3. Destruction, Decay, and Entangled Bodies

On the Destruction of Instruments

The act of destroying musical instruments invites a wide range of responses. Outrage over the 2024 Apple iPad ad led to an apology from the company after a viral parody that reversed the trash-compactor action, reconstituting the piano and other artistic materials to the sound of a Bach fugue.9 This reaction may have had as much to do with general anxieties about screen media and artificial intelligence incursions into creative work, as with the destruction of instruments themselves. In another arena, the frisson of audience pleasure mixed with distress in seeing a guitar smashed on a concert stage is well known. Pete Townshend’s first, perhaps accidental cracking of his guitar’s headstock led to his fame for smashing instruments on purpose, a kind of autodestructive ritual resulting partly from his study with artist Gustav Metzger.10 Kurt Cobain’s trashing of a Fender Stratocaster (and plenty of other valuable instruments, usually repaired) became part of his ’90s grunge mystique.11 Lady Gaga’s unscathed emergence from a burning piano and smashed glass shards during the 2009 American Music Awards gave her added status as a sort of superhuman performer, as “the crowd whooped with delight.”12 The “Sixties rock mythology” incited by Jimi Hendrix’s burning guitars and continuing through more recent performances with broken or burning instruments encompasses a sense of danger, showmanship, and “the romantic notion of rock’n’roll as a greater force than anything used to create it.”13 Even the image of Tori Amos’s burning piano in Boys for Pele, a more indie iteration of instrument destruction, conveys a sense of empowerment, especially with the title’s reference to the Hawaiian goddess of volcanic fire. These events and images seem less troubling than the unplanned destruction of instruments during airline travel, for example, or in the 2012 onslaught of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Black Crowes’ storage unit in New Jersey and destroyed all their instruments and equipment.14

Even in some artistic contexts, the fragility or creaturely quality of instruments can invite more sympathy than catharsis. In a 2019 studio visit, sculptor Jesse Darling describes dismantling a piano and linking it indirectly to the vulnerability of human bodies. “It seems sad, how easy it is to take a piano apart,” he muses.15 At the same time, a complex reaction including sympathy, awe, and distress is also possible. The piano-catapult scene in Northern Exposure, in which the instrument replaces the intended bovine sacrifice for art, brings up emotions ranging from relief (for the cow) to wonder at the piano’s spinning arc in the air, and finally to shock as the piano crashes, clanging, to the ground. Sometimes a more party-like atmosphere takes over, as in a 2014 video of Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning in which audience members stand around the instrument, chatting as if around a bonfire; the piano’s collapse leads to an excitement that some viewers—particularly musicians—might find painful.16 The 2021 ISSUE Project Room film, in contrast, is more artfully edited and even ritualistic, with the audience out of view except for those at home in front of their pandemic-era screens, taking in the slow, even contemplative experience of a piano gradually burning to the ground.17

Destroying instruments in ideologically driven contexts incites far more shock and even trauma than live piano burnings do, though some might argue that there is no difference. Piano destruction sometimes leads to comparisons with iconoclasm or book burning. In the academic sphere, several musicologists have expressed concern about what kind of instrument is being damaged or simply find these artworks “heartbreaking.”18 Though some visual artists may see the act of destroying a piano as quite commonplace, whether as an act of material experimentation or as a symbolic critique of Eurocentric culture, others see it in a more ambiguous space. This ambiguity plays out in artworks that break down other cultural objects, including media. Visual and conceptual artist Paul Travis Phillips, for example, performs works that critique book bans in the United States by making cuts to physical books that, in the process, become complex, material works of art. Phillips also uses rust to tear away at his own paintings in a form of autodestructive art, but he points out that rust works both as a destructive and a protective agent, like a scab on damaged skin.19

