1. Toward a History of Decomposing Pianos

Piano Burning as Ritual and Autodestruction

In a European context, the practice of burning pianos has a surprisingly long and murky history. Military piano-burning competitions in the United States and the United Kingdom began as a way to commemorate the Battle of Britain (against the German air force) by squadrons of mainly American volunteers. This practice involved not only competing for prizes but also smashing and burning pianos. These burnings are rumored to have stemmed from the burning of ships at Viking funerals or perhaps from the Gunpowder Plot in England. They may have commemorated the death of a specifically fine piano player or simply subverted cultural “standards” for RAF officers (the ideal of British pilots as gentlemen apparently included piano lessons for non-upper-class aspirants).1 No matter which of these explanations is correct, most ritualize the burning in a way that links a specific social group’s practices to historical rites of passage. As a form of revolt against enforced cultural standards, the prize-winning, destruction, and burning of pianos are all mixed up in carnivalesque subversion of hegemonic values. We will return later to some of the elements implied here: the instrument as stand-in or quasi-human object, also connected to the person who plays it, and the revolt against cultural hegemony in postcolonial contexts.

In the world of performance art, Annea Lockwood (whose father was an RAF pilot) is not the only artist who has set pianos alight, sometimes with a human pianist at the keyboard for as long as safely possible. When an artist takes up this practice, the burning of a piano no longer serves as a social ritual; it becomes a spectacle, intervention, or meditative action, depending on the setting. At the same time, ritual can still function as an aspect of art performance, as in contemporary opera and art installations that encourage passage through “threshold states.”2 From the ritual aspect of Greek theatre to Nietzsche’s idea of self-transformation through the tragic chorus, performance and ritual have long been intertwined.3 In the popular music sphere, Lady Gaga’s emergence from a burning piano at the 2009 American Music Awards works as a ritual of transformation, survival, and empowerment. In Antonin Artaud’s “theatre of cruelty” sense, destruction is key to the personal and social shifts that performance incites, by causing “the mask to fall” and exposing “the lie” of a false existence. Unlike Brecht’s theatre of critical distance, which exposes sociopolitical norms otherwise taken for granted, Artaud’s model is more cathartic: “the theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure.”4

Ritual functions like sacrifice have figured in many musical performances, and not only of the death-metal variety. The burning of a fiddle at the end of the 2024 Harpers Ferry Fiddle Day served as a celebratory ending to an intense folk-music fest, with historical reference to the armory burning there at the beginning of the Civil War. Some musicians reacted with more primal sentiments, however; one commented that “the fiddle gods have been sated!”5 Sometimes the image of a burning piano can signify ritual sacrifice in a personal way that bleeds into the collective, as in a publicity image for Tori Amos’s 1996 album Boys for Pele, a keyboard-rich fantasia on the immolation of patriarchal norms.6 The effigy-burning associations with this image imply that an instrument can stand in for a body, a phenomenon we explore throughout this book. Because the piano carries the burden of high culture along with its physical weight, some destructive works that do not involve burning—such as Danish artist Morten Poulsen’s moving a grand piano to the very edge of a raised platform in a concert hall or pushing another into a wall—also expose the effort of shifting that burden in a symbolic, ritual way.7

The following artworks reflect piano burning as a passage through physical danger, as well as larger ideological messaging in several cases. Artistic examples of piano burning from the past fifty years include Yōsuke Yamashita’s 1973 performance, filmed by graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu and refilmed in 2008, in which Yamashita improvised on the piano in a firefighter’s suit until “the piano stopped making sounds,” almost suffocating from the smoke in what turned out to be “a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself.”8 Here the piano becomes almost a body with agency, if imagined as a kind of worthy opponent in a ritual battle. Visual artist Chiharu Shiota’s 2011 piano burning as part of the MONA FOMA arts festival treated the instrument more as an inert, if still ceremonial, memory container. This burning took place on a public street in Tasmania, recalling Shiota’s childhood memory of a charred piano in a house that had burned down.9 These projects, concerned with metaphorical aspects of the burning ritual, relate to researcher and composer Stefan Östersjö’s 2009 collaboration with Bennett Hogg entitled Devil’s Water, with footage of “a burning violin floating downstream like a Viking funeral ship.”10 Piano burnings with more intentional sociopolitical messaging include Michael Hannan’s 2003 radiophonic work Burning Questions, which involved playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata on a burning baby grand piano to test “the cultural politics of auto-destructive music,”11 and Douglas Gordon’s 2012 video installation The End of Civilization, in which a burning piano in a wild Cumbrian landscape confronted the piano as a “the ultimate symbol of western civilization.”12

