You lift the heavy lid, propping it open and listening to the minuscule creaks and cracks as it settles into it’s new position. The lid hasn’t been opened for a few weeks now, so the settling echoes on the sounding board. The pedals creak too, clacking into movement for the first time in days, the sounds now able to resonate with the un-dampened strings, giving the pulses of echo a cacophonous tone. You sink your fingers into the first ivory-white key, countered by the intricate weighting and lever system and providing the felt hammer with a jolt of energy, flinging it towards the waiting string and striking a clear, sharp noise through the wood of the body, vibrating in the open lid, down through the metal rods to the pedals, through the legs and into the floor. The fine wires of the A key resonate with each other, held stiff by tiny metal tips and tightened by small octagonal pegs. You play through the piece, reaching deep humming notes and twinkling highs. The piano doesn’t register the melody as melody. Nor the harmony as harmony. It feels the raw vibrations, the knocks and clacks of mechanism and levers, the echoes within echoes playing across the brass struts and wood soundboard and beautiful rimming mahogany. It experiences the piece as rhythm and vibration, thrumming repetition or staccato beats. Notes and noises swirl across the strings, finding harmonic leaps across octaves and further, feeling their way around pegs and pins and bolts and shafts, tumbling down to the deep, thick wires of the lowest end and tip-toeing over the tiny lines of string between pin and peg outside of the resonating area. The shakes of the pedal open out and close down the sound, letting it roar from beneath the propped lid or tempering it to an enunciated whisper, or sometimes a sharp shout. The piece continues; the piano reacts. Its strings and its supports and its structure are warming up, flexing, responding, joining in. The wood loosens and copies the strings. Echoes play off each other and re combine, different now to how they did at the beginning. The piece climaxes; the piano replies. It settles once again. The activity has slowed. you ease back on the keys, returning from the world of harmony and melody to a gentle pace. The piano relaxes. The piece relaxes. The final notes disappear among the strings and wood and metal, the final vibrations conclude their journey through the legs of the piano, getting lost in the floor and the room around you. You stand from the stool. It creaks, breaking through the imagined final pulses of sound. You lower the heavy lid.