Ross Bolleter’s Music for Ruined Pianos

Over the past thirty years Bolleter has explored the timbral possibilities of ruined pianos, as quoted: old pianos that have been exposed to the elements of time and weather thus acquiring novel and unexpected musical possibilities. A piano is ruined (rather than neglected or devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers and has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, tonks and dedoomps. The notes that do not work are at least as interesting as those that do.

Ross Bolleter has five ruined pianos in his kitchen including the original ruined piano from Nallan Sheep Station, near Cue, 800 km north east of Perth, Western Australia. At Kim Hack's and Penny Mossops's olive farm, Wambyn, near York, Western Australia, Kim Hack and Bolleter developed the Ruined Piano Sanctuary, where some forty pianos are ruining in their own ways, and at their own pace, variously under trees, in dams, and on roofs. Bolleter's CD Frontier Piano, which represents the best of his work from 2007–2014, is almost entirely devoted to recordings of these dying pianos. Each piano in decay is a long-running composition. Death comes to every piano, and dying, each sings a different kind of song.