I respectfully approached the Ruined Piano in the tractor shed at Nallan Sheep Station and took hold of the fall to lift it. It was so rotten that it came away in my hands. I shoved batteries into my Marantz recorder and slung microphones over the dusty rafters. As I played, ants appeared journeying in concentric circles on the front panel of the Jefferson (Chicago ’26). Golden haired Emmy, the eight year old daughter of the sheep station owners, April and Dave Petersen, came in out of the majestic heat and stood on the cool floor of the tractor shed to watching me. I knelt to pull back the bass strings and then release them - firing off huge arrows. The piano roared and groaned. After some minutes April came over and muffled Emmy’s ringleted head in her huge flowered dress, as though shielding her from an atrocity. I knew that April wanted to speak, was about to speak. I pointed frantically up to the Nanyo and the Sanyo microphones with my right hand, while trying to finish the performance with my left. Finally, she broke in - ‘Have you finished?’ And I had.

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Forty years ago the Ruined Piano was the bar piano in the goldmining town of Big Bell. Big Bell with its art deco hotel is now deserted and demolished and the bar piano can be found at Nallan sheep station, 10 kilometres north of Cue (700kms northeast of Perth). The previous owners of the sheep station had left the piano out of doors where for several years it was exposed to the extreme temperatures of a semi-desert climate and a flood. As a result of these circumstances it has returned to a state of nature whereby the notes that don't work are at least as interesting as those that do. It is a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, clicks and dedoomps with not a single note (perhaps excepting D) sounding like a conventional piano.

I discovered the Ruined Piano in June 87 when Glenys my wife suggested we have a family holiday with our children Amanda and Julian at Nallan Sheep Station. After we had been there a day or so April Peterson, one of the present owners of Nallan Station, told us about a neglected piano in one of the sheds. I wasn't keen to look at it; this was meant to be a holiday and I'd seen wrecked pianos before.

This one was so totally done for however that I was totally won over. I had been preparing a variety of pianos - both uprights and grands - during the preceding three years, but this one, without the festoon of guitar jacks, rubbers, coins and pegs that I normally use, was "prepared" beyond any piano I had played or heard. Having brought a Marantz CD 330 and a pair of microphones to record an ambient tape of the crickets and a variety of sheep station sounds, I immediately hung the microphones over the rafters and made a recording of the Ruined Piano. With a variety of bugs crawling in concentric circles on the decaying front panel of the 'piano' as I played and with birds singing, roosters crowing, generators starting up, the owners complaining; in short, everyone and everything having its say, the recording turned out to be a lusty union of the environment and the piano.

***

The piano, that arch symbol of European musical culture (and cultural imperialism) in its present location and condition as the Ruined Piano functions is a dead end sign for the Northern Hemisphere traditions and styles that we have so gratefully and eagerly adopted in Australia. At Nallan sheep station all this is reduced to a debris of rotten wood and rusted wire. Re-entering the soil it is absorbed into the voices of the crickets and birds.

The guts of Schumann Chopin -
All that damp and unrequited love
Are strung out to dry

Unwound strings and dead wood
Whirr and chirrup
In the cicadas long electric blurt

***

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This piece has its origins in a talk I gave at the Syndey Zendo some four years ago. I asked Nathan Crotty to record a cassette to widely spaced, very long bass notes played on a Jackson Ruined Piano to accompany the talk. Each time that one of these low explosions occurred I stopped speaking until it had died away. After a while a thunderstorm came up so that no one, myself included, could tell what was storm, what was piano, what was my beating heart -

The reader may wish to imagine these low booming interruptions to the text that follows, but in any case, the fantasias and arias of boiling kettles, alarm clocks, protesting children will do just as well -

A piano is said to be Ruined (rather than Neglected or Devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers with the result that few or none of its notes sound like those of an even-tempered upright piano. However, a Ruined Piano has its frame and bodywork more less intact (even though the sound board may be cracked wide open), so that it can be played in the ordinary way. By contrast, a Devastated Piano is usually played in a crouched or lying position. (See the Taxonomy of Ruined Piano in WARPS: World Association for Ruined Piano Studies.)

