Two street pianos designed and painted by Cobourg artist Katriona Dean currently hold the top two positions on Bored Panda’s “Most Beautiful Outdoor Pianos You Can Play All Around The World” list.
Katriona both designed and painted the two pianos, one with a fox theme and the other with an owl theme, for the Town of Cobourg’s “Keys to Our Town”, a public art project featuring six street pianos painted by local artists.
The fox-themed piano — which Katriona has named “Foxgang Amadeus” in honour of Mozart, after a suggestion from a musician friend — is located in Victoria Park at the corner of King and McGill streets. Katriona’s partner Sorab Bulsara carved the ears and stool from an old tree stump, using only a chainsaw. The owl-themed piano, which was designed and painted by Katriona along with Cobourg arist and musician Gina Newcomb, was located in the same spot in 2013.
The Foxgang Amadeus piano first received international attention in late summer 2014, when Katriona posted a YouTube video of Cobourg musician Michael McNamara playing the piano while singing “Say Something” by A Great Big World.
Michael McNamara performs “Say Something” on Foxgang Amadeus
“I had heard from a friend that the most talented musician would walk up to my piano on a daily basis and play it and sing for anybody who was walking by,” Katriona explains in an interview with Wei Chen on CBC Radio’s Ontario Morning. “So I found him on Facebook and I asked him if I could meet with him one Saturday just to hear him play. As I drove to him, I could hear him from about two blocks away, which is the beautiful thing about these street pianos. They can be heard from blocks away.”
“So I got to him and he played about 17 songs for me that morning,” she continues. “I ended up recording one, just because it was so beautiful. I cried through it, it’s quite shaky video, and that’s the one that I put up on YouTube. It was just for the people who were there, the crowd that had gathered. They wanted to be able to see the video, so I posted it up on YouTube just to show them. About a week later, I got an email from somebody to say that it had about 10,000 views.”
Both of Katrionia’s pianos currently occupy the first and second spots on Bored Panda’s “Most Beautiful Outdoor Pianos You Can Play All Around The World” list, as rated by users of the art, design and photography website. The list also contains street pianos from major cities around the world, including Toronto, Denver, Boston, Melbourne (Australia), and Kiev (Ukraine).
Katriona studied graphic design at Durham College and currently works in the communications and marketing department at Trent University. She also freelances as an illustrator, sculptor, photographer, designer and marketing specialist.
The current interest in street pianos began in Sheffield in England in 2005 when a man moving into a new house couldn’t get his piano up the steps.
As a social experiment, he left it on the street and attached a sign inviting passersby to play the piano for free. The street piano soon became a popular feature of the local community and stayed on the street for over a year.
Inspired by the success of the Sheffield street piano, British artist Luke Jarram created the “Play Me, I’m Yours” project in 2007. He installed 15 street pianos throughout Birmingham for the public to play and, in just three weeks, an estimated 140,000 people either played the pianos or listened to others play.
Since then, more than 1,000 street pianos have been installed in 37 cities across the world, including New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, and Barcelona, with a total reach of an estimated six million people.
