GALERY N*1 GALERY N*1 GALERY N*1
	Piano History - Michal Murin It is more than probable, in the time of dadaist and surrealistic convulsions, not only that a fish once fell on the keyboard of the lovely, philistine piano, but probably that the strings were struck more than once by a bottle of whiskey. Such a sound could be taken as a joke, but also as a reflection on whether the piano, as the embodiment of beauty, glamour, respectability and dignity, has lost some of the status it once had. From all scenes the one that stands out most in memory is that from the surrealistic movie by Luis Buňuel, The Andalusian Dog (1929), where two dead donkeys are lying across the strings beneath the wings of two grand pianos. The effort of the surrealists to outrage not just the philistines, but the aristocracy too, are plain in the Surrealist Manifesto, so it’s no wonder that they chose to libel the admirable Bechstein piano in this scene. These surrealist and dadaist elements then evaporate for a while to reappear in works of American action artists and Fluxists across the board in the early sixties. Research into musical sounds and other acoustic possibilities of the piano continues. The character of such research epitomises the work of Fluxus, arte povera, junk art and process art. Beneath the penetration of the accident and chaos into art, we can watch not only the “corrections” of the instrument itself, but also of the way to play on it (clusters with fists, elbows, legs, head). By looking at the appropriation of the piano for such research we can also begin to understand the background of the history of electroacoustic instruments during the whole of the 20th century.
	Lovely pianos and new instruments At the time of Buňuel’s movie, the Czech composer, Alois Hába, was investigating microintervals, and he invented quartertone harmony. To perform his compositions, based on quartertones, he constructed a piano with three keyboards over each other (1923-24), which could be (in the absence of further knowledge) regarded as a lovely Fluxus object. Although Hába later had his own class in the academy, his invention did not find a wider application and this impact upon the “lovely piano” did not have as much consequence as the “prepared piano” of John Cage, realized 15 years later. By way of Buňuel’s dead donkey placed across a piano, which surely improved its sound, we can reach across to the most important personality of 20th century music, the inventor of the “prepared piano” (1938, 1940). Starting with crude preparations of the piano, such as putting newspapers, ashtrays and salvers between the strings, John Cage (1912–92) refined this approach and composed works with specified preparations using metal clips on strings, screws, spoons, bits of paper, felt and rubber, inserted between or across the strings – and his piano turned into a percussion instrument. John Cage used piano prepared in this way in his compositions Bacchanalia (1938, 1940), Tossed As It Is Untroubled (1943), Amores for Prepared Piano and Percussion (1943), Perilous Night (1944), A Book of Music (1944), Three Dances (1945), Sonatas and Interludes (1948), Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), Music for Marcel Duchamp (1951), 34’46.776’’ for two Pianists (1954), where the preparation is even changed during playing. The greatest experimenter and avant-garde composer of the 20th century in this way deglorified the pathetic beauty of the piano and enhanced its sound. His contemporary, the lesser-known Mexican composer Conlon Nancarow, constructed experimental works using player pianos (since 1949), and mechanic-pneumatic instruments as self-playing percussion instruments. Among his best known compositions are Studies for Player Piano. His first records were made on a mechanical piano with hammers hardened with lacquer. A new instrument was also the “timbre piano”, invented by Lucia Dlugoszewska, where special bows were used on the strings – an idea later taken further by Stephen Scott. Piano automata were also created by the Dutch Simeon Ten Hulten. Authors and composers in an effort to discover new sounds develop their own instruments. Parallel to mechanical instruments, as early as the end of the previous century there were already instruments utilizing electro-physical inventions. In 1897, the American Thaddeus Cahill patented the telharmonium or dynamophone, which could be regarded as the first electronic music instrument. It weighed 200 tons, was 20 m long and was presented for the first time to the public in 1906. The resultant sound of the first models came out of acoustic horns, made of piano acoustic plates; later models were led through a telephone network or a system of telephone devices, connected to special acoustic horns – it was the only way to amplify the sound in the pre-amplifier era. The third and ultimate prototype of telharmonium