BY CHLOE SANGER
The Piano Graveyard (pictured above) is located outside the tiny town of York in Western Australia on the Wambyn Olive Farm.
It’s a sanctuary, eerily scattered with dozens of decaying pianos that were strategically dumped there by composer and artist Ross Bolleter after his performance Ruined Piano Convergence, for a music festival in Perth. The pianos are long past playing – but in some, when the wind passes through, you can hear a hum of strings.
This strange place where pianos came to die was some of the inspiration for Melbourne’s Six Piano Collective. Founded by composer-pianist Kitty Xiao, the collective presents its debut concert this coming weekend. The performances will feature up to six pianos, and include newly commissioned works by Melbourne composers Elliott Hughes, Carolyn Schofield, CutCommon contributor Lewis Ingham, and Kitty herself, along with an Australian premiere by United States composer Nathan Felix.
All of the instruments are old, second-hand uprights, and the new works have been composed with their individual qualities in mind. The artists involved have built the performance from the ground up, out of their own pockets and love for the project.
The old upright piano is an object of many lives – often passed through generations of musicians, both young and old, experienced and inexperienced, they gradually lose their shine, action, intonation, and their value and status along with it. Eddie Tichelaar of ABC Pianos, who helped source the pianos for the concert, operates a piano recycling service as part of his business. It goes through around 150-200 pianos a year, all of which are redirected for a variety of uses. A small number are sold on as reasonable second-hand pianos.
“A lot of the pianos that we receive, which have reached the end of their musical life, are used as ornamental pianos in places like restaurants and bars,” Eddie tells me. Others are donated or bought by artists for their wood and parts to create new artworks. Then, there are the few that are restorable, if only someone took the time and interest. And these are the ones that were donated to the Six Piano Collective.
Rhys Boak from Carnegie’s Piano Service was the master piano technician behind the restoration of these pianos. Although he tells me that “restoration is too strong a word”, it sounded like a significant undertaking; having to replace hammers and joins, and spend several days painstakingly re-tuning them, some of which were more than 50 years old and hadn’t been tuned in decades. He miraculously managed to tune them all up to standard tuning with no string breakages, but very few people would be generous enough restore old pianos this way. It is time consuming and expensive, often yielding an undesirable result – the charming throb of old strings may not be that useful to a lot of classical musicians and music venues. His generosity with the project stems from his love of old pianos and how impressed he was with the scale and spirit of the undertaking.
Their past lives were probably spent in dry, carpeted living rooms, and some of these pianos will never sound as good again as they do now.
The project was really born in Austin, Texas, in the living room of composer Nathan Felix. He composed a piece for six pianos in surround sound, finding them second-hand off Craigslist. Inviting all his friends and neighbours to the original concert, the piece was eventually expanded and performed internationally.
“Classical music in Austin is very normalised,” Kitty explains. Home to some leading music schools such as Rice University and the Butler School of Music, the fast-growing city is also a live music Mecca where classical musicians are given the space to innovate and experiment. After Felix’s living room concert, the pianos were donated to local high schools music departments, paying forward the cycle of musical appreciation and participation.
There was something about the grassroots nature of the project and what it meant to the suburban area of North Austin that inspired Kitty to bring the concept to Melbourne.
“I want new classical music to strike a balance between being both challenging for the performers but listenable and accessible for the audience,” she tells me in their rehearsal space in Collingwood.
The rehearsal I have attended is for Kitty’s piece for five pianos, The Tenderness of Rain, which was inspired by Australian artist Lindy Lee’s artwork of the same name. The painting deals with themes of cyclic death and rebirth, an idea projected equally well by the pianos: as I sit and listen, I understand Kitty’s composition as a frame to highlight the vast timbral potential of these old instruments. Kitty is inspired by the idea of breathing new life into things that may be considered irreparable or useless. It feels good to hear the instruments in a resonant space like this. Their past lives were probably spent in dry, carpeted living rooms, and some of these pianos will never sound as good again as they do now.
The audience will be situated in the centre of the performance space, on stools that allow a 360-degree view of the performers who surround them. The Collingwood Arts Precinct, where it is held, is a former Technical College, recently restored from its ruins into a complex of contemporary art and performance spaces.
Whilst the Collingwood that I know is not socioeconomically comparable to a place like suburban North Austin, it definitely used to be. In a press release for the precinct’s opening, CEO Marcus Westbury explains that since Collingwood’s development in the last two decades, majority of its “creative community…had been priced out of the area”. Collingwood Arts Precinct aims to make Collingwood once again accessible for contemporary arts projects and this one seems especially fitting, preserving the old to create something new for the community.
The Six Piano Collective is comprised of Melbourne pianists Natasha Lin, Adam McMillan, Uri Barak, Rosie Riebl, Julia Hastings, Grace Ferguson, and Kitty Xiao, and conductor Laura Barton. Visit their Facebook page for more personal insights on the process from the performers and composers, plus a link to the event taking place this October 28. More information on the project as a whole can be found online.
Disclaimer: Chloe has crossed paths with Kitty on the arts scene in the past, and you can read Kitty’s interview about their combined performance in Nimbus Trio for the Concerts at St George’s Friends of Music Series – in which pianist Natasha Lin is also a team member. It’s a small community, folks.
Images supplied. Featured: The Piano Graveyard by Ken Brass, Australian Country Magazine.
