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Piano Decompositions: Notes

Piano Decompositions
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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Series List
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Epigraph
  7. Contents
  8. Introduction
  9. 1. Toward a History of Decomposing Pianos
  10. 2. Piano as Medium, Material, and Representation
  11. 3. Destruction, Decay, and Entangled Bodies
  12. 4. Media and Material Transformations
  13. 5. From Damage to Salvage: Instruments for Listening
  14. Coda: Re-membering
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Notes
  17. Index
  18. Author Biographies

Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. Salvador Hernandez, “A Mudslide Sent a 149-Year-Old Piano Out a Window and Into the Muck. Its Journey Isn’t Over,” Los Angeles Times, 11 March 2024, https://www.latimes.com.

  2. 2. WXII12 News, “6 Videos Show Destruction of Helene as It Ripped Through North Carolina,” 27 September 2024, https://www.wxii12.com/article/hurricane-helene-video-north-carolina-flooding.

  3. 3. See Daniel J. Wakin, “For More Pianos, the Last Note Is a Thud in the Dump,” Seattle Times, 30 July 2012, https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/for-more-pianos-the-last-note-is-a-thud-in-the-dump; and Richard Chin, “Requiem for a Piano: Hundreds a Year Are Being Trashed in Minnesota,” Minnesota Star Tribune, 29 March 2024, https://www.startribune.com/hundreds-of-pianos-a-year-are-being-trashed-in-minnesota.

  4. 4. ISSUE Project Room, Annea Lockwood: Piano Transplants—Piano Burning, Piano Garden and Piano Drowning, streaming event, 13 October 2021, https://issueprojectroom.org/event/annea-lockwood-piano-transplants-piano-burning-piano-garden-piano-drowning.

  5. 5. Peter C. Baker, “That Much-Despised Apple Ad Could Be More Disturbing than It Looks,” New York Times Magazine, June 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/magazine/apple-ipad-ad.

  6. 6. Ron Synovitz and Haroon Bacha, “Outrage Stoked by Video of Taliban Humiliating Musicians, Burning Instruments,” Radio Free Europe, 18 January 2022, https://www.rferl.org/a/taliban-video-humiliating-afghan-musicians/31660157. See also Cameron Moody, “Iranian Music Censorship and International Law,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 47, no. 1 (2022), https://ssrn.com/abstract=4208387; and Shima Shahrabi, “On Censorship, Cultural Destruction and the Power of Music,” Iranwire, 31 August 2016, https://iranwire.com/en/provinces/63959/.

  7. 7. Céline Trachsel, “Taliban verfolgten ihn, deshalb musste Pianist Elham (16) flüchten,” 20 Minuten Nachrichten, 23 May 2024, https://www.20min.ch.

  8. 8. See Brian Moynahan, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony (Quercus, 2013).

  9. 9. J. Philip Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1997), 53.

  10. 10. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Vintage Canada, 2011), 76.

  11. 11. Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), 108–18; and Matteo Ravasio, “On the Destruction of Musical Instruments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v8.32222.

  12. 12. Elin Kanhov, “From Birdsong to Deepfakes—Attending to Challenges for Music in the 21st Century,” webinar, Posthumanities Hub, 26 September 2024. See also Anna Kirse, Koku Opera (2016), clip available on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zJzeWi9jSY.

  13. 13. See WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies), 2022, https://bolleter.wixsite.com/warpsmusic; and Shohei Kudo, “Nature Prepared Toy Piano,” Instagram, 15 April 2024, https://www.instagram.com/shoheikudomusic/.

  14. 14. Annea Lockwood, “Bonfire of the Ivories: Visualize Your Piano—Burning,” interview in The White Fungus, excerpted in the Utne Reader, 8 June 2009. https://www.utne.com/arts/bonfire-of-the-ivories-visualize-your-piano-burning.

  15. 15. Kyle Devine, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (MIT Press, 2019), 14.

  16. 16. See Gordon Bolton, “How to Make a Difference with Eco-Friendly Piano Disposal,” Piano Movers of Texas, 20 December 2023, https://pianomoversoftexas.com/blog/make-difference-environmentally-friendly-piano-disposal.

  17. 17. Annea Lockwood, artist’s website, https://www.annealockwood.com/compositions/piano-transplants/. See also Culture Colony News, “Annea Lockwood’s Piano Drowning,” 2022, https://culturecolony.com/en/news/annea-lockwoods-piano-drowning.

  18. 18. Ross Bolleter, “The Well Weathered Piano: A Study in Ruin,” in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Conference, ed. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, vol. 2 (Australian Music Centre, 2009).

  19. 19. Natasha Barrett, artist’s website, Acousmatic/Electronic, https://www.natashabarrett.net/acousmatic.

  20. 20. Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia (Grove Press, 2020), 65–66.

  21. 21. Chuck Wing and Isaac Hale, “Now More Pianists than Ever Can Play Abravanel Hall,” Deseret (Utah) News, 2 September 2024, https://www.deseret.com/utah/2024/09/02/photo-gallery-now-more-pianists-than-ever-can-play-abravanel-hall.

  22. 22. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, eds., Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge, 2016).

  23. 23. Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

  24. 24. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-Listening to Resounding Plurilogues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

  25. 25. Salomé Voegelin, Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 61.

  26. 26. See Timothy Morton, All Art Is Ecological (Penguin Random House, 2021); and Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder, eds., Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art: A Reader (MIT Press, 2023).

  27. 27. See Catilin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Felicity Fenner, Curating in a Time of Ecological Crisis: Biennales as Agents of Change (Routledge, 2022); and Heidi Hart, Climate Thanatology: Companioning What Remains (Really Simple Syndication Press, 2022).

