January 13, 2024: Interview with Jesse Budel, Darren Copeland & Nadene Thériault-Copeland

Have a listen or read the transcript below:

Darren:  First off, let’s define what a ruined piano is, or ours [is] the decomposing piano. I’ve heard [the term] weathered piano. I’ve heard lots of different variations on the name.  Jesse, you might know that background, and, maybe explain those different names and usages.

Jesse: To my knowledge, the concept of ruined pianos, starts with an Australian composer-improviser, Ross Bolleter, who’s based in Western Australia, and in the 1980s, he was coming across a lot of disused and abandoned pianos in, particularly the Western Australian desert, which is a vast place.

Those were brought there by colonial settlers, as the social and entertainment fixture of their time. One statistic that I’ve read was that there were 300,000 pianos in Australia by the 1880s, which was one for every household. That reveals, I think, its importance in the Australian colonial setting.

But, pianos made out of wood and ivory and metal, have a lifespan like ourselves. And so [the pianos are] subjected to Australian conditions across the continent, which ranges from very harsh, dry, hot weather in our summers through to quite temperate, but cold, and wet winters. When left, particularly outside, these pianos start to shift and warp and change in their structure, which inadvertently then changes the sounds that they’re able to produce.

I’ve just pulled up Ross’s definition of Ruined Pianos. This is on the WARPS, or the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies website. He [Ross] says, “a piano is said to be ruined rather than neglected or devastated when it has been abandoned to all weathers, say on a sheep station or tennis court, with the result that few or none of its notes sound like that of an even tempered upright piano.

A ruined piano has its frame and body work more or less intact, even though the soundboard is cracked wide open with the blue sky shining through, so that it can be played in the ordinary way. By contrast, a devastated piano is usually played in a crouched or lying position.  Which I think’s a beautiful synopsis of the various definitions of ruined and devastated and whether the piano is intact.”

Darren: All of your pianos then would be considered ruined pianos.

Jesse:  Yes, they’re in different states, the eight of them. Some of them, well the ones that were introduced about five years ago, the actions have all completely gone, whether through public intervention – the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary is a publicly accessible site – or the materials have degraded in such a way that you can’t play on the keyboard anymore, the mechanism’s totally gone, and so, yes. And then the strings are corroding and that sort of thing, so, yes, very much ruined.

How about your own, Nadene? 

Nadene: We put it [the piano] out mid-December last year, so it’s been out a full year, a little over a full year. And when it was put out, it had already gotten to the point where it could not be tuned to concert pitch. There were some serious issues. Let’s put it this way: Heart and Soul, I had to play the left hand in a full tone lower key than the right hand to play them together.  So that was a full tone difference between the two, [the] bass and treble.  The tuner that we use said there’s no point in even trying to tune it.

We had it in our [NAISA’s] old space. We moved it to our new space and we had Jim Bailey do a prepared kind of FM transmitter thing on the strings and so we used it [as part of] an exhibition for about three months and we kept it inside [for that].  And then when we were about to re-open [in December 2022], I said, Darren, let’s put it outside.

We had a bookkeeper that used to be a piano tuner and I said, well, what’s the best way to do this? What do you suggest? And how can we do it safely? So, she told us what to do. And I just got the builder that had been working with [us] for six months to do all the things she told us to do. So, we bolted it down so [that] no one could push it over and cause anybody to get hurt.  We put that little kind of hat [roof like on a] tourist information buildings, we have that over top of it. Not really to save the piano.  More to slow down the decomposition of the soundboard because it kind of covers the soundboard.  And then he [the builder] built a bench and bolted it down, so no one could take the bench. So, there’s a bench that you can’t move in front of it. 

We started playing it, I think, in January. The first winter was really hard on it. But it would go from not playing at all to three hours later, playing fine. So, we got a lot of interest in it in the first six months, for sure. 

Jesse:  Do you, in that sense of witnessing the changes, in the instrument according to weather conditions and patterns, and I suppose then getting more specific, temperature and humidity, have you come to conceive the piano even more as a living entity that breathes with its environment?

Nadene: Yes, definitely. I mean I had a piano tuner in to tune my piano in my house, and it hadn’t been tuned in ten years, not a word of a lie, because I prefer it out of tune rather than in tune. It’s just that I like quarter tones. I like Charles Ives’ music. I really like the honky-tonk sound, and I like playing with that.

So, with the [decomposing] piano now, I could play it at noon and it’s dead. And then I could play it at one o’clock and half the keys have come back, or I could open it up and do some interesting things with it or whatever.  To me, it’s very freeing for me as an improviser to play the piano the way it is, because I can try the ideas out that I can’t really try on my own piano at home because I don’t want to wreck it.