While all these acts occur on a spectrum, there is a qualitative difference between the forced destruction of aesthetic materials and artistic acts of burning or breakdown. In cases such as Lockwood’s Piano Burning, no authority figures have seized the instruments from musicians. No enforcement of human behavior is at work, but rather an invitation to critical and affective response. In contrast, in 2023, photos emerged of the Taliban igniting a bonfire of musical instruments including guitars, a tabla (drum), and a harmonium, as well as speakers and amplifiers, in an effort to show the “immorality” of music.20 After taking control of Afghanistan in 2021, armed Taliban members broke into the country’s leading music school and destroyed classical string instruments, leading to the school’s closure and students’ fear of bringing their instruments home, in case the Taliban came searching “door to door.” A 2014 suicide bombing outside one of the school’s concerts had also targeted practicing musicians.21 In Iran, music censorship by fundamentalist provincial leaders has led to canceled concerts and religious protests and raids, including violent attacks on singers, despite a reprimand from President Hassan Rouhani in 2015.22 The situation has continued, with restrictions against most forms of music performance and production, prosecution of musicians in court,23 and underground gatherings by composers and sound artists.24

Though these violent crackdowns on music-making come from different motivations than artistic experiments in privileged countries do, they are important to remember in order to contextualize art forms that ought not be taken for granted in a normative sense. Discomfiting ambiguities arise here as well. Audiences gathered around a burning piano may find the performance exciting; a religious extremist burning “instruments of sin” may enjoy the performative aspect of this destruction or experience a kind of catharsis.25 Political acts of what might be called sonoclasm or musicoclasm can also be seen as the most extreme expression of a much broader suspicion of music’s affective power. From Plato’s warnings about the dangers of poetry and music to conservative Christian suspicions of singing, dancing, or even brass instruments in church, anxiety around music’s power is not new. Links between rhythm and heartbeat, implicit in music’s potential to entrain collective bodies in march beats or trancelike states,26 is one reason un-metered harp music is effective in palliative care for the dying27 and explains why some politically attuned composers have worked to disrupt lockstep rhythms as an act of resistance.28 Instrument destruction in popular music concerts may be, on one level, an acknowledgment of music’s power to escape human control and to affect the body in intensely palpable ways.

In the case of instrument destruction as performance, much less is personally at stake for the artists or musicians than it is under regimes that systematically destroy instruments or ban musical practice. At the same time, these performances may also work as a critique of hegemonic systems’ use of music to dominate. For the audience, cultural affordances or connotations of artistic value, not a pregiven value, lead to a sense of shock, distress, or crime-scene curiosity for those used to experiencing pianos as representations of high culture. This response is not bound only to the aesthetic value of art music, however, because that value might be secondary in other contexts. As in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, colonialist uses of music would attach painful associations to a European instrument like a piano, which might seem worth a bonfire. Even this act could be both destructive and creative, however; as artist La Vaughn Belle has described her work with postcolonial cultural materials in the Danish West Indies, “We burn things sometimes to transform them.”29

Piano burning is a particularly dramatic example of the wider phenomenon of destroying musical instruments, including but not limited to smashing guitars in rock concerts. Fluxus artists in the 1960s smashed violins (as in Nam June Paik’s One for Violin Solo) and dropped pianos from tall buildings (as in Al Hansen’s Yoko Ono Piano Drop), in addition to gentler performances such as Mieko Shiomi’s Liszt played on a piano in a pond.30 Frederic Rzewski’s 1980 piano work Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues adapts Pete Seeger’s melody of the same title into an aggressive, palms-and-elbow-on-the-keyboard imitation of the textile machines that made for harsh working conditions in 1930s North and South Carolina; sometimes the pianist treats the instrument with such violence, it has to be retuned after the performance. In addition to showing the similarity of piano hammers to the mechanism of a cotton mill, not to mention risking damage to the instrument, this piece also calls attention to damaged human bodies. A particularly disturbing example of this metaphorical link is Christian Marclay’s 1999 Guitar Drop, a video of a pickup truck dragging an amplified, “screeching” Fender Stratocaster for the same long thirteen minutes that white supremacists had dragged a Black man, James Byrd Jr., behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, the year before. As art critic Christina Rees puts it, whether the video is “successful” as art is beside the point; as a testament to racist violence, it is “excruciating, graphic, and exhausting.”31 Matteo Ravasio notes the ease with which one can link a guitar to a human body (it has a “neck” and a “body” of its own),32 making this work an invitation to several levels of outrage.