was finished in 1911 and was working until 1916.The instrument, at the height of its popularity, inspired the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni, who wrote the Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), which markedly influenced and inspired the young generation of electronic composers: Edgar Varese and Luigi Russolo. Melvin Severy and G. B. Sinclair at the same time constructed an essentially smaller choralcello electric organ (1888 – 1908) based on the principle of combining the keyboard and the vibration of piano strings determined by an electromagnet. Lee De Forest (1873–1961) designed the “audion piano” (1915), the first instrument, using the vacuum tube. This simple keyboard instrument exploited the combination of strokes of the frequency (heterodyne) oscillator system and the capacitance of the human body to control the pitch and timbre. The violoncellist and electrical engineer Lev Sergejewich Termen (1896–1993) used a similar principle in the thereminvox or aetherophone (1917). On the keyboard theremin instrument (1930) he replaced the capacity controls with a standard keyboard. This pioneer of electronic music presented his successful instruments publicly for the last time in the USA at the close of his unsettled life (exile in Siberia, Stalin’s decoration of the first class) in 1993. The collaboration between Termen and the violoncellist and radio-telegrapher Maurice Martenot led to the creation of the Ondes artenot (1928), the first successful electronic keyboard instrument, which Martenot himself used for teaching in the conservatory in Paris for nearly 20 years. It was also used by Olivier Messiaen in his composition Turungalila Symphonia, (1946 – 48). Lev Termen also collaborated with American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell, and together they designed the rhythmicon or polyrhythmophone (1930) – the first electronic rhythmical instrument for transformation of harmonic data into rhythmic data, and vice versa. To the interesting categories of new piano machines belongs the klaviatursphäraphon (1930), with its possibility of duophonic sounds and the microtonal tuning and the partiturophon (1930), enabling quintets to be played on four keys and one pedal. Their designer was the German musician Jörg Mager, who founded in a small castle in Darmstadt in 1929 the Fellowship for study of the electro-acoustic music. In 1913 – 22, piano sales in the USA doubled, despite the popularity of radio and phonograph. In order to try to increase sales, many inventors tried to improve the pianos – for example, Benjamin Franklin Miessner, who tried to electrify many instruments, including the piano, and in the early thirties created the electronic piano, the stringless piano and later the crea-ton. Among other “improvers” we can mention Simon Coper, who tried to prolong the sound of the acoustic piano and Fred Roehm and Frank Adsit, who designed the radiano (1926), a contact microphone for recording the piano. Following the design of Hugo Gernsback, Clyde Finch constructed the pianorad instrument (1926) in Radio News Laboratories in New York. It had 25 simple LC oscillators for every key of the two octave keyboard of the full polyphonic instrument. In 1928, Luigi Russolo created the rumorarmonio (rumor harmonium), where keys replaced the lever of intonarumori (1913), and which Edgar Varese planned for mass production. The last of Russolo’s experiments in 1931 was the prototype of a one octave instrument (enharmonic piano), which utilized the secondary vibrations of string instruments by bowing the strings (violin, viola, violoncello), strumming the strings (mandolin, guitar, harp) and striking the keys (piano). These pioneers of electronic music stimulated this field of research and creativity. Here we find genuine prototypes of today’s synthesizers, of interest in their own right for their sound and design: the emiriton (1932), Grosstonorgel (Oskar Vierling, 1936); Helliophon (Bruno Hellberger, 1936); the polyphonic electronic organ novachord (Laurens Hammond, 1939), of which up to 1096 models were sold; the monophonic instrument ondioline-pianoline (Georges Jenny, 1938-40), which combined vacuum tube with oscillator and touch-sensitive eight octave keyboard; the commercially successful electro-acoustic “multimonica” (designer Harald Bode, 1940), or the clavivox (Raymond Scott, 1950). In 1948, the Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961) presented his “free music machine”, the concept of which he had already realized, independently, by 1892. He worked on it further from 1900, and reported his research in 1938. Grainger experimented also with chance operations in composition, and by the twenties he had written Random Round, anticipating John Cage by nearly 30 years. In his first experiments Grainger used the pianola (a device, enabling mechanical piano playing), elaborating the sound by way of three “solovoxes” attached to the keyboard. He abandoned this combination, because it was impossible to get an uninterrupted glissando effect on a pianola. Grainger created experimental graphic scores for his instrument (1935), in which he could control the pitch, loudness and timbre on eight oscillators. The development of these inherently interesting keyboard instruments parallels the development of technologies, whose progressive and prolific expansion, backed by so many companies (Roland, Maplin, Yamaha, Simmons, Casio, Kawai, Akai, Kurzweil and others), led to many commercial outcomes that we cannot be concerned with here because we are looking at a wider picture.
