Unfortunately, the presentation of Annea Lockwood's ‘Piano Burning’, scheduled to take place on Thursday 4 April as part of the opening night of Rewire 2024, has been cancelled due to reasons outside of Rewire’s control. For more info, please click here.

The moving, curious, and ever-innovative work of composer, educator, sound artist, and musician Annea Lockwood has spanned over 50 years of concert music, field recordings, performance art, and multimedia installations. Born in New Zealand in 1939, Lockwood has had a lifelong fascination with the ways in which someone’s environment affects the sounds around them and vice versa. In her earlier work Piano Transplants (1969–1982) – which Piano Burning is from – this fascination led Lockwood to transpose the piano from the concert hall to somewhere it could be drowned in water, overgrown by plants, or, as is the case with Piano Burning, set aflame. Its score reads poetically: “Set upright piano (not a grand) 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.” Originally performed in order to make a good recording of fire for a dance work which never materialised, Piano Burning is characterised by the crackling of wood and the snapping of piano wire. As such, it is borne from somewhere between chaos and agency. “I feel that sounds are autonomous – they have a sort of lifespan,” Lockwood says in an interview with The Quietus. “That's at the bottom of a lot of my work.” In Piano Burning, this sensitivity to the autonomy of sound can be heard – and witnessed– in full effect. The piece asks what kind of sonic rebirth might happen amidst engulfing flames and billowing smoke.

Piano Burning will take place at Lange Voorhout