No cultural happening in San Francisco in recent years — not the Bay Bridge lights, not the three World Series parades for the Giants, not the current Summer of Love anniversary — has made our city what it is more than Flower Piano.
This is the third summer in a row that a dozen pianos will arrive at the city’s botanical garden stacked vertically in moving trucks, then placed on open lawns, hidden in leafy dells, and perched over ponds. They will live in what old-timers still call “the Arboretum” for 12 days, protected against the night fog by vinyl covers and bags of silica desiccant.
For a couple hours on the weekends, the pianos are reserved for pianists booked by the Flower Piano organizers. Otherwise, anyone can play. And people do. They bring sheet music in battered attaché cases; they bang out Bowie songs by memory; they start salsa jams and inspire dancing.
With Flower Piano starting this week, however, the ever-growing popularity could start to add more weight than buoyancy.
“This is the first time we’ve begun to have a conversation about the semblance of maxing out capacity,” says Brendan Lange, director of visitor experience and marketing at the garden.
It won’t happen, he says — the gardens encompass 55 acres — but the event now requires port-a-potties and rope barriers to keep plants from getting trampled. The event now also has sponsors and fund-raisers that include an evening soiree at $40 a ticket, a crowdsourcing campaign, and a screening of a documentary, 12 Pianos, about the musical duo Sunset Piano, the masterminds of the event.
Despite the growing Flower Piano budget — Dean Mermell, one half of Sunset Piano, won’t give exact numbers but says it’s around $200,000 — spontaneity should continue to rule the days. People become “accidental performers,” according to Mermell, a 53-year-old city resident and a piano player himself. (His Sunset Piano partner, Mauro ffortissimo, ignited the idea in 2013 with an impromptu performance on the bluffs near his Half Moon Bay home.)
“It blurs the line between audience and performer. No one is put on a pedestal, and it doesn’t make fun of anyone,” he says, explaining perhaps why last year 40,000 people showed up. From Beat poets to Carol Doda, Be-Ins and punk shows and dragfests, the city has always been enthusiastic about its own citizens getting on stage and going for it.
At the first Flower Piano in 2015, Antony Ty, who lives in the Castro, tried to keep his fingers warm on a cold, clammy day with Chopin’s Polonaise. Clips of him made the final cut of “12 Pianos,” and in 2016 he became one of the scheduled players.
“This was curious since my own, original music definitely teeters toward the immediate post-punk era — no jazz or show tunes or what I would think folks who frequent these events would be interested in hearing,” says Ty, who’s also partial to singing The Clash’s “Bank Robber” a cappella.
Flower Piano is the best of city life in another way: There are no piano police, just citizens. If someone is noodling around with no skills, and someone else with sheet music shows up, common courtesy is supposed to prevail. It’s a civics and a civility lesson.
Can something fun and funky get too rigid and corporate? Are Flower Piano VIP tents coming soon? “We worry to some extent but not too much,” says Lange. “It hasn’t reached that point.” (Opponents of the garden’s decision in 2010 to charge out-of-towners an entrance fee would argue the garden already has already sold out. But their fears that city residents would eventually have to pay, as well, have not yet come true.)
Mermell says he sometimes wonders about people’s motivations; not everyone is an accidental performer. That’s life in the big city too. With the usual free admission for city residents and $8 charge for others, Flower Piano is an easy stage for self-promotion. The inaugural year, Australian player Van-Anh Nguyen recorded her own performances with a side helping of mock diva — to start one video, she complains about the weather and boasts that she’s going to “kick some people off the pianos and plaaaaay!”
Nguyen, who likes fast-fingered mashups of pop, blues, and classical, is now on the featured schedule too, though she notes that wasn’t her intent coming up from Southern California, where she spends half the year. “I like taking classical music and putting it in platforms you would not normally hear classical music, so I went to explore,” she says.
Nguyen’s favorite spot to play? “Of course the Zellerbach Garden is the main stage so I love that, and [it] tends to have the best piano too.”
The garden’s Lange acknowledges some concessions to the expected crowds. A dedicated kids’ area with mini-pianos and other instruments will hopefully solve what Lange says has been “a little issue with kids who want to hang out at a piano forever.”
But when the piano is tucked into a redwood grove (Ty’s favorite spot) or nestled among California poppies, who wouldn’t want to hang out forever?