2. Piano as Medium, Material, and Representation

The Piano as Medium: Intermedial Perspectives

Physical, material, and symbolic perceptions are all in play when we approach the piano as a medium. When we speak of media here, we are not thinking simply of material objects or devices, such as books, computers, or musical instruments, as tools of communication. Instead, we consider the material underpinning of all human communication. The term media, from the Latin word for “in between,” refers to the interplay of material objects, human perceptions, and semiotic processes, as they enable communication across time and space. This complex mesh of mediation unfolds in multiple dimensions. For instance, like other tools of physical action and perception, musical instruments can be said to extend human perception. Instruments make pressure waves perceptible, mediating human awareness of the larger world.5 But we do not perceive musical instruments primarily as physical tools that transform air pressure deviations into sound. They are also objects designed to produce organized sound waves that we hear and interpret within an aesthetic framework. All sounds produced on a piano (even when handled by a beginner or nonmusician) are already qualified and evaluated within musical conventions.

To approach a piano’s meaning potential beyond conventional sounds and musical contexts, we draw on intermedial theory. This field of study has developed in the humanities to approach art forms as media in their own right. An intermedial perspective explores relationships within and between media by tracing the relationships among objects, perceptions, semiosis, and conventions6 and is specifically useful in exploring phenomena that challenge the conventional boundaries of media and communication.7 This perspective enables us to trace shifts in perception that occur when musical instruments are displaced and/or decomposed. Works like Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants force us to reassess our received understanding of what a piano means—specifically, what kind of meaning it conveys when its primary task, to produce musical sounds, is challenged.

Intermedial analyses tend to explore how media and materials shape works of art and draw attention to unexpected, unnoticed, or underlying meaning potentials; this is a useful perspective if we want to tease out the unconventional use of musical instruments. To approach this interplay of matter, perception, and semiosis, Lars Elleström proposes a conceptual framework of media types and media modalities that applies to all kind of media products, although in different ways. Our perception of distinctive media types, Elleström stresses, is based on interaction with specific media products—songs and other musical pieces, or social media posts and comments.8 When engaging with media products, we interact with material objects (of physical phenomena) as technical media of display. Technical media of display such as books, canvases, or digital screens offer interfaces for us to perceive basic media types or communicative resources that we use in many contexts, such as texts, images, gestures, or sounds. Depending on context and convention, we recognize and evaluate these basic media types as belonging to qualified media types. Thus, we identify a text as belonging to “literature” or “journalism” and recognize a specific image as an “oil painting” or a “caricature.”9 With Elleström’s concepts, we can show that what we call music relies on the interplay of bodies and objects manipulating pressure waves as a technical medium, which in turn enables us to perceive the basic media type of organized sounds. Again, depending on context and convention, we categorize these organized sounds as “classical music,” “techno,” or “commercial jingle.” However, when listeners are unfamiliar with these conventions or fail to perceive patterns of organization, they might only hear sounds or noise.

To analyze the entanglements of media and meaning within a media product, Elleström proposes the following modalities: material, spatiotemporal, sensorial, and semiotic.10 This framework is useful in understanding the web of situated objects, their perception, and the semiosis that takes place in any musical performance. In this study, we use it to trace what happens when musical instruments are treated in a way not meant primarily to produce musical sounds, thus activating other forms of meaning-making. Moving the piano out of its conventional indoor habitat and not using it to produce music draws attention to the object in itself, which mediates more than expected musical sounds. Elleström’s framework will allow us (in more detail in chapter 4) to address material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic aspects separately before pointing out their interactions. This approach shows that even if no music is performed on a decomposing instrument, we still can engage with these objects in meaningful ways.

