‘A special bond between music and art’: Bath piano shop turns old parts into palette

From an eagle to Elton John, the Played and Remade project enables artists to ‘make something magical’ from free materials

The task of loading once-loved but now unwanted pianos into a van and carting them off to the recycling centre is a disheartening and melancholy one. So a music shop in Bath that scraps as many as 300 redundant and unfixable pianos a year has launched a project to repurpose the thousands of parts that make up each instrument into pieces of art.

The Piano Shop Bath is inviting artists to take their pick for free from the varied materials that make up each piano – wood, cast iron, brass, felt, copper, steel wires and so on – and turn them into pieces that can then be hung in its showroom.