	Colour piano At the time of Hába’s researches, the Czech architect and sculptor Zdeněk Pešánek created a lumino-kinetic sculpture and also in 1920 a lumino-kinetic fountain with a thousand lights. In the effort to create a synthetic work he designed his first “colour piano” (1925), which was able to produce a light-kinetic sculptural painting, where the keys could also trigger the scenic means of the painting and the colour changes within the illuminated embossment work, in dynamic interplay with a mechanical spectrophone (reflector play). Pešánek’s piano was not unique in Czechoslovakia. The composer Miroslav Ponc after his activity in Berlin (1922-23) independently contributed to the contemporary theme of the colour piano – for instance in his work Big Canonical Preludium. These researches coincided with certain developments in film – abstract cinema and later, talkies – and include Bauhausian reflector plays (L. Hirschfeld-Macek in his work Farbsonatine of 1925, K. Schwerdtfeger, N. Braun), the colour firework, the ballet of dancing colours and shapes, perception of art as a chronospatial poetry, and the realization of the total work which attacks all the senses – the Wagnerian concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”. These were precisely the starting points of the work of Raoul Hausmann (chromatic sound) and of the Russian-French Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, who in 1915 designed the “optophonic piano” which he had been developing since 1912, and which later culminated in the colour organ, the clavilux. This synthetic instrument could spread sounds and coloured light at the same time, because every note played corresponded to one colour disc, projected by a light beam onto the screen. So Baranov-Rossiné managed the fusion of the arts that Charles Baudelaire or Alexander Skriabin had dreamed of. Baranov’s optophonic piano was presented in the Theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and in 1924 in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Like the instruments of the Hungarian Sandor Laszlo (Sonchromatoskop, 1920), this piano enabled the dynamic synthesis of music and coloured light in performances in big concert halls. Composers Alexander Skriabin and his disciple Ivan Wyschnegradsky were interested in the combination of music, architecture and colour. Already by 1910 Skriabin had drafted the sonata for an illuminated mystic cathedral, where he wanted to evoke in the listener quasi-religious sentiments through sensory experience in the performance environment. In the symphony Prometheus there is a section “Poem of the Fire” with composed instructions for the hypothetical instrument “tastiera per luce” (light organ), where we can see his effort to integrate his colour concept into his own harmonic system. None of the realizations of Prometheus were seen by the composer, but it is known that he wasn’t satisfied by any of them. The intentions of the author came closest to being realized only in 1962, in Kazan (Tartarian Autonomous Republic in Russia), by a group of young scientists and artists with the name Prometheus, committed to research into colour music at the Aviation Institute in Kazan. Ivan Wyschnegradsky wrote a vast score for his light dome (Mosaique lumineuse de la coupole du temple, 1943), containing a complex of geometric patterns, invented in accordance with his own microtonal harmony system. One further pre-digital pioneer in the combination of music and light (1919) was Walther Ruttman, a movie director from Berlin, who invented “abstract cinema” containing music and geometric shapes without any story. A comparably important figure in film in Berlin was Oskar Fischinger, one of the ultimate masters of colour music (Kinkende Ornamente, 1932), who as part of his “alchemical” studies experimented in the thirties with wax, using a music notably containing passages of silence. After emigration to the USA he also acquainted Edgar Varese and John Cage with his theory of the meaning of silence, and he founded a school of colour music, where every artist formulated his own spiritual starting points, drawing from everything from eastern