Grand Piano Mystery Solved
Jan-28-2011

Scorched, weathered, and most definitely out of key, it could be the most famous piano in the world right now. Sitting on a sandbar in Biscayne Bay a few hundred yards from Miami Shores, just as it has for weeks, the grand piano that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere on New Year's Day has become a viral sensation. National Geographic has posted pictures of it, the Miami Herald has written stories about it, and one of the nation's leading pranksters has even claimed responsibility for it.

But now the case of the stranded grand is closed.

Turns out the clavichord calamity was the work of a highly motivated 16-year-old artist named Nicholas Harrington who hopes that the stunt - which he preserved for posterity in photos and on video - will help win him admission to New York's Cooper Union, or maybe engineering school.

"It's not so much the video as the pictures we took," Harrington told TODAY's Ann Curry on Thursday. "It's just the art." He said he plans to attach the photos to his college applications, "to show how I pulled the stunt and how it went down."

The scherzo-phrenic scheme first began to take shape during a New Year's Eve party at the Harrington home, which happened to harbor the piano, a cast-off prop from a long-forgotten movie (Nicholas' father, Mark J. Harrington, is a production designer whose credits include the TV series "Burn Notice"). Nicholas had a plan to make an ambitious music video centered on the piano, but like many show-biz projects, it never got beyond the conceptual stage.

Then came New Year's Eve 2010. In high spirits - and likely under the influence of spirits - revelers at the Harrington home decided to set the instrument ablaze in a nearby canal.

But that idea wasn't, well, grand enough for Nicholas Harrington: The next day, he got the idea to maroon the piano on a mud bar in the bay.

"We did it just because it was cool," Harrington told Curry Thursday. "We needed to get rid of the piano some way, so we did the most artistic thing that we thought we could do with it."

After the instrument mysteriously appeared, speculation quickly ran wild about who might be responsible for the piano prank, and it only got more heated when the stranded spinet caught the attention of the national media. Billy Yeager, an independent filmmaker and well-known prankster, claimed responsibility. But then Harrington came forward to face the music.

One mystery still remained: How the heck did they get one somewhat scorched baby grand out into the middle of Biscayne Bay? "We used my boat, and we also used our davit to lift up the boat, which is like a mini crane," Harrington explained to Curry.

The teen understands that his enterprising work of performance art struck a sour note with some. "Some people are angry," he admitted. "If it comes to me taking the piano off, I guess I'll just take it off."

But, he added, "I think it'll be able to stay. It will wash away eventually."

Posted by Ken at 1:43 AM - Link to this entry  |  Share this entry  |  Print