It raises the question, "What is a piano?" (David Weinstein)

As the sound board of the piano opens wider to show the cloudless sky, and a dusty wisteria clambers over its broken hammers outside the machine shed on an upland farm overlooking the Southern Ocean, I remember the ancient koan of the monk who asked Joshu, "What is Joshu?" (Joshu being the name of the teacher and of the town where he lived.) Joshu answered, "East Gate, West Gate, North Gate, Sound Gate," and the undefended piano that is no longer a piano sounds like a shakuhachi, so open at the edges that everything and everyone can come through, can come in. And they do - yapping sheep dogs, trucks revving up, sheep-station owners complaining about drought, roosters crowing in some out-of-joint time, all sing the 108,000 tongues of the Buddha through the empty, dilapidated windows of one long pedal tone of the Ruined Piano.

****

Uniqueness and Non-Clinging

The Ruined Piano is a giant box of thumps, clicks, boompdidoomps, long rings, gongs, buzzes, dead ringers (notes that ring momentarily, then die completely). Notes that don't work are at least as interesting as those that do. Occasionally you push down one key and five or six others companionably go down with it, making for a surprise cluster and great swathes of harmonics singing forever.

Each Ruined Piano is utterly unique with respect to action and tuning (if we can talk of tuning at all). An F# one and a half octaves above middle C on a West Australian Ruined Piano in a semi-desert environment differs radically from the same note on a flooded piano in a studio four floors below pavement level in Prague. So approach each Ruined Piano as a new occasion for learning, letting go of last year's Sonata for the chaos, frustration and joyous confusion touched off by the wreck that's right there under your hands.

Going further, it's actually necessary to re-learn the Ruined Piano each day that you wish to perform on it. What was a sweet-swelling long ringer on Tuesday can be the merest plink by Thursday.

(On the other hand, overlearning can shut the performer off from the intoxication of real improvisation, from being truly guided by what lies so richly to hand. A degree of not knowing allows for surprises, and opens up the possibility of bewilderment and failure --)

*******

A Note on Anitya (Impermanence) and Ahimsa (Non-harming)

A piano judiciously left in the open and exposed to all weathers will ruin. All that fine nineteenth-century European craftmanship, all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, degrading to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire. The piano returns to aboriginality, re-enters the earth where the chirrup of its loose wires blown about by the desert Easterly is almost indistinguishable from the cicadas' long electric blurt.

In which case it's not necessary (or desirable) to burn or bury a piano in order to ruin it. A Ruined Piano should be an object trouve. However, I cannot eradicate the fantasy of a piano theme park - ancient Ronischs and Bechsteins hidden in the reeds at the edge of Camel Lake or behind the Banksia being lovely watered through the long harsh West Australian summer, nutured gently towards ruin by members of WARPS.

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Thomas Falke and I were driving to the red centre of Australia up the Great Central Road, which is actually for the most part an unsealed limestone and gravel track. In the heat of late afternoon we were deep in the samadhi of the road, oblivious in its long brown gut, when, suddenly, coming over a hill we were confronted by two bodies laying across the warm road. Thomas braked sharply and one of the figures, now visible as an aboriginal man in his middle years staggered up just inches from the bumper bar of our 4WD, waving his arms. She lay there for a while, as if dead, then swayed up, hair covering her face - whining, whimpering.

Too dry to speak, he whispered, “Got to get back to Warburton,” but with our Mitsubishi Pajero packed to the gills we couldn’t fit them in. Suddenly, she was gone from view. Immediately the left rear door was ripped open and Thomas’s tools clattered on the road as she tried to claw her way up on top of our suitcases, while her companion dragged her off, howling and whimpering rhythmically from behind the snarled mats of her hair. I felt the guilty weight of being a white Pajero tourist (why not stow our suitcases behind a rock, and retrieve them later?). We gave them Thomas’s fresh pure water, and then again, and then again, and again. We asked if we could take a message for them to Warburton. The man laboriously wrote in my diary.

To Kevin from Terry Message
‘Please inform Danny or Philip or
Livingston to help us. We are about….

when a white 4WD came over the hill and the driver agreed to take Terry to Warburton.

The girl we now know as Bettina squeezes on top of Thomas’s gleaming suitcase, and after praising her one and only ever loving father, extolling him as a crusader and a lawyer in a hoarse cracked voice, then damning her mother as nothing but a trouble maker (all this by way of introduction), she’s torrential. Gulping down water, eyes too bright for bearing, she asks Thomas where he’s from. ‘Germany! - you good guy. My teacher Mr Delaney, he from Germany. You, where you from? Australia? - well you OK --- I teach you words. OK? She points to her lips - ‘Muni’, and spells ‘M-U-N-I.’ ‘Muni, I repeat. ‘Yuwa’ (Yes!) she shouts. Then ‘kuru (eye), pina (ear), mulya (nose), tjarlinypa (tongue), yarangu (body), kapi (water), yilkari (sky)’ - her eyes huge and liquid, shouting ‘yuwa!’ each time I got it right.