philosophies to occultist mysticism, psychology, and later the preoccupations of the hippies. At this point we are reaching towards the synthesis of music and colour, and ideas we can see at work as early as in Pythagoras (582–500 BC), who understood the music of the spheres as a cosmic fusion, mirroring the geometric harmony of nature – as in the microcosm so in the macrocosm – searching for the parallel between the harmony of the firmament and life on earth. After him, Aristotle (384–322 BC) in his work De Sensu emphasizes the harmony between colour and music, and about their relationship he writes: “colours may mutually relate like musical concords for their pleasantest arrangement and like those concords be mutually proportionate”. Claudius Ptolemy (100–170) in his work Harmonics (150) compared the position of the planets of the Sun to musical intervals, and his followers became obsessed with the relation of music and the visual (quadrates). These included St. Augustine (354–430) and later the neo-Platonian Anicus M.S.Boethius (480–524), mainly in his works De Institutione Musica and Theorica Musice, not published until 1491-92. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), in his work Harmonice Mundi (1619), and in unpublished comments to Ptolemy’s work Harmonics, formulates the mathematically expressed relation of the planets, in note form – the “harmony of the spheres”. Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) also worked with musical-cosmological speculations making a lasting contribution with the work Musurgia Universalis (1646) and the world organ “die Welt Orgel” (Harmonia nascentis mundi Organum decaulum), which was taken up by the French Jesuit Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757) in his first experiments with the colour piano, the so-called clavessin oculaire as early as 1723. Playing the organ “Clavessin Oculaire” he vibrated the strings and at the same time projected transparent colour strips, with a light source behind. The instrument was publicly presented for the first time on December 21, 1734 in Paris, and described in the work Witticism, Smart Ideas and Special Inventions of Father Castel, issued only after his death. Castel’s visions were later deepened by George Anschütze. Following on, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) scientifically analyzed the relationship between the frequencies of music and colour. Painter and writer Johann Leonard Hoffman (1740–1814) dealt with the relationship between the “painter’s harmony” and “colour harmony” in his ultimately subjective theoretical system, based on an-ti-po-la-tion. He tried to assign colour to sounds. Others have followed Newton in trying to assign colours to the sound spectrum, such as Bainbridge Bishop (USA, 1877) and Alexander Rimington (England, 1895). Moreover, both of them invented colour organs similar to that of Englishman Bentam, on whose colour organ Skriabin’s Prometheus was performed for the first time. The technological developments of the 20th century have brought science and music together, opening up the field of possibilities and bringing back the baroque concept of colour music to the scene. The first use of Edison’s light bulb in the theatre happened in 1885 and only 25 years later Skriabin utilized it as a part of his composition. In the orchestral notation he dedicated a separate line on the score to light, named “luche”. The composer, whose fascination with Theosophy grew into a messianic obsession, tried to bring the cosmic mystery (in the form of apocalyptic synaesthesia) into the human realm. Independently from the European lines of inquiry, the idea of the singing cosmos occurs also in the East – for example, early Indian philosophy, which, long before Newton, connects every tone not only with planets, constellations or organs of the body, but also with colours. Some melodies in accordance with colour-cosmic-numerical symbolism, can be played only at a precisely set time, for example, only in the morning, or only in winter. Similarly, the Viennese composer Josef Mathias Hauer brought the relationship between colour and music to prominence in his lectures (1918-20), where, utilizing ideas of the philosopher Ferdinand Ebner and the painter Johannes Itten, he further developed Goethe’s teachings on colour. This was a preoccupation also for painters associated with the Bauhaus, such as Vassili Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, the DeStijl group, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Fernand Léger and, of course, Léopold Survage, who created in 1912 the first “colour rhythms”. These and other representatives of geometric abstraction also understood their works as beacons, music of the spheres, configurations of cosmic rules. They wanted colour to aspire to the condition of music. In this, they were trying to fulfil Flaubert’s prophecy