Introduction
During the historic 2024 rains in Southern California, a nineteenth-century grand piano, caked in mud, branches, and debris, landed upside-down in a street. It had tilted out a window when a mudslide pushed a house off its foundation in Los Angeles. The Blüthner piano now resides in an art gallery as an artifact that evokes “beauty even in the wreckage,” with implicit reference to climate disasters.1 It is one of many family pianos lost with all their attendant memories—for example, in the western North Carolina floods caused by Hurricane Helene in 2024.2 This broken-down instrument, violently reclaimed by natural forces, also recalls pianos either abandoned or intentionally decomposed over the past century.
In this book, we bring current environmental perspective to mid-twentieth-century artworks that involve burning, drowning, or decaying pianos. The continuing fascination with ruined or damaged instruments today, when fewer children take music lessons and more pianos are finding their way to landfills in privileged countries like the United States,3 shows the instrument’s power to carry cultural freight, whether as a vehicle for nostalgia or as an artifact in a time of ecological crisis and collective questioning of what civilization means. We trace this fascination back to the 1960s and 1970s, a time of artistic experimentation and similar questioning, in our focus on composer Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants. These works continue to find new iterations in live and filmed performances. During the Covid-19 lockdown, an extended watch party brought Lockwood’s burning pianos, as well as related sequences of pianos placed in a pond or in the forest, back to life in a new era of ecological, political, and public health crises.4 Witnessing an upright piano slowly burn until its inner metal harp is exposed, seeing forest plants overtake a baby grand piano in the summer heat, or listening to a piano half submerged in a pond is different from listening to music in a concert hall, at home, or via headphones. Instead of the pleasure of hearing either new or familiar sounds, we become aware of the instrument itself and its disruptive treatment. Audience members might feel a mix of discomfort and pleasure; if not used to this kind of performance, they might wonder why anyone would intentionally damage a musical instrument in the first place. For a primarily listening audience used to conventional music, piano destruction (and the thumping, crashing, or untuned sounds that result) might come across as an unraveling of the auditory order.
Artworks like Lockwood’s Piano Burning and Piano Drowning beg larger questions. What does it mean to burn or drown a culturally weighted instrument like a piano—or to risk playing it, however out of tune? The intentional destruction of instruments can cause strong and widely varied reactions (even in a fictional framework). A 2024 Apple ad showing a trash compactor reducing a piano and art supplies into the sleek, flattened surface of an iPad led to intense critique over the company’s apparent disdain for cultural work and heritage. In the end, Apple apologized and pulled the ad. This compression of art into screen simulacrum led to “visceral” responses (partly because the ad itself was well crafted as a piece of marketing5) but did not invite the cathartic if ambivalent pleasure of smashing instruments in moments of artistic abandon. When artists engage with musical instruments, something more happens. Jimi Hendrix’s famous guitar burning in 1967; Kurt Cobain’s smashed Fender Stratocaster; Tori Amos’s burning piano in promotional photos for her Boys for Pele album; Lady Gaga’s apparently unscathed emergence from a piano on fire in 2009—through examples like these, the demise of instruments in popular music has its own history of evoking danger and empowerment. Drowning or overgrown instruments appear in popular music culture as well; Taylor Swift’s clinging to a flooded baby grand in her “Cardigan” video evokes a sense of needing music for survival, while her performance on a moss-covered piano creates a more benign, fairy-tale atmosphere.
For all its performative power, and beyond the Apple ad controversy, intentional instrument destruction in different contexts can incite pain, even despair. A much-publicized incident of the Taliban burning an Afghan musician’s drums and harmonium, alongside the ongoing plight of musicians facing censorship in Iran, has led to outrage in the face of religious extremism and autocracy.6 As a result, support organizations such as Save Young Musicians have helped promising students from Afghanistan emigrate and pursue their careers in Europe.7 Acts of ideologically based instrument destruction are not new. They recall Maoist antipiano propaganda (framing the instrument as a bourgeois indulgence) during the Cultural Revolution, a 1917 episode of Bolsheviks dragging pianos through the streets like French aristocrats in tumbrels,8 Christian churches’ destruction of musical instruments in eighteenth-century Britain,9 and philosophical arguments (going back as far as Plato) for distrusting music’s power to affect the body—and the body politic.
