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# Weekend Words: Piano
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-piano/
- Published: 2015-04-26T13:04:32.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:31:31.000Z
- Description: On Mayday, the new Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano, opens to the public.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:08 (2014, 2015, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/04/piano.jpg)

Édouard Vuillard, “The Piano” (1896), glue-based paint on canvas, 213 x 154 cm, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris (image via Web Gallery of Art)

On Mayday, the new [Whitney Museum](https://hyperallergic.com/from-the-couches-to-the-conservation-labs-the-whitney-museums-new-building/), designed by Renzo Piano, opens to the public.

> I love a piano, I love a piano  
> I love to hear somebody play  
> Upon a piano, a grand piano  
> It simply carries me away  
>  
> **—Irving Berlin, “I Love a Piano”**

> If I’m going to Hell, I’m going there playing the piano.  
>  
> **—Jerry Lee Lewis**

> We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.  
>  
> **—Zelda Fitzgerald**

> Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;  
> Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see  
> A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings  
> And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.  
>  
> In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song  
> Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong  
> To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside  
> And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.  
>  
> So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour  
> With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour  
> Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast  
> Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.  
>  
> **—D. H. Lawrence, “Piano”**

> Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.  
>  
> **—Joan Didion**

> A PIANO.  
>  
> If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.  
>  
> This is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing.  
>  
> **—Gertrude Stein, *Tender Buttons***

> Isn’t this a death-trap, wanting to put too much in  
> So the floor sags, as under the weight of a piano, or a piano-legged girl  
> And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one’s ears!  
>  
> **—John Ashbery, “The Skaters”**

> The piano has been drinking, not me.  
>  
> **—Tom Waits**

> I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.  
>  
> **—Edith Sitwell**