Piano Decompositions

The Ecology of Destroyed and Decaying Instruments

Heidi HartAuthorBeate SchirrmacherAuthor

Tracing the history of destroyed and decaying pianos, Piano Decompositions asks what happens when we let go of controlling musical instruments. As Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher show how the piano can transform conversations around the Anthropocene and environmental destruction, they reveal the instrument to be a potent creative and ecological force, a medium to connect with environments in an explorative, attentive way.

Dense marshland with trees overlooking a waterway; at center an upright piano stands in the water. Faint music staff lines top to bottom.

Background photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels

Plants growing on a dilapidated piano left out in nature.

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    Open access for this book has been made possible with funding from the Linnaeus University Library and the Linnaeus Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies.

    Excerpt from Joan Larkin, “No One Wants Them,” Old Stranger (Alice James Books, 2024), published by permission of Alice James Books.

    Copyright 2026 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

    Piano Decompositions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.