She gulps down more water. She’s unstoppable. She’ll teach us all her words before we reach Warburton. And what’s more she urges us, ‘You tell that woman with red hair2 we good people, we good community. Yes, we tell her, but the telephone lines broken. You tell her. You tell her.’

“My dreaming is watersnake, blue watersnake. He lives inside me. He jumped up so happy when I saw your black toyoda.” “Stop - back, back!” she shouts. She rolls out of her air-conditioned nest and leads us barefoot over prickles and hot granite to her grandmother’s waterhole. She scoops up the shining water, drinks it. By the time we peer into the dark hole, it’s already filmed over, slicked with what looks like oil.

And down the biscuit coloured oblivious track - ‘mutuka (car), yiwarra (road), tawumpa (town).’ ‘Yuwa, yuwa, yuwa’, she guided us into Warburtons’ bare State Housing, sky like a fresh graze. She stepped out into the dusk, shut the left rear door firmly behind her. “Goodbye,” we called after her. No response - she just walked on silently towards the huge black woman in a floral dress, hanging out washing, staring back at her, silent, unrecognizing.

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At Tjunta (’thigh’ in the language of the Ngaanyatjarra people), Paul the wild white-haired pathologist is falling over in the car park. He staggers up, and yet in spite of his two sticks, one leg crosses over the other and down he goes again. The new chum, Mike, in his 4 WD that sheds roof racks and tyres has followed him here. Knows his story. He tells us that Paul had a massive stroke that landed him in Kalgoorlie hospital. When he realized that there was no rehabilitation, he discharged himself. He did it his way, hammering his Troopie up the Gunbarrel Highway, 800km of some of the roughest roads on the planet, to find a place to rest up for a few months and to write on forensic pathology. That’s what he teaches at the Sorbonne for six months of the year; he spends the remaining months writing on it in outback Australia.

When we arrive he’s resting close to Lasseter’s Cave, in the shade of an old river gum that’s bent over, its pallid trunk almost horizontal. A huge branch, really another rivergum, grows out of its contorted back. They shadow the cave where Lasseter holed up for his last desperate journey.

What we know is that he led an expedition into desert country west of Alice to find a huge gold reef that he had discovered thirty years earlier. After a run of unbelievable bad luck, most of his party left, and he ended by pushing on towards his goal with one companion. In the end they fought violently, and the other man returned to Alice. Lasseter battled on and claimed in his diary, fragments of which were discovered buried in the cave at Tjunta, that he eventually found his reef (it was smaller than he remembered) and pegged his claim. At dusk, in the midst of his triumph, his camels bolted, taking almost all his food and gear with them into the desert. For some time, it seems, an aboriginal tribe looked after him, but they finally had to leave him behind when he became too much of a burden.

Eventually, almost blind with Sandy Blight, and half dead of thirst and hunger, he rested up in the cave at Tjunta where aboriginal people cared for him. That sad little hole still smells of ancient ash and rancid fat.

When his strength returned a little he set out with only 1.7 litres of water hoping to meet up with a search party at Mt Olga. Still helped by aboriginal people, collapsing, then struggling on, he didn’t even make it half way.

His remains were found much later, concealed by branches. At his side lay a revolver, its chamber empty.