At the same time, the process raises new questions. How do audiences used to conventional performance practice make sense of piano decomposition if it radically questions and possibly transforms previous experiences? Why are these experiences—from Annea Lockwood’s experiments to today’s richly varied offshoots—so compelling? When we ask how the piano functions as a medium beyond being a musical instrument, it also moves beyond the three media types that Elleström delineates. In unconventional uses, the piano is no longer primarily perceived as a technical device to produce organized sounds, qualified according to or in dialogue with musical conventions. The object shifts into a strange place, with sounds distorted in ways that we cannot describe according to genre; we react to material situatedness and sensorial perception rather than to a “musical” experience.

Elleström’s framework has already shown how mediation through material and physical phenomena is fundamental to communication. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as unmediated communication,11 although the objects, bodies, technologies, and resources involved will vary in different contexts. However, approaching decomposing pianos, and thinking of a piano as a medium, requires a more elemental (or radical) way to approach mediation that does not directly actualize communicative conventions. This approach would need to move from a specific message to an experience of relations, and from the perception of the musical instrument as a sounding tool to a material body performing more-than-musical patterns. Media convey conventionally coded content, but they are also able to do this because they are modes of contact with the environment. They perform relatedness.

In our approach to decomposing pianos and renatured instruments, we draw not only on intermedial theory but also on theories of radical and elemental media to describe how these materials operate. Burning and drowning pianos push beyond the boundaries of interhuman communication and cultural messages; they raise questions of entanglement between human and nonhuman, or between media and environment. Media theorists Richard Grusin and John Durham Peters have explored mediation not only as a part of communication but also as a relational force, not simply delivering a message and offering content but providing connection at a more fundamental level. Richard Grusin derives the term radical mediation from the philosopher William James’s concept of radical empiricism, which describes forms of world perception as “experienced relations.”12 Grusin applies this concept to the understanding of media, in that “mediation operates not just across communication, representation, or the arts, but is a fundamental process of human and nonhuman existence.”13 This idea of “radical mediation” does not primarily focus on the relation between media and the messages that are conveyed, but rather on how they create connectedness, how they “function technically, bodily, and materially to generate and modulate individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among assemblages of humans and nonhumans.”14

Grusin’s mention of “human and nonhuman” twice on one page indicates a shift toward the posthumanist perspective that informs our project as well. His emphasis on materiality and affect relates to notions of immediacy, as a sense of direct involvement in mediated content (when we forget about the medium and engage with the story world), or as a rhapsodic human experience of “Nature” (as in the Romantic period in literature). Grusin’s radical media approach helps us to trace the physical interrelationships that might be perceived as “immediate.” Human and nonhuman bodies (“fundamentally media” themselves) experience the in-between of mediation with all their senses.15 At the same time, Grusin argues that mediation should not be seen as a fixed in-between position but instead as a more fundamental process that, by connecting actors, objects, and events, “generates or provides the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects.”16 The intermediality field has begun to apply similar thinking, moving from meaning-making as human interpretation of signs to acknowledging the distributed agencies of more-than-human networks. This approach shows how animals and plants also function in sensory-cognitive systems to experience meaning as “embodied, embedded, enacted, and even extended beyond the (human) body.”17

These more foundational aspects of mediation are useful in our exploration of what happens in the renaturing and decomposing of pianos, asking less what kind of message a burning piano communicates but rather which aspects of mediation are at work in the process. In an even more ecologically focused approach, John Durham Peters goes so far as to call water, air, fire, and earth “elemental media,” or environmental phenomena (not objects and institutions) as media. Peters considers media as “infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.”18 In his approach to digital and elemental networks, Peters moves away from “the urgency of the message to the nature of media (and media of nature).”19 While the concept of elemental media aids in understanding the radical shifts of digital transformation (like Grusin, Peters points toward the metaphors of digital media, such as “networks” and “clouds” marking media as environment20), our focus here is on mediation beyond social, communicative conventions and toward human–nonhuman networks shaped by environmental forces.

