After listening to Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Transplants’, I was deeply impressed by her unique approach and the concepts she presented.
First and foremost, Piano Transplants is a challenge and a critique of traditional musical concepts, with Lockwood’s use of discarded pianos as the main object of the work, burning and drowning in extreme ways, shattering my perception of the piano as an instrument. This is no longer the kind of musical composition that we know as an expression of emotion and skill through an instrument but more of a revolution against musical tradition.
The sound of the burning piano, the blistering sound of the submerged piano, and even the visual impact of the acts themselves all become part of this musical work. This makes ‘Piano Transplants’ transcend the boundaries of music and become a multifaceted expression of sound art, visual art, and performance art.
The combination of sound art with visual art can also be seen in Susan Philipsz’s visual art Turner Prize for her work ‘Lowland,’ a Scottish ballad (a lament about a drowning sailor saying goodbye to his lover in his dreams) that she hummed and played on a loudspeaker under the ‘suicide mecca’ under the George V Bridge in Glasgow. The artist’s intention is to transform this bleak public space with a private voice, encouraging the listener to reconsider the meaning of life. The bridge is here like a passage between life and death, a river that you cross to enter the world of the dead. The echoes coming from the bottom of the river are also like a chorus of the deceased. This sound art can also be called visual art.