Coda

By re-membering throughout this book, we have traced the sonic, historical, social, medial, and ecological resonances around intentionally decomposing instruments, with special attention paid to the piano. In many cases, these once finely tuned structures undergo transformation into more-than-instruments: a habitat for insects, a water-filled case of hammers and wires, an aeolian instrument played by the wind, or a tangle of firewood. Unlike the Apple ad transforming a crushed piano into a flat, digital simulacrum, these artistic experiments are open-ended and ultimately out of human control. Unlike an expensive Fender guitar smashed in a rock concert, these instruments will not be repaired and returned to their intended cultural function. They do work as sites of imaginative ecological repair, however: returning a piano to the earth through ritual fire or water is a kind of transition from anthropocentric sound-making toward more-than-human material and sonic relations. As media in their own right, decomposing instruments also shift perspective toward materialities usually taken for granted, as in the experience of finding one’s phone screen suddenly black, more matter and mirror than source of information. On another level, instruments that function as mediators, in the sense of connectors, help embody and amplify awareness of the real threats of fire and water to the world as we know it.

In their decomposition, pianos like Annea Lockwood’s transplants become reembedded in biological sources and processes. Our close intermedial reading has shown not only how these works destabilize conventional perceptions of music and human culture, but also how they open new possibilities for embodied, reciprocal sound experiences. The peculiar combination of instruments and elements, as well as the interplay between human-made material and nonhuman engagement, transforms our understanding of both cultural media and nature. The burning, planted, or drowned piano highlights Klangkörper relationships that activate ambiguous perceptions of subject/object and of the passage of time. The artworks disrupt received expectations about cultural objects and at the same time form new connections.

The decomposition of pianos is also an invitation to re-compose in several senses: to improvise and make new, unpredictable sounds on a once-domesticated instrument; to reimagine human cultural materials as part of a larger ecosystem; and to re-member the power of sound to affect human and nonhuman bodies, as Julia Adzuki’s tree instrument does with vibrating piano wires. Some artists have literally taken apart pianos and reordered their parts in new forms, as in the work of Jeff Bell, a sculptor whose 2013 show RePiano in North Carolina included a work called Nautilus, using a deconstructed piano’s cast-iron plate as the fin of a submarine like that in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.1 Works like these recall the practice of bricolage, or “fooling” in Appalachian culture, a form of “folk recycling” or “using an object to ends for which it was not intended.”2 In this context, what looks like a trash heap is really a rich field of source material. In an age when more and more pianos are being discarded or sold cheaply on social media, as burdens from a time of more ubiquitous music-making in middle-class homes, cast-off instruments offer new possibilities for experimentation and reimagining human culture.

From a posthumanist perspective, engaging with nature through instruments destabilizes the expected human position of control, often pushing the expression of cultural messages to the background. The radical letting go of valued objects from protected indoor spaces—especially when they can no longer serve their original purpose—does not merely result in a disruptive collapse of order. Instead, perception shifts from listening to music to a multisensory experience of materials, beings, and their interrelatedness. The entanglement of instruments and elements fosters symbiotic relationships, slow time, and inverted perspectives of mirroring surfaces. In this process, nature and culture are not opposed; instead, media transformation and human performance are part of a network that we usually perceive as unity, such as a musical work, a film, or an instrument.

Artists have always found methods to disrupt received perceptions and question reigning cultural paradigms. However, with posthumanist and intermedial approaches, we can trace in more detail how these radical material shifts, collapsing sensory orders, changes over time, and converging frameworks of destruction and natural processes enable new forms of more-than-human collaboration. At the very end of our project, coauthor Beate Schirrmacher had the opportunity to test this approach at a live performance of Piano Burning in Frederiksberg, Denmark (Figure 8). Attending an on-site performance, which we had previously analyzed through film, provided a more embodied and tactile experience, including smoke, heat, and sparks. Another striking element that Beate noticed was how the live-audience perspective heightened concern for the pianist, whose reflective playing contrasted with the quickly spreading fire. This dissonance provoked both worry and laughter amid the strange calm of the performance itself. The event’s sensory variability also highlighted how film’s two-dimensionality cannot fully convey the depth of space—particularly noticeable when shifting attention between Piano Burning photos and the live experience. Beate noticed that the audience’s perception constantly shifted as well, between flames devouring the piano and the piano shaping a spectacular fire, with burning colors and smoke gliding through every gap between the keys. When one bystander remarked that “the flames are like an orchestra,” the act of witnessing did in fact bear out the collapsing nature/culture binaries that we have noted throughout this book. Friends who had sounded skeptical about the idea of piano burning grew attentive to the materials, one after the other, and the overall transformational process.

Renatured and decomposing instruments do not advocate for the wholesale rejection of music and cultural heritage. Instead, these practices harness human responses to musical sounds and the instruments that produce them to engage with our environment in more attentive ways. By moving instruments outdoors and relating them with natural elements, these practices expose the distinctions humans make between what we protect and what we abandon. They also return a piano or harp to its sources in wood and metal, re-membering the instrument’s body even as it decays or collapses in flames. This is not a binary matter and a rejection of culture; rather, these rewilded instruments highlight the value of art, using artifacts to engage with nature in less hierarchical ways. We rely on the familiar in order to understand the new; media scholars repeatedly have pointed out how new media technologies are structured on practices of old media.3 Similarly, decomposing instruments invite us to engage with the nonhuman as attentively and curiously as we do with interfaces for human communication and culture.

As Fluxus-inspired works like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning and Piano Drowning regain popularity in a time of heightened ecological awareness, it is important to note that these works do not celebrate instrument destruction as an authoritarian regime would or as Lady Gaga’s audience did (in a completely different context) when she emerged from her own burning piano like a warrior queen. The point is not the erasure of the instrument or the empowerment of the artist, though these acts occur on opposite ends of the “sonoclasm” spectrum. Instead, a slowly burning or drowning piano becomes a medium for sensory engagement with human-made sound materials often taken for granted, reembedded in a more-than-human setting. Works like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants, along with more recent experiments using outdoor more-than-instruments, encourage deeper listening to a rich and fragile world.

As eighty-one-year-old Lockwood muses, listening to a marsh with a hydrophone in the 2022 documentary 32 Sounds, “It’s my sense that if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another . . . not even to the environment, we’re all within it.” She thinks of sound as a “sensory channel of connection” linking humans with bugs, water currents, or a passing train.4 In the documentary, an archival film of a much younger Lockwood listening to the sound of her burning piano shows her smiling in wonder, open to whatever she might hear. In a time when long attention is becoming more difficult for humans to sustain, in our already cyborg-like linkage with devices for fast-moving sensory input, works of gradual decomposition and attentive listening serve as reminders of elemental processes to which all “vibrant matter” eventually yields.5