Meet the Australian Music Teacher Who Can Play Over 350 Instruments
To hear more of Peter’s musical prowess, check out @oneharpiainen on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.
Peter Kaukiainen (@oneharpiainen) had a serious dilemma. After high school, he auditioned on the oboe for a music conservatory in Queensland, Australia. Glowing praise followed, along with an impossible edict: He had to pick just one other instrument to study. But when you hold the unofficial world record for most instruments played by one person, choosing just two is like choosing a favorite child.
“I just couldn’t cut down!” says the now 40-year-old teacher and music therapist, who gives new meaning to the term “multi-instrumentalist.” “So I went out to the world myself and learned as much as I could.”
No kidding. To date, he estimates he can play between 350 to 500 instruments. Yet for such a lengthy resumé, Peter wasn’t a young prodigy. In fact, he didn’t play any instruments until he was 13, but his fate was sealed early: his grandparents played 50 instruments between the two of them, and his great-uncle was country singer and guitarist Slim Dusty, one of the most successful musicians in Australia, with over 100 albums to his name.
Once Peter began to play, he did it stealthily. Each Friday, he’d select a different instrument from his school’s music room — French horn one week, bassoon the next — and return it Monday having learned how to play in his backyard, a massive, 1,000-acre (405-hectare) playground bordering the state forest in Queensland. Animals were his audience.
“I started noticing they were responding. I’d play notes and they’d sing back, so I started trying different notes,” he says. “That’s where I realized nature talks to you as well. So ever since I’ve had this wonderful relationship, especially with birds. Birds will come sit on the fence and sing to me while I’m playing.”
His friends aren’t just feathered. Whether Peter is tickling a glockenspiel or sawing delicate strains on a violin in the videos he posts, kangaroos cock their heads and kitties curl up to sleep. Humans are drawn to them as well, so much so that strangers who stumbled upon his homemade blend of music and nature therapy began reaching out to thank him.
“People started writing to me that the music I was doing was helping them with anxiety. Especially people who live in the city,” he says. “The Celtic harp is probably the instrument I use most in music therapy. Dementia patients and kids with very high autism respond beautifully to harp music, the sympathetic resonance of the harp. It can help people relax.”
He should know. After all, he began filming the videos as a self-help method. “I was grieving for my sister, who died suddenly, and I didn’t play for weeks,” he says. “So I started doing 15-second videos just as a way to get back into playing.”
Once he posted them, responses poured in from around the world.
“Helping other people heal helped me heal,” he says. “It’s amazing how you can access someone’s emotions whether they speak your language or not. It sounds a bit of a cliché, ‘the universal language of music,’ but it doesn’t mean it’s not real. Music makes you feel like you belong to something.”
—Rebecca Haithcoat Instagram @music
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