SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
One of the wonderful things about the arts is that they can sometimes help create something beautiful out of tragedy. NPR's Jennifer Vanasco visited a grand piano across the street from the World Trade Center memorial. That piano is open to everyone. It's part of a program with origins in 9/11.
JENNIFER VANASCO, BYLINE: We're in the Oculus in New York's financial district. It's a transit hub, a mall, and something of a tribute to September 11. Inside is a great cathedral of space, white marble everywhere. On the ground floor, surrounded by a circle of people, is a piano.
MONICA YUNUS AND CAMILLE ZAMORA: (Singing) P-I-A-N-O-O-O...
VANASCO: It's splashed with bright color - yellow, blue - and graffiti tags. In this austere space, it's friendly. Oh, anyone can sit down and play. But today, musician Michael Fennelly is accompanying his friends, Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora - both opera singers, both founders of Sing for Hope, which placed this piano and more than 700 others in hospitals, schools and public spaces worldwide. But Monica Yunus says the organization was born from the despair and uncertainty surrounding September 11.
YUNUS AND ZAMORA: (Singing, inaudible).
MONICA YUNUS: Camille and I were students at Julliard studying voice. 9/11 happens. The world turns upside down. As young people, we're looking around going, what are we doing? We're studying opera. I love it so much. But where is its place in our world?
CAMILLE ZAMORA: But we were thinking of our neighbors at the firehouse, that that day took 12 of their men.
VANASCO: That's Camille Zamora. She says they saw the firefighters every day on their way to class.
ZAMORA: All that we had was sort of this impulse to use our music in some way.
VANASCO: They photocopied music and sang with the families of those firefighters waiting to hear whether they made it back from the World Trade Center. Singing together brought meaning in a world that now seemed to be meaningless. But Yunus and Zamora wanted to do more. Singing at firehouses turned into singing at hospitals and eventually a lot of different kinds of programming, including bringing these pianos to public spaces. At the Oculus piano, people take turns sitting and playing a piece or two. There's a composer from Switzerland. There's a kindergartner. And then...
MADDAN: What's up?
VANASCO: ...There's New Yorker and musician, Maddan. He says there's a group of about 30 people who play regularly on this piano. And they've gotten to know each other.
MADDAN: It brings a beautiful vibe, you know? People want to sing with you. They want to play with you. They want to listen, you know?
VANASCO: That's because, Zamora says, a public piano is an invitation.
ZAMORA: I think that that invitation to pause, to look up from our phones, to look someone else in the eye, it is vital for our sense of well-being, to have this intentional infrastructure for connection.
VANASCO: And that connection happens, she says, every time someone sits at one of these pianos. Jennifer Vanasco, NPR News, New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO PLAYING)
MADDAN: (Singing, inaudible). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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