Stephen Davies has argued that the shock value of these performative acts stems not only from the instruments’ economic worth, practical use, or even cultural lineage but more importantly from what Ravasio reframes as “honorary person theory.”33 Musical instruments, Davies argues, are more than tools and invite an attitude of reverence that is not just due to their high monetary value.34 As an extension of the musician’s body, indeed nearly part of it, instruments take on physical, even erotic qualities; they are “held against the body, tucked into its crevices, or firmly grasped. They are placed in the mouth, or against the lips, or they are caressed by the hands.” Thus the close personal relation between the musician and the instrument provides a piano, horn, or guitar with a status more like that that of a person who “deserves respect in their own right.”35 The piano offers particularly dramatic experiences of relational embodiment in its activation of affective presence through a combination of touch and hearing, communicated across acoustic space.36 As experimental musician Bennett Hogg has found, even the proximity of an instrument to the playing body can link it in the same system of socially mediated vibrations; “the violin is a lie detector.”37

In the ease of anthropomorphizing the piano, and in Dany van Dam’s view of it as “erotic”/“exoticized” in postcolonial analysis of The Piano film,38 the musical instrument’s function as a body extension works in a dialogic and dynamic way. Though performance practices based on the nineteenth-century “genius” idea led to a standard of “disembodied” channeling of the composer by the pianist,39 this phenomenon also (paradoxically) yielded deeply embodied, “hyper-sensation” responses, as in the case of Liszt and his female audiences.40 Contemporary performers, especially when leaning into the piano in extended-technique pieces, often relish this double-bodied sense of music. In some cases, the performer may even experience a sense of a listening rather than performing role with the instrument as it surprises them with new sounds, as in Annea Lockwood’s Earwalking Woman.

Body–instrument entanglement has been the subject of recent research on “4E cognition,” which extends what we usually think of as neural thinking to include “embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended” forms of perception.41 This approach acknowledges that cognition is enmeshed in bodies and environments; it is a concept that music educators can apply to better understand how human bodies become “embedded” or “extended” in their instruments.42 The phenomenon of entrainment noted above, in which body rhythms synchronize with external beats,43 further links music to embodied experience, making military marches and throbbing club music especially effective in sociopolitical bonding, for better or worse. Johnson and Cloonan speak of the double way in which music communicates, as both physical and aesthetic event, with the potential for violent resonances.44 These phenomena help support Davies’s claim that we react to instrument abuse much as we do to certain forms of human injury.45 Davies compares this reaction with reactions to witnessing the injury of anesthetized bodies; although we know that the unconscious body can feel no pain, we still might flinch. Unlike body art that draws its intensity from both symbolic and actual inflicting of pain, instrument destruction does not evoke imagined pain but bears witness “to the injury” as the act of destruction itself.46

Pianos and Entangled Bodies

Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory (ANT) is useful in conceptualizing the ties between sound waves and body, musician and instrument, listener and headphones. The idea of social systems working through “dissemination,” rather than “purity” or “unity,” imagines a “fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character” creating multidimensional links.47 With the help of ANT, Johann Larson Lindal demonstrates that a musical work is more than an abstract concept; its materiality becomes graspable in a network of actors, events, intermediaries, and mediators.48 This concept aids in a metaphorical way as we describe various forms of sonic and material entanglements. From a posthumanist perspective, Claire Colebrook has applied Elizabeth Grosz’s “volatile bodies” sense of corporeality as “something like an inhuman embodiment that gives itself through humans, but is also expressed in animal bodies, and the bodies of things.”49 Jane Bennett has explored similar ideas in her “vibrant matter” studies,50 as has Stacy Alaimo in her concept of “transcorporeality” that demands an ethics of “epistemological humility” between humans and nonhumans.51 More recently, Daisy Hildyard has formulated “the second body,” a complex of resonant links between individuals and power lines, medicines, pollutants, and other species.52 As Latour notes, it is important to follow the “new associations” that are always forming in the “wild innovations” of collective actors.53 These entangled actions are not “coherent” or “controlled”54 but rather “borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated.”55

