Allegro Con Brio

About Allegro Con Brio

This large contemporary clear acrylic sculpture of a piano was inspired by the artist’s love of music.

This beautiful and magical piece of modern art is the unique vision of an award-winning author and music lover. Years ago, Ruth Kassinger noticed how sunlight streaming through her living room windows bounced off white walls, through a glass coffee table, and splashed rainbows around the room. When her eyes drifted to the black baby grand piano in the room, she had an epiphany. The idea for a full-scale, transparent piano sculpture filled with colors was born.

To create the piano, she worked with a talented team of acrylic glass artisans who created the piano’s body and its keyboard. Using laser technology, thousands of holes were drilled both by computer and by hand to ensure that all of the threads are perfectly parallel. Then, using small acrylic boxes as models, Kassinger spent a year testing various threads to determine spacing and color combinations until they expressed her vision of music. “It takes me months to thread a piano. I use embroidery needles that I manipulate with long-handled surgical forceps. The highly polished, clear acrylic form allows light to flow through the sculpture, illuminating the thousands of multi-hued nylon and French silk threads. The threads change color as you move around the piano and, thanks to an optical phenomenon called moiré, they appear to move as if being played.”

Kassinger is best known for her books about science, history, and gardening. As a science writer, she has studied and written about the concepts of transparency and color. As a music lover, Kassinger’s personal experience of listening to music is heightened by a form of synaesthesia where she actually sees colors when she hears music. And, having grown up in a family of craftsmen (her parents had a custom furniture business and she later designed several pieces for her own home), she has the skills to undertake her first sculptural piece: a ‘glass’ piano.

“My transparent piano sculptures filled with complex color patterns are a synthesis of my hands-on experience with materials, my idiosyncratic experience of music, and my scientific knowledge.” Ruth Kassinger

Among Kassinger’s artistic influences is the early-20th-century Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo, whose “revolutionary acrylic constructions eliminate mass as a sculptural element, evoke lightness and spatial openness, and create a sense of volume without perceptible matter.” The sculpture’s Italian name, Allegro Con Brio, is a musical term that refers to the fast tempo of a piece of music that is played with ‘spirit.’

Ruth Kassinger grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and received a B.A. degree from Yale University and a Master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. In addition to authoring three critically acclaimed books for adults and eight award-winning books for children, Ruth has written for The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Health, National Geographic Explorer, and other publications. She speaks regularly at conferences, bookstores, and with book groups. She is currently working on a series of transparent stringed instruments.