The term autodestructive art, referenced in Michael Hannan’s piano work, was developed by German-born visual artist Gustav Metzger as a way of radically interrogating past aesthetic forms after the Nazi period. The disruptive practices of Metzger and other notable postwar artists were a response to the ways in which National Socialism had appropriated German aesthetic traditions.13 Metzger’s philosophy also questioned the egocentrism of the market-driven art world in the face of historical atrocities and ecological crisis.14 His 1960 Acid Action Painting took on the quality of a demonstration, also a form of ritual, as the artist applied hydrochloric acid to white nylon at the Temple Gallery in London. Though Metzger did not burn musical instruments, the autodestructive element in his philosophy not only interrogated past cultural forms in the context of historical atrocities but also performed a contemporary critique against the culture industry (in the Frankfurt School sense) and ecological crisis, specifically by making the maltreatment of nature visible. As a teacher of Pete Townshend, Metzger did influence the smashing of guitars as an autodestructive act in music.15 In a broad sense, Metzger’s approach employs destruction and even “revulsion” toward “transforming people’s thoughts and feelings, not only about art . . . but to use art to change people’s relation to themselves and society.”16 A 2024 reconsideration of his work, along with that of gunpowder artist Cai Guo-Qiang in Los Angeles, shows a tension between slowly burning or oozing substances and more explosive actions, all of which critique entanglements of capitalism, violence, and ecological destruction.17

Different strands of intention and interpretation come into play (and sometimes overlap) in piano-burning performances: metaphorical, sociopolitical, and ecological. Annea Lockwood’s pianos work metaphorically in their relation to the “transplant” idea and to global heating in more recent iterations; they also function in a more directly ecological way, as experiments with elemental forces. In all the cases noted above, decomposing a piano works by taking apart and exposing the instrument’s structural composition as well as the idea of musical composition that is based on scored notes to be played exactly as written. The autodestructive aspect of fire (once intentionally set by human hands) takes its own course in breaking down the piano’s wooden case, exposing the cast-iron frame that holds its wires in tension, ultimately causing the wires to snap. The process also recalls rituals involving fire as a threat to be faced and overcome. Though slower than fire, the force of water also takes on an autodestructive role when a piano is placed in a river or pond. As in a baptism or purification ritual, the water functions as a means of change. It may or may not directly critique capitalist modernity, like the art collective Superflex’s 2009 Flooded McDonald’s or Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen’s more recent drowning of a 1:1 scale model of a Le Corbusier villa in a Danish fjord.18 Whatever its attendant meanings, the piano is transformed in a ritual passage from an object of cultural containment to an unpredictable tangle of hammers, wires, and keys. Who knows what sounds will emerge?

Decomposing Pianos in the 1960s Milieu

Annea Lockwood’s burning and disintegrating pianos did not originate directly from an explicit position of critique but were certainly informed by the general 1960s’ questioning of established cultural traditions. A key element in this period was “a reconsideration of the object of art, a move away from the static and autonomous object towards a practice which, at times, literally moved out of the studio, in an attempt to be more responsive to the world.”19 Though conceptual art was developing at the same time, as a foregrounding of idea over object to the point of “de-materializing” artworks “that would be free of art-world commodity status,”20 artists like Metzger performed this critique through processes that retained their materiality even when corroding or breaking down. As Synnøve Vik has noted, in Metzger’s work, “the transformative practices of materiality and technology make explicit the creative process inherent in all forms of destruction.”21 Though Annea Lockwood was hardly the only artist to break down pianos (Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s 1966 “Piano Destruction Concert” was a touchstone art event as well), her burning and drowning pianos attracted attention as much for their generative energy—the crackling of fire, the sound of rain invading a piano in the woods—as for their apparently destructive premise. In a broad sense, these works relate to the 1960s’ smashing and burning of guitars onstage, but in a way that continues the process of decomposition over a longer period and in a new environment outside conventional concert venues.

Jacques Rancière has gone so far as to claim that “art can only be art when the question of whether it belongs to the art world or the ‘real’ world is unclear,” in terms of what he calls its “sensory milieu.”22 Lockwood’s Piano Burning and Piano Drowning exemplify this ambiguity not only in their physical placement outdoors but also in the variation in performance and audience framing. In each case, a simple set of instructions guides the performer to place an already “defunct” piano in a particular kind of outdoor setting, leave it, and either burn it or document its slow decay. Lockwood may have been influenced by earlier piano-drowning experiments in the Fluxus milieu, such as Mieko Shiomi’s 1963 “Event for the Twilight,” accompanied by handwritten instructions to “steep a piano in the water of a pool” and “play some piece of F. Liszt on the piano.”23 The Fluxus practice of writing musical scores with nonnotational graphics or in prose, describing the musicians’ dress, gestures, and actions such as “scraping” the violin or “detuning” various instruments, likely influenced Lockwood as well. “In these rituals,” writes Rui Eduardo Paes, “the most sacred postulates of erudite culture and the conventional concept of spectacle were systematically overthrown.”24

