In early 2005 Tos Mahoney artistic director of Tura New Music, suggested that I gather ruined pianos from throughout the state to create an installation for the Ruined Piano Convergence at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. I travelled through the wheat belt and the Perth metropolitan area gathering pianos, recording some of them, and talking with their owners to find out about the history of their piano. Vivienne Robertson travelled with me, photographing the pianos and my encounters with them. I ended by creating a curving labyrinth of some fourteen pianos in the main hall at PICA that people could walk through, playing the pianos as they went, starting and finishing anywhere they liked. I removed the lower panels of most of the pianos to ensure access to the strings. This hands-on experience catered for people's curiosity about the highly accessible sounds of the piano keyboard, and the slightly less accessible sounds of the strings (I had removed the lower panels of most of the pianos.) The installation could be played by any number of people at the same time. As far as possible, each piano had its own story printed and placed on it, so that people could also read their way through the installation.

Sometimes the condition of the piano was such that it couldn’t be moved without it breaking apart. In Piano Labyrinth these pianos were acknowledged by the presence of a photo of the piano with an accompanying story placed in the curve of pianos. One such piano was owned by Ian Clarke, a farmer who has a property just out of Goomalling, about two hours east of Perth. His piano is on top of a hill in one of his paddocks. You can see it as you drive into his property – strange and lonely against the clouding and unclouding skies. Ian told me this story: We had inherited a piano that sat around for years, without anyone playing it. Finally my wife said, “Could you take it out of here, so we can put a dresser in.” So I put it on the front end loader and drove it slowly up the hill. When I looked back toward the house I could see my wife watching, astonished, from the kitchen window. I drove on to the top of the hill, where I placed the piano. Now we call it Piano Hill. The piano’s been there four years now – returning to the earth from which it came. Now there are lupins growing up around it. When there were sheep in this paddock they used to congregate around it. Maybe it was a talking point for them. Late afternoon: the piano is casting long shadows. It darkens in the rain, then dries back to to light grey. As it returns to nature (to use Ian’s phrase), it is shedding its casing. Its pedals are below ground level, and there are caterpillars, spiders, wood lice and ants living in it. As the wind blows through the sea of lupins, the piano emits its own little song, but you have to lean in close to hear it. The keys – heaped up on each other – are like the scree of breakaways. I found pianos in garages and on verandas, as well as in the open. People were happy to see their piano go, but wanted it to have a good home. Understanding that their piano would be part of Piano Labyrinth was seen as contributing to that – “It’s good that you can find a use for it. Better than it ending up at the dump.”

Add photo Lonely Piano photo by Vivienne Robertson

Shot of Ian Clarke with RB at the Goomalling Piano photo by Vivienne Robertson

Promo film DVD*

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Ross Bolleter is a lover of pianos in varying states of decay, rescued from the slightly out-of-tune to trashed old instruments found at a rubbish dump. Inside the cover of his Crow Country CD he is pictured with what must be the quintessential ruined piano-abandoned outdoors, with accumulated gum-leaf detritus, it's an Australian icon. In his Unfinished Business (1987) Bolleter alternately rattles the damaged keys and plucks the sagging strings, creating extraordinary chords and harmonics, and establishing a musical language unique to the 'instrument' at hand. Background sounds of a barking dog or curious onlookers are retained. Yet the pianistic sensibility remains and is even extended.

The piano is an instrument of great tonality, regardless of it age, condition, or the music being played. Bolleter teases the ear, offering just a few recognisable phrases. The rest is about being the instrument, about what it is to make sound and how sound becomes music. Nothing ever dies, it just changes, metamorphoses into something else. We imagine all the different musics that the instrument might once have produced.

