Piano in early society

The award-winning 1993 film The Piano by Jane Campion featured the musical instrument in colonial New Zealand.

Now an academic plans to write a "cultural biography" of the piano funded by a $140,000 Marsden Fund grant.

Kirstine Moffat, of Waikato University, says she intends to write the social and literary history of the piano from the arrival of the first instrument in 1827 to the birth of radio in the 1920s.

She said pianos regularly featured in first-hand accounts of the settlement experience and in literature set in the colonial period.