Earth, water, air, and fire, Peters points out, provide environments for living beings; at the same time, humans design tools to domesticate the elements, from ships that navigate the oceans to aircraft that ply the air. But humans also use elements as media of communication and connection. Peters lists telling examples from the language of technology that still connect mass media and modern devices with the elemental forces of heat and light; for instance, “the German term for broadcasting, Rundfunk, contains the term Funk (spark) in tribute to the early history of radio, with its spark gap transmitters,” or the Samsung “Galaxy Blaze” and “Ignite.”21 Along with Peters, Melody Jue has explored the meaning-making potentials of the ocean in Wild Blue Media, which includes chapters on inscription, data, and archival thinking—in the “residue of past marine life, sedimented” in limestone, for example.22 In the emerging links between posthumanism and intermediality, Asun López-Varela Azcárate has described a “semiotic continuum between nature and culture” not dependent only on human cognition, a spectrum in which “materiality is punctured with meanings, becoming storied matter.”23

An example from human–material semiotics that relates to our study of pianos is Peters’s treatment of bells as markers of time and space. Bells are objects designed to use metal, air, and sound waves as media for communication. They not only communicate specific messages but in a more general way mobilize bodies and their physical capacity to affect their surroundings. Bells have been central to humans’ sense of time passing and of rootedness in a specific place, connecting humans in fundamental ways with the elements. Peters points out that historically, bronze bells not only announced bad weather but were also credited with the power to change it, taking on uncanny, almost human attributes.24 Bells thus work as a medium “both in signs and ontology,” especially if one considers that the air has not always appeared “empty and open” but “was once possessed with spirits and pestilences.”25 Though Peters does not specifically link the bell’s sounding metal with musical instruments, its structural function does have this in common with a piano’s cast-iron frame. The bell’s shape is as iconic as that of a grand piano too. And like a bell’s associative links with hours of the day, worship services, picturesque tourist towns, weddings, funerals, or weather warnings, the piano’s resonance calls up its own range of meanings, from concert halls to cartoon saloons, from Jane Austen novels to classic jazz, from street pianos to stadium pop.

The concept of elemental media provides an entry point for thinking about a piano as a complex medium, from the physical impact of its materiality to the organized sounds of music and the connotations it carries. This approach exposes the materials and forces at work in the instrument, however it is used. Stefan Östersjö has noted that violins and guitars are made out of wood and thus “used to be trees: they germinated from seeds, photosynthesised, grew, and most likely reproduced themselves; there are probably trees still growing in the world that are the offspring of these instruments.”26 Of course this is true of pianos as well. At the same time, Östersjö points out that musical instruments are not only tools made of a certain material, and thus “the sociomateriality of a musical instrument is arguably far more fine-grained than that of a hammer.”27 A toolbox’s hammer is designed to hit nails on the head. The wooden hammers inside a piano are part of an entire system of pressure and release, with the aim to produce a specific sound. This particular use does not make the piano’s hammers any less elemental or embodied, however. Alexandra Huang-Kokina has described the modern piano as “entail[ing] the most elaborate and diverse range of tactility in producing musical sound,” as the pianist’s upper-body movement extended through the fingers activates both percussive and string mechanisms that in turn release the piano’s affective resonance.28 The choice of tonewood, the tension in the copper wires, and the stiffness or softness of the hammers’ action create an instrument-specific personality that pianists bring to life.

Material History of the Piano

After considering the intermedial and elemental relations between instruments and environments, we now address the piano’s material-cultural implications. Apart from musical sounds, the piano as an object thus transmediates the instrument’s cultural history. We now show why this instrument—mingled with the history of humans as “storied beings”29—incites strong reactions if burned or left to decay in nature. With the elemental media involved in a piano’s construction in mind, we also take into account the narrative dimension of material ecocriticism, in which, as Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann have phrased it, “material forms—bodies, things, elements, toxic substances, chemicals, organic and inorganic matter, landscapes, and biological entitles—intra-act with each other and with the human dimension, producing configurations of meanings and discourses that we can interpret as stories.”30

