A visit to ‘The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate’

Two years ago, a Portland Jewish family’s home was destroyed in an arson. As they got rid of all their burned belongings, the one thing they couldn’t bear to do was toss out with the rest of the burned remains a 100-year-old Steinway grand piano that had belonged to “Grandma Bess.” Much of it was intact, though not restorable. They reached out to musicians and artists and ultimately found their way to Jennifer Wright. She’s a classical pianist by training, a composer and a sound artist who works with found instruments and other objects.

The family, who wants to keep their identity private, worked with Wright over the next two years on turning the grand piano into a mixed media exhibit, including a newly formed glass piano and textile art made with the burned strings. In a statement that is included in the exhibit, the family wrote: “Seeing the piano transformed from a burned and destroyed object into the foundations of new instruments, furniture, art, beauty, and community awareness is a balm for the wounds of waste and loss. … Finding connectedness is an antidote to hate.”

We visit the the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education to talk with Jennifer Wright and OJMCHE director Rebekha Sobel.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Two years ago, a Jewish family’s home in Portland was destroyed by arson. As they got rid of their burnt possessions, one thing they couldn’t bear to toss out was the 100-year-old Steinway grand piano that had belonged to Grandma Bess. Instead, they reached out to musicians and artists, and ultimately found their way to Jennifer Wright. She is a classical pianist, a composer, and a sound artist who works with found instruments and other objects. Over the last two years, Wright helped turn their piano into new works of art, art that’s now part of a mixed media exhibit on display at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. It’s called The Burned Piano Project: Creating Music Amidst the Noise of Hate. We went to the museum yesterday to talk to Wright. I started by asking what led her to make music out of trash, toys, and found objects.

Jennifer Wright: My adventurous spirit, I think, is what led me there. I found that as a concert pianist, I kept looking for the stranger music or the more obscure music, things that you didn’t hear all the time. That got harder and harder to find something that was really exciting. I started to compose and once you start to compose, it’s hard to go back because it’s so satisfying to create something that the world has never seen. It’s a very different part of your brain and your artistic creativity than interpreting someone else’s work.

So once I started creating my own sounds, I became really interested in orchestral combinations of things, which used to as a pianist. But I wanted to go further and I wanted to see – what else could the piano do, perhaps if you didn’t have to be quite so precious and careful with protecting these instruments? What if I had an old junker piano and I could put tacks in all the hammers and it just led me to experiment with all sorts of things that can make noise. Everything in our environment has these amazing capabilities, but we often overlook them in favor of something that’s already known to us.

Miller: Do you remember when you first heard about this piano?

Wright: Yes, very clearly. Several different people contacted me out of the blue saying there was this piano that had been through a fire and would [I] like to do something with it, because I believe my reputation had preceded me. A lot of folks knew about the work that I did taking apart musical instruments, repurposing them, creating something new out of them. But this was a grand piano, which was really different. It’s a huge creature. I had done a lot of work with uprights which are a little easier to move and to take apart. I just promised my husband that I wouldn’t put any new pianos in the basement and I was trying to stick to that.

Miller: It was like taking stray cats into your house at a certain point?

Wright: Really large, heavy, bulky stray cats. And I was going to stick to that because my husband has to help me move all these pianos and it’s a lot for him, too. So at first I declined. I really wasn’t looking for another big project like that. But then the family themselves found me and I heard the story of Grandma Bess’ piano for the first time and that changed everything.

Miller: Why? What was it about the story that changed your mind?

Wright: Well, it wasn’t just any normal piano. You know, there are lots of pianos out there. People buy and sell and give away pianos every day. But not every piano is loved like this piano was loved. This was a symbol of art and culture and living the good life. And it was so important to multiple generations of this family. They made music, they played with it, they just kept it around long after nobody played it anymore because they couldn’t bear it to let it go. And I know how that is. I love pianos and this was a beautiful Steinway, an heirloom. But to know that this beautiful piano endured this trauma, this symbol of good life was overnight incinerated in a hate crime. This was horrifying. I couldn’t even imagine going through something like that. And yet the family had this impulse to create something beautiful out of it. If anything could be salvaged, they hoped that some silver lining of some piece of artwork, some beauty could be made from the remains of this piano.

Miller: Let’s have a listen to the words of the family. They’ve wanted to preserve their anonymity so we’re not gonna hear their actual voices. We’ll hear somebody else. This is from a video that’s part of the exhibit that you helped put together. Let’s have a listen to their memories of what the piano meant to them when they were kids, and as they got older.

