When Music Invades the Urban Spaces: the Piano City Festival in Milan, a New Paradigm of Sociability?

Abstract

In 2010 the pianist and composer Andreas Kern organized Piano City, a metropolitan piano festival with original and innovative elements: the locations for the concerts are living rooms; the profile of the executors and interpreters include professional musicians, but also piano students, teachers, amateurs and piano-lovers; the heterogeneity of the musical genres (classic music, rock, jazz etc.); last but not least, the use of the Internet as a medium to publicize the event. Inspired by Kern’s idea, Ludovico Einaudi first organized a Milanese edition of Piano City in 2011. Since then, the piano-festival has represented a significant episode in the recent revamping of the city image after a period in which it had become dull and weak.
Milan has interpreted at its best the philosophy of this event: the promotion of typical places, the use of the web and of social media, the urban hospitality and the free exhibitions, the inhabitants’ involvement, the incentive to explore the city in order to rediscover and reappropriate the public spaces; these are just some of the strengths of Piano City Milan: these elements make this piano festival an opportunity for the construction of a collective sense of place and a new paradigm of urban sociability that offers the city the chance to redeem itself, its own identity and to activate new forms of self-narrative.