As a technical device that produces musical sounds, the piano carries a long and complicated history. The varied and overlapping stories of the piano’s development would require a separate volume, but those stories’ material dimension is important to our project. We consider the physical aspect of shifting tuning practices, an interplay that stretches across material and sensorial media modalities, to point out how decaying pianos still sound, even as their tuning breaks down. Pianos left outdoors expose the always looming problem of out-of-tuneness in an instrument that normally requires technical expertise to be performance ready. While the out-of-tune piano has become a trope in films, usually indicating nostalgia for a lost, past life (the baby grand associated with childhood and dreams in both the 1982 and 2017 Blade Runner films, for example), it is a very real threat to performers who depend on exact tuning when using different concert instruments each time they appear in public. Tuning an antique instrument highlights the paradoxical delicacy and tension within the massive body of a grand piano. An old, fragile instrument’s internal string pressure may not be able to bear the tension of the standard 440 Hz tuning (for the A above middle C)—a problem solved by tuning the instrument slightly flat (with the wires slightly looser than they would be at 440 Hz).

The piano’s precursor, the Baroque harpsichord (with many variants of its own), descended from the medieval stringed psaltery. On the material level, the harpsichord functions with a plucking mechanism rather than the hammers that attack the strings in the nineteenth-century pianoforte and the pianos of today. This means that the harpsichordist cannot vary the volume of each note, as a pianist can with differences in pressure. A harpsichord’s close-fitted system of plectra (once made from bird quill and later from leather and eventually plastic), which pluck sets of several strings or “choirs,” is as delicate as it is complex.31 These vibrating strings create a beating effect, the chime-like timbre of the instrument, in addition to producing a pitch for each key. A second, upper manual (keyboard) in some instruments allows for slight differences in dynamics; in some cases, a lute stop creates a softer sound. The tensile strings need to be tuned often, as they are thinner and less pressurized than piano wires. Harpsichords are also much more sensitive to changes in temperature and humidity than pianos are. Long storage or lack of care can result in strings becoming so loose that the plectra cannot engage them at all, or some strings will sound (or not) depending on the day. As a result, the sound of a harpsichord is more mechanical but at the same time more delicate than that of a modern piano.

Based on its structural options (and thus moving from the material to the sensorial aspects of the instrument), the harpsichord became a testing ground for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tonal experiments that radically changed how musical scales sound today. Unlike string instruments that can easily be retuned, or wind instruments already tuned to a particular key, a keyboard instrument relies on a whole system of tuning across the stepwise diatonic scale. The Western harmonic system most familiar today builds on the invention of tempered tuning in the 1600s. This tuning, with many variants of its own that are beyond this chapter’s scope, solved some of the problems that resulted from the Pythagorean system of overtone-based intervals. This system lines up in a series of ratios that can be replicated by dividing a string at certain points, with unison as 1:1, octave as 2:1, and perfect fifth as 3:2. Though commonly combined in European harmony to create consonant chords, these intervals are not necessarily used in musical cultures based on pentatonic or microtonal tuning systems. Strangely, the overtone series of ratios only lines up to a point (the end of the scalar progression, where the sonic relationship begins to sound off). Thus, the semitones F-sharp and G-sharp, for example, are at very close but different frequencies, and as a result it is not possible to modulate between different keys without sounding out of tune. Tempered tuning, on the other hand, distributes this difference over all the semitones of a scale (with “well” and “equal” variations of its own). In this way, discrepancies between semitones that are close in natural tuning are imperceptibly balanced out. F-sharp and G-flat coincide on keyboard instruments in tempered tuning, a so-called enharmonic confusion that allows movement between different keys.