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After my mother’s funeral I tell this story to my brother and his family in the cafe at the Gates of Salvation.
I was at the laundromat just about to start my wash when an old aboriginal guy came up to me wearing a battered slouch hat with the black, yellow and red flag of Black Australia on the front. He beckons me outside,
‘C’mon boss - see, they’ve run into your car.’ A young Vietnamese couple stand there apologetically pointing out my smashed out right front light. I point to the buckled mudguard of my ancient rusted Suzuki Hatch, and say to the woman,
‘Save the insurance. Fifty dollars.’ ‘Talk to him.’ He looks doubtful, points out the long scrape on the side of his car. ‘But you ran into me (more or less) innocently parked here.’ Then I notice a young child strapped in the baby capsule, and say guiltily, ‘Forty dollars - better than losing your no-claim bonus.’
They scramble the forty dollars together and present it to me as we say our uncertain goodbyes. Rich at last, I climb the golden hill to lunch. The old black guy steps in front of me, asks me for five dollars.
‘Sorry’, I say. ‘$2.00 then.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Bus money. I got clothes in the laundromat, no different from you.’
I pullout $2.00 and odd change. ‘Give me all of that.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because they wouldn’t have said anything to you at all. I got you they money.’ I give him $5.00, then push up the hot hill for a Charlie Tricoli’s cheese and mortadella roll.
Afterwards I buy a wallet from the Amnesty International Op Shop to hold the remaining dollars. They’ve only got one wallet left. The stitching’s come unpicked, but it’s got a golden boomerang emblazoned on it. It costs me 20c.
My brother says, ‘Bring the Suzuki over and I’ll unbend it for you.’
My niece cuts in, ‘That’ll cost you $50.00.’

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Halloween late afternoon a piano abandoned on the edge of the drive they’ve just moved in made sure the white Merc’s under cover the piano’s under the dripping trees

A little girl appears between the rough dark stumps (they cut down the gums) to say ‘ It’s ours, but it’s too big to fit through our door.’ Would she play?’ She would. ‘Memories’ from Cats sweetly tentative in C (years ago after I’d hammered out clusters for hour after hour , with the neighbours slamming their windows shut, my daughter Amanda just home from school would push up the Yamaha’s lid and play to soothe the furious day - ‘Memories’ from Cats - windows thrown open to the adoring street

She’s Charlotte The wind blows her recital to all who sleep and season on the hill

‘I must go in. We’re having tea.’

Delicate rain stars the walnut cabinet going black

Goodbye

Goodbye

**

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I loaned my Yamaha Grand Piano to a New Age afficianado of John Cage. He wanted to create a piece where several hundred bees would be encouraged to take up brief residence in the piano - fifteen minutes - no more. As they blundered confused and enraged into the strings they would create a resonant hive.The audience would have to lean forward, straining for the faint far off sounds of their suffering.
Two days after the performance, effectively a memorial service for the sound poet Jas Duke who had died that day, I got a phone call from the artist to say that no-one could get the bees out. They’d put bowls of water inside the piano and rocked it from side to side, but so far had only dislodged two or three infuriated bees.
Humiliated and enraged, I threatened the Technical Producer, who deftly hand balled the responsibility back to the hapless artist. My distrust burned down into slit eyed fury, and I threatened to sue the Institute for the replacement value of the piano, if it was ruined.

Panicked, they smoked the bees out - swarms of them crossed the railway line, flying straight down Wellington Street towards the Indian Ocean. A hundred or so remained to die in the dark sticky catacombs that would have become honeycomb given time. I brushed out their dry sticky bodies that whispered and crackled. My daughter Amanda cleaned the sticky brown puddles from the polished pine soundboard with a worn-out toothbrush. The tone sounded very sweet and rough.

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"This morning as we were packing up, one of the ropes restraining the piano broke - we think it must have been rubbing & fraying on a sharp corner of one of the boxes, all this time with the jolting of the wagon, & and that the agitation of this morning's packing snapped it at last....
Robert's hand was crushed as he tried to catch and steady it. A great splinter of wood was driven straight into one of his fingers. This is not the first time the piano has hurt one of the boys. I see I am writing about it as though it as though it were a kind of Wild Animal....

Left behind us in the dust & the afternoon sun, the Piano looked a ridiculous object but also very beautiful. Louisa let out a strange sob - Oh I cannot bear it she said we cannot leave it there like a child in the street - push it over the cliff & Drown it - The edge of the cliff crumbled a little as they pushed it over & so there was no clean moment, just a sort of tilt & then a bang as it went over the side. The children rushed to to the edge to watch & I was so afraid they would follow it over & so determined they would not that I did not look at the Piano till just before it struck an outcrop of rock about twenty feet below us, turning a sort of slow cartwheel in the air & then - bursting -
There was a great roaring as the strings snapped & it flew apart & keys & splinters soared in all directions - it disturbed a large number of Sea Birds & they all rose up screaming in the air, it is a miracle they were not struck as all the Piano Fragments bounced and bounced again on the great rocks strewn down the cliffside & planted in the sand....
How many people, I wonder, have been forced to do what we have done? Perhaps all over this terrifying country there are Dead Pianos - left on beaches - abandoned on tracks - pushed over cliffs - rotting in ruined huts & cabins - making peculiar Homes for birds & mice & spiders playing witches' music among the strings & fretwork, & the silk all gone to rags."