In Under Rookwood (1995-6), for double bass, Bolleter collaborates with Richard Lynn. Again the emphasis is on exploring the tonality of the instrument, on getting inside it and looking out. The sense of time, normally engendered by the harmonic development in the music, is supplanted by a sense of being. The work is an edited aggregation of several recordings of musical events involving double bass, some scored, some improvised. That Time (Simulplay II), a work of nearly half an hour's duration, is a recording of a live performance by collaborating musicians playing in different locations and unable to hear each other. The performance involves double bass and prepared and ruined pianos. Again, there is the aleatorical dimension, in that the final result can neither be pre-determined nor repeated.

Also on this CD is a live performance by Bolleter on piano accordian, in which he investigates traditional accordian tangos, and a work for decaying pianola. Bolleter is a consummate musician, who extracts a unique musicality from every instrument. This is fabulous music.

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Imagine discovering an ancient, decimated upright piano in a tractor shed in a remote field about 600 miles northeast of Perth, Australia. The piano is so rotten that the wood has nearly reverted to topsoil. Covered with roots and leaves, and with only a handful of unbroken keys, it has now transmigrated to the point where it's more fit to be a home for a colony of ants than it is to be the remnant of a musical instrument. Could you make beautiful music with this wreck? Ross Bolleter can. He treats the pedals like sewing machine treadles and plucks at the bass strings as if they so many bows, firing notes instead of arrows. The rhythmic clicks, groans, and pings tell this instrument's sorrowful history to a portable tape recorder in the puzzled presence of of an eight-year-old girl in a flowered dress. (At the conclusion of "Unfinished Business" you can hear the ringleted Emmy ask Bolleter, the improviser/bard who has translated into music the pianola's tale of deterioration, "Have you finished?") With the ruined piano's life momentarily restored, it can die again, this time in peace. What beautiful music this is. And there is little fall-off from "Unfinished Business" to the other tunes on this exquisite disk. On "Under Rookwood," bassist Richard Lynn plays/improvises a multi-tracked piece conceived by Bolleter that was used to back a short film. Lynn is a very good bassist, and he nearly matches Bolleter's ability to capture that global understanding that hovers on the edge of sleep, just out of our reach. On "That Time," Bolleter and bassist Ryszard Ratajczak broadcast similtaneous improvisations from opposite ends of Australia to a couple of audiences at still other locations. The performers could not hear each other as they created their music, but the resulting music shows clearly that they were somehow "in touch." Although Ratajczak plays it a bit safe in the early going, scrubbing away at double-stop tremelos for a substanstial segment, in the end his accompaniment to Bolleter's ingenious prepared piano barrages is highly successful. It's hard to believe the two men were not in the same room when this music was made. The two radios set up in each of the concert halls must have throbbed and chattered in tandem as if an invisible electronic conductor was present. Bolleter's solo accordian piece "Labyrinth Tango" is stuffed full of off-killer dance music. His style may remind you of Rudiger Carl's, but it's most nostalgic than campy. "Piano Dreaming," another piece involving the ruined piano of the Murchison Goldfields, continues in the "Labyrinth Tango" vein of what might be called "false bravura dancehall". Here, there are a variety of tracks performed on (unruined) cousin instruments and subsequently layered together by Rob Muir. The good cheer provided by the healthy young pianos of church and bar is no match for the ineffable sadness of the old tractor shed hulk, and in the end the degradation is universal. What beautiful, beautiful music this is.

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The piano has been under attack for a while now, assaulted by Laurel and Hardy, abused by Fluxus, bricked up by Walter Marchetti, pushed off high buildings by cartoon cats. These elaborate and ecstatic acts of destruction, expressive of an abiding hatred of the bourgeoisie, merely accelerate the inevitable. Death comes eventually to every piano. Some, like Liberace's, might die of shame; others, like those of Jools Holland, we suppose must lie awake at night praying for oblivion to overtake them, while those that have endured the sausage-fingered thump of Diamanda Galas pray stoically for one hour under the healing hands of John Tilbury. But these are the aristicats of the piano world, long-lived and pampered. Outside the concert halls, across the world their domestic cousins are left to decay, and the myth of the elephants' graveyard finds a curious parallel in the hidden mausoleum of ruined pianos, whose wizened ivories stand proud like the fingernails of a youthful corpse, their bodies caved in and crumbled.