The spacious intervals of Pythagorean tuning were once heard as links in a network of micro- and macrocosmos, carrying “music of the spheres” connotations long after their enshrinement in ancient Greece. While these intervals sound strange to most listeners today, tightening their tonal distances seemed transgressive to musical conservatives of the 1600s.32 Bach, however, appears to have relished this problem-solving effort and the invention of technologies to support it. Preludes in his Well-Tempered Clavier (1722, 1742) move through harmonic passages that must have sounded both dissonant and revelatory at the time; a pianist playing this music can easily imagine Bach’s exploratory pleasure in moving to another key without the instrument itself sounding out of tune, for all the ear’s adjustment to new intervallic distances. The temperament of most European classical music sounds completely predictable to ears accustomed to it now. The smooth transition between different keys and scales is one of the piano’s characteristics that many pianists may take for granted. At the same time, this tuning was an act of disembedding the instrument from “natural” overtones and further removing it from sounds that would occur without human intervention. In Lars Elleström’s model, the technical medium of keyboard instruments took on new, qualifying characteristics as changes to the tuning system yielded new cultural potentials. Thus, instruments like the piano became indicators for a controlled yet flexible sound.

Even after the period of tonal innovation, the move from harpsichord to fortepiano in the late eighteenth century was hardly straightforward, with many experiments with the body of the instrument: extra pedals to create drone effects, extra keys for sounding microtones, or even attachments of other instruments such as the mandolin.33 Even the terms fortepiano and pianoforte did not apply in a clear trajectory, though the latter was more commonly used in the nineteenth century. During the early transitional period, differences in the heft or lightness of the instruments’ hammer mechanisms depended on the English or Viennese schools of piano making. These variances partially determined the sound of music composed on the instruments at the turn of the century, including Mozart’s delicate melodies and Beethoven’s more full-bodied chords and scalar explorations.34

A modern piano’s wooden case encloses a complex system of chain reactions. When the pianist strikes the keys, they function as levers, transferring that motive force to wooden hammers that in turn strike copper wires supported and kept in tension by a cast-iron metal frame, known as the harp.35 Unlike a harpsichord, the piano’s keyboard responds to varying finger pressure to move from soft to loud (piano to forte). Pedals further manipulate the piano’s expressivity, both in terms of sustaining sound from one note to the next (also unlike the harpsichord, which requires more complicated fingering to connect notes in a phrase) and in dampening the whole keyboard to create a quieter effect mechanically. In its overall structure, the body of a piano is a system of regulation, as it mediates and moderates a wide range of pressure waves. Its soundboard, usually made of spruce, absorbs higher overtones as it carries vibrations from the struck strings. The cast-iron plate that floats over the soundboard keeps the whole system of high-tension copper wires from imploding; the matching system of delicately weighted wooden hammers rests on felt pads, working as a shock absorber in tandem with supportive leather knuckles.36

The process of making such a complex instrument is environmentally costly, not only in the extraction of wood and metal but also in the process of casting iron, which requires protective gear to avoid respiratory and nervous system effects from lead, manganese, and a long list of other air pollutants.37 The practice of making keys from ivory (until the 1940s) gives the instrument an even more problematic history in colonialist and extractivist terms. Decomposing a piano is not simply the act of returning its wood and metal to their earthly sources; it also raises questions of how its processes of construction, and even the chemicals in its varnish, reveal the impossibility of human–nonhuman interaction without environmental cost.