about singing colours. In geometric abstraction, mathematics was as fundamental as it was to the highest levels of formal music, as in the Art of Fugue or The Well Tempered Clavier. The American physicist Albert Michelson forecast in 1899 the development of a colour art analogous to music, where the artist could perform the colour spectrum in various combinations. Piano only entered this experimentation with colour or light music in the case of the sonochromatoscope, chromatophone or clavilux. Ideas stemming from the Bauhaus and in part from the Russian avant-garde of the twenties about the relationship between music, light and geometric shapes, were acknowledged in the arts of the early sixties in kinetic art, working not only with the mechanical movement, but also with the movement of their components – light, colours and geometric shapes. The American architect Claude Bragdon experimented with a colour organ and big music “spectacles” – for example, a “cathedral without walls” which he created in Central Park in New York in 1916. He built a studio in Long Island, where he could work together with the Promethean group (the visionaries of colour music) on instruments dreamed up especially for colour music. The most significant figure was the American of Danish origin, Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968), whose first clavilux was completed as early as 1905, and who was also influenced by Bragdon’s experiments. In 1922 he constructed the “Lumia”, a sort of monumental piano producing sounds and colours. Wilfred produced claviluxes for optical-phonic performances, but also designed them for domestic use in a kind of interactive home movie theatre with an “abstract colour film”. He received recognition in both the thirties and the sixties, when Frank J. Malina – theorist and author of lumino-kinetic objects – frequently quoted him in his texts as a pioneer of the kinetic and kineto-optic art in its heyday. The “Licht-Töne Orgel” (light-tone organ) of 1936 worked on another principle of the relation between light and sound, when Welte designed in Germany an electronic instrument using a tone generator controlled by electro-optic glass and printed rotating discs, where pre-printed waves affected the pitch and timbre. On a similar principle there was the “optigan” (optical organ) of 1971, also using discs with graphic representation of waves. The instrument made available real piano, guitar, marimba, percussion sounds and different sound effects. Lasers and computers have been a breakthrough in the struggle for the realization of the colour piano and colour music. It might be presumptuous to assume that any of the above mentioned creators would be immensely pleased by the possibilities of computer controlled spotlights, laser disco-shows or last but not least by the one octave laser piano of Jean Michel Jarré. The effort to design a “colour piano” returns at the end of the century, coming forth in technically superior art projects. Waltraud Looper in her work Scherzophren (1988) at Ars Electronica 1989 installed a piano with its 84 keys connected to neon tubes, so that by striking the key, instead of the string’s response, you hear a sampled sound with a maximum of 8.5 seconds length. And so, the visual experience was activated by the acoustic and vice versa. In the Berlin festival KLANGMESSE – Neue Musik 1997, Jeff Burns presented old ideas of the colour piano with new perspectives in his performance The Piano of Light. Burns assigned to twelve tones twelve colours as a combination of basic colours (red, blue, green) and their opposites (magenta, yellow, cyan). For the performance he used a colour projector and 60 spotlights, controlled by piano keys through a computer. The impulse to connect old colour piano ideas with new technologies has been helped along by most recent neurological researches, which have confirmed that light and sound impulses meet and are jointly activated in the brain. The Golden Nike for interactive art at Ars Electronica 1997 in Linz went to the project Music Plays Images x Images Plays Music – an interactive multimedia project, based on the installation of Toshio Iwai, which used a computer to realize a musical production of the piano virtuoso Ryuichi Sakamoto. The pianist playing normally created through the computer dynamic, geometric elements, projected to the screen behind the piano. The process was then reversed so that the pianist played in response to the geometric shapes, which were positioned by Iwai by way of computer mouse onto the keyboard. The dynamics of geometric shapes on the screen was mirrored by computer controlled piano playing.