Australian composer and improvisor Ross Bolleter has devoted himself to tracking them down and bringing them momentarily back to life. Bolleter in the instigator of WARPS, the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies. His Left Hand of the Universe is a composition "for up to seven performers playing lefthanded on any number of ruined pianos on three continents simultaneously". The first realisation of this epic work took place in September 1997 in Slovakia (with 'ruined pianists' Michal Murin, Milan Adamciak and Zdenek Plachy), Colorado (with, among others, Dan Wiencek and Stephen Scott) and Western Australia (with Bolleter and Nathan Crotty), a similtaneous blinnd improvisation designed to reveal the pleasures of synchronicity. Bolleter is strict about what he's after: the piano has to be ruined rather than neglected (such as you find in the back rooms of pubs or your parents' garage) or devastated (such as you might find in a war zone or after an earthquake). The Romantic associations are emphasised in the realisation of the composition, whereby the addition of a human figure to the ruin completes the picture. Local colour is incidental: the deposits of 1000 pigeons, the scent of the blood of 200 slaughtered sheep, the division of an entire country - each provides a distant background hum of endless metaleptic potential which is obscurely undercut by the ruin itself. So too Bolleter's insistence on only lefthanded performances emphasises the digressive and dreamlike, and lays claim to magical powers by which failure is valorised as universal, a sinister shadow cast across the ages.

Before its expressive articulation, then, the composition is characterised by the quizzical and tentative relation of the player to the warped instrument and its feral and unpredictable responses. As with some of the more radical of current probes into the structure of contemporary music (one thinks of players such as Micolas Collins, Ikue Mon, Keith Rowe inevitably), Left Hand approaches instrumentation itself afresh in its perverse search after the abandoned and rotten. Its positioning of the player is suggestive not of a belated application of Jean Dubuffet's anthropological requirements of art brut - from the detritus of civilisation comes forth an unschooled or insane raw art of incandescent ineptitude, such that it overthrows and redeems the asphyxiating offical culture - so much as an alchemical process in which said player is the secret ingredient precipitating a seemingly magical transformation, where an apparently exhausted resource is encountered symbollically as well as physically. Mindful of the ecological element of rot, it embraces and colludes with the disintegration of melody, of purposefulness, of the instrument itself and the idealogical edifice it comprises - a fitting methodology at the end of a century of unmitigating disillusion and worldwide waste.

Of necessity tuneless, the music of Left Hand is uniformly disorienting, a mournful celebration of its own relationship to 'proper' piano music. Bolleter says, "all that fine 19th century European craftmanship, all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out and degrade into a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire," and the singularity of art music's monological address to posterity is subverted in the fragmentary, lefthanded improvisations on broken instruments. The fragments are perceived on the one hand in relation to an apparent original (to the piano's former self, to an ideal piano and the monumental canon it represents), and on the other hand in relation to a new whole (figured in Bolleter's blunt question: What is a piano?), a totality supplemented and questioned by the abandoned ruin. This double reading, realised in a collage in which alterity is allowed ample breathing space, makes the remix of the three geographically discrete recordings in the finished Left Hand truly universal and represents the ruined piano as a figure of a ruined world. Synchronicity, the psychic manifestation of the doubling effect, allows for unnerving moments of lucidity in the flux of relativity, suggestive of a spatial collapse that further informs Bolleter's ruins. I'm rereading an anecdote in the sleevenotes of another of Bolleter's CDs, Crow Country (a selection of his best work over the last 11 years), to ensure I'm not mixing up his solo works with the transglobal 'Left Hand', when his voice on Left Hand starts reading aloud the selfsame anecdote about secretly playing a pianola in the bush. Time collapses in on itself like an imploding star.