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My first ruined piano, a small, Mignon upright, arrived by way of a local piano repairer and showroom. I phoned them in early1998 to inform them that I was on the lookout for an abandoned instrument, and they rang back, a month or so later. They had been given a piano they couldn't repair, and were about to throw out. Of course I'd take it! Unfortunately, between their rush to get rid of it, and my eagerness to accept it, I neglected to ask its history, so I have to say it has come from "an anonymous donor". I happily paid the bemused removalists $20 to deliver and then place it against the shed, in the shade of a young Eucalyptus Scoparia. It remained there until Easter 2001, when I cleaned the shed to make room for it inside. The piano was now very unstable, as its base and one side had rotted. It was evolving into a Devastated Piano; although it sounded wonderful, I didn't want it falling on me. Plus, it had company; a large, heavy, Morel player piano. This instrument spent many years at the Windsor Hotel (in a north-eastern Adelaide suburb). The custodian of the piano, the daughter of the now-retired publican, did not wish to pay the substantial costs of its restoration (at the above-mentioned repairers) and so offered it to me in June 2000. Its flagging bellows valiantly pumped Verdi's 'Il Trovotore' (like a very ill troubadour) and other frayed rolls around the crowded shed until an afternoon with my eager nephews finally muted them. It has now replaced the Mignon beneath the spreading branches of the Eucalyptus.

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After not being in contact with Ross Bolleter for more than five years, suddenly somebody rang me up before my children even woke up. I hate such moments - but I enjoyed this telephone call from Ross in November, 1998 inviting me to join the 'Left Hand of the Universe'.

I knew the principle of similtaneous improvisation from an earlier project with Ross in May, 1989 (before the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia). The left hand concept interested me too, but what convinced me was Ruined Pianos. I was immediately inspired to write a text about using pianos in contemporary visual art, about colour pianos, about the piano in the age of the computer. This study got me to think about a sound object exhibition where all exhibited art works use a piano or part of a piano - an idea that evolved into 'Piano Hotel'.

Just as we need homes for abandoned dogs, there was sensed the need to establish a hotel for abandoned, lost, damaged and demolished pianos. The Guild for Protection and for Freedom of Pianos through its hotel, or rather asylum, offers to musical instruments resuscitation services by their artistic appropriation and reinterpretation. The work of artists in this process is resurrected for the spectator-listener; not condemned to age in some forgotten institutions, establishments, stores or lofts. And so 'Piano Hotel' - part of the third annual international musical - creative project SOUND OFF '97 of the not-for-profit organisation SUM.

I found an older brother of 'Piano Hotel' here in Slovakia - the Museum of Keyboard Musical Instrument in Markuaovce, in which all the instruments are ruined according to WARPS' typology. Here are exhibited 200 years old, and they are really beautiful. The most interesting for me was the piano for travelling - it looks like a little table, with legs that can be taken off... In the Museum I started to think about ross' instructions for the performance of 'Left Hand of the Universe', and to find a balance between what he wanted and my own imagination. 'Piano Hotel' evolved, a multimedia stage show using visual and theatrical elements with video projection and big sound objects created from piano parts, including a multimedia performance profile of my friend and teacher Milan Adamciak, the left hand of Slovak music. All three of us - Plachy, Adamciak and I - played together for the first time, improvising music from Adamciak's visual scores which are 30 years old, combined with 'Left Hand of the Universe'. I also made a video film with Milan in monologue about his piano.

I decided to realize the destiny of the piano, which shares the destiny of its owner; we are talking abou the devastation of piano socially ruined violincellist and musicologist. The originally appointed piano for 'Left Hand of the Universe' was the property of Milan Adamciak - composer, musicologist, performer and an improtant character in Slovak improvised music. But his piano had inadvertantly gone too far down the road of ruining. When he moved into an old bachelor's flat after his second divorce, his piano fell into the custody of Slovak designer whose name is not worth mentioning. Three years later when we arrived to collect the piano for 'Left Hand of the Universe', he informed us that the wooden parts no longer existed, and his wife added, "Luckily we where able to incinerate". I can imagine how the wooden parts must have defended themselves against the fire, most probably by spitting. There remained only the frame with strings and the upper resonance plate, found in Adamciak's flat.