  28. 28. Hannah Baader, Gerhard Wolf, and Sugata Ray, eds., Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (De Gruyter, 2024); and Karl Kusserow, ed., Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective (Princeton University Press, 2021).

  29. 29. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ed., Rethinking the Musical Instrument (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022).

  30. 30. Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments (MIT Press, 2022).

  31. 31. Aaron S. Allen, “Ecoörganology: Toward the Ecological Study of Musical Instruments,” in Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon (Oxford University Press, 2023).

  32. 32. Stefan Östersjö, Listening to the Other (Leuven University Press, 2020).

  33. 33. See Davies, Themes; and Ravasio, “On the Destruction.”

  34. 34. Beate Schirrmacher, “Musical Performance and Textual Performativity in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher,” in Word and Music Studies—New Paths, New Methods (Danish Musicology Online Special Edition, 2016); Beate Schirrmacher, “The Transmediation of Ambivalence: Violence and Music in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick’s Film Adaptation,” Ekphrasis 2 (2019): 26–40; and Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher, “Music, Noise, and Nature: Energetic Ambiguities in Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War,” Music and the Moving Image 15, no. 3 (2018): 3–19. See also Kanhov, “From Birdsong to Deepfakes.”

  35. 35. Asun López-Varela Azcárate, “Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics and Distributed Agency for Sustainable Development,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Asun López-Varela Azcárate, and Miriam de Paiva Vieira (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

  36. 36. Vadim Keylin, “Unauthored Music and Ready-Made Landscapes: Aeolian Sound Sculpture,” Gli spazi della musica 4, no. 2 (2015), http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica.

  37. 37. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  38. 38. For a thorough discussion of “forever” waste versus regenerative composting, see Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Klodens fald: Æsthetiske og økologiske perspektiver på olie, plastisk og andre hyperabjekter (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2021).

  39. 39. In addition to Peters’s text on elemental media, see Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48.

  40. 40. See Davies, Themes; and Ravasio, “On the Destruction.”

  41. 41. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/death-of-the-posthuman/.

  42. 42. Lars Elleström, ed., Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

1. Toward a History of Decomposing Pianos

  1. 1. Roy Heidicker, “Battle of Britain: RAF Piano-Burning Tradition,” Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, 18 August 2017, https://www.seymourjohnson.af.mil/News/Commentaries/Display/Article/1282899/.

  2. 2. Ruth Jones, “Ritual, Creativity and Performance in Contemporary Art and Anthropology,” LAND2 research network, University of Leeds, 2023, https://land2.leeds.ac.uk/ritual-creativity-performance-contemporary-art-anthropology/.

  3. 3. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (Fordham University Press 2004), 40.

  4. 4. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (Grove Press, 1958), 31.

  5. 5. Kate MacLeod, Harpers Ferry Fiddle Day video, Facebook, 20 May 2024, https://www.facebook.com/macleodkate/videos/382084211497296.

  6. 6. Nick Hudson, “Desert Island Dissection,” Nick Hudson Industries, 2022, https://www.theacademyofsun.com/post/desert-island-dissection.

  7. 7. Morten Paulsen, artist’s archive, 2014–23, https://www.morten-poulsen.dk/works-and-projects-archive.

  8. 8. “Japanese Pianist Plays the Burning Piano at a Sunset Beach,” Reuters, 19 March 2008, https://reuters.screenocean.com/record/231745.

  9. 9. Alcantara, “Chiharu Shiota—In Silence,” 2002/2019, https://www.alcantara.com/artists/chiharu-shiota/.

  10. 10. Stefan Östersjö, Listening to the Other (Leuven University Press, 2020), 13.

  11. 11. Michael Hannan, “Burning Questions: Artist’s Statement,” Earclips, 2002, https://www.abc.net.au/rn/legacy/features/earclips/.

  12. 12. Alan Sykes, “Burning Grand Pianos on the Scottish Border,” Guardian, 22 May 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2012/may/22/.

  13. 13. Michal Ben-Horin, Musical Biographies: The Music of Memory in Post-1945 German Literature (De Gruyter, 2016).

  14. 14. Gustav Metzger, Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art (Coracle/Russell Press, 1996). For analysis of Metzger’s work in the context of destructive art and trauma, see Kristine Stiles, Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

  15. 15. “Gustav Metzger, Whose Creations Were Works of Destruction, Dies at 90,” obituary by Colin Dwyer, NPR, 3 March 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518350960/gustav-metzger-whose-creations-were-works-of-destruction-dies-at-90.

  16. 16. Metzger, Damaged Nature, 27.

  17. 17. Claudia Ross, “What Happens When Creation Is Destruction? The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang and Gustav Metzger,” Hyperallergic, 5 November 2024, https://hyperallergic.com/963549/.

  18. 18. Superflex, Flooded McDonald’s, artists’ website, 2009, https://superflex.net/works/flooded_mcdonalds; Zachary Small, “Danish Artist Drowns Le Corbusier’s Most Famous Building in Fjord,” Hyperallergic, 6 August 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/453981/.

  19. 19. Donna De Salvo, ed., Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (Tate Publishing, 2005), 3.

  20. 20. Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (University of California Press, 1997), ix.

  21. 21. Synnøve Marie Vik, “Damaged Nature: The Media Ecology of Auto-Destructive Art,” in Media and the Ecological Crisis, ed. Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg (Routledge, 2105), 44.

  22. 22. Jacques Rancière, “What Medium Can Mean,” Parrhesia 11 (2011): 35–36.

  23. 23. Fluxusgram, “Event for the Twilight,” Mieko Shiomi, Instagram, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CyMNh0My6B2/.

  24. 24. Rui Eduardo Paes, “Fluxus—40 Scores,” Wrong Wrong Magazine 22 (2017), https://wrongwrong.net/article/fluxus-40-scores.