Though ANT does not clearly address habitual patterns of oppressive systems, it does aid in understanding constellations of bodies and materials in flux. The movements of musicians, instruments, sound waves, and listeners, changing their entanglements in surprising and even violent ways, are already more complex than they may appear, even in the conventional framework of the concert hall. This approach relates to Grusin’s “radical mediation” and Peters’s “elemental media” in the allowance for nonhuman “actants” (Latour’s term, in the sense of “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman”) to interact in mediating/mediated relationships.56 As “influence” or “translation” in ANT terms, the intermedial aspect of musical practice becomes clear as well; consider composers’ adaptations of earlier works, the kinetic-performative lineage of Liszt, and the relationship of musical score to its embodiment onstage. In relation to our study here, the term actants can apply to human or nonhuman participants in the material modality (to return to Elleström’s term as well) of musical destruction or decay. These actants can range from humans testing and documenting a decomposing piano in a pond to algae or frogs making a habitat inside it.

The embodied qualities of sounding musical objects are not restricted to musical instruments but also extend to secondary sound technologies, as Marshall McLuhan’s nervous-system model of media would have it.57 Rolf Goebel points out how musical recordings are often described as intimate experiences in literary texts and how sounding objects such as gramophones often gain transgressive, quasi-human, uncanny, or nostalgic agency. The engagement with musical sound when described on the page or when played back with technical devices, Goebel argues, calls for a counterpart. Recorded, “dead acoustic data” are reanimated when played back with technical devices such as gramophones and records.58 Played on high-quality speakers, a historical recording of a choir in Vienna singing Bach just after World War II, for example, can sound almost frightening in its strange blend of heaviness and fragility.59 At the same time, while the objects that play back music gain some quasi-human agency (or at least function as actants), there is a fundamental difference here, as the affective reaction to a burning tape recorder or a gramophone would not be the same as to a burning body or even a burning acoustic instrument.

In his article that builds on and critiques Stephen Davies’s approach, Matteo Ravasio is not convinced by the explanation that we consider instruments as quasi individuals. He points out that an injured musician would be more subject to concern than his or her isolated arm or finger.60 However, following Davies, notions of reverence toward the almost human bodies of musical instruments can convey something about the maltreatment of other nonhuman species such as rivers and trees—especially when the wood of a piano or guitar recalls its forest origins, or, on a larger scale, when nonhuman entities gain legal rights. The “elemental” transformation that occurs in a burning piano also recalls humans’ “debt to fire,” as John Durham Peters puts it; “fire is a jealous god and it calls for enormous expenditures and sacrifices.”61

Ravasio proposes an alternative theory for the shock of a destroyed musical instrument: artistic value theory, which explains strong responses according to the instrument’s special role in music-making as an art form. Unlike brushes and chisels or pens and typewriters, musical instruments are more than tools for producing artworks. They are part of the very artwork they help create. They are also objects of admiration for their level of craft and sound quality. This argument links pianos or violins to frescoes or sculptures in that “what has artistic value is to be paid a certain reverence and respect.”62 Perhaps this value even implies “love,” as Ravasio notes in his only reference to Lockwood’s Piano Burning, quoting (via Davies) a composer who responded, “Somebody must have loved that piano.”63 Here again we encounter the spectrum of instrument destruction, in which forced destruction happens at a remove from artistic experimentation but is not entirely divorced from it. On the one hand, headlines about the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas created global outrage in 2001; on the other hand, more recent art attacks by climate activists have led to debates about cultural iconicity and what really matters when the world is burning.64 When musical instruments are destroyed or damaged, this is different from the destruction of unique and specific artwork (the musical score remains), yet the affective resonances overlap.