Left Hand deals in - provokes - the inevitability of collapse, each piano struck or caressed in circumstances suggestive of the transitory and partial: a lunar eclipse over the Indian Ocean, the shambles of a bitter divorce in central Europe, the baffled attention of a crowd of American music lovers. There's nothing exotic about it: on the contrary, this music has a strange familiarity, the vast distances between performers and the haphazard sound of the ruined instruments notwithstanding. The beautiful crashes, trembles and shudders of these pianos are those of the uncanny dissolution of contemporary domesticity, summoning up visions of a wilderness only fitfully kept at bay by thin partition walls and warded off by the swagger of individual identities. Seek them out, lift their lids, let them into your life.

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This winter's evening saw the coming out party of ruined piano music. The organisers had underestimated the deep hunger in Perth audiences for this unique art form. The 300 chairs were soon taken and people were standing and sitting in the aisles. And after two hours of the strangest music ever heard in Perth, the audience responded with huge enthusiasm: stomping their feet, whistling and calling for more.

Ross describes his epiphany with his first ruined piano, in a woolshed in Cue. "I respectfully approached the piano and lifted the fall. It was so rotten it came away in my hand. As I played, ants moved on concentric circles on the surface". Other desert stories followed, about lost and cranky explorers, and Ross's own encounters with aborigines.

He introduced the first piano to arrive in Alice Springs. It was carried there last century on the back of a camel, counterbalanced by a waterdrum. Ross explained that it is a short boudoir piano originally from Soho, London. Ross, however, explored the shadow side of its personality, using its toothy, abrasive sounds in a piece that raged with rhythmic intensity.

Yet most of the music was desert-like, starlit and serene. A disintegrating piano seems to have infinite voices. The audience were exposed to rattles and snarls, to insect music and the snores of hibernating bears, to tender furry keyboard sounds, and the visceral boom of the plucked bass notes.

Despite the decomposition of all elements, Ross remains a musician, in love with beauty, balance and proportion. We heard a performance of consummate sensitivity and intelligence. A delight to all.

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After all that piano music, this is definitely the place for a brief acknowledgement of the work of Ross Bolleter. Living and working in Perth, Bolleter has devoted much time to coaxing beautiful, sad tones from pianos most of us would imagine were fit only for the scrap heap. But these ruined instruments, ravaged by time, climate and, in the case of one left out all summer on a tennis court, directly by weather, have tales to tell, and Bolleter helps them get those stories off their chests.

Crow Country contains two tracks that employ ruined pianos, one of them, actually, a pianola. Because the instruments have to be recorded in situ - they'd fall apart if you moved them very far - the resultant music is partly environmental. So dogs are inclined to bark and thw ind to blow, and at the end of Unfinished Business, April Petersen, co-owner of Nallan sheep station in the Murchison Goldfields, 700 kilometres north-east of Perth, comes to ask Bolleter, on tape, 'Have you finished?'

Other works on Crow Country include the gloomily meditative Under Rookwood, for 16 double basses, all of them Richard Lynn, and the improvised piece, That Time (Simulplay II). This was the result of two musicians, bassist Ryszard Ratajczak and Bolleter himself on piano, improvising similtaneously, the former in an ABC studio in Sydney, the latter in a studio in Perth, neither aware of what the other was playing. A recipe for chaos? Well, yes, of course; and yet, as ever it seems with Bolleter, the finished work (originally heard only by the 30 people who had gathered together in yet a third venue, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) is completely compelling. It runs for the best part of half an hour, and there is scarcely a moment when the music doesn't seems perfectly convincing. The final story here - and really all Bolleter's pieces are stories - is told by an accordian on which the composer maniacally improvises incompletely remembered tangos and a mazurka. Bolleter is a fine accordianist, but his instrument, like those pianos, is on its last legs. Its story, then, is all the more rich and all the more urgent.