  25. 25. Kate Molleson, Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the Twentieth Century (Abrams Press, 2022), 302.

  26. 26. Annea Lockwood, “How to Prepare a Piano,” in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Conference, ed. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, vol. 2 (Australian Music Centre, 2009), 20.

  27. 27. Molleson, Sound Within Sound, 276.

  28. 28. Molleson, 277.

  29. 29. Molleson, 277.

  30. 30. Soundlands, Piano Drowning, Plas Bodfa, Wales, 13 October 2021 and ongoing, https://soundlands.org/piano-drowning/.

  31. 31. Kieron Shand, “Annea Lockwood’s Piano Drowning,” Culture Colony: Vision, 19 January 2022, https://culturecolony.com/en/news/annea-lockwoods-piano-drowning.

  32. 32. Annea Lockwood, interview, Navel-Gazers, 14 February 2023, https://blog.navelgazers.co.uk/2023/02/.

  33. 33. Lorie Waxman, “Selva Aparicio’s Memorials to Loss and Renewal,” Hyperallergic, 26 March 2024, https://hyperallergic.com/880247/.

  34. 34. Benning Violins, “Folk Fiddles and Rattlesnake Rattles,” undated, https://www.benningviolins.com/reference/folk-fiddles-and-rattlesnake-rattles.

  35. 35. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, “A New Historicism? Sound, Music, and Ruined Pianos,” in Hope and Marshall, Sound Scripts, 6.

  36. 36. Ruth Ewan, The People’s Instruments, solo exhibition, Denmark, 2012, artist’s website, https://www.ruthewan.com/the-peoples-instruments/.

  37. 37. Art in Context, “Fluxus Movement—The Avant-Garde Fluxus Movement Explained,” 9 March 2023, https://artincontext.org/fluxus-movement/.

  38. 38. Lockwood, Navel-Gazers interview.

  39. 39. Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood, Hearing Studies (Open Space Music, 2021).

  40. 40. David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction (Penguin, 2022), 239.

  41. 41. Vadim Keylin, “Unauthored Music and Ready-Made Landscapes: Aeolian Sound Sculpture,” Gli spazi della musica 4, no. 2 (2015), http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/spazidellamusica.

  42. 42. Keylin, 74–75, 79.

  43. 43. Magda Mayas, Orchestrating Timbre: Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance (University of Gothenburg, 2019), 48.

  44. 44. Rob Sommerlad, “The Amazing Adventures of Kastner’s Miraculous Pyrophone (Part One),” Science Museum blog, 9 February 2012, https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/pyrophone1/.

  45. 45. Mayas, Orchestrating Timbre, 47.

  46. 46. Richard Hawley, “How Composer John Cage Transformed the Piano—With the Help of Some Household Objects,” Smithsonian, 24 September 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/.

  47. 47. “Rebecca Horn,” The Art Story, undated, https://www.theartstory.org/artist/horn-rebecca/.

  48. 48. Anna Xambó, De-Tuning a Tuning, PhD website, 2022, https://annaxambo.me/music/solo-performances/.

  49. 49. Mayas, Orchestrating Timbre, 16, 49.

  50. 50. La Biennale di Venezia: Music, Zeno Baldi/Lisa Streich, 8 October 2024, https://www.labiennale.org/en/music/2024; Zachary Woolfe, “In the Art Biennale’s Shadow, Venice Celebrates Music, Too,” New York Times, 22 October 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/arts/music/venice-music-biennale.

  51. 51. Ultima Programme, “Dancing into Fire,” Oslo, 2024, https://www.ultima.no/en/dancing-into-fire.

  52. 52. See BBC On This Day, “Hitler Survives Assassination Attempt,” 20 July 1944, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/20; and Peter Julicher, “Enemies of the People” Under the Soviets: A History of Repression and Its Consequences (McFarland, 2015).

  53. 53. Naama Tsabar, Estuaries, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2024, https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/naama-tsabar/.

  54. 54. Salomé Voegelin, Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 60–61.

  55. 55. Lockwood, Navel-Gazers interview.

  56. 56. Queen’s University Belfast, Seminar and Concert: Annea Lockwood (featuring Xenia Pestova Bennett on piano), 21 April 2023, https://www.qub.ac.uk/research-centres/sarc/events/archive-2023-events/.

  57. 57. Annea Lockwood, “From the Banks of the River Danube: A Conversation with Annea Lockwood,” interview by Daniel Beban, 2008, https://thebigidea.nz/stories/.

  58. 58. Lockwood.

  59. 59. Hope and Marshall, “A New Historicism?,” 3.

  60. 60. Annea Lockwood, R. I. P. Hayman, and Gordon Monahan, discussion in “The Environment,” special issue, EAR: Magazine of New Music 16, no. 2 (1991): 32.

  61. 61. Shohei Kudo, “Nature Prepared Toy Piano,” Instagram, 15 April 2024, https://www.instagram.com/shoheikudomusic/.

  62. 62. Jackson Arn, “The Whitney Biennial’s Taste for Flesh,” New Yorker, 22 March 2024, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/.

  63. 63. Julia Krolik and Owen Fernley, The Decomposing Piano, 2009, https://decomposingpianos.com/trilogy/harp/.

  64. 64. Simone Keller, Call-a-Friend Project, Center of Contemporary Art, Tbilisi, Georgia, 4 February 2024, https://www.facebook.com/simone.keller1/posts/.

  65. 65. Susan Bates, organ demonstration, Winston-Salem, N.C., 6 October 2024.

  66. 66. Lockwood et al., discussion in “The Environment,” 30.

  67. 67. Tori Wrånes, Loose Cannon (2010), artist’s website, https://www.toriwraanes.com/loose-cannon.