	From the refusal of elegance to the elegance of refuse (the piano from the sixties to the nineties) In the sixties the Fluxus movement was formed, its members mainly musicians but also writers and creative artists. Their actions initially appealed to an elite audience, but turned out to have broader historical significance. Peter Weibel in the Venice Biennium in 1997 presented the work of the Wiener Gruppe from the late fifties and from his own historical researches he proved how the little known work of this group was ahead of its time. His scholarship has compared piano demolition in Wiesbaden and in Vienna. The performances Neodadaism in Music (Düsseldorf, 1962) and The Festival of Fluxus (Wiesbaden, 1962) presented action music (including non-instrumental), compositions for music instruments, jokey actions, instructions for performance such as how to perform the work with language paradoxes and tautologies. The real starting point of Fluxist initiatives were the heritage of Marcel Duchamp and his found objects as ready-mades, and John Cage with his avant-garde compositions and lectures, as well as prepared piano, but we need to acknowledge the courageous formulations of the members of the Fluxus group, who were against the “middle-class line in music”. This is the strong opinion of Ben Vautier, the inventor of the total work of art, who has regarded “all activities and events” as art. An example of instruction wqith musical instruments is Composition 3 of the 12 Piano Compositions by George Maciunas for Nam June Paik: Paint patterns onto the piano with orange paint. Another Maciunas composition is Piano Piece, where he nails the keyboard, moves the piano into the performance space, tunes the piano, washes and waxes it, draws a picture of the piano and shows it to the public, or, taking a lath as long as the keyboard, presses down all the keys at the same time. Another of the Fluxists was the designer of musical instruments, Joe Jones, who besides creating of a lot of stringed instruments, extended the functions of old pianos – for example by installing electric motors with wires, striking the strings. Ben Patterson seated four pianists around the piano, and let them fill their glasses. Ben Jonson in his Knocking Piece (1965) let the players with Plexiglas masks strike the piano strings with various strikers and Tomas Smith pushed the piano against the wall. George Brecht in the score instructions orders the player to stand, sit and walk (3 Pieces for Piano, 1962). Mieko Shiomi in Event for Twilight gives the instruction to submerge the piano into water in a pond and play a Franz Liszt composition. Serge Oldenburg has a composition (4 Concerts for Piano, 1962), where he let four players spill a bottle into the piano, and to drink it out glass by glass. The same composer, in 1969, devised Hitch-Hike with Piano to Paris. Ben Vautier in 1964 had the pianist who didn’t want to play and had escaped from the piano chased from the room. Another time he let the pianist hunt down and shoot the piano from various angles. Vautier is also strong on the question of the role of the score in the music of the second half of the 20th century, as he recommends in one of his instructions to support the leg of a wobbly piano with a folded score, which could not have been his own score – a single piece of paper containing just one sentence. One of the most impressive performances of a piano composition was in 1982 during Ars Electronica in Linz. Nam June Paik, after a long period of concentration anticipating the sound of a tone, literally “missed” the key with his finger and hit the keyboard with his forehead, as he followed the track of his finger all the way to the floor. Serious and funny at the same time was the work of La Monte Young’s Piano Piece for David Tudor (1960), in which he installed straw bales around the piano and on the keyboard. A piano was used by Jean Tinguely as part of his famous and monumental self-destructing metal sound-producing monster Homage to New York (1960). Arman, one of the most important representatives of French New Realism, known for his installations of musical instruments, didn’t avoid the piano and in his work, Chopin’s Waterloo, in a glass house of considerable dimensions, recomposed fragments of the piano. Wolf Vostel, in honour of Maciunas, realized the “travelling piano” as a low-tech noise emitter. Other approaches to the piano as an object included Dorothy Iannone, who had the beautiful, innocent white piano spiced up with children’s drawings full of dirty motifs. The Italian Fluxus artist Walter Marchetti made a replica of the piano using toilet paper supplied by Ann (now Annear) Lockwood, who, in the late sixties, set up the projects Piano Burning and Piano Garden. To the Fluxus activities we can also assign various acoustic objects. An example are the pianos of Nam June Paik from the sixties, full of found objects and composed into a neodadaistic visual object (Piano integral) or using a glass-covered keyboard (Prepared piano 9). His elegant piano with old TV screens of 1986 is a unique example of interior