A Curvy New Piano Gets Its Debut

UNLIKELY GUITARS
Everyone’s screen time goes up when it gets this hot. It’s OK. If you’re a guitar lover, you could rack up a few hours getting to know YouTuber Burls Art.

His YouTube channel features guitars he’s made from paper, coffee beans, mirrors... he's even made one from salt! But I think his recent guitar made out of 2,000 colored pencils is pretty wonderful:

And by the way, if you've ever wondered whether electric guitars get a voice in modern concert music, you should check out the innovative and haunting ways that composer/guitarist Steven Mackey uses them. Here's his intensely driven piece Physical Property with the Kronos Quartet:

A MEGA-HIT FROM PAKISTAN
Our good friends down the hall at the public radio show The World just did a report on a new, irresistible song by Pakistani musician and Harvard alum Ali Sethi. “Pasoori” has been analyzed in The New Yorker, it’s shown up on the hit TV series Ms. Marvel, and now it’s racked up some 270 million YouTube views. The story of two lovers yearning for one another while forbidden to meet is about as old as time. But it’s one that will forever reverberate with personal and even political meaning.

CURVY NEW PIANO HAS ITS DEBUT
Well, we’ll always be grateful to Bartolomeo Cristofori for coming up with a most excellent invention back in the 1600’s: the piano! I'm sure he'd be fascinated to learn about the many transformations it’s undergone over time. And while it may seem as though we’ve reached perfection with the modern nine-foot beauty that can whisper and roar and everything in between, the truth is that people are still coming up with new ideas. Legendary conductor/pianist Daniel Barenboim recently patented a new design that keeps the strings from crossing over one another.

And now there’s the Maene-Viñoly Concert Grand. Renowned architect and amateur pianist Rafael Viñoly thought it would be helpful if the keyboard could be curved to match the natural arc of a pianist’s arms as they rotate from the shoulder to reach the upper and lower regions of the instrument. He and master piano maker Chris Maene worked with an Italian professor of medicine and biology as well as some famous pianist friends to come up with a whole new instrument. And on July 19^th, Kirill Gerstein gave it its first spin in public at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. (If you've subscribed to medici.tv, you have till October to see the recital.)