What is it, I wonder, about accordians and stories. First there was E Annie Proulx's beautiful novel Accordian Crimes, and now, again from Ross Bolleter, The Night Moves on Little Feet, a CD containing three stories that are also, in the words of the album's subtitle, 'eulogies and wakes'. Why do accordians seem so human? Is it that they wrap themselves around the human body, like a lover? Is it that they breathe? On The Night Moves, Bolleter and his regular collaborator, Rob Muir, set out to tell stories of old accordians and old accordianists. Or, perhaps more accurately, they allow the instruments and their players to speak for themselves. Many of the anecdotes and fragments of anecdotes thrown up by Bolleter and Muir's oral history approach to their subjects are humorous, and yet ultimately the CD, like Crow Country, is profoundly moving. The accordianists whose lives are celebrated and deaths lamented in the three extended pieces collected here are culturally displaced, their instruments providing a link with old Europe, a lifeline in their new Australian homes and a means of communication, it would seem, beyond the grave. When Bolleter was on The Music Show, a few months ago, the program's producers received many phone calls of inquiry, and I'm not surprised: there's something very direct about all his work, and yet it tells us things that no other music does. So do try Bolleter. I can pretty much guarantee you won't have any other CD like these.

Andrew Ford is a composer. He presents The Music Show on Radio National each Saturday and 10am, and his 10-part series, Illegal Harmonies, will be repeated from 5th August on ABC Classic FM; see Highlights and the Program Guide for more details. His CD Harbour is available on Tall Poppies. These discs are available or can be ordered through all ABC shops.

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Andrew Ford delights in the sound of rotten keyboards and asthmatic accordions.

You know that old upright piano in your garage? The one your grandmother bought for your father to learn on. The one your own children had their lessons on. The one their teacher suggested you trade in for a better model. The one that's not been tuned since 1974 and has been out in the garage since 1989 and got wet the year after when the roof leaked. And that you heard the scratching from, and subsequently found mice nesting in. And that you'd get someone to take away only it's ridiculously expensive, or you'd take to the tip yourself except, if you moved it, it would probably fall apart and injure you. Well, there's a man in Western Australia who'd rather play your piano than a new Steinway grand. His name is Ross Bolleter and he is one of Australia's most interesting and distinctive composers.

Although Bolleter is now in his mid-50s, there is something about him that is forever young. It comes out in a puckish enthusiasm for his work, an ability to lace the undoubtedly serious nature of his work with humour, identifying the absurdities of life and laughing at them. In this, I suppose, he resembles John Cage except that where Cage's laughter was wheezy and long drawn-out, Bolleter's staccato guffaws are bellowing loud and they come and go without warning.

As a composer, Bolleter has spent the majority of his career away from the concert hall. He has composed for radio, film and television, and he supplements this income by working as a cabaret pianist and accordionist. But there is an altogether less commercial side to Bolleter that involves pianos and accordions. And not just any old pianos and accordions.

I think it was Andre Previn I heard tell the story of turning up to play at a small music club in the US. Before the concert, he makes his way to the stage only to discover that the piano, while technically playable, is badly in need of an overhaul. Jokingly, he suggests to the promoter that the last person to play the instrument must have been Dave Brubeck, the jazz pianist famous for his hammering style. The promoter looks amazed and tells Previn he's right, Brubeck was there only last week. I may have forgotten a detail or two, but that's the gist of it, and the point is that the piano is a delicate instrument, its precision mechanism requiring regular attention from highly trained technicians. You should never, for example, leave your piano out on a tennis court during an oppressively hot West Australian summer. At least, not unless you want Bolleter to show up on your property.