All of this said, Lockwood did not set out primarily to “overthrow” cultural norms but rather to experiment with their materials in new settings. Her overall approach is one of “porousness” and attentive listening—not only to the materials in each composition but also to the surrounding cultural mood.25 When she first burned a piano, in 1968 London, she was well aware that “we were burning American flags, political effigies, the status quo,”26 and though she has never thought of herself as an activist, she “set out to capture the essence of immolation.”27 She found an abandoned upright piano in a dump, as households were casting them aside “to make room for television sets,” moved it to an art festival site on the Thames, and, after inserting asbestos-wrapped microphones into the piano’s case, added lighter fluid and set it aflame. A three-hour burning process left the instrument in embers and inspired Lockwood to hold an informal séance invoking the spirit of Beethoven.28 This explicitly ritual aspect of the performance, in which the dead composer was asked what he thought of it, did not apparently yield a clear answer, except in a “strange affirmative blurp” on the burned-piano recording.29

As Lockwood further developed her practice around decomposing pianos, she combined renaturing with systematic documentation. Playing the piano in addition to photo-documenting it is an auditory and kinetic way to trace its overtaking by the elements, as it grows less in tune with the tempered scale but perhaps more in tune with its outdoor environment. This mixture of performance art and conventional instrumental playing creates an already multilayered intermedial complex. The addition of elemental media, as water meets the wood, copper, cast iron, and felt that make up the piano, carries the instrument into another, stranger perceptual experience. Textual scoring of the work brings it back into the realm of human culture in an oscillating relationship that keeps the nature/culture divide ambiguous. Lockwood’s prose score for Piano Drowning (from 1972 in Amarillo, Texas) reads like this:

• Find a shallow pond with a clay/other hard bed in an isolated place.
• Slide upright piano into position vertically, just off-shore.
• Anchor the piano against storms, e.g. by rope to strong stakes.
• Take photographs and play it monthly, as it slowly sinks.
• Note: All pianos used should already be beyond repair.30

Lockwood’s insistence on already defunct instruments raises questions about how “beyond repair” they actually are, whether from a musician’s or observer’s perspective; this caveat implies ethical responsibility toward economically and aesthetically prized instruments. With outdoor spaces as a stage, curiosity and even discomfort around the piano, as vulnerable as it is valuable, affirm Rancière’s point about art working in liminal territory.

Lockwood’s 1960s–70s piano works introduce another element beyond simply destroyed or decaying pianos in her metaphorical approach to instrument and body. The title Piano Transplants, initially inspired by heart transplants, works not only in the ambiguous space between life and art in Rancière’s sense but also between object and body, human and plant, decomposition and salvage.31 These works decompose pianos in a sense beyond violent destruction, as Lockwood was most interested in transitions between material states and their acoustic potentials—not just for the sake of disrupting musical tradition but also to discover something more about it. During her years of work with Piano Transplants, she also used a recording of a human heartbeat in her 1970 tape piece Tiger Balm, continuing to follow her interest in the body and with “sound as a conduit of connection with the nonhuman environment.”32

A similar visual-art example from this period is Dennis Oppenheim’s 1969 Gallery Transplant, in which the artist relocated gallery floor plans to a snowy stretch of gravel in Jersey City, New Jersey. Unlike this literal recontextualization, however, Lockwood’s burning or drowning pianos rely on a more elusive, organic metaphor of transcorporeal organ replacement for the sake of survival. The question of what survives of a burned or decayed piano animates these works; from a contemporary ecological perspective, reembedding the piano’s material in the natural world is a kind of composting, which leads to both literal and metaphorical renewal in a more-than-human world. In a more recent work that takes the opposite route to this nexus of death and regeneration, artist Selva Aparicio’s “Time’s Refrain” (2016–24) embeds wasps’ nests inside an upright piano with its front panels removed, transplanting organic material into the instrument as in a surgical procedure.33 The nests appear almost like internal organs inside the body of the piano, not unlike the placement of a snake’s rattle inside a fiddle in Appalachian tradition, whether for luck or for the buzz.34

Such links between instruments and bodies became a point of discussion at the 2005 Ruined Piano Convergence, where Lockwood and others reflected on piano destruction not as an activist intervention but as a reflective and generative response to a screen-dominated age—well beyond the replacement of pianos by televisions in the 1960s. The conference notes put it this way: “If a concern with using noise or distortion for the production of music is, in some ways, a hangover from the modernist avant-garde, its transformation into a biological phenomenon during our digital age represents a distinctly novel development.”35 The term biological refers to the piano’s resonant materiality, particularly in ruined pianos that can still be played or sounded by fire or wind or even insects, not as conventional music but as a combination of wood, metal, and textile that mediates sound waves outdoors. From the perspective of media archaeology (a field of study mostly focused on relations between present and past media technologies), long-decayed pianos could appear as fossils of an older, analog age, insistently remaining and echoing in a field or forest or pond. Music archaeology, a related field that investigates prehistoric instruments and culture, has informed contemporary artworks similar to Lockwood’s—for example, Scottish artist Ruth Ewan’s 2012 The People’s Instruments, which included a ritual sacrifice of a burning piano in a lake, imitating ancient burial practices.36 In this case, the piano becomes a stand-in for a body, enacting the “biological” shift at the metaphorical as well as material level.

