World Piano Day 2025

Don’t forget, folks, March 29th is World Piano Day when pianos, pianists and piano music are celebrated around the world. Why the 29th? Most acoustic pianos have 88 notes and so, every year, World Piano Day is always celebrated on the 88th day of the year. I should know, because before I entered the teaching profession I was a piano technician (and when I worked for that famous store, Harrods, found myself in the homes of some wealthy and famous piano-owning clients. But I also found myself working in schools and eventually got the bug for something different).

Times have changed. When I began my career as a primary school teacher, it was often recognized that anyone who could add ‘Can play the piano’ to their CVs was likely to be seen as quite an asset to the school and increased their employment prospects quite a bit. As the current century got under way, CD players, electric keyboards and then something called the internet made access to music, backing tracks and so on so easy, quickly replacing the humble piano forte. But in my new book about pianos I refer to the string/percussion/tuned/solo/ soft and loud instrument (it’s got everything!) as the ‘bouncing piano’ because it has always fought back in popularity – Channel 4’s The Piano series being a recent example. Pianos were used in cinemas to great effect, but then talkies came in. The gramophone also rivalled the piano for entertainment but ‘worse’ was to follow, the radio and then the television. Who needs pianos? The 1960s saw many smashed in village green fetes and student rag week competitions, the idea being to see how quickly an old piano could be smashed to smithereens and its parts squeezed through a hole of a certain diameter. Electric organs and synthesizers became all the rage, but the piano never completely died out, they were designed and made better for the modern world and so in the 1970s proved to still be wanted and played. Being many things – beautiful pieces of art, sophisticated machines with over 12000 moving parts, symbols of wealth and class – the piano has done wonders to survive for around 300 years, having been invented by an Italian craftsman long before such things as the penny stamp, telephone, bicycle, photography…

In my early teaching career, when there were more pianos around in schools, I used to enjoy taking the front off an upright to show the children its inner workings (be it a science lesson or DT). Interest and fun could also be had by removing the bottom panel. With the children sitting very quietly on the floor in front of the piano, I would get one child to hold the right (sustaining) pedal down while another carefully strummed some of the strings, it made an eerie sort of sound and, for the ‘plucker’, was perhaps their very first composition. Even better was to hold the pedal down and get a child to shout a word right at the visible strings: if done correctly, it gave an impressive echo. 

Don’t forget to give the remarkable piano the recognition it deserves and celebrate it on World Piano Day. I’ll here give a pianissimo mention of my new book too, if I may, for it’s called The Piano, You Can’t Knock It (published by Lewarne-Publishing).