Family: We would lay on our backs on the soft rug under the piano as she played so the music completely enveloped us. We used to argue over who got the important job of turning pages at her synagogue performances. After Grandma Bess died and our parents brought the piano to our house. We would make forts underneath it. But for the next 50 years, no one gave the piano the same kind of love that she gave it. Our parents had vague hopes that at least one of us children would take a great interest in playing the piano. But we didn’t. We still kept the piano, each generation unwilling to let it go. It stood there in perpetual tribute to Grandma Bess. In its silence, the piano still sung her love of life.

Miller: So that’s part of the story that made you change your mind and say, “Ok, I’ll take this project on.” Do you remember the first time you saw the piano?

Wright: Yes. It had been removed from the home because the home had been completely incinerated and the ceiling had caved in on the piano. There are pictures in the exhibit of the piano in the house still and it’s the only thing left standing because it was such a sturdy thing. But eventually, when they had to take it out, it was laid on a tarp in their back garden, with the legs taken off. It was just right on the ground with the apples on the ground and the birds singing around it. It was just a remarkable setting. I started to visit this piano to see... We didn’t know where this was all going to go. What condition was it in? Let me learn more about it and about Grandma Bess. And then I discovered that it could still play, after a fashion. But luckily when the fire happened, the piano was closed and the key cover was down. So the insides were somewhat protected. Definitely still covered in soot, water damaged, and beyond repair – it’s all rusting – but still played.

Miller: I wanna give folks a sense for what it sounded like. In the video, you’re kneeling on a big tarp in their backyard. There’s this piano without legs, all charred, and this is you playing it outside?

[Piano music plays.]

Miller: What was it like to play the piano?

Wright: It was remarkable. I couldn’t believe that it still could function at all after enduring that. But it was a little nerve wracking because there was a lot of water damage and the strings were already starting to rust quite dramatically. So we knew we didn’t have much time. The strings were going to start snapping soon.

Miller: I was going to say it sounds like some barrelhouse piano. It was out of tune, not as resonant, but it sounds like it’s going to survive. But you’re saying that it wasn’t long for the world?

Wright: Correct. Once you put water and pianos together, nothing good happens. So, the fire had actually done less damage in some way than the water of putting the fire out.

Miller: Did you have a sense from the beginning of what you wanted to turn the piano into?

Wright: No, not at all. This has been a two year process of thinking deeply about what would be the right thing to do with Grandma Bess’ piano. And there was so very much of it and we didn’t know in the beginning. But I suggested to the family, you know, let’s take it apart and look at it like raw materials and then we could come back to it and think would we like to make some small memorable object that you could keep on a bookshelf, you know, something that would give you good memories of Grandma Bess and the piano and maybe, maybe just something small like that. We didn’t have very large ambitions in the beginning, because the most important thing was that the family was comfortable with this process and that it was doing something good for them. We had no idea that this would become a bigger public project.

But after about a year when I had been playing with all these raw materials and I’d had parts of this piano all over my house, I got this idea that it could be quite wonderful to invite other artists and have everyone interpret these raw materials in their own personal way. And the family thought that that would be a wonderful thing to do. And that’s when we approached the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.

Miller: The biggest part of your work here is a version of a piano. Can you describe what this is?

Wright: She’s definitely a one of a kind. This is the glass piano and it incorporates a good chunk of what we call the action of Grandma Bess’ piano – the moving parts, the keys attached to the mechanism that throws the hammers at what in a regular piano would be the strings, but of course, all of that is gone, so it’s only the working moving parts of Grandma Bess’ piano. And I’ve created a whole new case for it. Instead of strings, what the hammers are hitting when I play the keys are these long, clear borosilicate glass rods.

Miller: It’s so striking. It’s beautiful – the glass – but it also seems so fragile. It’s striking to me that out of the literal ashes of this violence, you replaced the wood with something that itself seems very breakable. Why glass?

Wright: A couple of different reasons. Partially because everything else I tried felt a little too normal or it had been done before. I spent a lot of time in Home Depot clicking and clanking on pipes and copper tubing and pieces of wood and metal because wood and metal would be the sort of obvious choice. They’re a little bit more sturdy. You could kind of control them a little bit more. But I was looking for a sound that would be special because Grandma Bess’ piano was no ordinary piano. It was so embedded with love and memories, and I wanted her to sing,

to become a real musical instrument, not just like an interesting piece of sculpture that could maybe play a couple of notes or make a few sounds. I wanted it to be a really flexible creature. So I thought long and hard about glass because that sense of fragility is so ever present. I’ve broken many of these glass rods and I keep snagging them on things and it’s part of the aesthetic, you have to treat her with care. But it’s worth it because what a metaphor for other people, for anything that we care about, we should put that much care and attention to.

