The 2023 Charlotte SHOUT! festival kicks off this weekend, bringing funky art installations and live music to locations around uptown Charlotte for the next two weeks. One new installation this year is inside a formerly-empty church on Brevard Street — and you might hear it before you see it.
Inside the historic Grace A.M.E. Zion Church, a team of craftsmen and volunteers have built an amphitheater entirely out of deconstructed pianos. They call it the Pianodrome.
The team held a jam session this week to celebrate the amphitheater's completion and break it in with some sounds before the Pianodrome opened to the public.
Free-flowing, relaxed music filled the space as a man strummed a guitar and a man beside him played one of the pianos built into the amphitheater's seats.
Project lead and musician Matthew Wright stood nearby, sipping a glass of champagne with a smile.
"We're toasting it today. We're sort of christening it, if you will," he said.
About 50 pianos = 1 amphitheater
Wright's team spent the past two-and-a-half months painstakingly deconstructing and then reassembling about 50 pianos for the project.
"Everything, right down to the screws, is taken from pianos. There's nothing in this sculpture which isn't taken from an old piano," Wright said. "The whole project is a way of upcycling these beautiful, historical objects."
Some of the pianos were donated. Others came from a warehouse in Minnesota.
Wright pointed out cast iron piano harps that have become structural supports, and carved piano legs dividing the seats. His team kept some of the gold lettering and old piano labels as details in the sculpture.
Three pianos embedded in the structure are still playable, "so you can have little spontaneous jams," Wright said as he tinkered on some keys.
This is the third Pianodrome that Wright has helped create. He helped build the first two in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he plays the saxophone in a small band.
He said the first Pianodrome started as a band project.
"My bandmate, Tim, had the idea to make a circle of pianos, turn it into a structure with tiered seating, this sort of thing, and I took him on. I was like, 'Yeah, let's actually do it,'" Wright said.
After winning praise in Scotland, Wright and his team were recruited by Charlotte SHOUT! to build a Pianodrome here, and he got to work looking for more pianos and local craftsmen to help.
One craftsman donated his own childhood piano
One of those locals was Greg Lilley. He helped with woodwork, and also donated his own childhood piano to the project.
"Right over there behind the young lady with the guitar," Lilley said, pointing to the top of a row of seats.
You can still see part of the upright piano, made in 1892, that his father bought when Lilley was six years old.
"It took me a little time to be able to let go of it, because I really just wanted to have it, you know, to have it and hold," Lilley said.
He hoped to one day restore it, but then decided donating it to the project would have more meaning.
"Now that I see it all done, I'm just beyond words," Lilley said. "It's so much fun to have it be part of the thing."
'It's a place for bringing people together'
Now that the work is done, the public will get to explore and enjoy the space. Kat Martin with Charlotte SHOUT! said the Pianodrome will open daily for lunchtime concerts, piano recitals, live speakers and performances, and unstructured free play.
"There might be some students playing, then there might be 20 minutes of just anybody come play it, and one of the teachers is doing a scavenger hunt, where you walk around and find different things in the pianos," she said.
Building the amphitheater was just half the work, Wright said. The rest will come from those who visit the space.
"What we want people to bring to it is their own experiences, their own enthusiasm, their musicality, their friends. You know, it's a place for bringing people together. For it to be alive, people need to bring their whatever it is to the space, or even just their ears," Wright said.
Festival organizers are still working out what might happen to the Pianodrome once the festival ends. Wright said it could remain inside the empty church permanently.
For now, visitors can see and hear it for themselves through April 16.