Most importantly, Ravasio argues, pianos are more than objects to be looked at. Through their vital role in performing music in a concert hall, stage, or studio, they are involved in an intrinsically performative way in sounding human and instrumental bodies. In Ravasio’s artistic value theory, a musical instrument acts as a material pars pro toto for musical experience. In this sense, the attraction and discomfort of watching a piano collapse is related to the aesthetic values and experiences that musical instruments actualize. Musical instruments represent the art not only produced but also performed with them specifically. While computers or pencils, brushes or paint are related to the production of literature or art, these objects do not necessarily evoke the experience of literature or art. Still, if only the aesthetic appreciation of art music prompts audiences to react to the destruction of musical instrument, this argument would also imply that everybody agrees on that aesthetic value. Even if people experiencing Lockwood’s burning or drowning pianos may not feel a strong reaction to a culturally weighted object collapsing, they may respond to the piano’s material structure at risk, as a quasi-living entity. One YouTube comment on the 2019 Piano Burning states, “I knew the snapping strings were coming but the anticipation was just too much to bear.”65 In different ways, both Ravasio and Davies describe musical instruments as more than functional tools. However, this perspective frames musical instruments not only as extensions of the performer’s body or as intrinsic parts of the performance of the artwork but also as carriers of independent, almost human status. Anthropomorphizing pianos is nothing new. As Stuart Isacoff puts it in his history of keyboard temperament, “Today’s piano is a miraculous machine: a colossus of cast iron and wood—filled with screws, hammers, and felt—weighing nearly a thousand pounds. Its frame sustains twenty-two tons of tension exerted on its strings—the equivalent of twenty medium-sized cars. Yet it can respond to the slightest whisper of a pianist’s touch, producing a sound as warm and caressing as the human voice.”66 While attributing human qualities to instruments may seem to reinforce anthropocentric attitudes, it also opens a space to consider instruments in a wider context of aliveness. From an ecological standpoint, the piano’s materiality, with all its extractivist history, links it to nonhuman life as well. The making of an instrument from wood implicitly reminds musicians and listeners alike that these carefully crafted bodies “continue to breathe, expand, and contract—vibrating as their environments change.”67 This vulnerability to natural conditions makes the piano’s body as sensitive to homeostasis (or the lack thereof) as a human, fox, or tree. Lockwood’s own point about the piano as an “instrument designed for maximum control” relates on one level to associations between classical music and discipline,68 but it also denotes the paradox of fragility and extreme tension in a piano’s design. To loosen or break apart the hammer mechanisms and pressurized wires inside a piano’s body is similar to an assault on any living vascular or nervous system—and thus moves beyond human cultural conventions.

Posthumanism and Decaying Pianos

The act of burning or drowning a piano occurs in the ambiguous zone between human and nonhuman, creating another layer of complexity beyond music and violence. It also activates ambiguity between intentional destruction and more passive decay, as both occur at different points and speeds depending on whether a human sets the instrument on fire or places it outdoors. Either way, the decomposition of a piano into wood that can burn or decay strips it of its usual affordances and places it on an equal footing with the rest of the forest, pond, or field. Any experience of cultural loss becomes a natural loss as well, and vice versa; as Mikkel Krause Frantzen notes, “A loss of nature is by definition also a loss of culture, culture understood as a life-form.”69 To understand instruments as a form of more-than-human entanglement, we apply the lens of posthumanism to music, inviting a less anthropocentric take on burning and drowning pianos. We then move from destruction to decay as we view decomposing instruments in a process of cultural-to-ecological transformation.

In a broad sense, posthumanism refers to a decentering of human exceptionalism in favor of the view that “the posthuman subject . . . is embedded in its natural environment, inextricably linked to the animals and vegetation around, and fused with technology.”70 Art theorist T. J. Demos has noted that such a reorientation opens human subjects to “multinatural” experiences.71 One of the central challenges of posthumanism is to conceptualize a relation between the human being and its environment that is not based on received binaries such as subject/object, human/animal, or culture/nature. Of course, posthumanism is itself a human construct, like the influential if contested term Anthropocene. Even posthuman as a word cannot quite move beyond the human self-centeredness it strives to overcome. So how can one conceptualize the nonhuman in a way that it is not perceived directly in difference, as other to human? As environmental humanities scholar Scott Slovic points out, the effort to overcome anthropocentrism is daunting and perhaps even impossible (“we can’t really think like a stone, but it helps us to imagine what it would be like to think like a stone”).72 To pretend, as John Durham Peters has posited, that humans are on equal footing with any other species on this planet would be to downplay or ignore the massive destructive impact of human activities on other species.73 Works like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants expose the difficulty of posthumanizing cultural materials while at the same time showing a renatured piano’s surprising power to provoke more entangled thinking.

