I may have posted this, a few years back, but I can't find it, soooooo...
The scene..? The local annual festival (Les Trois Elephants, France...) which attracted 300 volunteers, and 10-15000 visitors. I was, for several years, one of the standing committee to manage it all. One of the specialities, other than an excellent programme of top and up-and-coming acts, was street art, jugglers, theatre, odds and sods of all sorts, all with a festive spirit. That year, we rummaged through some brain-storming ideas of things to put on, apart from the rock concerts, main stage. I had worked for an enterprise importing second-hand pianos from the North of England to France, to be refurbished and sold here. In this, I had contacts with a major supplier of pianos, and knew that they had a massive stock of unsalable joannas, gleaned from modest homes all around the North. I 'phoned them, and organised a shipment of a trailer-load of these old wrecks, to be delivered to the festival site a week or so before the 'off'. The idea was thus : The fifty or so pianos were to be stacked, to build the Biggest Bonfire of Pianos in the World. It would be laden with divers fireworks, with things like ping-pong balls between the strings, so that, in melting, sounds would emanate.I had even foreseen a couple of sacrificial microphones inside, to capture and broadcast the cacophony as they burned and fell, 'live', and record the feat.
Alas, it all went awry when first one, then two, then more volunteers and committee members, in seeing these items, asked if one could be spared, as they wanted to give it a Good Home. By the time I became aware of this covert dilapidation of my pyramid stock, it was too late; half had been filched, and it was too late for me to complete the stock with enough to achieve the World Record I'd envisaged. The pianos were, in the end, dispersed around the site, tarted up with gaudy paint, and added to the atmosphere in a less spectacular style.
The cost..? I had contacts with shippers, willing to come back from Blighty with any load rather than empty, and the job lot of duff, wooden-frame pianos cost even less than the transport. The biggest part of my budget was to be the pyrotechnics, which were not called upon in the end. A shame; I would have liked to have gone down in History holding that World Record title. The Festival has moved on since, so there is no longer an annual, national event here that I could pin this to. One day, maybe; one day...