By the time Bolleter arrived at the Nallan sheep station, in the Murchison goldfields of Western Australia, some 700 kilometres north-east of Perth, the piano had been moved from the tennis court and was wintering in the tractor shed. This is where the composer first made its acquaintance. For Bolleter, it was love at first sight.
Bolleter makes the subtle distinction between pianos that are ruined and those that are merely neglected or completely devastated. For example, a ruined piano, according to the composer, ``has its frame and bodywork more or less intact (even though the soundboard is cracked wide open, with the blue sky shining through) so that it can be played in the ordinary way". In contrast, devastated pianos are generally so far gone that one must crouch or even lie down beside them in order to play them.
Following its abandonment to all weathers on the tennis court, the Nallan piano was ruined but not devastated. Cage, back in the 1930s, came up with the notion of a prepared piano, in which screws and bolts and rubber erasers were inserted between the strings in order to effect a wholesale change of the instrument's timbre. Instead of sounding like a piano tuned to an even-tempered scale, it took on the quality of a box of toy percussion instruments, tuned to some private and unpredictable system of its own. Bolleter's ruined pianos often sound like this, but instead of being prepared to a composer's specifications, they have been prepared by history and by geography. Time has taken its toll on these instruments, but the more pronounced changes were wrought by the environment in which they were abandoned. These pianos were prepared by the landscape; they were prepared by the weather; conceivably, the local fauna has also prepared them. And they sound magnificent.
In the Nallan tractor shed, Bolleter approached the 1920s Jackson piano. As he lifted the rotten keyboard lid, it came away in his hands. He strung his microphones over a beam and set about extracting the music that remained in the piano, plucking the strings and tapping the keys. Not only music, but also armies of ants emerged from the instrument as it clattered and growled and pinged.

Now those same sounds are coming from my CD player. The clatters emanate from both the keyboard and the pedals and it is mainly through their percussive sonorities that we sense the piano's struggle to communicate. The growls, growing to roars, come from the lower strings, silent for too long and anxious to be heard. The pings, from higher up, seem more reticent. At first, all these noises are strange, strained. It is almost painful to hear them. But with time and a little patience one enters the piano's world. The environment around the piano the tractor shed and the world outside it recedes. The distant conversation of April and Dave Petersen, owners of the sheep station, and their daughter Emmy, the yet more distant voices of birds and dogs, gradually disappear and one is caught up more and more in Bolleter's developing relationship with the Jackson. ``After a time," Bolleter writes, ``I knew that April wanted to talk, was about to talk. I pointed frantically up to the Nanyo and Sanyo microphones with my right hand while trying to finish the piece with my left. Finally, she broke in `Have you finished?' And I had."
And that is how it finishes on the CD: with April's question. I don't know whether to think of this music as an improvisation or a composition, and I don't suppose it really matters, the main difference being the degree of spontaneity involved. Back in the tractor shed, I imagine it was improvisation. But now, coming out of the loudspeakers of my stereo, after (one assumes) some mixing and editing, the music seems composed.
Bolleter has called the piece Unfinished Business. It is an appropriate title for the excavation of these last sounds lingering in the wreckage of what was once, presumably, the pride of its owners. And indeed this piano originally had plenty of business, entertaining the patrons of the Big Bell Hotel in the 1930s and 1940s. One pictures it the centre of attention, the Saturday night drinkers gathered around, their voices raised in a communal rendition of Roll Out the Barrel. Or whatever. But as Ed Baxter, in The Wire, has observed, ``the beautiful crashes, trembles and shudders" that make up the piano's present repertoire are ``the dissolution of contemporary domesticity, summoning up visions of a wilderness only fitfully kept at bay by the partition walls". The wood and minerals from which the piano was forged are slowly returning to their natural states. One might go further and hear these sounds as the sonic representation of what happens to European culture when it is transplanted in Australian soil. It takes time, but the soil wins.
Whenever I'm pressed, really pressed, by people outside Australia (and sometimes even in Australia) to say what Australian music sounds like, I will, of course, mention Peter Sculthorpe, and pieces such as Mangrove and Earth Cry. I'll also mention David Lumsdaine's Kelly Ground and Mandala 5 and his environmental compositions such as Pied Butcherbirds of Spirey Creek. But I usually end up with Bolleter's ruined pianos. As with Sculthorpe's music, there's sometimes an explicit connection with the landscape of the country. Thanks to a creative development fellowship from ArtsWA, Bolleter is working on a series of pieces for ruined and prepared pianos inspired by Timmy Payungka Tjapangati's 1972 painting Secret Sandhills. And as with Lumsdaine's pieces, birdsong is never far away. But in Bolleter's music for ruined pianos the country is literally present. It is not simply a matter of these instruments, these ambassadors of European culture, having lost something with their exposure to the passing years and aggressive Australian climate. They have also gained something. One culture had been replaced by another. `
`All that fine nineteenth-century European craftsmanship," Bolleter writes of a degrading pianola, ``all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out and degrade into a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire. The pianola's dusky melodies become the harsh and common parlance of dogs, crows and sheep station owners complaining about the drought."