Miller: Can we hear one of your compositions? What are we going to hear first?

Wright: I’ll play a piece that I wrote for the family. It was one of the first things I wrote for the glass piano when I started to understand the sort of sounds that she would make, because I came in with all these ideas of what I would build. And then of course, as with any art or composition, it takes on a life of its own. And so the glass piano started to tell me what sort of sounds it was going to make. And I thought a lot about this trauma and about the fact that we’re all the keepers of our own stories, but we can take trauma and put it down and that’s how we can move forward. So, this piece is called, “Keeping is Not the Same as Carrying.”

[Piano music playing.]

Miller: That is “Keeping is Not the Same as Carrying” by the composer and creator and artist Jennifer Wright. It’s part of the Burned Piano Project, which is up right now at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. This is just one piece of the piano that was turned into art. There are a number of others in this room with us including one of the works by another artist here, Bonnie Meltzer, who is a textile artist. Can you describe what we’re looking at right now?

Wright: It’s absolutely remarkable. All of Bonnie’s work is remarkable. We’ve worked together before. So when I had this big pile of piano strings that I’d cut out of Grandma Bess’ piano, I couldn’t think of a better person to transform them into something absolutely stunning. What we’re looking at is a large wall tapestry hung on a very sturdy copper pipe because all these piano strings are quite heavy. Bonnie’s used the base piano strings which are a steel core wrapped in copper wire, so they’re quite thick and quite beautiful to look at just on their own. But she has woven horizontally all of these hand crocheted, beaded, different levels of texture and color in wire, in fabric. It’s stunning. It glitters and it’s just like a landscape. You can sort of see these dark colors at the bottom with blacks and reds that are referencing the fire and they become lighter as you move towards the top of the tapestry. It’s just a beautiful glittering piece, a great tribute to Grandma Bess’ piano.

Miller: And then sort of chillingly right in the middle, the words “Because they are Jewish. Because they were Jews.”

Wright: Yeah. So when we discussed this event as we did so many times in so many ways to think, how can we tell this story? How do you even tell a story that is so full of personal detail and yet is quite universal? It really speaks to anybody who has felt isolated or targeted or who has been a victim of something like this. How do you present this? How do you even understand it? It happened because the family was of the Jewish faith. But we talked a lot about their coping mechanisms, their survival mechanisms, and we both felt so strongly that they survived as well as they did. They came through this so well also for the same reason, because they had such a strong faith and such a strong community surrounding them that it helped them get through it.

Miller: How did you navigate working with this family, working on this project, as somebody who’s not Jewish?

Wright: I kept asking them all the time if they were still ok with that. Because in the beginning when it was maybe not going to be anything the public saw, I don’t think it mattered. But as it became this idea that we could present an entire exhibition of artwork, what did they feel like now? And I kept making the most ridiculous blunders. One point in particular – I had sent out an email saying, hey, this week is really busy. What if we had our production meeting on Saturday? And it was crickets for a little while and then very delicately one of them emailed me back and said, “You know, you might have a little difficulty getting this group together on a Saturday.” I just needed to be reminded over and over of things that weren’t part of my lived experience. But ultimately, the family felt that this is not just a story about them and it didn’t need to be told by someone who was also Jewish. And I’m very thankful for that because it’s been an amazing transformative journey for me.

Miller: Can we hear another one of your songs, one that I think is actually connected to this issue?

Wright: Yes, it stuck with me because I kept making charming little missteps like that. So eventually I wrote a piece for the glass piano called “The Difficulty with Saturdays.”

[Piano music playing.]

Miller: I wonder if you could tell us about one more piece of art here that you made. Can you describe what this looks like for everybody out there who can’t see it right now?

Wright: Tucked into a corner of the gallery here you have a large earthen mound. And laying on this very sculpted pile of soil is the cast iron plate from the inside of Grandma Bess’ piano, which is just about six feet long, about five feet wide, and it’s this dull bronze color. If you’ve ever peeked inside a piano you’ll see that they’re just a beautiful curved shape in there, a very sturdy piece of metal, because it has to hold over 2,000 pounds of pressure on the inside of a piano…

Miller: All the tightened strings.

Wright: Yes, exactly. Otherwise the piano would just implode from all that pressure pulling inwards. After I took all the strings out and dismantled the piano entirely, I saved what we call the harp, or you could call it the cast iron plate. And I wanted to create a sort of magical garden setting for it because I felt that if the glass piano was the spirit that could sing, then this was the weighty body of the piano. And I wanted to return it to the earth in an idealized, beautiful way. So I surrounded it with moss and seed pods and handmade fireweed flowers, which of course are the first things to spring up after a wildfire. And I surrounded it with things like pine cones and lotus pods, things that speak to the regenerative processes of fire. Pine cones can’t open unless the fire comes by and melts the resin so that they can release their seeds. There are these jewel beetle wings because beetles are among the first things to return nutrients back to the stream of energy. I wanted to give Grandma Bess’ piano a beautiful idealized ending in this way.