Many efforts to relate posthumanism to human-made sound fall into familiar ecocritical habits of textual or musical analysis without more radical reflection. Stefan Sorgner’s contribution to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, for example, frames Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as a structural posthumanism analog “because it embraces and uses all facets of life, even the traditional audience gets included, which is very much in the spirit of pre-theater dramatic works.”74 Moving into “cyborg music” and touching only briefly on Björk’s “creation of new instruments,”75 the essay’s overall argument does not engage fully with musical materiality and fails to escape either the literary-critical model or the anthropocentric idea of technological progress. Some concerts and experiments linking digital technology to acoustic instruments do challenge received ideas of the nature/culture binary, but even recent studies on “rethinking the musical instrument” or “ecoörganology” tend to focus more on synthesizers and wearable technologies than on deeper reconsiderations of instruments’ materiality in the biological world.76 Studies and experiments that take that entanglement into account, by musicians and artistic researchers Stefan Östersjö, Sabine Vogel, and Julia Adzuki, will figure into our discussion later in this book.

A posthumanist perspective on burning and drowning pianos is useful mainly in loosening anthropocentric, binary-driven approaches to music. While, in Davies’s approach, musical instruments appear as stand-ins for human bodies, and in Ravasio’s approach as materializations of art, the relation between musician and instrument also invites us to consider these instruments in more-than-human context. The new materialist aspect of posthumanism contains “an ontological reorientation that . . . conceives of matter itself as a lively or as exhibiting agency” related to Peters’s mediating forces.77 In Emanuele Coccia’s more rhapsodic terms, “Life is always the reincarnation of that which is not alive, a cobbling together of mineral elements, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet.”78 If pianos work as performative matter, they can take on a creaturely quality beyond the concert hall or living room. If the piano not only connects the human body with musical sounds but also with musical machinery, this enmeshment relates to Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as technology and body being closely linked.79 The instrument’s collapse is transformative not in the sense of a broken robotic extension of the human, however, or in the flattening sense of the Apple trash-compactor ad, but rather in its yielding to the ecological “carnival” from which it came.80 The implicit critique of human cultural hegemony in Lockwood’s works, as well as in Ross Bolleter’s ruined-piano explorations in Australia, is an invitation to imagine human-made instruments as part of a larger shared ecological context.

Several other strains of posthumanist thought are helpful in addressing the decomposition of instruments. One approach, beyond the linear trajectory of Rosi Braidotti’s “critical posthumanism,” which draws on postcolonialist and feminist models to critique the “monadic Enlightenment subject,” is to think backward, dedomesticating and defamiliarizing human cultural phenomena.81 In his posthumanist approach to music, Gary Tomlinson argues that if one avoids the temptation to anthropomorphize birdsong, for example, it is possible instead to hear the reverse: human song-making as related to nonsyntactic animal processes, such as “dedicated neural networks, intergenerational pedagogy, practice, and sheer energy expenditure,” even if some “trans-species capacities remain to us obscure.”82 As we have already noted, a relatively new approach is to relate posthumanism to intermediality, which is based on the argument that nonhuman species also engage in complex interactions with their environments and with each other, with meaning-making potential in biology and materiality, a “semiotic continuum between nature and culture.”83

