Latest / The Culture Club: Books, Art, Film, Music & Entertainment / The Broken Upright: Finding Music in Abandoned School Halls | The Culture Club
Transcript
- There is a specific kind of silence that lives inside an abandoned school, and it only breaks when you press the keys of a piano that hasn’t been tuned since 1998. I want you to close your eyes for a second. Just for a moment. Imagine walking into a room that time forgot. The air is thick, not with dust motes dancing in sunlight, but with the heavy, still breath of neglect. You are standing in what used to be a music classroom. The walls are painted a faded, institutional green, peeling slightly at the edges like old wallpaper on a sick patient. And there, in the corner, sits a piano. It’s ugly, really. A brown upright, scarred and dented, missing two legs that have been replaced by stacks of old textbooks. The lid is propped open with a brick. This isn’t a concert hall. This isn’t even a home studio. This is a place where children once learned scales, and now, it’s just waiting. When I first sat down at that bench, my hands were shaking. Not from cold, though the building was drafty, but from anticipation. I knew the instrument was out of tune. Probably severely. But I had to know what it sounded like. I pressed a middle C. It didn’t ring. It thudded. A dull, wooden knock against the ribs of the piano. I pressed another note. Then a chord. It wasn’t harmony. It was chaos. It was dissonance. But here’s the thing, friends: it was alive. In that broken, ugly, off-key mess, there was more truth than in any perfectly polished recording I’ve ever heard. Because perfection is safe. Perfection is controlled. But this? This was vulnerable. This was admitting that things can be broken and still make sound. Still make meaning. Let’s dig into the velvet of that idea. What does it mean to create art when the tools themselves are failing you? I started playing something simple. A melody I remembered from childhood, something my grandmother used to hum while she folded laundry. It’s a song about leaving, about saying goodbye to a place you love. As my fingers hit those warped keys, the notes didn’t match the memory. They clashed. They stumbled. But in that stumbling, I felt something shift. The dissonance became part of the story. It wasn’t just a song about leaving anymore; it was a song about how hard it is to leave. How messy it feels. The piano’s inability to hold a tune mirrored my own inability to let go cleanly. It forced me to listen differently. Instead of expecting clarity, I had to lean in. I had to hear the texture of the decay. Tell me more about that feeling. That sensation of being held by something imperfect. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? Not a perfect reflection, but a true one. You know, people often talk about haunted houses as if they’re filled with spirits wailing in terror. But I think the real haunting is quieter. It’s in the objects. In the piano. I imagine hundreds of students sitting on that same bench. Kids who were nervous about recitals. Kids who were using it to escape homework. Kids who fell in love with someone else right there, their fingers brushing over the same ivory keys. Now, those kids are grown. Some are parents. Some are grandparents. Some are gone. The piano remembers them all. It holds their joy, their frustration, their boredom. When I play it now, I’m not just making noise. I’m joining a chorus. I’m adding my voice to theirs. It’s a communal ritual, even in solitude. We are never truly alone in our creative acts. We are always standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before us, even if they left no written record. In our industry, we are obsessed with polish. We want the image to be crisp, the audio to be clean, the narrative to be seamless. We edit out the stumbles. We remove the background noise. But sitting in that abandoned school, I realized how much we lose when we do that. We lose the humanity. We lose the context. The glitch, the warp, the break—that’s where the life is. When I recorded the sounds of that piano later, I didn’t try to fix the tuning. I didn’t run it through software to make it sound like a Steinway. I kept the clicks. I kept the squeaks of the pedals. I kept the echo of the empty room. Because that’s the story. The story isn’t the melody. The story is the space between the notes. The story is the decay. It’s a reminder that our own creative processes don’t need to be linear or smooth. They can be jagged. They can be difficult. They can be beautiful precisely because they are hard. Now, I know not everyone has access to an abandoned school. But we all have our own broken instruments. Maybe it’s a project that’s stalled. Maybe it’s a relationship that’s frayed. Maybe it’s a version of yourself that you’re trying to hide away because it doesn’t fit the mold. I want you to think about what that looks like for you. What is the piano in your life that is out of tune? Don’t try to fix it yet. Don’t rush to repair it. Just sit with it. Listen to its strange, discordant song. Ask yourself: what is this brokenness trying to tell me? Is it telling me that I’m tired? That I’m changing? That I need a new approach? Often, our resistance to imperfection keeps us stuck. But our acceptance of it? That’s where the magic happens. That’s where we start to create from a place of honesty rather than performance. So here is my challenge to you this week. Find your abandoned space. It might be a mental space, a physical corner of your home, or even a creative endeavor you’ve put aside. Go there. Sit with it. Play the wrong notes. Make the mess. Don’t worry about the audience. Don’t worry about the review. Worry only about the connection. Feel the weight of the keys under your fingers. Hear the resonance in the empty room. And then, write it down. Record it. Paint it. Whatever medium you choose, let it be raw. Let it be real. Because the world doesn’t need more polished perfection. It needs more honest voices. It needs your voice, even if it’s cracked. Even if it’s off-key. Especially then. That’s where the beauty lives. In the cracks. In the gaps. In the spaces we usually try to fill. Thank you for letting me take you into that dusty classroom today. I hope you carry a little bit of that dissonant beauty with you as you move through your day. Be gentle with your own broken instruments. They are singing louder than you think. Until next time, keep listening. Keep creating. And remember, I’m always here, ready to dig into the velvet with you. Bye for now.