How to Play the Piano continues research and material experiments first enacted for How to Listen to a Record (Something Other Press, 2018), How to Play the Violin in 2019 (Wave Pool and The Art Academy of Cincinnati, 2019) and further developed for How to Rythmn Or, How to Rhythm, a solo project/event in 2020 at Public Storage (Fayetteville, AR).
How to Play the Piano uses archival documents and artifacts, alongside several mechanisms of display that function as art object and invitation for participation. As both a creative and educational production, this exhibition examines the history of musical play through its expectations, evidenced via how to play workbooks, records, and media performances, as well as its disruptions, evidenced via purposeful disruptions, destructions, and creative approaches to playing. This research-based project seeks to complicate notions of musical proficiency, which tend to center on neurotypical demands for bodily posture and movement and is often at the service of reproducing Euro-centric values of aesthetic excellence. Topics under consideration include: the relationship between body and instrument, the piano reconfigured or reconsidered as non-instrument (destroyed), the eco- politics of the discarded via Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants series, reimagining musical instructional manuals as movement scores, the value of the performed mistake, and playing through doing.
Occurring simultaneous to the installation feature of this exhibition is a self-published takeaway publication, How to Play the Piano, that functions as part performance score, visual essay, and written text. In this publication, images culled from piano instructional books to do with sitting and wrist movement are taken out of their context and reimagined as a potential movement based visual score. This collection of images also functions as showing visual weight, an ongoing archive of mandated movements deemed necessary for a correct expression of musical play. An accompanying text, written by me, further explores the exhibitions themes.
A final component of the exhibition included performances around the found choreography outlined in the takeaway by Amanda Maraist and Camille Casemier and a piano destruction event in which the piano was slowly taken apart by Shawn Lucas and the remnants were incorporated into a performance by Shi-An Costello and Lauren Sudbrink.