If Jane Bennett’s “‘vital materiality’ runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman,”84 then it also breaks down the life/matter distinction.85 This blurring of human, animal, and thing thus hints at the entropic vulnerabilities of a body or a piece of wood. Underlying this move is a willingness to accept the failure of the human cultural project itself, whether in terms of its inability to cure or care for the larger world or in terms of its future demise. Claire Colebrook’s approach to posthumanism, in which humankind already holds the capacity for its own failure at being human (along the lines of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment), goes so far as to consider Homo sapiens to be a “parasitic” species, something beyond the simply predatory: “it lives only in its robbing and destruction of a life that is not its own.”86 Following Adorno and Horkheimer, who held that Nazi barbarity arose from, not in spite of, the very culture that had enshrined Goethe and Beethoven,87 Colebrook’s perspective asks for a radical reconsideration of the arts and humanities: “Today, in a century that can begin to sense, if not articulate, humanity’s capacity to destroy its own species-being, along with the milieu that it has constitutively polluted to the point of annihilation, what sort of defense might one make for the future of humanities disciplines?”88 If humankind is a parasite, she writes, its “inflections do not just radiate outward and create local distortions but deterritorialize or become inflections of the whole, capable of infecting or polluting every other line of system or parasitism.”89

The term deterritorialization is invasive in Colebrook’s sense. According to this model, a burned or drowned piano would signal inevitable collapse of high culture devouring itself, or at least serve as a reflection that novelist Jennifer Croft has put this way: “Every artwork, even something as sublime as a symphony, arose at the expense of a forest, or a tundra, or a desert, or a stream.”90 This view (even if posited by a semireliable narrator) is certainly part of the picture. But it negates the entanglement of human-crafted materials and the ecosystems from which they come, as well as the potential for human change in “loosening” (to use Annea Lockwood’s word) anthropocentric control. As Christine Daigle has argued, “the human we need to see extinct is the humanist concept of the human, not the human itself.”91 There can be pleasure, not just punishment, in imagining human cultural spaces invaded by other, outdoor ecosystems, as theatre scholar Vicky Angelaki has done in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum: “What if debris suddenly exploded everywhere, the Roman statues now resting on a surface of scattered leaves and fallen branches? . . . What if wildlife creatures roamed the corridors with the same ease as the affluent tourists?”92 In an imaginative leap in the opposite direction, what if pianos took on the ruminative attitude of cows in a pasture, as in Samuel Barber’s lilting song set to the Jerzy Harsymowicz poem “A Green Lowland of Pianos”?93

The term deterritorialization contains another inflection that allows for more than simply grim acceptance of—or even Malthusian pleasure in—humankind’s often cruel and ultimately self-destructive culture. The term takes on a more descriptive than prescriptive role in Elizabeth Grosz’s thinking about sound in the nonhuman world. Drawing on Darwin’s mapping of various species’ mating patterns through sound, biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt, or “lifeworld,” and Deleuzian models of music’s affective power in nature, Grosz has theorized a vibratory complex in which “the very bodies of organisms are the instruments” and “art is of the animal” as “the unexpected, unpredictable effect, of the coupling of a milieu or territory with a body.”94 This perspective includes humans in the messy, noisy tangle of the world, for all our parasitic tendencies. For all the “anxiety” associated with posthumanism, rethinking the human in terms of more complex mappings allows us to “acknowledge the materiality of our entanglements” to see how “materiality and subjectivity are radically intertwined,” as Daigle puts it.95 Her approach to posthumanism in terms of “vulnerability” finds those points where decay can disorient humans from our need for control, certainty, and permanence in a productive way: “We do not experience ourselves as the fleeting beings we are” when in fact we are “tenuous embodied selves.”96

