Piano Burning: Annea Lockwood’s art of destruction
Get stuffed, Pete Townshend. Destroying guitars is an old hat. Do you know what’s really cool? Destroying pianos. It’s a lot more work, but its beauty lies therein. Any spotty oik whose tunes are dying a death can save face by smashing their second-hand Ibanez so the audience will remember that instead. It takes some serious dedication to decide that the poor Joanna in front of you has tinkled its last ivory and must go up in a storm of flame. Well, dedication and a whole lot of gasoline.
Tragically, the go-to story of immolating the 88 keys is probably apocryphal. It’s an absolute banger, though. Jerry Lee Lewis, scandalised at being booked to open for Chuck Berry, finishes his set, douses his piano in petrol and chucks a lit match at it. Strutting backstage, he then shouts, “I’d like to see any sumbitch follow that!” The truth is, fire is no joke, and had Lewis been insane enough to do it (which admittedly isn’t out of the question), there would have been hell to pay. Also, like, photos of it happening, probably?
This is because setting a piano on fire is no mere act of stagecraft. Those things are expensive, cumbersome, and require an incredible amount of craftsmanship. This is why the act of destroying them is mainly seen in the world of art, most notably from New Zealand native composer Annea Lockwood. Fascinated with the idea of music as performance art, Lockwood began a project called Piano Transplants in 1968. Taking inspiration from John Cage’s work on prepared pianos, Lockwood noted that the whole idea of Cage’s work was predicated on taking extreme care of the piano itself. Which got Lockwood wondering, what if you… didn’t?!
During an interview with Irene Revell, Lockwood detailed the process behind the first real entry in the Piano Transplants series: “[We] had microphones that were expendable, so we stuck one down near the pedals at the bottom and wrapped the cable in asbestos, which you could do in those days! [We] ran it out to a little Uher tape recorder… and twisted paper with lighter fluid poured on it down at the bottom.”
While nominally an audio project, Lockwood saw the beauty in the destruction very quickly: “Once, I saw a piano burn with green, violet, red and orange flames because of the variety of varnishes that were burning, and that was gorgeous. It is always visually really beautiful.” That performance in 1968 led to many others over the course of several decades, and while the idea was formed as an act of field recording, eventually, someone was going to live the meme and take it a step further.
In the same interview, Lockwood says, “The most recent, in Bangor, Wales, was phenomenal because three people said that they wanted to play it. They were all musicians, good improvisers. Each of them, after it had already been set on fire, took a turn at playing. They’d worked out roughly what they were going to do with it, having played it before and knowing what its capabilities were. But they were playing for a good couple of minutes each, I finally got worried and shooed them away. They were fantastic, and their improvisations were really beautiful.”
A reminder, at a time when we need it most, that beauty can be found in anything. Even the destruction of something beautiful.