Context in Music History: Expanding the Sounds of Music

Lockwood responded to the 1960s artistic climate as a composer as well as a material artist. The Fluxus movement that informed her work drew on innovations in several different media and genres, from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to composer John Cage’s philosophy of sound, chance, and silence.37 Just as ordinary objects became part of art exhibitions, materials not normally viewed as musical (such as stones, shells, coins, and glasses of water in Cage’s 1952 Water Music) took on important roles in concert performance. Lockwood’s early compositions experimented with glass as an acoustic medium, from “cullet (glass ‘rocks’ formed as waste products in the cooling process) to ultra-thin microglass from which electron microscopy slides are made,” as a way to follow her own interest in timbre and the playful approach of Fluxus sound poets.38 Whether working with glass or pianos, Lockwood is curious about resonances not organized according to scored music. In a collection of listening exercises that she compiled with her partner, Ruth Anderson, she applied the same decontextualizing approach to words: “Choose a word and repeat it until it loses its lexical meaning and becomes ‘only’ a sound.”39

Unlike Cage’s experiments with nonmusical objects in concert, Lockwood’s Piano Transplants take the instrument outside the concert hall or living room. An indoor acoustic space, especially one shaped with wood, is still ecologically related,40 but removing the piano from its normal habitat questions the conventions of art and music as culturally confined practices. In opening the body of the piano to wind, fire, water, plants, insects, and weather, Lockwood defamiliarizes it as an instrument and also, as Vadim Keylin has pointed out, treats it as a readymade “sound sculpture” with aeolian potentials of passive sound.41 This phenomenon, related to the movement of air over sand or other flexible surfaces, occurs most obviously when wind blows through harp strings, creating eerie overtones. With both composer and performer absent (except in some cases of experimentation and documentation), Lockwood’s instruments also take on an acousmatic quality, as in some electronic music in which the sound’s source is not clear. Instead, audiences hear “the air and water streams, making the listener aware of what is usually inaudible,” while at the same time transforming the very environment in which an instrument is “consumed.”42 Thus the piano becomes a medium between artist and environment, culture and nature, music and noise.

Lockwood’s particular interest in the piano followed a long trajectory of experiments with the instrument’s materiality and sonic potentials even before the twentieth century. Before the grand piano was standardized for mass production in the 1880s, instrument builders tested a wide range of sizes, materials, and combinations “to alter the sound of the instrument, attaching frames, pedals, objects” and even “mandolin attachments.”43 Ancient instruments like the water-powered Alexandrian hydraulis may have influenced later curiosities such as the pyrophone, or “fire organ,” invented by a French physicist in the mid-nineteenth century; this instrument used flames to generate vibration in glass pipes—perhaps a kind of “controlled burning” piano.44 The practice of adding to or exposing the piano’s resonating materials continued with work in the early 1900s by Henry Cowell exploiting the piano’s strings, in what is called “inside” rather than “prepared” piano, which usually involves objects attached to the instrument while the pianist plays the keyboard.45 John Cage’s 1940s Bacchanale and Sonatas and Interludes are examples of prepared piano, with “very specific instructions” using screws and bolts to augment the piano’s percussive qualities.46 George Crumb’s 1970s Makrokosmos combines both inside and prepared aspects of extended-technique performance, with amplification added to the instrument, as the pianist plucks and mutes the strings, plays the keyboard, and even cries out into the body of the piano. In the 1990s, artist Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy went so far as to partially disassemble a grand piano and suspend it from the ceiling of an art gallery, splaying keys and hammers that would sound in “a clumsy and unpredictable cycle,” upending visitors’ received ideas of a piano’s cultural function.47

Contemporary experimental piano works—many by female composers—often add electronic enhancements along with stones, fishing line, the pianist’s voice, or “de-tuning” techniques.48 Improvisational composer Magda Mayas describes the work of several female composers who have “dismantled” pianos to expose the strings and soundboard, as a radical response to the inviting challenge of a “massive, static, and immobile” instrument that she approaches as a kind of “Pandora’s box.”49 This curiosity also drives Swedish composer Lisa Streich, who premiered her work Orchestra of Black Butterflies at the 2024 Venice Music Biennale; two motorized pianos “tuned a quartertone apart” and with paper strips on the strings create a “ghostly lyricism” and the “slightly woozy quality of a slowing-down music box.”50 At the 2024 Ultima contemporary music festival in Oslo, Zhanna Gladko’s Dancing into Fire formed a sonic, sculptural, and gestural reaction to her father’s own piano destruction work from 2015, with a circle of piano wires suspended onstage and sounded by female musicians and poets. This work critiques not only patriarchal inheritance but also political oppression of female artists in Belarus and Iran.51 Its cultural resonance recalls violent uses of piano wire as instruments of execution by hanging, for example in the case of Hitler’s would-be assassins in 1944 and in the USSR as well,52 making the reclaiming of the copper strings in a harmonious circle all the more striking. In the blurry zone between contemporary music and visual art, Naama Tsabar’s 2024 Estuaries, part visual artwork, part composition, and part participatory experiment, invites museum visitors to play piano wires strung from felt panels or inside openings in the walls while circling pieces of broken guitars on the floor. The wires resonate throughout the space in random chords and dissonances, as various hands touch and release them. Occasional scored performances activate the deconstructed instruments as well.53

