BROKEN MUSIC by Ed Baxter - THE WIRE 3/2000, p.24
The piano has been under attack for a while now, assaulted by Laurel and Hardy, abused by Fluxus, bricked up by Walter Marchetti, pusched 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 Tibury. But these are the aristocrats of the piano world, long –lived and pampered. Outside the concert halls, across the world their distant 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 youthfull 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 is 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 Adamčiak and Zdenek Plachy), Colorado (with, among others, Dan Wiencek and Stephen Scott) and Western Australia (with Bolleter and Nathan Crotty), a simultaneous blind improvisation designed to reveal the pleasures of synchronicity. Bolleter is strict about what he’s after: the piano has to be ruined rather then neglected (such as you find in the back room 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 colours 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 ot 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 Nicolas Collins, Ikue Mori, 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 official 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 symbolically 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 ideological 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 disorientating, 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 this 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 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 cental 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.