Piano Burning, to be performed at this year’s Rising festival, is a simple and somehow beautiful musical event: get a piano, and burn it to the ground. | NickdMiller risingmelbourne risingmelbourne
In late March, in a paddock in Tyabb on the Mornington Peninsula next door to a mushroom farm, a small team of Rising art festival producers, technicians and a curator set fire to an upright piano, and watched it burn to cinders.
It was a technical test run of one of the more unusual musical performances coming to this year’s Rising winter arts festival:, by expat New Zealand artist Annea Lockwood, which premiered on the banks of London’s Thames river in 1968.“Set upright piano in an open space with the lid closed / Spill a little lighter fluid on a twist of paper and place inside, near the pedals / Light it / Balloons may be stapled to the piano / Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can.
“The recording was totally useless because people talked their heads off,” she recalls. “But it sounded magnificent. There are resonant spaces inside the instrument; when a piece of the structure collapses it sounds great.”“I had no idea it would look so stunningly beautiful,” Lockwood says. “I’ve seen colours in the flames depending on the varnish: purple, green, orange and of course red.
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