25 ways to kill a piano

A couple of years ago, one of the angriest comment threads ever on Music Thing concerned a bunch of students in Aberystwyth who bought a piano on Freecycle, put it on a beach, burned it, and said it was art. Today, YouTube is stuffed with people being mean to pianos. Damn, you must have had some bad piano teachers...
  1. Throw it off a cliff, set fire to it
  2. Shoot it with shotguns and an AK47
  3. Knock it over and jump on it
  4. Jens Johansson (who is Yngwie Malmsteen's keyboard player) smashes up an old piano while giggling hysterically
  5. Back a pickup truck into it
  6. Play it with a JCB digger (this one really is the stuff of nightmares)
  7. Drive over it in an enormous truck
  8. Put on a leather coat and fill it with fireworks
  9. Smash it and sample it
  10. Fire it from a trebuchet (or here at Burning Man, where presumably it's performance art)
  11. Throw it down a hill
  12. Burn it and call it art (again)
  13. Pull it off the back of a moving pickup truck
  14. Drag it behind a pickup truck
  15. Chop it with an axe
  16. Hit it with a sldege hammer
  17. Throw it off a building (Warning: Video contains giggling MIT students, where they've been doing it since 1972)
  18. Bash two together
  19. Drop it off a fork lift truck
  20. Drive a car into a piano shop
  21. Blow it up
  22. In the interests of fairness, here's an organ getting smashed by giggling metal fans
  23. Use a burning acoustic guitar to set it alight
  24. Throw stuff at it
  25. Blow up a grand piano with really a lot of TNT
(Idea from Michael, whose new book Sod Abroad will make you chuckle)


Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
 
Jeff DeRose of www.ice-axe.com made a beautiful video of a piano burning in the snow for my toy piano band Twink.
 
Twink kicks ass. Supercute is a great, great album.
 
#6 is doubly horrific, because it's not just any piano, but a potentially valuable Pianola (player piano). Philistines!
 
i was expecting at least one of these to be a dx7 patch
 
I've had some very pleasing results from torturing a piano. I love how an injured instrument sounds. Why do people have to be such luddites? shucks.

this is nice:
http://www.polymatic.de/data/umzug/poly_upload_brand_1.JPG
 
John Cage once said, "A piano is like money. No one appreciates it except the person who has it in their hands."
 
What about that Art of Noise video where they cut through the iron frame of a grand piano with power tools?
 
piano destruction was of course very important in the fluxus movement in the 1960ies. here's a great video of sonic youth playing george maciunas' composition "Piano Piece #13 (for Nam June Paik)" from 1962, one of the key pieces of piano destruction music (and obviously by far more that just piano destruction):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hjbyN-IUUlA
 
This comment has been removed by the author.
 
I've always liked this trebuchet fling from northern exposure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Se08RZ34A
 
Cool..

Bashing two together would be the least destructive..

And a brutal way to do it would be Chainsaw Massacre style

:)
 
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