Miller: The family actually created two works here based on pieces of the piano. Can you describe them?

Wright: They’re wonderful. This one right here is a table. It’s a functioning table, but also very much a whimsical piece of art. It’s a little bit M. C. Escher-esque in a way because it takes some of the legs of the piano and the pedal lyre that holds the three working pedals and it has created a sort of table structure out of them with the glass top. And you can actually still press the pedals down and they make the moving parts move.

Miller: I so want to push the pedals right now.

Wright: You can.

Miller: Really?

Wright: You can. I mean, they won’t do much, but it’s very satisfying.

Miller: Sustain. Thank you. And then there’s also a mobile here with all kinds of pomegranates.

Wright: If you look at the top of the structure, you’ll see that there are several keys that I took out of Grandma Bess’ piano. So I didn’t use all of them in the glass piano. The family members each wanted a few keys – a black one, a white one, the action that goes with it. And this mobile actually uses some of the keys as the structure that holds up this kaleidoscope of actual dried pomegranates, pictures of pomegranates in various stages of their life cycle, and different parts of the action of the piano. And they’re moving dynamically through space and throwing these really interesting shadows on the walls. Really just to show that nothing is static, that everything does change, and everything does pass in its way.

Miller: I started by asking you how you started working with toys and trash and found objects. But unless I’m mistaken, you hadn’t worked before with something that had been destroyed or gotten to because of an intentional act, because of the desire for some kind of destruction. But that’s why you had this piano to begin with. How did that inform everything about the way you did this project? That at the root of this was some kind of hatred?

Wright: It all came back to the family over and over because it’s their experience, it’s not my direct experience. I wanted to be extremely respectful with how I treated that and especially if we were going to put this out in any sort of a public way, I wanted to make sure that they felt represented. Luckily they were very pleased to have artists simply go for it. They weren’t feeling that we had to create anything in particular. They were just happy that something was happening. They felt energetically that that was really wonderful. But I kept checking in with them. We were in constant dialogue for two years – we still are – about how everything’s feeling.

For me, I wanted it to be a slow thoughtful process because you don’t want to make a quick decision and then put it out in the world when it’s something of this weight. I love sounds, I love playing. I take music quite seriously, but also I try not to take it too seriously at the same time. It’s the balance that I love. But when it was something like this, I feel like just combining interesting sounds was certainly not enough. That was not going to take the project where it needed to go. I felt that this trauma, these experiences of working through the trauma, informed every part of the artistic thinking. There would be no quick decisions, something that you’d have to live with and process just like the family is living through this and processing it still.

Miller: What do you hope that visitors will take away from this?

Wright: Well, it’s been amazing to see what people have taken away so far. It’s been really cool to see young kids come to the exhibit and they see a picture of Grandma Bess’ piano and they go, “There’s a box of Legos underneath that piano. I hope the Legos are OK.” You know? And then sometimes people walk through the exhibit, they don’t say a word, but then they come up to me and there are tears running down their face. It’s an amazing exhibit because the two works by Bonnie, the two works that I have, and the two works that were contributed by the family members are all so different and so incredibly personal. There’s something for everyone, in a way.

It’s very beautifully presented. It’s very beautifully written. And people tend to come back and spend a long time here. I hope that they take away some positivity because we live in such a broken world and we all can only do our best to fix what we can. There’s this quote on the wall which I absolutely love that says, “It is not upon you to finish the work of repairing the world, but neither are you at liberty to abandon it.” I would like people to go away feeling that they have some agency to do good in the world and sort of like me, you know, an odd classical musician making strange noises with strange things. That’s my voice. That’s how I can contribute. I’d like everybody to feel that they could do the same with the tools that they have.

Miller: Thank you very much. That was the pianist and composer Jennifer Wright, one of the artists behind the Burned Piano Project that’s on display now through the end of June at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.

After I spoke with Wright, I was joined by the new director of the museum. Rebekah Sobel took over at the beginning of this year.

That was after this exhibit was already in the works. But I asked her why the museum took it on.

Rebekah Sobel: I’d like to speculate on that a little bit. I had a few conversations with our director emerita Judy Margles who is really part and parcel of the development and display of this exhibit. So I just wanted to give a shout out to her. But all of the topics and all of the content here are right in line with all of our exhibitions and storytelling and values and our mission here at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.

