piano and a little over a month into the project, we were just blown away by what he had done so far.”

A graduate of North Putnam High School and with a reputation for his works of art at Conspire, Rees, with the help of his daughter Jamaica, says that this project, “was going to give this piano one last chance to do the thing it was created to do”.

The project also received support from Black Lumber in Greencastle and the Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, which made Rees an artist in residence.

“The overall design of the piano was bridging a gap of where we are and where we are going,” Rees says, “After stripping it down and painting three coats of white paint over it having a clean slate, it was just so awesome to put that first marker on there and start drawing.”

The design on the piano “transcends mortality” Rees said. “We can go back to any culture in the past and the thing that we hold on to is their art and music and that is the overall message of the design: we live on through art and music.”

One of the design pieces on the piano are two well-known songs, “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” by John Denver and “Piano Man” by Billy Joel, in which Reese linked together a line from each of the songs to form a new sentence: “Life ain’t nothing but a funny, funny riddle, thank god I’m the piano man, sing me a song tonight.”

When asked about the background of the project and how it came to be, Richmond says the project was designed to become a “focal point” for the community.

“The piano project was created almost as an extension to the Indiana Street closure to provide these community spaces where people can come and just hang out,” Richmond said.

But then COVID-19 entered the picture putting everything on hold. Richmond went on to say that after COVID, the project became a “shining light in a time of despair for small businesses.”

Richmond hopes the project will be not only an artistic drive, but an economic drive to show that “we are partnering with businesses instead of the traditional aspect of putting the piano in a park or public spaces, which serves a purpose to show that we can come together and help our community and small businesses.”

With all of the reactions so far being positive, Rees hopes that the Greencastle Piano Project will inspire people to come out and play music all the time.

“I hope to see people playing it and the art drawing people to it,” Rees said.

More pianos are in the works with the next one to be revealed in the next year. For now, the inaugural piano designed by Rees is on display at Wasser.

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