decoration. During the Venice Biennium (1992), John Cage presented his “non-acoustic” acoustic installation, when the reverted piano was lying on pillows from which not a single sound could be wheedled. A similar soundless piano-object was created by Joseph Beuys, who packed the piano with “sacral” felt; and in his environmental sculpture Betrothal he installed a piano and thermometer in a room, the walls covered with felt fabric. Other Beuys projects include one where he poured sand into piano, or another connecting a piano to oxygen tanks, or another still in which he splashed the piano with acid salts after filling it with candies. Another soundless piano was Segal’s sculpture of a pianist. A nod in the direction of John Cage was made in the installation and performance of the Korean Soun-Gui Kim with the name Piano Préparé (1984), performed in a space reminiscent of antique ruins. Rebecca Horn in the early nineties had pianos hanging from the ceiling, the mechanical parts allowed to move by themselves and create sounds. Concert for Anarchy, as the work was named, was technically and aesthetically perfectly presented and is in a class of its own, in terms of the concepts and instructions of Fluxists. Hanging pianos were also used in Paul Panhuysen’s installation in 1984 in Budapest, Hommage to Franz Liszt (Long Strings Installation), and in 1990 in Washington (Two Suspended Grand Pianos). In the Binaer exhibition (1993) in Vienna there was a piano by Rodney Graham, connected to a computer. The composition was performed without participation of the pianist and the keys moved “all by themselves”, similarly to the work of Rebecca Horn. A piano is an object which arouses the desire to violate the security it presents; the mere fact of its beauty and presence in a space is irritating. In the work Snail snail come out of your hole, or else I’ll beat you black as a coal (1987), Walter Martin put the piano into a precarious position. The piano cannot be easily turned upside down just as a beetle cannot, yet its wobbliness is a source of tension. A coil of rope, tied to its leg like an umbilical cord, only serves to heighten the uncertainty. Helen Chadwick in her work Ego Geometria Sum: The Piano – Aged 9 Years (1983), created an installation of a piano of painted wood, quietly played by hands without a body, and having leg fragments instead of pedals. This work had an autobiographical feel, bringing back long hours of childhood practice. By using objects but suppressing their original purpose, she has investigated not only her own sensibility, but confirmed that people are determined by the objects that surround them. The Australian Ken Unsworth created such objects as Piano Trio (Teaching three pianos to sing unison, 1998) using metronomes and motor parts, and Rapture (1994) with 7 keyboards stacked above each other in the shape of a staircase with hay spilling from every step, or layer of keyboard. In 1990, Gino di Maggio in cooperation with the Gallery Fondazione MUDIMA prepared the exhibition PIANOFORTISSIMO, in which piano objects by Andersen, Ashley, Arman, Ayo, Aubertin, Ben, Beuys, Brecht, Brown, Cage, Cerdini, Chiari, Chopin, Corner, Costa, Dienes, Dupuy, Garnier, Gehlhaar, Giorno, Guerini, Heidsieck, Hendricks, Hidalgo, Higgins, Iannone, Jones, La Monte Young, Lombardi, Lora Totino, Kagel, Knížák, Knowles, Maciunas, Mac Low, Mambor, Marchetti, Miller, Morrow, Mosconi, Novak, Oldenburg, Ortiz, Paik, Paradiso, Patterson, Ruhm, Saito, Scheemann, Spacagná, Spoerri, Tudor, Vostell, Watts, Williams, Dali (homage), and Marinetti (homage) were presented. The exhibition was documented with a video catalogue and Internet sites of the foundation. Other artists with an interest in piano parts include Barabás Márton, Viktor Lois, Janny Pomodor, Vladimír Labat and Ivan Kříž from Brno. Viktor Lois, constructing acoustic objects making use of recycled pieces of metallic and technical waste, once used the lid of the piano that had belonged to a famous Hungarian actress and singer of the end of the 19th century, Lujza Blaha. Márton is known in Hungary as a creator of works of high class interior decoration using piano fragments without evident function. Lowland Slovak Vladimir Labat constructs pianos according to numerological traditions and assigns them to the instrument collection he has been assembling since the seventies. The quotation of the Fluxus injunction to destroy the piano was taken up by a group of “gladiators” in the project of János Szirtes Carnival of surprising sounds, realized in the Pepsi Sziget 98 festival in Budapest. The concept proceeds from the question “How can a camel pass through the eye of a needle?” Szirtes has subverted the question to ask, “How can the piano pass through a five inch gap?”