What about you? Do you have your own ‘normal’ piano that is in tune that you play, or?

Jesse: Given my living circumstances, which is still in a rental capacity, I haven’t been able to acquire one just yet, so I stockpile the ones that nobody wants on my family property up in Murray Bridge. But I have a Roland FP4, so it’s a very reliable, equal tempered, electronic instrument with weighted touch that does the job.

I suppose to the question of the living entities, certainly, the instruments, fluctuate with seasonal cycles in the summer, pretty much because of our extremely dry conditions here in South Australia the wood is an all-time low with the humidity. And so the actions that may have expanded and [so are] just not able to move because they’re jammed up against each other in the winter, release and you’re able to play.  And each season has its effects on the strings, for example. So, you start to get gamelan along after one or two years playing, particularly the upper register where there’s three strings.

And then eventually parts of the action start to fall either to the left or right of where they’re intended to hit. And so, you can be striking two strings at once adjacent and that may be a semitone, it may be a different interval. And so, I suppose then, when improvising or engaging with the instrument, each time it’s a distinct moment, a distinct iteration of how the piano wants to vocalize at that point in time dependent on and contingent on all of that and its being in that space.

Nadene:  I found it interesting that, and this relates to something somebody asked me after a performance I did on it [the piano], she asked me why I wasn’t playing anything recognizable on it like a Concerto or a piece by Beethoven or Bach or whatever. And it was such an odd question because it’s so far away from how I look at that instrument. Why play something on that, that it’s not meant for. In order to let the voice of the piano speak, you have to work with wherever stage it’s at and let it speak whatever language it can speak at that time, whether it be rhythmic or atonal or whatever. 

And I was reminded of that when I was listening to some of the excerpts of your, I forget which, the second or the fourth, I can’t remember, but you brought some melody into it that I didn’t expect.  I didn’t expect something tonal, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Jesse: Yes, well, that’s the music theater musical director in play there. It’s just like, oh, it’s a pretty melody, nice.  And then contrast that with whatever techniques you can bring to the table to get the instrument sounding.

On playing recognizable repertoire, if you reflect on the evolution of instruments and how they’ve been encouraging or provoking or inspiring to different composers who in their own time were trying to explore new sound worlds in a certain lens or through a certain lens, you can think of the ruined piano, each being its own distinct instrument and how it wants to sound, then, providing an appropriate sound world output that it wants to have. And so, if the keyboard’s not working, why would you even attempt to play Beethoven or Ravel? It just doesn’t make sense. And so, you’ve got to then, you’ve got to consider it differently. It’s like comparing an acoustic, nylon string guitar, to an electric guitar, to a slide guitar. They all have very different sound worlds and therefore outputs that they lend themselves to. 

Darren: I was interested to hear one thing that Nadene has talked about in our conversations is that when you’re improvising with somebody else, you’re maybe using an instrument that’s familiar to you and they’re performing an instrument that’s familiar to them. But in this case, it’s a solo improvisation with an instrument, that is, whose character may not be known to you at that moment until you start playing it. So how does it change the approach to improvisation than it might in other contexts?

Jesse:  I think if I might answer that, Darren, just from my side.  I think one thing that I’ve learned through engaging with multiple ruined pianos is that when working with them, whether that’s performing or improvising, I’m far more open to failure [of] an intended action and sonic output and whether it comes through. And so, it’s embracing the capacity of my intention to fail but also for the instrument to fail with me, and that can bring interesting results when you are working very much in an integral kind of capacity with the instrument. You, you’re both kind of figuring out what’s going to happen as you go.

And so, then you as a performer have to bring a certain capacity to be flexible and navigate that with the instrument. How about you Nadene, have you found that with your piano?

Nadene: I did a little video on how to improvise because a lot of people would sit in front of it and not know what to do. And I said, well, you just start playing.  And as you’re playing, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and then you just tell a story through sound. But on your point, and this happened so many [times] on the concerts I did in the summertime, this happens so many times where I would play a wrong note. And it was kind of like, the keys jammed or they didn’t work or whatever. And it really isn’t a wrong note if you keep going and you turn it into something else, no one really knows. 

Jesse: I mean, that’s the first rule of jazz, right? Like there are no wrong notes, it’s just what you do afterwards.

Nadene:  Exactly. For me, my background is completely Royal Conservatory trained – I went to York U, did the whole concert thing, a lot of Western music, but then I switched to composition and I did everything I could to compose anything but Western music and as dissonant as possible. So [then] I didn’t play the piano for years and years because I didn’t really want to get stuck in that groove and I couldn’t play anything that wasn’t written [at the time].  So, then I began to improvise on my own piano and got myself out of that reliance on reading music that other people had written and gotten into improvising.

