Seattle’s discarded pianos get new lease of life

With the boom in mainly acoustic pianos well and truly over, it’s little surprise many are finding their way onto landfill and junk sites, no longer loved or maintained.

Fortunately, for piano lovers in the Seattle area, one man’s mission to save these unwanted instruments means many will get a new life, where they otherwise would’ve been discarded forever.

Chad Newell of Seattle Piano Recycling believes the change in societal behaviours, and the ubiquity of digital pianos, set the decline of these beautiful acoustic pianos on a steep slope.

Street pianos gallery

“(The) 70s and 80s were the biggest decade of the most quantity of pianos being sold in American history,” he said. “And then starting in the 90s, with the creation of the Internet and digital keyboards by Yamaha and Casio, people stopped buying acoustic pianos like they did before. So, we’re talking from 300,000 pianos a year to 30,000 pianos a year.”

In the ’50s, people had pianos in their homes, bought from one of the hundreds of lower-end piano manufacturers. It was one of their primary sources of entertainment, before TV and other distractions came along.

“But what happened was people stopped playing the piano,” he said. “They have grandma’s piano, they have the great grandma’s piano, the aunt and uncle’s piano, and everyone keeps playing merry-go-round with the piano between the families until somebody can’t keep it anymore.”

Newell has an obvious disdain for modern electronic instruments, describing them as “artificial” and with “no craftsmanship”. Not so the acoustic instruments of the past. “Each piano was made in an artisanal way by hand, all the carvings, all the wood. Everything was glued, all the hammers were meticulously placed. Everything was meticulously regulated and tuned to perfection.”

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