. He built a wooden fence, with a gap at eye-level, and on both sides he stationed a piano and a group of “gladiators”. The first unstructured effort turned into a giant fight, with much destruction of pianos, a humorous competition full of sophisticated tricks producing unexpected sounds, whereby the whole seriousness of the demolition act turns towards humour, nineties-style. Among the work of Slovak artists we can mention the burning piano by the designer Svetozár Ilavský in the exhibition Exteriér III, 1989, in Janko Kráľ Orchard in Bratislava, in which hot strings were flying, breaking and accidentally striking the other parts of the piano. An acoustic object using piano was created by the artist Juraj Meliš in a TV document about his work, František Guldan and Svetozár Ilavský for the exhibition Skola Ludus. Some interesting projects were realized by Milan Adamčiak in the concerts of Transmusic Comp. (TMC), for the TV film TRANS MÉDIA and in his earlier concept pieces, where he let the piano be cut into the shape of a cross, or where he allowed the piano to be crucified, as in the instruction-based piece, Golgotha for a Piano, Cellist and Chimes. Other Adamčiak works with TMC include the concerts FLUXFEST in Bratislava and CONCEPT IN MUSIC in Prague, in which the instructions were given: Play the piano in any way, but not with hands, Activate the piano in any way except via the strings (for Giuseppe Chiari), March on the piano with different objects (for Walter Marchetti). In collaboration with Michal Murin he made use of the lid of a piano as a visual-acoustic object, as part of a visual-video-literary-theatric-acoustic multimedia performance The Left Hand of the Uni-verse (1997), conceived and devised by Australian composer Ross Bolleter. The association New Seriousness (Július Koller and Peter Rónai) from Bratislava presented the piano, covered by a big net. This Art Strike, or Slovak Cultural Situation of 1992 is a reaction to the peripheral state of the Slovak artistic life. The piano is an object of interest also in performances of Michal Murin Play a Piano and later Aldeabrus (1989-90) and other works performed by him as administrator of PIANO HOTEL. In the festival TRANSART COMMUNICATION 1997 in Nové Zámky the Spanish performer Bartolomé Ferrando concluded his demolitions of the piano with a total demolition when, with a strong Fluxus gesture, he crushed a child’s piano and distributed the fragments among the audience. The Slovak artist Peter Kalmus collected them and created an assemblage on top of a piano for the exhibition PIANO HOTEL (curator Michal Murin) in the synagogue of Šamorín, prepared in 1997 by the Society for Non-conventional Music (SNEH, Bratislava). Other objects created for this exhibition include one by Otis Laubert, who packed the piano with cotton-wool and covered the keyboard with pins pointing upwards, stuck on the keys; Jozef Cseres created a text about pianos, which responded to the installation; and Milan Adamčiak presented his piano as a process of decomposition (of the personality) of the piano. Rachel Rosenbach “prepared” the piano by preparing a bed inside it, where from time to time someone slept (among other things). This kind of preparation of the piano was not unlike that of Jaroslav Šťastný, who put twigs, flowers and stones into the piano in the monastery in Plasy near Pilsen (1994), and later using the same piano, Michal Murin prepared the instrument with his naked body, instead of screws and rubbers putting between the strings fingers, heels and other parts of the body. The opening of the exposition PIANO HOTEL was a multimedia performance called Left Hand of the Universe for three ruined, but acoustically interesting pianos, as part of a larger project by Australian musician Ross Bolleter. The audible part of the performance is documented on the CD Left Hand of the Universe issued in Australia by Sunset Music. This overview began with a homage to the piano fragment from Buňuel’s An Andalusian Dog, and so it is logical to conclude with a mention of Jane Campion’s film The Piano, which was a success in 1994, and won several Oscars. If we look at the film from the viewpoint of avant-garde and Fluxist tendencies in the music of the late 20th century, we can distil a series of beautiful conceptual piano pieces. Already in the introduction of the film we are fascinated by a piano in a packing case deposited on a wild beach – that is an interesting object, and the environment is interesting too. The conceptual piano pieces encoded in the screenplay and then realized in the film include: Play on the table with cut-out keys, Play and lift your skirt, higher, higher, even higher, Play with the forefinger cut off, Write on the key: You have my heart, Black keys will be offered in exchange for pieces of clothing, and so on. The entire piano deal can be understood as an extended conceptual concert. Another composition can be fo PS: NOT SO GOOD TRANSLATION OF ORIGINAL TEXT. FOR INFORMATION ONLY.