Making new sounds with familiar instruments, a common practice in contemporary art and music today, was only one aspect of mid-twentieth-century avant-garde piano composition. Cage’s famous 4′33″ (1951/52) may be the best-known example, with the pianist instructed to sit at the instrument without playing at all, foregrounding random sounds in the concert hall instead of scored music. Salomé Voegelin has pointed out that however open-ended this work appears, it still treats silence as “a matter of musicology, a ‘disciplined’ and organized sound . . . and this music remains a Western, singular, hegemonic concept. Once ordered, silence loses its blurring relational potential and cannot create the criticality of proximity and fuzziness.”54 As a young composer, Annea Lockwood sought out this very “loosening of control” and finding “details blurred” through listening, particularly in her work with composer Morton Feldman: “Letting a resonance play out entirely before striking the next tone was a central teaching and it reinforced something the glass concert had taught me too—to give a sound time—let it ‘live out its life’ fully, listening closely to the whole energy/timbre change.”55 In Lockwood’s own prepared piano work, Earwalking Woman (1996), the pianist focuses on listening to the instrument’s strings and frame when stroked or struck, responding with improvisation.56

This receptive attitude is also important to the burning, drowning, or what Lockwood has called “permanently prepared piano.”57 These instruments take time to resonate, even before human hands touch them in their damaged states. Approaching a piano first from a listening rather than a performing position treats the instrument not as a tool for rendering a musical score but rather as a material, sounding object in its own right. The emancipation of the piano as an object is also evident in Lockwood’s scoring of these works after burning or transplanting the instruments.58 This apparently backward process permits an intimate curiosity that counters the tendency toward spectacle in twentieth-century art. Lockwood has observed that “while many of her peers in Fluxus and other artistic movements were offering ‘piano destruction corridas’ throughout the 1960s,” she was less interested in “destruction” than in “something less predictable, arising from the gradual action of natural forces . . . on an instrument designed for maximum control.”59 In a 1991 composers’ discussion for EAR magazine, Lockwood noted that she uses specific outdoor sites “as an acoustic part of the piece” and that one of her “slowly sinking” piano transplants is still partially playable twenty years after being placed in a Texas pond. “Classical music,” the moderator (composer R. I. P. Hayman) responded, and Lockwood laughed, saying more than her words did about the project’s implicit critique of Eurocentric and even anthropocentric musical objects.60

In the concert hall, audiences expect to hear certain forms of music, with the assumption that the instruments will function in tune. Thanks to the musicians and personnel behind the scenes, they usually do. At the same time, these instruments are sensitive objects, extremely responsive to changes in temperature and humidity. A grand piano in particular is so heavy, difficult to move, and complicated to tune that it requires physical labor and specialized expertise. From the perspective of conventional musical practice, deliberately exposing a piano to the elements equals destroying it as a musical instrument. What Lockwood points out, however, is that these pianos do not stop being sounding objects; the sounds they make are simply, and often radically, different. In a contemporary example, a spirit of curious experimentation informs Shohei Kudo’s Instagram-friendly videos of a “nature-prepared” toy piano in a moving stream, perhaps inspired by Cage’s (indoor) Water Music with stones and twigs inserted into the piano’s gamelan-like structure. The resulting sound is playful, repetitive in improvisation with close intervals, and strangely soothing.61 This project works in a similar way to the bite-size TikTok music theory demonstrations that younger musicians, less bound to concert traditions, are producing to make art music more approachable.

Whether online, in a museum, or outdoors, with Annea Lockwood’s influence in the background, pianos are more often becoming objects for experimentation and play. Even a piano that no longer makes pitched tones is still a sounding object, as in Nikita Gale’s “Stolen Time” at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, a work featuring a player piano that only sounds the “tuneless plonks of keys moving down and up” and making an uneasy “link” between music as “either a score or a physical performance.”62 The Canadian duo Decomposing Pianos has described their experiments with a century-old instrument, recording the piano after long exposure to rain and eventually removing the keys, until only the “iron harp” inside remains; they find that “the harp is a new voice from within the decomposing instrument.”63 A 2024 project by Simone Keller literally takes a piano apart, piece by piece, inviting a group of improvisers to make sounds with the instruments’ separated parts and to take a soundwalk along the “hidden rivers” of Tbilisi, Georgia, accompanied by a toy piano.64 This freeing of the instrument from its concert-hall associations and allowing it to sound even in pieces expands ideas of what is music and what is noise, and what is in and out of human control.