While less threatening than instrument destruction under a rigid political regime or even during a rock concert, decomposing a piano in performance art can incite strikingly varied reactions. A classical musician might recoil when a piano burns, depending on the instrument’s quality; a folk musician used to fiddle-burning festival rituals might find the experience celebratory; contemporary artists might find the act commonplace if exposed to previous experiments with instrument destruction. From another perspective, a colonialized observer might feel relief after having been forced to march into school to the sound of European classical music.10 In a time of climate emergency, others might question the basic value of human culture and music or wonder why a burning piano may incite a stronger reaction than wildfires seen on the news. Researchers point out that when musical instruments are destroyed as part of an artwork, this action is qualitatively different from assaults on other material objects or tools.11 They disagree on what causes affective reactions to these acts, often without additional reflection on the instruments’ materiality in larger contexts of human culture and more-than-human entanglement.
Performance artworks like Lockwood’s Piano Burning, Piano Drowning, and Piano Garden (in which the instrument decays amid deciduous foliage) inhabit an ambiguous space between contemplative or immersive aesthetics and the dystopian mode in environmental art. This book shows how this ambiguous position also collapses conventional binaries between music and noise, destruction and repair, and culture and nature. In the process, conventional expectations of musical performance and media communication also collapse. Lockwood’s works instead foreground the material transformation of human-made instruments and offer an experience of ecological relationality. These artworks highlight the piano’s cultural and material freight in new contexts of fire, forest, and water.
Artistic practices of piano burning and other forms of instrument destruction have a longer history than might be expected. Before Hendrix, Cobain, and mid-twentieth-century avant-garde artists, folk and military traditions included burning instruments, and Laurel and Hardy’s 1932 The Music Box famously portrayed a player piano damaged through a series of comic mishaps (and taking on its own independent movements outside human control). In works like Annea Lockwood’s, humans may set the destruction in motion, but the instruments’ exposure to the elements is what breaks them down. Thus, piano decomposition has taken on new meaning in this time of climate crisis and heightened awareness of ecological entanglements. These works recall not only destructive practices but also older instruments such as the water-driven hydraulis (an instrument with pipes and keyboard dating from as early as the third century BCE) and Baroque organ pipes using water to make bird sounds, thus making explicit links with elemental forces. More recent experiments with instruments such as the Wave Organ in San Francisco or toy pianos played with water and stones echo these earlier art forms while taking on new urgency today. Many of these works call attention to what Elin Kahnov calls “nature-culture,” which collapses the perceived binary between the two when considering phenomena like performing birds or a “tree opera” that includes the forest’s sounds.12 Likewise, a piano responding to fire or water muddies that distinction and invites human observers to become more entangled in the process too.
Our book does not serve as a catalog of the many works involving piano destruction or decay, but we demonstrate how these works move past mere provocation, inviting engagement with ecological crisis and greater criticality toward cultural tropes and objects usually taken for granted. We have chosen to focus on burning, drowning, and decaying pianos because they unfold multiple meanings, especially in a time of increased ecological awareness. Pianos damaged as the direct result of climate emergency (as in the case of the Los Angeles mudslide or the North Carolina floods) haunt our project, though we concentrate on artworks that experiment intentionally with the effects of fire, water, and weather. We use the term renatured to describe instruments placed outdoors in a broad sense because adjectives like ruined, neglected, devastated, or nature prepared have taken on particular connotations in communities that work with these instruments, such as a piano-salvage operation in the Australian bush or experiments playing toy pianos with stones attached in a stream.13 We use the term decomposing to indicate more specific projects that intentionally disturb received notions of musical composition in favor of more ecologically embedded, compost-like transformations. We also distinguish between destruction (in the sense of intentionally setting a piano on fire) and decay (in the more passive sense of placing an instrument outdoors for an extended time).
