Ross Bolleter and ruined piano
	The Left Hand of the Universe - Ross Bolleter The Left Hand of the Universe is a WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies) project. It is a three-part composition for up to seven performers on ruined pianos on three continents. It was first performed simultaneously at Šamorin Synagogue near Bratislava, Slovakia, at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, and in Perth, Western Australia in September and December, 1997, and January, 1998. The performers were: in Slovakia, Michal Murin, Zdenek Plachy and Milan Adamčiak; in USA, Dan Wiencek and Stephen Scott; and in Australia, Ross Bolleter and Nathan Crotty. Ruined piano is the left hand of the musical universe. A ruined piano decays, becomes derelict as you play it. You re-learn the instrument each time you perform on it. It commits you to improvisation because pitch and mechanism are falling away under your fingers. It is ‘left hand’, too, in the sense of derelict, abandoned, weakened, declining, sad, quirky, crumbling... It draws on the underworlds of intuition, of anxious descent into the dark as you play. This entire 73-minute piece is played with the left hand only. 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. A ruined piano has its frame and bodywork more or less intact (even though the soundboard is 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. The ruined piano isa giantbox of thumps, clicks, boomdidoomps, long ringers, 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, will differ radically from the same note on a flooded piano 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 under your hands. Going further, it’s actually necessary to re-learn the ruined piano each day that you wish to perform on it. 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 ruined piano raises the question: What is a piano? Most languages are pretty cruel to left-handers. the English word ‘left’ comes from the Celtic word ‘lyft’, which means weak or broken. On the other hand, the Celtic word for ‘right’ means strong or straight. The Latin word for ‘right’, dextra, gives the English for ‘dexterous’ and ‘dexterity’. But the Latin for ‘left’, sinistra, gives the English ‘sinister’. In French, the word for ‘right’, droit, gives us ‘law’, while ‘left’, gauche, gives us ‘gawky’, which means awkward or uncoordinated. The in the Gypsy language Romany, the word for ‘left’, bongo, also means evil. Performing with the left hand is the pathway to intuition and to wonder. A child living in Western Australia wakes at 2 am, and, rubbing her eyes, looks at the map of Europe, and asks her mother, ‘What’s happening in Slovakia right now?’ The moment embraces the morning sun shining on the contemporary music class improvising with whirlies and pyrophone in the forecourt at Colorado College, Dan Wiencek playing a ruined piano in the middle of them all... Michal Murin, Zdenek Plachy and Milan Adamčiak playing ruined pianos in the Synagogue at Samorin, with dogs barking furiously throughout their performance... And at 2 am during a lunar eclipse over the Indian Ocean, Ross Bolleter and Nathan Crotty perform on two ruined pianos in a living-room in North Fremantle, only metres from where West Australian musicians performed Michal Murin’s Visual Composition on Dog Beach, amidst the rusting remains of the undersea telephone cable that once linked Perth to Europe... During the performances the musicians told ‘left hand stories’ - little palm-of-the-hand stories that draw on the shady, the shadowy, the fleeting corner of the eye connections between things, the weak, the bent, the quirky, the insecurely translated, the ruined, the synchronous, the accidental, the undergrowth of chance that disfigures our best intentions and secretly forges strong links between the most unlikely things in the dark reaches of our consciousness. Left-hand stories have some kinship with jokes, but maybe even more with the blue-black music of chance, fate, failure, dream.
	Ross Bolleter
	As my father was terrified of taking action without asking my mother, but when she wouldn’t eat and couldn’t stop herself falling asleep in her chair say after day, against her fading failing remonstrations he rang for an ambulance, got her to hospital just in time to save her from dying of septicaemia. Months later when she was battle axing him through the exhausted afternoon I cut in to defend him. ‘But he saved your life’ ‘Don’t bring that up’ she shot back ‘He only did it once’ * * My parents bought me an accordion for my eleventh birthday after they heard Reg Smirke playing on the radio. He was a fine accordion player and noted womaniser who blew his right hand off while duck shooting. After that he learned to play the accordion upside down. I would glimpse him teaching the Enigma Tango to his only student, a boy of some eleven years wearing thick glasses and a hearing aid as I rose past his studio (lit by one bar bulb) in the ancient shuddering black iron lift * * * I descend to the drowned studio at Dlouha 39, Prague, through four layers of darkness groping through the squelching umbra, with one boot sole letting in freezing water, to confront by torchlight the Petrov Grand Piano, rank, swollen from drowning. Petrov’s Defence turns out to have been no defence at all. My white hands are splashed with mud, my blue elbows shiver. The keys are swollen, jammed, so I have to lever them up, with the ivories coming away from my tugging fingers like fingernails off a soft drowned body - then force them down All that for only the tiniest bing plinking starlit note. From the abyss of the arcade four floors above Gypsy music plunges down, roaring, blurred. I stop, let it pour, then go on lifting, pumping the keys. The DAT is daubed with mud; my eyes die in their sockets; my full bowels ache. I shamble up flight after flight of agonised stairs through the engulfed arcade to the below-street toilet at Michal’s Hungarian Restaurant. I push past the dark hunched girl on the stairs, burst in on a wet-haired Gypsy preening himself before the brown-skinned mirror blocking my way to the cubicle. ‘Want to have sex?’ he whispers. ‘No, oh no, I’m straight...’ ‘No, no” - he smoothes the air with his hands, shaping it in explanatory curves. And at that moment I know he’s trying to sell his siter, wearing a blue canvas jacket - hungry, ravaged on the stairs.
	The Left Hand of the Universe was devised to take a sounding of reality. I composed five little fragments to find out how particular notes sound on different ruined pianos in different parts of the world. Normally a piece composed for a well-tempered piano assumes a uniformity of mechanism and pitch, and that piece will sound roughly the same whatever piano it is performed on. The scored pieces in this case seek to investigate and reveal the radical differences between ruined pianos. ‘Piano Archeologico’, the first movement of The Left Hand of the Universe, lovingly charts the decay of five ruined pianos on three continents. Over three performances you can experience the pianos as they weather and decay before your very ears. Synchronicity is the occurrence of similar or identical phenomena occurring at the same time in different places. The Left Hand of the Universe creates a field in which synchronistic experiences can occur. Both attention and inattention sculpt synchronicity. And yet it is finally indifferent to our plans. At the deepest level all experience may be synchronistic, each flash that happens to catch our eye just a tiny spark of the great fire. I am concerned to investigate melodic, rhythmic, textural similarities, as well as synchronous silences, between the different performances taking place at the same time. In what way can these be seen as synchronicities?
	Performers and audiences of the original moments of performance were able to get hold of only one corner of this submarine, subterranean piece. When it is assembled and mixed in the studio, that is when it slowly comes completely up like the great hulk of a ship being salvaged - black, streaming, covered in seaweed, and full of skeletons. Working this way - imagining the other, improvising towards them while not hearing them - all this builds a strong sense of connection. Michal Murin and I have been creating music together for some eleven years without our ever meeting. It has been a privilege to work with him and Zdenek Plachy, along with Stephen Scott, Dan Wiencek and Nathan Crotty - the result, full of joy and risk taking, is a left handed compliment to them all. (together with Susan Murphy, Sydney, May 2, 1998)