Cultural History and Representation

The nineteenth-century European pianoforte marked a social—and spatial—transition from aristocratic and church performance culture to broader musical experience, mirroring the wider spectrum of tones the instrument could convey. The plucked harpsichord of courtly entertainment and operatic recitative had often played a supportive role as an improvised continuo instrument outlining harmonic frameworks, along with a cello. The more muscular, dynamically varied, and soloistic pianoforte could shine in its own right and not just as a chamber instrument. In one view, the nineteenth-century instrument “evolved” to meet the requirements of larger, more democratic concert halls, with the wires’ tension increasing tenfold as a result of the addition of metal frames and a sound that would have seemed “thunderous” compared to the harpsichord.38 In fact, this new instrument could respond to larger or smaller physical spaces, both concert halls and living rooms, evoking a full-scale orchestra, as in the showpieces of Franz Liszt or a miniature opera in three pages, as in Franz Schubert’s intimately dramatic songs. European bourgeois families with a piano at home could host a Liederabend, practice amateur chamber music, or try out the latest piano reduction of an opera score. Solo improvisation (the core of Chopin’s compositional method) became part of musical evenings in European salon culture as well. The piano became a medium for adapting larger forms of music into intimate form and for individualistic “genius” culture to develop around the instrument, as in the case of Liszt especially. As Lawrence Kramer has pointed out, the “visual excess” of Liszt’s performativity—and the “pianomania” it fostered—risked obscuring the sound of the music itself, but it contributed to the “dynamics of modern mass entertainment” associated with grand pianos today.39

For all its uses as a showcase for male performativity, the nineteenth-century pianoforte was also strongly associated with domestic femininity, taking on additional qualifying characteristics. Female composers like Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann produced vital piano works of their own, but without the recognition their male counterparts received. For most young women, the piano represented a certain type of middle-class femininity, a suitable occupation for wives and daughters that provided both discipline and diversion and guaranteed a more modest body position than when playing the flute (traditionally considered unbecoming for young women playing with moist, pursed lips) or the cello (with legs spread out).40 With its central role in the education of girls, the piano provided discipline to the female body and signaled both “the family’s wealth and the daughter’s virtue.”41 Families from the middle into the upper classes could also show off their accomplished daughters in the heteronormative marriage market so vividly described in Jane Austen’s novels—though actual pianistic accomplishment was less important than the act of appearing at the keyboard for the male gaze.42 A key scene in Austen’s novel Persuasion illustrates how playing the piano kept women physically in place: Captain Wentworth moves freely through the room during Anne’s performance, while she is, as Gillian Dooley notes, “hemmed in both physically and by social convention.”43

Thus, beyond its functions as a musical and social instrument, the pianoforte became a (conventional) symbol of male genius in the concert hall and of well-bred femininity in the domestic sphere. Whether in upper- or middle-class nineteenth-century homes, the piano took on almost transcendent overtones. As pianist Arthur Loesser notes in his history of the instrument, “the possession of a keyboard instrument had become such a habit among those who could afford it that it ceased to be an object of simple ostentation; the habit had become sanctified,”44 taking an idea from a religious to a cultural context. This sanctification came with colonialist and ecological costs—not only in the production of pianos from materials harvested in South America and Africa but also in the broad effort at cultural erasure of Indigenous peoples during nineteenth-century expansion in North America. Many nineteenth-century pioneers moving West in covered wagons brought a piano with them, carrying music as a sign of cultural legitimacy even in the most hardscrabble desert towns. Hymns and sentimental songs drowned out the ritual and functional music of the local tribes who had lived in the settlement zones for thousands of years. In missionary efforts, translated hymns served as a “corrective” to what colonial settlers heard as the “unruly voices of Indigenous people.”45 In a scene from the U.S. historical TV series 1883, the female protagonist plays Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata on a piano that must be left behind on the plains, signaling a tearful farewell to European musical culture that did not generally take place.