Composers who work with renatured and/or decomposing pianos show a range of willingness to let the instrument go. Especially because a piano is often described as a “string instrument under keyboard control” (as an organ is a wind instrument under keyboard control),65 the idea of authoritative structure often carries over into artistic experiments. The open curiosity of the Canadian project, Keller’s collective improvisation, and Kudo’s toy water piano is not always in play. In the 1991 interview with Lockwood, composer Gordon Monahan explained his own 1988 Aeolian Piano work that took a different approach, with a helicopter airlifting the instrument to a hilltop overlooking the St. John’s harbor in Newfoundland. In that case, extra 170-foot strings were attached from the sound board to the cliff face and then amplified, creating aeolian sheets of sound “that could be heard almost a kilometer away.”66 This grand work does respond to its environment, but it also colonizes it by drilling into a cliff face, rather than simply letting a piano break down into sounding matter in a particular ecosystem. Even Tori Wrånes’s similar work Loose Cannon (2010), with a piano bolted to a cliff face in northern Norway and then set on fire, appears as a controlled, spectacular experiment.67 Lockwood’s interest in letting go of control of the instrument (not just preparing it to respond to the wind) creates a humbler, more receptive link to the surrounding land. In this way it connects to the practice of finding already ruined pianos and discovering how their remaining materiality sounds.

Ruined Pianos: Exposure to the Elements

As part of nineteenth-century colonizing efforts, seven hundred thousand pianos were shipped from Europe to Australia, where the instrument became (according to a French music critic who visited in the 1880s) “a necessary piece of furniture,” however “cheap and nasty” in a “humble dwelling.”68 Many of these pianos were later abandoned to the elements, out in the bush on sheep station land, in a collapsed shed, or even in a ghost town’s ruined bar, with wind and dust blowing in for decades. Campion’s New Zealand–set film The Piano took some inspiration from this colonialist history, making the piano the protagonist. The piano emerges from a sea journey with the sounds of a perfectly in-tune recording, foregrounding the instrument’s role as a stand-in for Eurocentric culture, in an inconsistency between audiovisual narrative and the piano’s material condition. The instrument is clearly used in a metaphorical way to stage colonial cultural hegemony, as the sound of a piano in these films is both more stable and less frail than it should be. Thus the film makes an audiovisual argument that postcolonial novels tend to make, about art music and instruments as representatives of colonial power. This contrast also exposes the breakdown of colonializing projects involving musical instruments, which have become part of the landscape in places where they were meant to solidify Western cultural values. This phenomenon becomes palpable in a short story by Kerryn Goldsworthy about nineteenth-century Australia: “Perhaps all over this terrifying country there are Dead Pianos—left on beaches—abandoned on tracks—pushed over cliffs—rotting in ruined huts and cabins—making peculiar homes for birds and mice and spiders playing witches’ music among the strings and fretwork, and the silk all gone to rags.”69

A surprising number of these renatured pianos still make sound, and the practice of finding and improvising on them has become something of a cultural adventure. When composer and improviser Ross Bolleter discovered a ruined piano on a sheep station in 1987, he pulled and released the old strings as the “piano roared and groaned.”70 He had found a new mission. A century after the French critic’s report, in 1991, Bolleter and extended-technique pianist Stephen Scott founded WARPS, the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies. Projects have included symposia, intentional piano transplants in locations across the world, an outdoor piano sanctuary in Australia, and improvisational as well as composed performances on the instruments. The organization has also developed an idiosyncratic taxonomy of broken and weathered pianos, with the following terminology, depending on where the instruments are found and in what condition:

• neglected (including veranda pianos),
• abandoned (including shed pianos),
• weathered,
• decayed,
• ruined,
• devastated,
• decomposed, and
• annihilated as after having been blown up by a landmine planted in it by the Germans retreating northwards through Italy in 1945.71

Bolleter’s own text becomes rhapsodic when describing these renatured instruments, touching on the piano’s cultural and colonialist freight:

The only unchanging law is the law of change. Ruins are what remain. A piano judiciously left in the open and exposed to all weathers will ruin. All that fine nineteenth-century European craftsmanship, all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, and degrade to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire. The piano returns to aboriginality, goes back to the earth. Plucking the bass strings on an ancient weathered piano whose sound board is cracked wide open can produce astonishing pitch bends, then cataclysmic shuddering. Sounds which would be suppressed in conventional performance are given full rein. When those arch symbols of European musical culture and cultural imperialism linger as Ruined Pianos, they sing of transience, failure and loss. They sing of all that we loved that will never come again—the loss of home, the fading away of prestige and glory. They sing the chaos at the heart of the colonial enterprise, an Australian expression of the heart of darkness—the dark heart howling its cracked anthems.72