So, when the piano happened to be put outside at that particular time, it was like someone pressed go! and I could just do whatever I wanted to do and explore anything I wanted to. And it just came to me and it was very, very freeing. And it didn’t really matter; there were no mistakes in my books. It just, whatever came out, came out and you can shape it. You can. it doesn’t matter where the piano’s at in its weathered [state], you can shape it into an interesting performance, story, whatever you want to call it. It can have a beginning, middle and end.  You can just color outside the lines.

Jesse:  I think also, I mean, any improvisation requires it, but it hones your listening skills as well, because given that the ruined piano is almost a unique very distinct percussion instrument, each piano on its ongoing journey. You sensitize to the micro variations in sound in a way, perhaps that an equal tempered piano that has the regular kind of expected result wouldn’t.

And so, I was just reflecting on, there’s a moment in one of the second recordings where none of the hammers were remaining. Someone from the public had broken off all the hammers from their keyboard action, so I was like, okay, that’s not working, but I got a couple of [broken] hammers and I remembered hammering them, hammering the strings like a dulcimer at one point.

At another point, and what I was getting to was, there were a couple of strings that were broken and so I took those off and then used them on the middle strings and was bowing them and so it was like listening to bowing, other strings with those broken strings. And it kind of clued me into listening to the overtones that I was able to produce with, with that bowing of metal on metal. And that was a really interesting texture whilst also listening to your own improvisation. And so, trying to work in with that.

Darren:  So, were those discoveries made after you pressed record? Like as you were doing it or were they part of a preparation process before you record it? 

Jesse:  I, maybe, set up the strings to begin with and just had a maybe 30 second to a minute listen to a number of the textures that could come out of it just to see if those strings wanted to speak.  But it was largely what came up in the improvs.

Nadene: Yes, and that’s how I approached it, too. I think the day before I went to it and just check to see what was working and then kind of was giving Darren directions – [as in] Don’t put the mic here, because I’m probably going to be using a drumstick here or something and it’s going to hit your mic or whatever.

So that’s all I did. And then the day of it was just, yes, hit record. That was it.  And what I tried to do in the four different [recordings] that I sent you were just to give you four distinct maybe areas of the piano or just different timbres that the piano was offering.

So, the first take, I tried to focus on whatever keys would play. The second was the strings. The third was the back. And that was fun hearing as I discovered this time around some of the ribs are starting to pull away from the soundboard at the back. And so, when you’re hitting the ribs, you’re getting more resonance and you’re hearing more of the overtones and the soundboard as part of the percussion.

And then for the last one I was trying to – usually by the end more keys are working – So the fourth take is kind of going back to the keyboard and [saying], okay, let’s see what it’ll do now.  That’s kind of how I approached it. But I’m doing it all on one [piano]. You’re doing it on four different pianos. So that’s like four different experiences.

Darren: They did sound similar, right? Like I would not have known they were different pianos unless you told me. I thought they could have been just different approaches to the same piano. 

Jesse:  Yes, it was kind of luck of the draw, really, I think. I remember, it was almost, what’s the French term for when you wander? Like a wandering through the streets? A flâneur, an approach where it’s like, okay, let’s see what this piano wants to do. And the first recording that I made lined up with that beautiful E flat resonance that you were managing to get out in that first take.

So, yes, it was happenstance that they wanted to kind of work together in that regard because most of the other keys, non-black keys, aside from [that] it was Fs and C flats. So, yeah, we had an E flat Dorian kind of texture there, and it was, yes, just a beautiful kind of happenstance that kind of worked.  It could have been a very different response if it was a piano where the action wasn’t working.

Nadene: I have a question because someone else told me this happened to them when they put a piano outside. After about four or five months, the damper pedal, when the keys don’t work, if you hit the damper pedal, it hits all [of them]. It plays all the keys.  Does that happen at all or no?

Jesse:  It can do it. I think it really depends on whether the piano is in that functional state when I’ve taken it on. So, the pianos that I collect are largely beings that have been neglected and people aren’t willing to put in the money to restore them.

And so that can mean that there’s a lot of detuning going on or that certain keys are not functioning or that the pedals are not functioning. And so, getting to your question more specifically, yes, those that have the pedal working it can, with enough force, kind of jolt them all and hit the whole harp with all the mallets.