Our book is structured diffractively, approaching piano decomposition from several historical viewpoints and media theories. This approach highlights the ambiguity of destroyed or decaying instruments, depending on their cultural and artistic context. On one level, a performance like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning reduces a cultural artifact to its materiality as wood and therefore fuel for fire; this is shocking in a way a burning cupboard would not be. But on another level, a piano left outdoors suffers the decay implicit in the life cycle of a tree. Questions of sustainability (wood cut from forests or plantations) and colonialist extraction (ivory used for keyboards before the 1940s) haunt the very history of the piano. Recontextualizing a musical instrument in a pond or forest, subject to rain, insects, and overgrowth, is not as forceful as burning but is equally damaging to the instrument over time, even if it already involves what Annea Lockwood sought out as a “truly defunct piano.”14 In all of these cases, multisensory witnessing of the piano’s demise is as important as listening to its sounds, as the effects of natural elements through time expose the instrument’s inner workings bit by bit. On a cultural level, the artworks draw attention to what Kyle Devine calls “musical exceptionalism” and “commodity fetishism” around instruments like the piano, particularly amid current concerns about Eurocentrism and white supremacy in the classical music tradition.15 On an ecological level, they invite questions of waste (the sheer bulk of instruments no longer used in human households), toxicity (lead in piano surfaces or keys), and transformation (piano wires sold as scrap metal; pieces of the instruments repurposed to make cabinets or garden planters).16 On a metaphorical level, they enact burning and drowning to reflect the reality of fires and floods resulting from human-caused climate change.
Annea Lockwood’s own idea of “piano transplants” into unlikely settings complicates her works in a productive way, as human-worked materials are recontextualized and transformed into their basic elements of hardwood, basswood, steel, iron, copper, leather, and felt. Lockwood envisioned her works as metaphorical extensions of human heart transplants.17 In this imaginative leap, subjecting a piano to fire or water is more transformative than violent. The works relate to a subculture around already ruined pianos in Australia, from histories of the instruments as nineteenth-century colonialist transplants (much like the instrument dragged ashore in Jane Campion’s New Zealand–based film The Piano) to an outdoor sanctuary for cast-off pianos and the “post-musical” works played on them.18 The idea of sounding ruined pianos has also informed electronic works such as Natasha Barrett’s 2019 The Weathered Piano (quattuor tempora anni), which creates acousmatic sounds—with no clear source—to evoke the effects of climate-disrupted weather.19
Pianos outside their expected habitat take on a haunting quality, especially if they are in a state of disrepair. In a time when pianos are no longer a fixture in many households and instruments often become a burden to those inheriting them, social media images of landfill rescues or upcycled pianos have created an online niche. In addition to texts and films about the ruined-piano subculture in Australia, a recent study entitled The Lost Pianos of Siberia traces the remains of what was once a Soviet project to encourage collective artistic training in the hinterlands.20 And the public display of broken and upcycled pianos aided in a successful 2024 effort to save an acoustically prized concert hall in Salt Lake City from planned demolition to make room for a sports-entertainment complex.21 When passersby can touch and play instruments that have outlived their indoor capacity, they may better understand not only the fragility of undervalued art forms but also, as an unintentional benefit, the materiality of an instrument that is more a part of the natural world than they may have realized. This process of exposure and breakdown invites a more ecologically attuned sense of what a musical instrument can be.
Theoretical Approach
Our project links questions of cultural affordances with ecomusical materiality in a time when ecocritical fields are moving beyond analysis of human-made works that happen to refer to the natural world. Over the past decade, ecomusicology has pushed boundaries of traditional analysis to ask how listening and sound-making could become more humbly related to the world of which we are only a part.22 In the related field of sound studies, recent projects that question anthropocentric and colonialist approaches include Mark Peter Wright’s Listening After Nature, which argues for a more open, less extractivist method of field recording that does not attempt to “capture” other species’ sounds;23 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Sound Practices in the Global South, which takes a “plurilogue” approach to non-Eurocentric listening and music-making practices through a series of interviews;24 and Salomé Voegelin’s Uncurating Sound, which untangles colonialist tendencies in curatorial practices and speaks for “affective knowledge possibilities” through sound as “being with” rather than “being music.”25 All of these studies are part of a larger-scale reconsideration of human culture on earth, with implications in aesthetic philosophy as phenomenological and even vegetal entanglement,26 environmentally grounded curatorial practice,27 and art history with a growing focus on climate and biodiversity.28