  68. 68. Oscar Comettant, In the Land of Kangaroos and Gold Mines: A Frenchman’s View of Australia in 1888 (1890), trans. Judith Armstrong (Rigby, 1980), 136–37.

  69. 69. Kerryn Goldsworthy, “14th of October 1843,” in Red Hot Notes, ed. Carmel Bird (Queensland University Press, 1996), 89.

  70. 70. Ross Bolleter, “The Well Weathered Piano: A Study in Ruin,” in Hope and Marshall, Sound Scripts, 90.

  71. 71. Bolleter, 92.

  72. 72. Bolleter, 89.

  73. 73. Bolleter, 96.

  74. 74. Bolleter, 96.

  75. 75. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 11.

  76. 76. Robert Castiglione, The Well Weathered Piano, documentary film, 2021, https://vimeo.com/455140930.

  77. 77. Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CriSAP), University of the Arts London, Wild Energies: Live Materials conference program, 2022, https://www.crisap.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Wild-Energies-Live-Materials-Programme.pdf.

  78. 78. Bolleter, “Well Weathered Piano,” 95.

  79. 79. Queen’s University Belfast, 21 April 2023.

  80. 80. Neil Fisher, “Nash Ensemble Review—Searing Moth Requiem Caps a Great Birtwistle Tribute,” Sunday Times (U.K.), 27 March 2024, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/.

  81. 81. Benning Violins, “Folk Fiddles.”

  82. 82. See Mark A. Cheetham, Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018).

  83. 83. See Hannah Baader, Gerhard Wolf, and Sugata Ray, eds., Ecologies, Aesthetics, and Histories of Art (De Gruyter, 2024); and Heidi Hart, “Emergency in Reverse: Moments in Climate Art History,” Solastalgia exhibition catalog, Kalmar Konstmuseum, Sweden, 2023.

  84. 84. Strøm electronic music site, “OPLØSNING: An Audiovisual Performance Exploring Life and Decay in a Subterranean Climate,” featuring composer August Rosenbaum and visual artist Ea Verdoner, 23 October 2024, https://strm.dk/oploesning-an-audiovisual-performance-exploring-life-and-decay-in-a-subterranean-climate/.

  85. 85. Milo Juráni, “Anthropocentrism on the Stage,” Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, no. 24 (2021), https://www.critical-stages.org/24/.

  86. 86. Vicky Angelaki, “Theatre and Environment: Crisis, Society, Representation,” seminar, Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, 10 April 2024.

  87. 87. Brian Hioe, “A Haunting Meditation on Fukushima: Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Is Your Time,’” Electric Soul, September 2021, https://www.electricsoul.com/magazine/.

  88. 88. Jill H. Casid, “Necrolandscaping,” in Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape, ed. Jens Andermann, Lisa Blackmore, and Dayron Carrillo Morell (Diaphanes, 2018), 237.

  89. 89. Casid, 240.

  90. 90. Nils Bubant, “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 137.

2. Piano as Medium, Material, and Representation

  1. 1. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-Listening to Resounding Plurilogues (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 69.

  2. 2. David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction (Penguin, 2022), 239.

  3. 3. Naomi Sato, Japanese shō demonstration, Theatre of Voices live performance, Copenhagen, 18 May 2023.

  4. 4. Aaron S. Allen, “Ecoörganology: Toward the Ecological Study of Musical Instruments,” in Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon (Oxford University Press, 2023), 17.

  5. 5. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton University Press, 1995), 10–11.

  6. 6. Maria Grishakova, “Intermediality: Introducing Terminology and Approaches in the Field,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Asun López-Varela Azcárate, and Miriam de Paiva Vieira (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 14.

  7. 7. See Gabriele Rippl, introduction to Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music, ed. Gabriele Rippl (De Gruyter Mouton, 2015); Lars Elleström, ed., Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and Jørgen Bruhn and Beate Schirrmacher, eds., Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (Routledge, 2022).

  8. 8. Elleström, Beyond Media Borders, 46.

  9. 9. See Lars Elleström, ed., Media Borders, Multimodality, and Intermediality (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); and Elleström, Beyond Media Borders.

  10. 10. Elleström, Beyond Media Borders, 46.

  11. 11. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  12. 12. William James, A World of Pure Experience: Essays in Radical Empiricism (Longmans, 1912), 42.

  13. 13. Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 125.

  14. 14. Grusin, 125.

  15. 15. Grusin, 132.

  16. 16. Grusin, 129.

  17. 17. Asun López-Varela Azcárate, “Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics and Distributed Agency for Sustainable Development,” in Bruhn et al., Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, 1215.

  18. 18. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15.

  19. 19. Peters, 8.

  20. 20. Peters, 4.

  21. 21. Peters, 127.

  22. 22. Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), 145.

  23. 23. Azcárate, “Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics,” 1223.

  24. 24. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 230.

  25. 25. Peters, 230–31.

  26. 26. Stefan Östersjö, Listening to the Other (Leuven University Press, 2020), 13.

  27. 27. Östersjö, 21.

  28. 28. Alexandra Huang-Kokina, “Touching Through Music, Touching Through Words,” Performance Research 27, no. 2 (2022): 50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2117419.

  29. 29. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014), 8.

  30. 30. Iovino and Oppermann, 7.

  31. 31. John Koster, “History and Construction of the Harpsichord,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord, ed. Mark Kroll (Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316659359.003.

  32. 32. See Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (Vintage, 2001).

  33. 33. See Magda Mayas, Orchestrating Timbre: Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance (University of Gothenburg, 2019).

  34. 34. David Grover, “History of the Piano from 1709 to 1980,” AMH Piano Services London, https://www.piano-tuners.org/history/d_grover.html.

  35. 35. Nicholas Giordano, “The Invention and Evolution of the Piano,” Acoustics Today 12, no. 1 (2016): 13.