Bolleter is not only a composer, he is also a storyteller. His pianos have histories and so do his accordions that's right, he composes for asthmatic accordions with perforated bellows and very often his music has an extra layer, the composer himself speaking to us. It might be about anything his impressions of the environment in which the ruined instrument was discovered, his memories of David Helfgott, the time his house was robbed and the things that were stolen. My own favourites among Bolleter's stories are the ``accordion lives" he recounts on his CD The Night Moves on Little Feet. We learn of the former lives of the somewhat decrepit instruments he is playing; we hear about their former owners and how they came to Australia with their instruments.
``What grabs my imagination," Bolleter says, ``are conceptual pieces where ordinary life is intruding everywhere. Most of my impulse to work in traditional forms is absorbed in composing for film and video where the possibilities for humour and subversion lie so close to hand (and one can reach for a sardonic waltz, fugue or tango ...). I continue to be strongly attached to working ... with visual and conceptual artists, poets, philosophers and animals."

Bolleter's art is incl usive; it admits the whole world. Even when it is at its most intimate (and there is no other word for some of his ruined piano pieces), he is inviting. And indeed sometimes he invites the whole world, as when, for instance, he leads a simultaneous improvisation by left-handed pianists in radio studios in Fremantle, Colorado Springs and Samarin, Slovakia (The Left Hand of the Universe). For Bolleter, as for the sandpiper in Elizabeth Bishop's poem, ``The world is a mist. And then the world is/minute and vast and clear." One minute, he is attending to minutest details of sound. The next, he is sending them around the world. And the more parochial these details, the more universal they seem. The more the pieces are about Bolleter, the more they seem to be about us.

For example, I think Bolleter's music for ruined pianos speaks to us with such a directly emotional voice because it taps into our collective childhood. I suspect that most of us have our first (and in most cases, our last) experience of real music that is to say music played and composed by ourselves on a piano in a state of some disrepair. My own first composition was created and performed on the piano in my grandmother's front parlour. The piano wasn't ruined, but it was certainly neglected, and the composition that issued forth from ``the boom of the tingling strings" (DH Lawrence, this time) was called The Animals in the Jungle. I was maybe five. My parents and grandparents listened with stoical indulgence.

I have no idea what became of that piano, but as I listen to Bolleter's instruments, it is not just the heat of a West Australian summer I feel, not just the dogs and the crows and the station owners. I am also transported to the parlour of my grandparents' house in Kirkdale, Liverpool. It is cold and dank, because it is never used. My grandparents always sit in the back of the house, reserving the parlour for who knows what: a royal visit, perhaps. I can feel this cold and smell my grand-father's Erinmore tobacco and, just, through the cloud of aromatic smoke, my grandmother's rice pudding.

My grandparents are long dead, their house pulled down, and the piano probably ended its days being smashed to pieces with sledgehammers at a fair-ground. But Bolleter's music brings it all back. Like all the best art, his music not only takes us into its own world, it also takes us into ourselves.

Ross Bolleter's music is available on CD from Tall Poppies and from the New York record label Pogus. You can also obtain CDs from the composer's own website: www.iinet.net.au/-bolleter (email: bolleter@iinet.net.au). Particularly recommended are The Country of Here Below, Crow Country (which includes Unfinished Business), The Night Moves on Little Feet and Piano Dreaming.

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