At the same time, piano culture in the United States is much more diverse than European inheritance; blues, gospel, or jazz without the piano would be hard to imagine, as all these forms that originated in Black culture make innovative use of the instrument’s percussive and tonal range. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, first ragtime and then boogie-woogie adapted European piano styles to blues-inflected music. Pianos brought to lumber and mining camps inspired the mostly improvised boogie-woogie music (in contrast to scored ragtime), also notable for its “percussive and blueslike” quality that favored “rhythmic contrasts rather than melodic or harmonic variations.”46 The piano slowly found its way into jazz ensembles, first imitating ragtime and boogie-woogie styles and then adapting trumpet signatures such as Louis Armstrong’s “single-note line.”47 By the mid-twentieth century, the piano had become such an essential presence in jazz, gospel, and soul music that it is no surprise to find Aretha Franklin’s baby grand—on which she recorded her 1967 breakthrough “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”—enshrined in the former speakeasy in the legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.48 Though often (until recently) ignored in histories of art music in the United States, Black composers have long contributed symphonic, operatic, and piano repertoire, from the “Afro-Romanticism” of Florence Price’s 1934 Piano Concerto in One Movement to the multigenre 2022 opera Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels.49 All of this said, the piano’s position in Black culture has often been an uneasy one, as exemplified in August Wilson’s 1987 play The Piano Lesson (and its 2024 film adaptation), in which a family in the sharecropper era must decide what to do with their heirloom piano, which includes decorative carvings by an enslaved ancestor but could be sold to buy the land on which the family’s forebearers labored. The piano itself aids in a violent exorcism, with its hammers striking copper wires with enough intensity to burn away not the piano but a troubling family ghost.

Outside the United States, pianos have taken on different post-European afterlives. In many official contexts, Western art music has been enshrined in hegemonic culture and used to demonstrate superiority. At the same time, music has sometimes signaled postcolonial identities that transgress clear binaries, transcending language but also in ways that have silenced Indigenous communities. For instance, Jane Campion’s The Piano links music with muteness—not only in the protagonist’s literal speechlessness but also in the sense that settler education (and with it, music) set out to silence Māori culture.50 Here the instrument’s journey into a Gothic vision of New Zealand carries both colonialist and anthropomorphic, erotic weight, undergoing a kind of reverse exoticization from a Native perspective when local Māori visitors start to pound on it.51 Scenes like these show the “impossibility of upholding white, Western norms and values in places that are so different from the metropolitan home.”52 In the case of postcolonial Australia, unlike the United States, the abandonment of so many pianos in the wild indicates a failure of ideals of cultural superiority and a return to the instruments’ sheer materiality, even as their colonialist durability continues. A “piano graveyard” in the bush near York, Australia, symbolically conveys this transition as detritus of colonial culture after the pianos’ use in a Perth art installation left them without a place to go.53

Focusing on what remains and resounds in ruined pianos, not just romanticized images of them, is one way to keep their colonial origins troubling. Another and apparently opposite strategy makes a radical, defamiliarizing break between the piano’s legacy and its remaining sounds. To do this requires seeing the piano as an intricate mechanism, removed from sonic conventions and treated as a more universal, versatile, adaptive, and migrating instrument. Annea Lockwood has noted this with reference to the postcolonial aspect of her work: “I came from an Anglo culture that walked into my country [New Zealand], in a very Victorian sense: domination over the environment. . . . The way I’ve worked with environmental sounds is exemplified by the sound itself as autonomous, a world unto itself.”54 This inheritance of a colonialist legacy gives Lockwood the luxury of playing with (and sometimes destroying) instruments while her sense of the wider environment has led her to swerve away from Eurocentric concert repertoire and toward the sounding of instrumental materials in their own right—returning from “qualified” to the more basic media types of structured sound.

Separating sounds from their hierarchical and ideological histories is of course a challenge. The term affordance helps in understanding how adhesive cultural associations can be. Introduced by James J. Gibson in 1979, the theory of affordances has shifted from debates among psychologists to applications in sociology, information systems, and the humanities.55 In basic terms, “the notion of affordance provides a bridge between the social and the artefact,”56 blurring the subject–object binary and making room for the web of associations that surround a song, for example, and depend on listeners’ cultural backgrounds in interpreting what they hear. In media studies, affordance typically refers to the material qualities of a given medium, but when applied by musicologists, the term is used more in the cultural affordance sense, relating the physical properties of music to the contexts in which they sound. Music links people with common associations (from lovers’ favorite songs to national anthems), amplifies ideological positions (as in a political rally), and even influences readiness to buy certain products (in advertising and shopping centers).57 The physical properties of music—tempo, sonority, rhythm—affect human bodies in palpable and sometimes violent ways that are not necessarily connected to their cultural context. By tracing the material characteristics (the mechanics), sensorial experience (the dynamics and tempered tuning), and the spatiotemporal situatedness of instruments, we can describe connections between the piano as an object and its cultural affordances.

