Examining musical instrument destruction through an ecological and intermedial lens

Musical instruments are typically seen as objects both used and maintained with ritualistic care. But what happens when they’re tossed from homes in mudslides, burned during ecstatic parties, or waterlogged by pop stars in viral videos—and how do these elemental interactions transform the way we see and play instruments? Piano Decompositions asks what happens when we let go of controlling musical instruments. What kind of meanings start to sound when instruments are moved out of the protected cultural space and engage with their surrounding elements?

Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher trace the history of destroyed and decaying pianos, both sorting them within the realm of artistic violence against instruments and following their return journeys into water, sand, and soil. They parse the artistic vision of Annea Lockwood, whose iconic burning, drowning, and decaying Piano Transplants presented a novel means of drawing attention to the increasing threats of climate change in the 1960s and ’70s. Turning to instruments made from found materials and others played collaboratively with wind and water, they demonstrate how human sound making is entangled in the more-than-human world.

Showing how the piano can transform conversations around the Anthropocene and environmental destruction, Hart and Schirrmacher find the instrument to be a potent creative and ecological force, a medium to connect with environments in an explorative, attentive way. Piano Decompositions unearths new ways to relate our concepts of curiosity, pleasure, and music to the natural world.

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Heidi Hart is an independent arts researcher and guest instructor at Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. She is author of several books, including Climate Thanatology: Companioning What Remains; Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster; and Hanns Eisler’s Art Songs: Arguing with Beauty.

Beate Schirrmacher is associate professor in comparative literature at Linnaeus University and member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies. She is coeditor of Truth Claims Across Media and Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media.