Our project builds on these growing areas of inquiry and at the same time adds to studies of musical instruments that sometimes, but not always, explore their ecological relatedness. Though materiality has been a key element in ecocriticism for several decades, with extensions into ecomusicology, these fields still call for an in-depth study of the surprisingly persistent phenomenon of decomposing pianos. While the 2022 anthology Rethinking the Musical Instrument includes historical studies of pianos and harps, along with analyses of digital extension practices, it does not make explicit links between instruments and their ecological source materials and sound-making potentials outside the concert hall.29 Sound Actions, Alexander Refsum Jensenius’s reconsideration of musical instruments also published in 2022, links digital sound technologies with human embodiment and affect, assuming an anthropocentric position in its treatment of musical “biomechanics.”30 This text also implies a digital ascendance that does not account for the ongoing fascination with weathered and deconstructed analog instruments. On the one hand, the 2023 anthology Sounds, Musics, Ecologies includes a chapter on “ecoörganology,” or the study of instruments in ecological contexts, but it focuses on digital portable music players rather than on acoustic instruments.31 Stefan Östersjö’s 2020 Listening to the Other, on the other hand, describes his practice of releasing violins and guitars into outdoor settings, so that they become mediators and listening agents in a more-than-human context,32 a shift that this book investigates as well. Topically focused studies of instrument destruction, on the spectrum of political repression to guitar smashing, inform our project,33 as do our previous collaborations on music and violence used in film and literature to communicate complexity. We have also argued that art addressing ecological crises draws on the ambiguous potential of music and sound to foster audiences’ experience of “nature-culture.”34 This book applies our earlier research toward instruments themselves while adding intermedial, elemental media, and posthumanist perspectives. We also consider recent theoretical work linking intermediality and posthumanism35 and studies of outdoor instruments as “sound sculptures.”36
After providing background on the piano’s cultural affordances, we discuss the material and medial specificities of the instrument, as well as various affective responses to its destruction or decay. Our in-depth analysis of Lockwood’s Piano Transplants shows how intermedial relationships among pianos, environment, and human perception perform the work of decentering anthropocentric perspective on musical instruments, with the additional layer of film as mediation. Combining intermedial analysis with a posthumanist framework allows us to show what the transformation of instruments can do in shifting awareness toward ecological entanglement. In our analysis, we explore different forms of media—not only the materials of the piano and the films of Lockwood’s works but also in John Durham Peters’s sense of the elemental media of air, water, and fire.37 By taking a third way between intermediality and theories of elemental and radical media, we show how a burned, drowned, or abandoned piano is not simply destroyed but changed into a form of productive refuse, not as “abject” waste in the sense of oil or plastic permeating a damaged planet but as part of an organic cycle of radical re-formation.38 In examining the media transformation of performance to film in Lockwood’s Piano Burning, Piano Garden, and Piano Drowning, we also consider the appeal of the films’ slow aesthetics during Covid-19.
Finally, we make a conceptual shift from performance-oriented to more environmentally grounded instruments, showing how the burning or breakdown of a piano can open the way not only for decomposing instruments but also for reimagining their purpose in a less human-centered world. Some ways musical materials can take on new, less anthropocentric functions include using found materials to create listening tools, so as to better apprehend the life of a river or a tree; playing already ruined pianos to create performances that are based on close listening; or placing musical instruments in unlikely natural spaces to find out how the local ecosystem sounds through them. Our examples include contemporary performance artist Julia Adzuki’s Resonant Bodies tree trunk strung with piano wires, Stefan Östersjö’s collaborations involving violins and guitars left outdoors to respond to ecological effects, and coauthor Heidi Hart’s artistic research project subjecting a Gothic harp to humid weather (including a hurricane) in the southern United States. Ultimately, this book argues for the value of ambiguity in questioning traditionally Eurocentric musical representations while at the same time salvaging remnants of their own sensory fire.
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 1 contextualizes Annea Lockwood’s work within a longer trajectory of piano destruction and decay in both art-historical and musicological frameworks. We trace the history of intentional piano burning from early twentieth-century military rituals to 1960s Fluxus performances and more recent critiques of Eurocentric cultural history. Mid-twentieth-century land art and interventionist ecological works of the 1980s inform this history, as do the experimental piano compositions of John Cage and George Crumb, leading to current extended-technique piano practices that interrogate how the instrument sounds and what purpose it serves. The history of autodestructive practices in visual and performance art (in particular the work of Gustav Metzger) sheds additional light on piano destruction and decay. We include additional examples of recent artistic projects to deconstruct and reimagine the body of a piano. Finally, an environmental art history perspective aids in understanding the recent resurgence of interest in performances like Annea Lockwood’s.