In a description of ruined piano playing techniques, Bolleter is more practical, providing instructions on how to play while sitting on the ground or with hands upside-down, how to force down sustain pedals with erasers, how to work the hammers when the keys no longer sound, and how to use already broken-off pieces of the piano “to strike or stroke the strings.”73 A 2021 documentary shows Bolleter improvising on various ruined pianos, showing what wild sounds (also perhaps in the metaphorical sense of rewilding instruments) can an emerge when a keyboard no longer registers the diatonic, tempered scale that forms the spine of European classical music. Like Annea Lockwood outlining her piece Earwalking Woman, Bolleter puts listening first, to find out what “metallic percussive effects, . . . squeaks, squawks, and grinding sounds” the instrument will yield.74 This approach reverses conventional musical training, with “forms of musical creation emerging from the very fabric of the sounding material, rather than from the abstraction of the written score.”75 At the same time, Bolleter hears each piano’s haunting by past music played from score, “the voice of the past in it.”76

Surprisingly in this documentary (as well as in Sophy Roberts’s history-travelogue The Lost Pianos of Siberia), ruined pianos elicit little commentary on the ecological implications of instruments decaying in the hinterlands, in terms of varnish or other chemical remnants, structural shelter for nonhuman creatures, or broader questions of human materials left to rot outdoors. Likewise, a 2022 conference on Lockwood’s work raised further awareness of her site-based sound work, with papers on topics such as “sonic agencies” and “material experience[s] of time”—but less attention than might be expected to the climate and cultural implications of a piano’s dramatic demise.77 Still, although Bolleter’s ruined-piano works do not respond explicitly to climate or biodiversity crisis like much environmental art and music today, they do invite multispecies listening. Bolleter’s written reflection on the Ruined Piano Sanctuary does include some observations about nonhuman sharers in the instrument’s materiality: “a nineteenth century British Challen piano engulfed by white ants that have transformed its insides into a gothic cathedral of ingested wood,” a rats’ nest in the top of a British upright, and a German piano left in a dam and “occupied by frogs.” At night, apparently, “you can hear them jumping about on the strings creating strange and subtle accompaniments to their croaking.”78

In a similar nod toward multispecies receptivity, Lockwood has recently commented on her wish not to “listen to something” but rather to “listen with the neighborhood.”79 Her decaying instruments in Piano Drowning and Piano Garden certainly invite other creatures to nest, feed, sleep, chirp, croak, or simply pass through. Like composer Harrison Birtwistle’s 2012 Moth Requiem for choir, alto flute, and three harps, inspired by a poem about a moth caught in a piano and making “unearthly noises,”80 openness to otherness in a human-made instrument may foster more multispecies awareness than a didactic work of art would do. Interestingly, all these works echo older folk-music traditions, such as the placement of snake rattles in Appalachian fiddles. This practice makes a buzzing sound that warns against playing the strings too hard, adds mojo to the music, and perhaps even drives the devil away.81 The ritual aspect of burning or drowning pianos may be implicit in most cases, but it does recall folk practices of bonfires, plant offerings, and music as magic or medicine. Invading a piano with fire or water, elements now associated with climate crisis, can work homeopathically (in the sense of poison as medicine) in facing the source of grief after wildfires or hurricanes.

Environmental Art and Performance

For all of Lockwood’s focus on sound and metaphorical “transplants,” her works also fall within a larger tendency toward ecological art in the 1960s and 1970s. From the broad perspective of transplanting art outside, Piano Transplants relate to the era’s large-scale land art innovations, usually created by male artists, including Dennis Oppenheim’s Annual Rings (1968) and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970). Though these artists generally worked by manipulating aspects of the land itself, they saw site-specific works as ways to bring art outside the museum, just as Lockwood was moving pianos from the concert hall or living room. That said, as in the case of Gordon Monahan’s cliff piano as spectacle, these works do not show the entangled, listening approach of Lockwood’s outdoor works; nor do they indicate attunement to pressing ecological concerns. Although Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking and disturbing book Silent Spring (1962) was very much in the public consciousness, with the first Earth Day celebrated in 1970, it took time for artists to move from using “earth as material,” as in the Spiral Jetty, toward the direct ecological messaging of Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks (shown at the documenta 7 contemporary art exhibition) and Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation in lower Manhattan, both projects appearing in 1982.82 These works not only used soil and plants as material but also signaled humankind’s destructive relationship to nature.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, concerns about air pollution, nonrecyclable waste, and harmful pesticides were prevalent, and the image of a decaying piano likely took on connotations beyond Lockwood’s original transplant idea. Though her scores are not intended as ecocriticism, their ritual earthiness may indicate why the piano burnings and transplants are reperformed, revisited, and rewatched today—and why they have inspired numerous later explorations of pianos burning or decaying outdoors. From the perspective of environmental art history, which studies past artworks with attention to the ecological conditions of their time as well as their implications in the current climate crisis,83 any act of renaturing and/or decomposing a piano takes on new significance. A 2025 performance on a piano left to decay for five months in Copenhagen’s Cisterns underground art space is one of many works building on Lockwood’s legacy, not only creating a “sonic sculpture where all sonic ideals collapse”84 but also pointing to moisture, mold, and the threat of future flooding in low-lying Denmark.

