When I look at Charles Brooks’s Fazioli Grand Piano Part 2, I find myself thinking not just about music, but about space—about architecture, about the hidden craftsmanship that makes beauty possible. The photograph transforms a familiar object into something monumental. Inside what I have always thought of as an instrument lies a cathedral of light and resonance. Strings stretch like arches, felt hammers become ribbed vaults, and the glowing vanishing point feels like an altar. I see this and I think: the piano is not just played, it is inhabited.
I’ve never had the talent or discipline to become a pianist, an architect, or a photographer of Brooks’s caliber. And maybe that’s why this image strikes me so deeply—it lets me glimpse the kind of craftsmanship I cannot achieve myself, but can still stand in awe of. In some ways, that awe is the point. The work of others expands my world in ways my own two hands never could. Art reminds me of the limits of my own skill while simultaneously enlarging my vision. I am smaller, yes—but the world is bigger.
The piano has always been that paradox for me: intimate and cosmic, fragile and monumental. Scriabin’s Vers la flamme feels like fire bursting through a column of sound; Crumb’s Makrokosmos turns the instrument inside out, a whole cosmos pressed between wood and wire. Feldman’s Palais de Mari pares everything down until silence itself feels architectural, like walking through a vast, dim hall where every note is a solitary pillar. And Sorabji’s Gulistān is a labyrinth without end, the piano as endless passageway. These are works I return to not because I understand them fully but because they remind me of what music can hold.
Film music does the same. Clint Mansell’s The Fountain gives me spirals of piano that feel like staircases into the cosmos—light, gravity, and sound all braided together. Mica Levi’s The Brutalist, by contrast, feels like concrete, the piano stripped bare of ornament, its tones like slabs of stone. Neither is “just” a score; both are architecture made audible. Listening to them alongside Brooks’s photograph, I sense the same truth: sound and structure are not separate realms, but two sides of the same creation.
Quotes from the great pianists echo in my head as I think about this. Neuhaus once wrote, “Do not find yourself in the music, but find the music in yourself.” Looking at Brooks’s photograph, I feel as if I have stepped inside that music—its corridors, its radiance, its hidden geometry. Debussy’s reminder that “Music is the space between the notes” comes to life here too, because the photograph is made just as much of shadow and silence as of structure and light. Even Monk’s playful insistence that “The piano ain’t got no wrong notes” feels fitting; the photograph tells me that every string, every beam of light belongs to the whole.
I think, too, about the way architecture, art, and music all require craftsmanship that exceeds me. They ask for patience, mastery, years of practice, and an ability to imagine forms beyond the immediate. I don’t have those gifts, but I can receive them. And in receiving them, I am changed. The cathedral built of wood and steel, the chord built of silence and tone, the photograph built of light and shadow—all of them make my own world more spacious.
So when I return to Fazioli Grand Piano Part 2, I do so not as a critic or a practitioner, but as a grateful witness. Projects like Brooks’s expand my vision, both large and small: large, because they remind me that music, art, and architecture are infinite worlds to enter; small, because they let me see details I had never considered before, like the curve of a single string or the flicker of light across felt. In both directions, outward and inward, they remind me that life is richer when I admit that I am not the maker, but the one who marvels.
And maybe that is my own art: the art of awe, the art of gratitude.
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