  36. 36. Bill Huesman, piano technician, interview with Heidi Hart, Winston-Salem, N.C., 6 April 2023.

  37. 37. United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Iron and Steel Foundries: National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants,” 2020, https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/.

  38. 38. Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken, 230.

  39. 39. Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (University of California Press, 2002), 70, 75.

  40. 40. Gillian Dooley, She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music (University of Manchester Press, 2024), 227.

  41. 41. Larson Powell and Brenda Bethman, “‘One Must Have Tradition in Oneself, to Hate It Properly’: Elfriede Jelinek’s Musicality,” Journal of Modern Literature 32 (2008): 172.

  42. 42. See Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “Middle Class Desire: Ornament, Industry, and Emulation in 19th-Century Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 4 (2002): 324–38; and Regula Hohl Trillini, The Gaze of the Listener: English Representations of Domestic Music Making (Brill, 2008).

  43. 43. Dooley, She Played and Sang, 11.

  44. 44. Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (1954; Dover, 1990), 236.

  45. 45. Dylan Robinson, “Giving/Taking Notice,” Performance Matters 8, no. 1 (2022): 28, https://doi.org/10.7202/1089676ar.

  46. 46. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; Harper Perennial, 2022), 114–15.

  47. 47. Jones, 159.

  48. 48. Heidi Hart, FAME Studios visit, Muscle Shoals, Ala., 15 April 2023.

  49. 49. Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Who Hears Here: On Black Music, Pasts and Present (University of California Press, 2022), 237–38; Brian Seibert, “With Her First Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Returns to Her Roots,” New York Times, 19 May 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/. For a perspective on reconsidering repertoire and performance practice in the United States, see Alex Ross, “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music,” New Yorker, 21 September 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/.

  50. 50. See Liana MacDonald, “Silencing and Institutional Racism in Settler-Colonial Education” (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2017), https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/articles/thesis/.

  51. 51. Dany Van Dam, “An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner,” in Neo-Victorian Things, ed. Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres, and Danielle Mariann Dove (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). For studies of narrative texts that engage with European art music as an intrinsic part of the hegemonic culture but also use it in oppositional ways, see, e.g., Christin Hoene, “Music in Contemporary Fiction,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Christin Hoene, Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature (Routledge, 2015); and Cameron F. Bushnell, Postcolonial Readings of Music in World Literature Turning Empire on Its Ear (Routledge, 2013).

  52. 52. Van Dam, “An Instrumental Thing,” 94.

  53. 53. Chloe Papas, “Ebony and Ivory: A Field of Ruined Symphonies,” ABC Local, 13 November 2013. https://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2013/11/13/3890191.htm

  54. 54. Annea Lockwood, R. I. P. Hayman, and Gordon Monahan, discussion in “The Environment,” special issue, EAR: Magazine of New Music 16, no. 2 (1991): 32.

  55. 55. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, classic ed. (1979; Taylor & Francis, 2014).

  56. 56. Stephen A. Harwood and Najmeh Hafezieh, “‘Affordance’—What Does This Mean?,” U.K. Academy for Information Systems Conference Proceedings, 2017, 1, https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/.

  57. 57. See Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2004); and Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

  58. 58. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Vintage Canada, 2011), 76, 98–99.

  59. 59. Robinson, “Giving/Taking Notice,” 32.

  60. 60. Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (HarperCollins, 2001), 38–39.

  61. 61. Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (1980), trans. Richard Nice as The Logic of Practice (Polity, 1990), 102.

  62. 62. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 20.

  63. 63. See Chattopadhyay, Sound Practices.

  64. 64. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 230–31.

3. Destruction, Decay, and Entangled Bodies

  1. 1. Susan Bates, organ demonstration, Winston-Salem, N.C., 29 September 2024.

  2. 2. Choe Sang-Hun, “North Korea Deploys a New Weapon Against the South: Unbearable Noise,” New York Times, 16 November 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/world/asia/north-korea-noise-weapon.

  3. 3. See John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, eds., Music and Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 2010); Bruce Johnson and Martin Cloonan, Dark Side of the Tune: Popular Music and Violence (Ashgate, 2009); and Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (MIT Press, 2010).

  4. 4. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947; Continuum, 2007), 47.

  5. 5. Beate Schirrmacher, “The Transmediation of Ambivalence: Violence and Music in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick’s Film Adaptation,” Ekphrasis 2 (2019): 26–40.

  6. 6. Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48.

  7. 7. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/death-of-the-posthuman/.

  8. 8. Christine Daigle, Posthumanist Vulnerability: An Affirmative Ethics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

  9. 9. Siena Linton, “Apple Apologises for Piano-Crushing Advert—After Brilliant Bach Parody,” Classic FM, 10 May 2024, https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/.

  10. 10. “Gustav Metzger, Whose Creations Were Works of Destruction, Dies at 90,” obituary by Colin Dwyer, NPR, 3 March 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/03/518350960/gustav-metzger-whose-creations-were-works-of-destruction-dies-at-90.

  11. 11. Ernie Smith, “A Brief History of Rock Stars Destroying Guitars,” Atlas Obscura, 21 March 2016, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/.

  12. 12. James Montgomery, “Lady Gaga Shatters Glass, Braves Flames at American Music Awards,” MTV News, 22 November 2009, https://www.mtv.com/news/ceocru/.

  13. 13. Mark Beaumont, “Jimi Hendrix, Fire Hazards and Saturday Night Live: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Raucous History of Trashing Guitars,” Independent, 25 March 2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/.

  14. 14. Smith, “Brief History.”

  15. 15. Emily Watlington, “Jesse Darling: Studio Visit,” Berlin ArtLink, 14 May 2019, https://www.berlinartlink.com/2019/05/14/.