Several examples in literature provide a helpful lens for understanding the contingency of musical affordances, especially in postcolonial contexts. For the Trinidad-born narrator of Dionne Brand’s memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, European music recalls painful childhood experiences of being marched into class in a stiff uniform to the sound of the “incessant, repetitive European classical music” that marked “the national culture” to which she could never—and never wanted to—belong.58 Indigenous sound scholar Dylan Robinson has written on feeling “anxious” when hearing “cello, brass and percussion,” whose “striving sound, taking space / leaves me less room to listen.”59 In Ojibwe novelist Louise Erdrich’s Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, a white woman’s near-erotic relationship with her piano is violently ruptured by a flood. Swept away with her instrument’s “revolving” in the “powerful vein,” she wants to cling to its “cold, dead keys” but loses her grip, eventually finding her way to solid ground—and a new, gender-bent life on the reservation.60 Unlike the flooded piano as a young white singer’s lifeline in Taylor Swift’s “Cardigan” video, this piano, an icon of colonialist culture, must be sacrificed.

Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus is also helpful in describing how cultural affordances work.61 Composer Stefan Östersjö thinks of this concept as “a set of dispositions acquired through socialization processes” or “tacitly transmitted, embodied schemes and patterns,” although “the specific social space, the objective conditions in which musical practice is socially constructed, is what Bourdieu would call a ‘field.’”62 From this perspective, a piano’s habitus is the constellation of its sociocultural resonances, which manifest in each performance “field.” The instrument’s materiality mediates its associative meanings but is not dependent on them. From our intermedial perspective, the piano’s material characteristics, sensorial experiences, and situatedness inform its meaning potential. When “transplanted” into a forest or pond, or when treated as an object to be burned, the piano is more than a cultural relic; it can be watched, heard, and even sounded (whether by humans or by other creatures) over a long period of time after its transplantation. Listening to improvisation on a decomposing piano also serves as a reminder that European concert music takes place in a finite time and place, in comparison to the hours-long, meditative performances of Indian classical music63 or Indigenous musical rituals that run all night in the American Southwest. This defamiliarization of the piano makes it less bound to Eurocentric musical tradition and more open, as a medium, to new forms of listening.

In this chapter, we have described the piano’s complex materiality and framed it in terms of radical and elemental media, beyond its role as a tool for making organized sounds. We have shown how, in the history of the piano’s development, manipulating “natural” overtones and loading the instrument with cultural status have moved its materiality further from its botanical and mineral origins. The sheer size and weight of a grand piano holds a paradox of impressive materiality and expectations of sounds that transcend the earthly, similarly to the effects John Durham Peters has noted with regard to bells.64 We have provided basic context for intermedial theory, which will inform our analyses in chapter 4, as distinct from media and communication studies that focus on media as socially determined content transmission. From Lars Elleström’s perspective, the qualifying aspect of a sounding instrument leads to questions about how pianos are used and how, as a result of their materiality, these instruments have historically functioned differently from harpsichords, to showcase male genius and female domesticity (by keeping female bodies in the home practicing), all the while encoding Western “superiority” in colonialist contexts. Background on the piano’s structure, tuning history, and socioeconomic affordances, as well as its extractivist and colonialist inheritances, has helped lay the groundwork for the following chapters on posthumanist and intermedialist approaches to decomposing pianos. Moving a piano from one habitat to another or radically defamiliarizing it through fire foregrounds the instrument’s materiality and shows how it can work as a medium between physical sound waves and cultural norms.