In chapter 2, we answer the question “why destroy/renature pianos?” by describing the piano’s hybrid structure (as both a percussion and string instrument), its ecological sources and costs, its complexity of design, and its history of tempered tuning. By approaching the piano as a “radical” or “elemental” medium in itself,39 we lay the groundwork for our third-way approach to instruments as media that activate intermedial and elemental relationships among beings, objects, and environments. We then trace the instrument’s trajectory into nineteenth-century bourgeois homes, its symbolic value as a marker of economic class, its function in gender politics and control, and its colonialist and environmental costs. We include perspectives on the piano’s role in places outside privileged homes or concert settings where it takes on different values as an out-of-place object, a symbol of oppressive hegemony, or a source of subversive reclamation. A thorough postcolonial history of the piano, as well as a broad consideration of the instrument in all its manifestations (including jazz and rock), are beyond our project’s scope; we focus on the piano’s implicit legacy of European classical music and ways in which its colonialist movement has created defamiliarizing effects. We apply perspectives from literature and film to show how the piano has taken on weighty cultural affordances that trigger strong but not consistent reactions.
Chapter 3 applies our previous research on music and violence to violence on musical instruments by asking what it means to destroy an instrument. After presenting several studies that seek to understand why smashing guitars and burning pianos leads to strong affective responses,40 we describe burning instruments under fundamentalist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan as an example of extreme actions on the instrument-destruction spectrum, a range that also relates to contemporary artworks on the history of book burning. We explore the idea of instruments as extensions of the human body and how this connection invites specific responses. In this context, pianos appear less as culturally freighted instruments than as exposed, fragile, sounding bodies. Moving from destruction to the decay of pianos over time, we take a qualified approach to posthumanism in which renatured instruments decenter and deterritorialize human cultural materials. Decaying pianos also signal human culture’s tendency toward its own demise, as in Claire Colebrook’s thinking on extinction,41 but with more emphasis on material transformation as a kind of composting than on human parasitism or failure as a species.
Chapter 4 builds on theories of radical and elemental media, in which media appear not only as texts, films, or social media feeds but also, at a more basic level, as water, fire, wood, and metal. We focus on Annea Lockwood’s piano works to perform a detailed analysis of the instruments’ breakdown and transformation. We also discuss the material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic modalities at work in the 2021 filmed versions of Lockwood’s Piano Burning, Piano Garden, and Piano Drowning, applying Lars Elleström’s approach to intermediality.42 Multimodal aspects of the filmed performances (the simultaneous experience of sound, image, and meaning-making) combine with the media transformation of film editing to create a simulated experience of slow time, piano sounds, the instruments’ decay, and audience–performer interaction. Our third way between elemental and intermedial media theory shows how different layers of mediation shift perspective on what a musical instrument is and means, while breaking down the music/noise and nature/culture binaries.
Chapter 5 reflects on the various perspectives on piano materiality, destruction, decay, and transformation discussed throughout this book. We then move from decomposition to reimagine Eurocentric performance instruments as salvaged materials for new processes of listening to the more-than-human world. Stefan Östersjö’s wind- and water-responsive guitars and violins, Sabine Vogel’s experiments with ecologically sensitive flutes, and Julia Adzuki’s ash tree trunk strung with piano wires serve as our main examples of more than instruments. We also include a reflection on coauthor Heidi Hart’s experiment with a decaying harp in the heat and humidity of North Carolina, where the instrument becomes a site for spiderwebs and insect eggs, as well as de-tuned sonorities that radically democratize conventional musical scales.
A short coda concludes the book with the idea of re-membering to reflect on instruments’ reparative potential as ecologically entangled cultural materials. This chapter also includes a description of a live piano-burning event in Denmark, a multisensory experience that confirms such art events as entry points for greater environmental engagement and listening beyond conventional sounds. Decomposing instruments prefigure a future in which human performativity becomes less relevant in the face of larger planetary concerns; at the same time, more ecologically attuned instruments offer new sources of curiosity and pleasure.