  16. 16. Annea Lockwood, Piano Burning (1968), YouTube, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5lHF-KesM.

  17. 17. ISSUE Project Room, Annea Lockwood: Piano Transplants—Piano Burning, Piano Garden and Piano Drowning, streaming event, 13 October 2021, https://issueprojectroom.org/event/annea-lockwood-piano-transplants-piano-burning-piano-garden-piano-drowning.

  18. 18. Mischa van Kan, commentary, musicology seminar, Linnaeus University, 5 October 2023, and Bryan Gilliam, Harp Transplant visit, Winston-Salem, N.C., 30 March 2024.

  19. 19. Paul Travis Phillips, studio visit, Winston-Salem, N.C., 17 September 2023.

  20. 20. Sophia Alexandra Hall, “Taliban Burns Musical Instruments in Bonfire, Declaring ‘Music Causes Moral Corruption,’” Classic FM News, 1 August 2023, https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/.

  21. 21. Elizabeth Blair, “Afghanistan’s Music School Falls Silent, Its Future Is Uncertain Under the Taliban,” NPR, 21 August 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/08/21/.

  22. 22. Shima Shahrabi, “On Censorship, Cultural Destruction and the Power of Music,” Iranwire, 31 August 2016, https://iranwire.com/en/provinces/63959.

  23. 23. Cameron Moody, “Iranian Music Censorship and International Law,” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 47, no. 1, https://ssrn.com/abstract=4208387.

  24. 24. The Listening Biennial organization hosted a shared online space for its group in Tehran and the Listening Academy in Berlin in fall 2024, making outreach and communication possible for artists and researchers in both groups; see https://listeningbiennial.net/about.

  25. 25. Nafiseh Mousavi, commentary, “De-Composing Instruments” seminar, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 26 November 2024.

  26. 26. See Eugene Montague, “Entrainment and Embodiment in Musical Performance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, ed. Youn Kim and Sander L. Gilman (Oxford University Press, 2018); and Sylvie Nozaradan, “Exploring How Musical Rhythm Entrains Brain Activity with Electroencephalogram Frequency-Tagging,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369 (2014): 20130393, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0393.

  27. 27. Paige Pfleger, “What Music for the Dying Sounds Like,” NPR, 30 July 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/07/30/488027745/music-for-the-dying.

  28. 28. See Heidi Hart, Hanns Eisler’s Art Songs: Arguing with Beauty (Camden House, 2018), 8–9, 58–59.

  29. 29. La Vaughn Belle, For Alberta and Victor: A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities, solo exhibition, The Women’s Building, Copenhagen, 2021–22.

  30. 30. Fluxusgram, “Event for the Twilight,” Mieko Shiomi, Instagram, 2023, https://www.instagram.com/p/CyMNh0My6B2/.

  31. 31. Christina Rees, “Notes on Christian Marclay’s Guitar Drag,” Glasstire: Texas Visual Art, 30 June 2015, https://glasstire.com/2015/06/30/.

  32. 32. Matteo Ravasio, “On the Destruction of Musical Instruments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v8.32222.

  33. 33. Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), 108–18; and Ravasio, “On the Destruction,” 2.

  34. 34. Davies, Themes, 111.

  35. 35. Davies, 111.

  36. 36. Alexandra Huang-Kokina, “Touching Through Music, Touching Through Words,” Performance Research 27, no. 2 (2022): 50, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2022.2117419.

  37. 37. Simon Waters, “Performance Ecosystems: Ecological Approaches to Musical Interaction,” conference paper, EMS: Electroacoustic Music Studies Network—De Montfort/Leicester, 2007, http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_WatersEMS07.pdf, 5.

  38. 38. Dany Van Dam, “An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner,” in Neo-Victorian Things, ed. Sarah E. Maier, Brenda Ayres, and Danielle Mariann Dove (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 91–110.

  39. 39. Mine Doğantan-Dack, ed., Rethinking the Musical Instrument (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), 3.

  40. 40. Huang-Kokina, “Touching Through Music,” 51.

  41. 41. Albert Newen, Shaun Gallagher, and Leon DeBruin, “4E Cognition: Historical Roots, Key Concepts, and Central Issues,” introduction to The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, ed. Albert Newen, Leon De Bruin, and Shaun Gallagher (Oxford University Press, 2018).

  42. 42. Christoph Seibert, “Situated Approaches to Musical Experience,” in Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities, ed. Ruth Herbert, David Clarke, and Eric Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2019), 11.

  43. 43. See Montague, “Entrainment”; Nozaradan, “Exploring.”

  44. 44. Johnson and Cloonan, Dark Side.

  45. 45. Davies, Themes, 115.

  46. 46. Davies, 117.

  47. 47. Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 370.

  48. 48. Johan Larson Lindal, “The Movement of a Musical Work: Ernst Krenek’s Opus 20 in the Interwar Years” (PhD thesis, Linköping University, 2024), https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1835846&dswid=5506.

  49. 49. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1994); and Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 124.

  50. 50. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).

  51. 51. Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 5.

  52. 52. Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021).

  53. 53. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007), 12.

  54. 54. Latour, 46.

  55. 55. Chengzou He, “Latour’s ANT Theory, New Materialism and the Future of Intermedial Studies,” seminar, Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies, Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, 7 June 2023.

  56. 56. He.

  57. 57. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1965).

  58. 58. Rolf Goebel, “The Soul of the Phonograph: Media-Technologies, Auditory Experience, and Literary Modernism in the Age of Covid-19,” Humanities 9, no. 82 (2020): 6, https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030082.

  59. 59. EMBER Audio + Design visit, Winston-Salem, N.C., 19 June 2024.

  60. 60. Ravasio, “On the Destruction,” 2–3.

  61. 61. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 163.

  62. 62. Ravasio, “On the Destruction,” 4.

  63. 63. Ravasio, 5.

  64. 64. Vittoria Benzine, “Here Is Every Artwork Attacked by Climate Activists This Year, From the ‘Mona Lisa’ to ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring,’” Artnet, 31 October 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/.

  65. 65. Annea Lockwood, Piano Burning (1968), performed by clipping, YouTube, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EMu15_9SF8.

  66. 66. Stuart Isacoff, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (Vintage, 2001), 229.

  67. 67. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, eds., Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge, 2016), 119.

  68. 68. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, “A New Historicism? Sound, Music, and Ruined Pianos,” in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Conference, ed. Cat Hope and Jonathan Marshall, vol. 2 (Australian Music Centre, 2009), 3.

  69. 69. Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Klodens fald: Æsthetiske og økologiske perspektiver på olie, plastisk og andre hyperabjekter (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2021), 112. Passage translated by H. Hart.

  70. 70. Mads Rosenthal Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg, eds., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 26.

  71. 71. T. J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke University Press, 2020), 18–19.

  72. 72. Scott Slovic, roundtable discussion, Environmental Humanities Conference, Journal of Ecohumanism, 18 November 2023 (online).

  73. 73. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 4–5, 9.

  74. 74. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Music,” in Rosenthal Thomsen and Wamberg, Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, 369.

  75. 75. Sorgner, 372–73.

  76. 76. See Doğantan-Dack, Rethinking; and Aaron S. Allen, “Ecoörganology: Toward the Ecological Study of Musical Instruments,” in Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon (Oxford University Press, 2023).

  77. 77. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010), 6–7.

  78. 78. Emanuele Coccia, Metamorphoses, trans. Robin Mackay (Polity Press, 2021), 5.

  79. 79. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991).

  80. 80. Coccia, Metamorphoses, 5.

  81. 81. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), 37–50.

  82. 82. Gary Tomlinson, “Posthumanism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Ariana Phillips-Hutton (Oxford University Press, 2021), 420.

  83. 83. Asun López-Varela Azcárate, “Posthuman Intermedial Semiotics and Distributed Agency for Sustainable Development,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Asun López-Varela Azcárate, and Miriam de Paiva Vieira (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 1223.

  84. 84. He, “Latour’s ANT Theory.”

  85. 85. See Bennett, Vibrant Matter.

  86. 86. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 178.

  87. 87. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (Herder and Herder, 1972).

  88. 88. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman, 159.

  89. 89. Colebrook, 181.

  90. 90. Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey (Bloomsbury, 2024), 145.

  91. 91. Daigle, Posthumanist Vulnerability, 141.

  92. 92. Vicky Angelaki, Theatre and Environment (Bloomsbury, 2022), 2.

  93. 93. Samuel Barber, “A Green Lowland of Pianos,” set to text by Jerzy Harsymowicz, trans. Czesław Miłosz, in Samuel Barber: Collected Songs (1971; G. Schirmer, 1980), 128–32.

  94. 94. Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (Columbia University Press, 2008), 45. Broadly put, Grosz’s model posits the deterritorializing of need-driven birdsong into human musical environments rather than the movement of human cultural materials into larger ecosystems, but her model is still useful to our project in imagining movement between species and territories.

  95. 95. Daigle, Posthumanist Vulnerability, 7.

  96. 96. Daigle, 75.

  97. 97. Catilin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 11.

  98. 98. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 309.

  99. 99. Hugh Morris, “Grief, Hallucinations and Exhumed Violins: The Astonishing Music of Richard Skelton,” Guardian, 11 April 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/apr/11/.

  100. 100. Ruth Ewan, The People’s Instruments, solo exhibition, Denmark, 2012, https://www.ruthewan.com/the-peoples-instruments/.

  101. 101. Allen and Dawe, Current Directions in Ecomusicology, 155.

  102. 102. Tomlinson, “Posthumanism,” 420.

4. Media and Material Transformations

  1. 1. See Gary Tomlinson, “Posthumanism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Ariana Phillips-Hutton (Oxford University Press, 2021).

  2. 2. Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), 108–18; and Matteo Ravasio, “On the Destruction of Musical Instruments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 8, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v8.32222.

  3. 3. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1965).

  4. 4. See Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

  5. 5. Eugene Montague, “Entrainment and Embodiment in Musical Performance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body, ed. Youn Kim and Sander L. Gilman (Oxford University Press, 2018).

  6. 6. Maddy Shaw Roberts, “New Study Finds Audience Heartbeats and Breath Rates Synchronise During a Classical Concert,” Classic FM Digital Radio, 6 October 2023, https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/.

  7. 7. Lars Elleström, ed., Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 33–41.

  8. 8. Axel Englund, Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (Ashgate, 2012), 154.

  9. 9. Davies, Themes, 117.

  10. 10. Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 124–48; John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  11. 11. Mikkel Krause Frantzen, Klodens fald: Æsthetiske og økologiske perspektiver på olie, plastisk og andre hyperabjekter (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2021).

  12. 12. ISSUE Project Room, Annea Lockwood: Piano Transplants—Piano Burning, Piano Garden and Piano Drowning, streaming event, 13 October 2021, https://issueprojectroom.org/event/annea-lockwood-piano-transplants-piano-burning-piano-garden-piano-drowning.

  13. 13. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 118.

  14. 14. Peters, 115.

  15. 15. Peters, 130.

  16. 16. Peters, 116.

  17. 17. Peters, 146ff.

  18. 18. Peters, 136.

  19. 19. Peters, 135.

  20. 20. Peters, 199.

  21. 21. Claire Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Open Humanities Press, 2014), https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/death-of-the-posthuman/.

  22. 22. ISSUE Project Room, Annea Lockwood: Piano Transplants—Piano Burning, Piano Garden and Piano Drowning, streaming event, 13 October 2021, https://issueprojectroom.org/event/annea-lockwood-piano-transplants-piano-burning-piano-garden-piano-drowning.

  23. 23. Caramoor Summer Music Festival, “Sonic Innovations,” 2023, https://caramoor.org/upcoming-events/sonic-innovations/.

  24. 24. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 166.

  25. 25. Peters, 218.

  26. 26. Rob Schmitz, “A 639-Year-Long John Cage Organ Performance Strikes a New Chord in Germany,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/2024/02/06/1229217832/.

  27. 27. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 248.

  28. 28. Catilin DeSilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 3–4.

  29. 29. Delyth Lloyd, “Tryweryn: Personal Stories 50 Years After Drowning,” BBC News, 21 October 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-34528336.

  30. 30. Plas Bodfa, Piano Drowning, 2022, https://www.plasbodfa.com/piano-drowning.

  31. 31. Lloyd, “Tryweryn.”

  32. 32. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 61–62.

  33. 33. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942), trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1983), 20.

  34. 34. Bachelard, 55.

  35. 35. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 93.

5. From Damage to Salvage

  1. 1. Thomas L. Hawkins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton University Press, 1995), 87.

  2. 2. Scott Slovic, roundtable discussion, Environmental Humanities Conference, Journal of Ecohumanism, 18 November 2023 (online).

  3. 3. See John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

  4. 4. Stefan Östersjö, Listening to the Other (Leuven University Press, 2020), 22.

  5. 5. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Routledge, 2011), 134–35.

  6. 6. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 242.

  7. 7. Music & Arts, “How Weather Impacts Your Sound,” undated, https://thevault.musicarts.com/how-weather-impacts-your-sound/.

  8. 8. David Woodworth, conversation with Heidi Hart, Heartland Harps, Zirconia, N.C., 21 December 2023.

  9. 9. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 12.

  10. 10. Landscape Quartet, Klagshamns Udde aeolian performance, 2014, https://vimeo.com/91443152.

  11. 11. Mike Adcock, “Review of Wind, water, strings, bow” (artwork by Stefan Östersjö), RootsWorld, 28 April 2022, https://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/.

  12. 12. Lawrence Kramer, The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (University of California Press, 2018), 63.

  13. 13. Shop Smith Academy, “Wind Harp Physics,” undated (archival material).

  14. 14. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 30–31.

  15. 15. Östersjö, 127.

  16. 16. Östersjö, 130.

  17. 17. Chris Dart, “Tree Harps: This Duo Turns Trees into Gorgeous Ephemeral Instruments to Record Music in the Forest,” CBC Arts, 14 October 2022, https://www.cbc.ca/arts/tree-harps-this-duo-turns-trees-into-gorgeous-ephemeral-instruments-to-record-music-in-the-forest.

  18. 18. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 131.

  19. 19. Östersjö, 132–34.

  20. 20. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 3, 25.

  21. 21. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1950; Oxford University Press, 1991), 15.

  22. 22. Melody Jue, Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), 69.

  23. 23. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 140.

  24. 24. Östersjö, 141.

  25. 25. Stephen Bonner, “Aeolian Harp,” Grove Music Online, 2001, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/.

  26. 26. Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (Continuum, 2012), 13.

  27. 27. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 149.

  28. 28. Henry David Thoreau, “The Telegraph Harp,” journal entry, 23 September 1851, The Blog of Henry David Thoreau, 23 September 2014, https://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-telegraph-harp-thoreaus-journal-23.html.

  29. 29. Sabine Vogel, online conversation with Heidi Hart, 7 November 2023.

  30. 30. Sabine Vogel, catch the horsetail, SoundCloud, 2012, https://soundcloud.com/sabine-vogel/.

  31. 31. Anna Orlikowska, conversation with Heidi Hart, The Listening Academy, Berlin, 7 September 2024. See also Anna Orlikowska, artist’s website, https://ekwc.nl/kunstenaar/anna-orlikowska/; and Sarina Scheidegger, Ululoszzhhh, performance on ceramic whistles, Instagram, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/sarina_scheidegger/p/C90D54LIWuc/?img_index=1.

  32. 32. Vogel conversation, 7 November 2023.

  33. 33. Flutopedia, “Poetry by Rumi,” trans. Coleman Barks, https://www.flutopedia.com/.

  34. 34. Vogel conversation, 2023.

  35. 35. Vogel conversation, 2023.

  36. 36. Lily Hunter Green, Bee Composed, 2014, artist’s website, https://lilyhuntergreen.com/work/.

  37. 37. Östersjö, Listening to the Other, 30–31.

  38. 38. Julia Adzuki, Resonant Bodies, artist’s website, https://juliaadzuki.com/resonance.html.

  39. 39. Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 13.

  40. 40. “Harpo Marx Plays Wreckmaninoff,” from A Day at the Races (1937), clip available at YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoTyDD0C93U.

  41. 41. The Listening Academy, Tehran and Berlin (live and virtual), 4 September 2024.

Coda

  1. 1. Jeff Bell, “Building Things from His Imagination: A Conversation with Found Object Sculpture Artist, Jeff Bell,” interview by Kyesha Jennings, North Carolina Arts Council, 12 July 2022, https://www.ncarts.org/blog/2022/07/12/.

  2. 2. Rachel Wise, “Loving to Fool with Things,” in Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, ed. Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll (West Virginia University Press, 2019), 340.

  3. 3. See, e.g., Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 1999); and Andrew Chatwick, The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power (Oxford University Press, 2017).

  4. 4. Sam Green, 32 Sounds, documentary film, 2022, YouTube movies, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t1HMGVMDXY.

  5. 5. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010).

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