Miller: In what way? I mean, how is this right in line with the mission?

Sobel: We tell stories of multigenerational trauma. We talk about the history of the Holocaust, the history of discrimination in Oregon, families experiencing all kinds of trauma and trying to deal with it, get through it, act upon it, generations of those families reflecting on it. That’s our bread and butter.

Miller: What does this project mean to you personally?

Sobel: That’s a really great question. I am fascinated by the sounds – listening to Jennifer play, watching the video, thinking about how this piano has been in so many different contexts and continues to live on. It’s amazing. And we don’t have a lot of sound elements here in the museum. We have some talking heads, and we have a few audio pieces scattered around. But adding music to our space has been just amazing.

Miller: We’re in front of one of the works that I didn’t talk about with Jennifer. This is another piece by the textile artist Bonnie Meltzer. And my understanding is you wanted to be in front of it. Why?

Sobel: I just wanted to point out that one amazing thing about museums, especially these days, is that we try to have participation by our visitors. And so in particular, with this piece, you can actually take a piece of thread from one of the art installations – this basket was made from wires from the piano – and take a thread and tie it onto this ball of other threads that other visitors have tied already to become both part of the display that stays here after you leave, but also connects us all to each other.

Miller: It says here, “With the act of tying a red thread from the basket to the yarn ball, you’re making a symbolic connection to everyone. There is no Other, only an Us.”

Sobel: So this piece symbolizes to me in this exhibit a little bit about what Jennifer was talking about in terms of having a place to not only put your trauma but also to talk about some kind of action. So not only can you come here to experience the story of this family’s trauma, but to think about if you’re carrying trauma with you, here’s an activity that you can do to connect with others. You don’t know them, you haven’t seen them, you don’t talk to them, but you’re able to leave something else behind.

Miller: More broadly right now, in Oregon, what does holocaust education look like?

Sobel: We provide education to students and teachers that come here to the museum. We go out to all different cities in Oregon to give direct education in the classroom, and we also provide teacher training, professional development programs, to help teachers feel more comfortable teaching the Holocaust on their own.

Miller: Do you have a hope or plans to expand that work in the coming years?

Sobel: I would love to, yes. Right now we have one staff member that’s based in Eugene. We’d love to have people all over the state supporting teachers in their own environments. We’d also love, pending funding, of course, to take some of our exhibitions out to various communities and leave them there for people to be able to use them. A lot of people can’t always make the trek to Portland.

Miller: You spent almost 25 years in DC in various jobs, many of them in museum worlds. Why did you want to come to Portland?

Sobel: I’m originally from Los Angeles. And so I am excited to return to the West Coast, Oregon in particular. I’ve learned in the past few months my family actually has a connection here. My grandparents came here in the late 1940s. My grandfather, David Beitch, was actually the director of the JCC.

Miller: You just learned that recently?

Sobel: Yeah.

Miller: After you made the decision to move here?

Sobel: Yes. I didn’t know much about my parents, or my mom’s, life here in Portland when she was little. We didn’t visit here as kids. They said that they spent a little time in Portland, but it wasn’t until I started asking questions that I learned about my own family story.

Miller: A few months ago, the journalist Franklin Foer published an article in the Atlantic arguing that with the rise in antisemitism on the left and the right – the title says it all: “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” What has it been like for you to take the helm at this museum at this time?

Sobel: Challenging, breathtaking, and amazing. I actually don’t agree. I’ve never felt that there’s been a Golden Age of Jewish culture or a feeling about being Jewish. I feel like we’re always coming from behind or underneath. There isn’t a Golden Age that’s ended. I think we’re here. We have always been here for a really long time and there are Jews that we don’t even know that are Jewish. And so talking about culture, talking about different ways to express your identity, to me that is part and parcel of Portland. Everybody’s here from every generation from different places and some people that have been here much longer than any of us, we don’t even know.

Miller: What do you most hope that people will take away from this exhibition, this project?

Sobel: I hope that people come to this exhibit and take away the feeling of commonality, that if you’ve been through something, there are others that have also been through something. And you can find camaraderie in that. This is a specific experience of losing a piano and being traumatized by a hate crime. But it also could be a universal feeling of just being discriminated against in a variety of ways. So connecting. Connecting with other humans. Also in support of helping people connect with each other. This weekend, the first weekend of the month, we have free Sundays so people can come to the museum for free and check out the exhibition.

Miller: Rebekha Sobel, thanks very much.

Sobel: Thank you.

Miller: Rebekha Sobel is the director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. We talked yesterday. The Burned Piano Project is on display through the end of June. You can find information about some upcoming public events on our website, www.opb.org/thinkoutloud.

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