For three centuries the grand piano has been a horizontal machine: a long, heavy case that eats floor space, takes a crew to move and carries a hefty carbon footprint. British pianist and composer Sarah Nicolls has spent years asking a simple question: what if you stood it up?
Her answer is the Standing Grand, a genuine acoustic grand re-engineered so the strings and soundboard rise vertically from the keyboard. It isn't an upright in disguise. It keeps a grand's scale and string length, folded into roughly an upright's footprint.
The short version
The Standing Grand is a full acoustic grand piano turned on end, with strings and soundboard running vertically.
Nicolls reports roughly 60% less weight and carbon footprint than a conventional grand.
The strings face the player, making plucking and strumming them natural.
It grew out of her Inside-Out Piano and has been developed through her Future Piano initiative.
From prototype to purpose-built
The idea began with Nicolls' Inside-Out Piano. A rough 2008 prototype turned an upright's strings around to face the performer. In 2014, French piano technician Pierre Malbos built a refined version from a 1912 straight-strung Erard grand, rotating its soundboard and strings ninety degrees. The Standing Grand is the next step: purpose-built rather than converted.
Development has run through Future Piano, which Nicolls founded in 2017 with Innovate UK funding, while crowdfunding has helped move it from one-off prototype toward something more widely playable.
Lighter, greener, and played from the inside
Standing the instrument up pays off in practical ways. A lighter, more compact piano is easier to tour with and fits smaller venues, practice rooms and homes. The reported 60% cut in weight and carbon is a meaningful number for anyone weighing the environmental cost of a new instrument.
Then there's the sound. Composers have asked pianists to reach inside the instrument for more than a century, plucking, strumming and striking the strings. On a conventional grand that means leaning awkwardly over the rim, out of the audience's view. Here the strings face the player, so those techniques become natural and visible.
Why it matters
Players: A grand's string length and sound in a space where only an upright would fit, plus easy access to inside-piano techniques.
Venues and educators: A lighter instrument is cheaper to move and easier to place in small rooms.
The industry: Piano design has barely changed in a century. A credible vertical grand challenges assumptions about what the instrument must look like, and what it costs the planet to build.
The bigger picture
The vertical grand isn't a new dream. The oldest surviving upright piano, built in 1739 by Domenico Del Mela in Gagliano, Tuscany, was an early attempt to stand the strings skyward. It now sits in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence.
Whether the Standing Grand becomes a fixture in studios and on stages or stays a bold outlier, it reframes an instrument most of us assumed was done evolving. Sometimes innovation isn't about adding technology. It's about turning a familiar idea on its end.
Sources: Sarah Nicolls (sarahnicolls.com), King's College London, Pianist magazine, World Piano News, gearnews and the Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze.