Piano Decompositions - Hart, Heidi

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Résumé :
Examining musical instrument destruction through an ecological and intermedial lens

Musical instruments are typically seen as objects both used and maintained with ritualistic care. But what happens when they’...

Biographie:
and how do these elemental interactions transform the way we see and play instruments? Piano Decompositions asks what happens when we let go of controlling musical instruments. What kind of meanings start to sound when instruments are moved out of the protected cultural space and engage with their surrounding elements? Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher trace the history of destroyed and decaying pianos, both sorting them within the realm of artistic violence against instruments and following their return journeys into water, sand, and soil. They parse the artistic vision of Annea Lockwood, whose iconic burning, drowning, and decaying Piano Transplants presented a novel means of drawing attention to the increasing threats of climate change in the 1960s and ’...

Sommaire:
ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Toward a History of Decomposing Pianos2. Piano as Medium, Material, and Representation3. Destruction, Decay, and Entangled Bodies4. Media and Material Transformations5. From Damage to Salvage: Instruments for ListeningCoda: Re-memberingNotesIndex...