Artists who cultivate decay, in works such as Beverly Buchanan’s 1981 Marsh Ruins, an elusive system of eroding concrete and tabby on the Georgia coast in the United States, often find that “entropy can best be described as possibility” as the process of decay adds more biological factors to a given system.97 In terms of a musical instrument, decomposition can also add new and unexpected sounds. As coauthor Heidi Hart has observed in her work with a found harpsichord, stored in a basement for thirty-five years, the instrument may look intact on the outside, but internally, moth-eaten felt, loosened strings, and a cracked soundboard make stranger sounds than what one would expect in a Baroque-style keyboard instrument. For all their long-untuned fragility, the string “choirs” yield surprisingly robust glissandi when strummed (or struck with dulcimer hammers), with overtone whistles along the damaged soundboard. Dried moth wings shiver under the vibrating strings. Some of the keys still release tonal sounds, depending on the day’s temperature and humidity, while others simply thrum like a percussion instrument. This decaying instrument made in 1980s Leipzig, associated with long-ago aristocratic chamber concerts as well as with cultural traditions maintained in the former East Germany, is now a vulnerable mesh of wood, strings, metal, and bits of plastic and felt as the delicate system of plucking mechanisms breaks down. It makes less organized and more creaturely, weather-dependent sounds than it was designed to, yielding new possibilities for improvisation. Frequent soundings by the household cats, testing the keys or tapping the strings, give it a surprising more-than-human function as well. This is hardly a dead instrument, still capable of clicking, thrumming, and the occasional resonant tone.

Even a burning piano still vibrates (if most notably in the dramatic snap of a copper wire) in Annea Lockwood’s performances that both burn the piano and record its sounds; a piano settled into a pond or forest will still respond to weather and touch, whether human or not. The vibratory bond with a musician’s body becomes enmeshed in other forces too. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, who in turn cite the birdcall-obsessed composer Olivier Messiaen, “music is not the privilege of human beings: the universe, the cosmos, is made of refrains; the question in music is that of deterritorialization permeating nature, animals, the elements, and deserts, as much as human beings.”98 The forces of entropy and even violence, which Grosz’s model does not fully take into account, are also a part of this shifting dynamic of territory and vibration. The ambiguity between decay and transformation is what makes works like Annea Lockwood’s powerful, as they show the inherent cost of breaking out of one familiar habitus and into a new one. They also expose both the cost and possibility of literal breakdown, whether at the speed of fire or at the slower tempo of rising water and spreading vines. This move from the musician–piano connection to a more complex and unpredictable mesh of elements and other life-forms gives the instrument a posthumanist representational power beyond its familiar cultural affordances. It may show the self-destructive tendencies of human-made culture, but it also reveals new possibilities for more-than-human listening and sound-making.

Burning or drowning a piano, or watching a long, slow film of its demise, does more than simply reenact a Fluxus-style performance from the mid-twentieth century. This is also a more complex process than Ólafur Elíasson 2018 Ice Watch enacting ice slowly melting in an urban setting, with its obvious signaling of threatened glaciers. The sonic component of listening to a piano’s collapse, in addition to the visual processing of time, makes the experience palpable in its unpredictability. In this sense, Lockwood’s works are more in line with Richard Skelton’s buried and “exhumed” violin, to which he attached microphones to hear the “unplayable husk,” allowing for decay or destruction, and listening with more curiosity than the need to control.99 They also relate to Ruth Ewan’s 2012 project performing a ritual sacrifice of drowning instruments (including a burning piano) in a lake that will become a future peat bog, “echoing prehistoric burial techniques.”100 Lockwood’s Piano Transplants evoke ritual connections between culturally invested objects and the environment; they recall the close historical relationship between music and violence; they critique the piano as a representation of tradition, high culture, and human performativity; they deterritorialize instruments into more-than-human ecosystems; finally, these works transform the instruments through the process of decay.

Piano decomposition performs the posthumanist shift of decentering the human, however challenging that is to do. If classical music in particular has come into question for its colonialist and white supremacist underpinnings, and if human music-making in general—even less privilege-tainted forms like pop and jazz improvisation—can be accused of anthropocentrism, burning a piano may also convey a cleansing impulse for those asking what good the arts can do when Mother Earth herself is burning. In light of “toxic” aspects of the European musical legacy,101 Lockwood’s transplant idea works as a form of radical recontextualization and “alienated understanding of what it means to be human.”102 At the same time, ideas of human parasitism like Claire Colebrook’s may be too limiting in imagining what is possible for posthumanist instruments. Experiments with burning and decaying pianos allow humans to see and hear the rest of the world more clearly, with human sound-making as a part of that complexity.