Through ongoing iterations in slow films and art performances, burning or decaying pianos invite associations with today’s monster fires and floods, in addition to questions about the instrument’s extractivist history and role as a kind of cultural sacrifice. Today, when musicians and dancers perform with melting glaciers, artists create installations foregrounding waste and decay, composers write music about and for a heating planet, and “vegetal theatre” entangles human culture in nonhuman settings,85 Lockwood’s 1960s and 1970s piano performances seem to be decades ahead of their time. The “durational” aspect of Ólafur Elíasson’s well-known Ice Watch, in which blocks of ice melted as a “nonhuman presence in a dense human space” in Paris in 2015, or of Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures “colonized” and decayed by the ocean environment,86 pick up the thread of Lockwood’s decomposing, renatured pianos, with more direct environmental messaging. Some piano-related works of the past decade respond explicitly to environmental crisis and its human costs, as in a 2017–18 installation by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, Is Your Time. This work creates a meditation on the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, with an abandoned piano augmented electronically to play as if by itself, “voicing” the presence of its unknown, former owners, sometimes with “broken keys.”87 All of these works make human and nonhuman losses (past or future) physically perceptible, especially in the case of Ice Watch, in which visitors can touch and press their ears to what feels like a piece of melting glacier.

Recent scholarship on art and the Anthropocene shows a preoccupation with death, extinction, and haunting—not only as a ghostly trace of human presence but also as a possibility of new, strange compostings and coalescences. Jill H. Casid coined the term Necrocene to indicate the fallout from human pillaging of earthly resources: “In representing the Anthropocene as a scene of genocide precipitated by the fatal transformation of the world into orbis, or territorialized globe, by techniques of colonial landscaping . . . it might, rather, be named the Necrocene.”88 Still, although empire is sown as invasive seeds, Casid argues, “such ostensibly founding scenes of dissemination as devices of bio- and necropower set the stage for other possibilities, for there is arguably nothing predictable about the effects of transplantation, production, and reproduction or the kinds of composting and decay that turn what I term death-in-life into emergent forms.”89 Casid’s use of the term transplant is hopeful in the sense of Lockwood’s metaphorical idea; something of a decomposed instrument survives and challenges humans to reimagine what music, sonic materiality, and listening can be. The results are usually surprising. As Nils Bubant writes, “Anthropocene landscapes of death and extinction are . . . also inhabited by emergent and unexpected constellations of life, nonlife, and afterlife.”90 Perhaps Bolleter’s observations about frogs, ants, and rats invading ruined pianos has more relevance than simply novelty. The piano’s afterlife is not only a haunting through decay but also an invitation toward ecological attunement through what was once a domesticated instrument.

Annea Lockwood’s instruction to photograph and play a Piano Transplant monthly is one way of documenting environmental art history. This is not just a history of death through decay but also a tracing of microclimates and monthly cycles of light, darkness, rain, cold, heat, humidity, or drought. Each time the piano is played, its tuning is more chaotic, its parts and pieces looser (as keyboard control breaks down), its crevices more crowded with nonhuman occupants. This very looseness can become an opportunity for wild, percussive sound, as in Ross Bolleter’s improvisations on a ruined piano. In the case of a burned piano, the instrument’s frame reveals its inner harp, becoming ambiguous in the traditional taxonomy of music-making, before it falls to the ground in a thrumming, sparking mass. If the instrument is eventually split into firewood, as in the Christmas Eve scene in Billy Elliot, it signifies human survival of the implicitly animal kind, breaking down the old, false nature/culture divide for the sake of winter warmth. In a time of undeniable global heating, a burned piano signals loss from wildfire, too, and perhaps a sacrificial offering of human cultural ambitions, never without planetary cost.

This chapter has linked histories of decomposing instruments to show the complexity of potential meanings in works like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants or Ross Bolleter’s improvisations on ruined pianos. From military histories of burning pianos to postcolonialist neglect of instruments in the Australian bush, and from Fluxus nonperformances to “prepared,” “inside,” or literally deconstructed piano works, the instrument has invited a wide range of material experiments. From an environmental art history perspective, pianos relocated outdoors, as well as pianos burned in an artistic ritual, carry more significance amid current ecological concerns than they may have fifty years ago. Decomposing a piano—subjecting it to fire, water, weather, plant growth, and nonhuman creatures—ultimately reembeds it in the world from which its materials came.