The piano, which in the thirties had been part of the English Embassy in Bratislava, had acquired Adamciak by marriage. Now, because his flat was too small for it, he accepted an offer to install it in the garden of Hugh Davies. From the body, he decided, there should grow a tree, and above the keyboard, a rock garden. They did not succeed in realizing this arrangement because the frame, propped against the wall, crashed down on Adamciak's thighs. Emergency services saved him from beneath the piano. Six weeks later he recovered enough to be with us for the performance, with pieces of his piano too.

The year 1997 will stay seared into my memory not only as the year of the birth of my second son, but also the year of the Ruined Piano.

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they fell to ruin on the cracked shellac of the americas
lost from canada to puento del sud
i have seen them in the treeline from lost mountain shacks
like dead viet cong snipers
beyond war
others live unplayed in homes with old sick people
here her old graduation gift flirts with my crippled wife
teasing out some Mussorgsky now and again
(the korean baby grand she played so often was sold for food and house payments when my engineering resume became hyphenated)
this is a pretty new planet
"pioneers get arrows"
the fates are generous, if not kind

***

you play 'em

I write about 'em

'em be 'em

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The Prepared Piano

A prepared piano is one (usually a grand piano) on which the temporary addition of objects (usually between the strings) creates new timbres and pitches when the instrument is played in the normal manner (depressing keys which cause hammers to strike strings). John Cage (1912 - 1992) was the most controversial and influential American composer of the twentieth century. In 1946 he embarked upon a study of Indian philosophy with Gita Sarabhai and of Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki. These studies helped nurture his belief in the philosophy of non-intervention and interpenetration that led to his compositions using chance procedures and his 'silent piece', 4'33". Cage's reputation is so deeply associated with the avant-garde of the 1950's-60's that his early, revolutionary work for prepared piano is sometimes overlooked.

Cage's invention of the prepared piano dates from the late-1930's, and was a result of a request for music for a dance performance. Cage was working in Seattle as an accompanist for Bonnie Bird's contemporary dance classes and would ideally have liked to use a percussion ensemble. However, as the performance area was small, he had to do with a piano placed to one side of the stage.
Some years earlier, Cage's friend, teacher and fellow composer Henry Cowell had transformed the sound of the piano by playing inside the instrument. (See 'The Piano Interior', below.) Cage first tried muting the instrument by resting dinner plates on the strings and placing nails between them, but this proved unsatisfactory as they bounced around or slipped through the strings.
The workable solution was to wedge screws, nuts, small coins and rubber stripping between the strings. This muting served to alter completely the pitch, timbre and dynamic of the instrument and provide the performer with their own percussion orchestra. Throughout the 1940's Cage wrote almost entirely for percussion or prepared piano. His preparations suggests the sound of Balinese or Javanese gamelans, or of ensembles of woodblocks, marimbas and xylophones. Today, the repertoire of the prepared piano includes diverse styles of music.
The once infamous prepared piano is a keyboard instrument unto itself, as different from the romantic piano as that instrument is from the baroque harpsichord. Here is an orchestra that can be carried around in a briefcase.

The Piano Interior

Rather than playing the instrument in the conventional manner and altering the sound with the addition of objects between the string, the performer of the piano interior disregards the keyboard to produce music by direct contact with the strings (and/or body of the instrument).
These unconventional techniques include plucking strings with a fingernail, scraping fingernails or objects lengthwise along strings, strumming, brushing or striking the strings (or body) with the hand, mallets, or other objects.
The groundbreaking work for piano interior, The Banshee was written by Henry Cowell (1897 - 1965) in 1925. The piano interior remains a popular means of unconventional music-making, for there are no time-consuming preparations to attach to the strings. The music continues to develop through the incorporation of digital music-sampling and editing processes.

The Ruined Piano

Contrary to widespread fears (that unfortunately prevail even today), carefully applied piano preparations and most playing of the piano interior causes no permanent damage to the instrument. In fact, both these forms of music-making require instruments that are tuned and stable in pitch (to the system called equal-temperament, where each pitch is exactly 100 cents apart), and have mechanism that function correctly (a specific string is struck when the corresponding key is pressed).
However, there is a genre of music-making - an evolution of the prepared and interior techniques - that eschews both of these considerations. This is the music of the Ruined Piano, discovered in Australia by Ross Bolleter and spread through WARPS - the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies.

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