Nadene:  Quite an effect. Yes. I used that in the first take, extensively. I don’t think I used it again [later].  But yes, it gets a little annoying after a while because it’s essentially the same sound.

Jesse:  You’ve got to have strong calves and quads.

Nadene: Yes.  [And] I have to play with gloves on because all the ivories fell off a long ago.

Jesse:  So how is it for you performing in winter? This is something I’m curious to know. For me, it’s just temperate, wet, maybe lows of 12, 13 degrees Celsius at most. But for you, it gets into freezing temperatures.

Nadene:  Well, 20 below. Last year. This year, we haven’t yet [seen 20 below].  Sunday felt very cold.  I think it only registered as minus six [Celsius], but with the windchill I think it was closer to minus 10 C.  So my calves, my thighs were frozen after an hour of playing because I just took one take after another and I didn’t bring any long johns. I was wearing my fall jacket rather than my winter jacket.

So yes, I had a hat on and I have to wear gloves because my hands just get too cold. And yes, boots on.

Darren:  What I noticed, you mentioned that your winters are wet and I found that our piano went through the most change in October, November, when we ended up with a lot of rainy weather.  We had a really wet, even into Christmas time, that whole period is like, you know, I felt the piano really took a lot of wear and tear from that.  Those two months of wet weather, whereas last winter, I mean, maybe it was just because it was initially out there, but it didn’t actually experience as much change, I think, as it did this last couple of months.

Nadene:  Art’s birthday, Darren, it rained last year.  None of the keys were working. Yeah, there’s wet weather though too, right?

Darren:  But when you get into the minus 5, minus 10, it kind of dries out more. And if we have, because we usually get more sun when it gets to minus 10, there’s more sunnier weather. And we don’t get as much snow or things like that. And it’s drier, the air is drier. So, I wonder.  We don’t get extended periods of minus 20 like you would in the western Canada or further north, but that tends to be our ceiling.  So, it’s hard to say what would happen for a long time, but I certainly noticed that transition between plus 10 to Minus four is kind of like a danger zone almost, because it tends to bring on the weather.

Nadene:  Yes, when it goes from warm to hot or sorry, warm to cold, back to warm, back to cold, and then there’s rain in between that, that seems to really cause issues, but we don’t generally leave any of the front or the lid off.  We leave all that on. So, if the keys don’t play, there’s not really a lot you can do with it. As a bystander, as a community member, when they’re going by, they kind of check it out. So, they generally leave it alone because they figure it’s not playable. And oh, that’s the other thing we did.  We screwed down the lid on the top. 

Jesse:  Right. Okay.  Interesting.

Darren:  I mean we’re in a very public place. It’s on a main street. So, it’s not hidden in the forest so it’s there, kind of on display. So, we didn’t want it to be overtly vandalized but, at the same time, public presence sometimes shortens people’s curiosity and exploration because they feel more on the spot.

Nadene:  Well, we actually have the live stream camera on all the time. And if it’s 10 or 11 o’clock at night, if they sit down to play, the light will actually come on.

Jesse:  Interesting.  So, there’s a surveillance kind of mechanism there, or something that would intimidate them if they were to feel untoward towards the piano. Yes. For us, it being in a public space, yes, means that people are free to interact with them in any way. And quite a number of the lids are off and other parts of the body are off.

And so, the weathering process is more direct and more immediate. That being said, I suppose the harps down, the first two that were installed about five years ago, their strings are still going strong. Some of them are quite a bit duller than when they first started.  But both keyboards are very much gone and I’ve taken the actions out of both of them so that the strings are more freely available to be plucked or strung.

Nadene:  Yes, that’s the next step for us. I think, because everything’s swelling up, like the whole frame that covers the strings is swelling and that’s not going to be long before that just completely busts apart. So once that’s off, everything’s open. 

So, what drew you to start your own piano sanctuary like personally. 

Jesse:  Yes, I suppose my initial interest in ruined pianos came via a close friend and mentor, Gabriella Smart, who is a concert pianist and new music presenter.  She’s the Artistic Director of Soundstream New Music based here in Adelaide.  She was interested in getting a piano sanctuary started in the Adelaide Parklands, which are quite a vast, circuit of parks that surround the Adelaide, CBD.  But Adelaide City Council didn’t come to the table on that one.

So being based up at Murray Bridge at that point in time, which is 70 kilometers southeast of Adelaide and quite closely tied to the arts and youth sectors of that community, I was on a committee at the time related to arts and cultural activities in the town.  The idea [came to] let’s set up our own sanctuary here. And so that got approval to have two pilot sites with a number of safety measures in place. So, all of the pianos are mounted on concrete plinths and chained to upright poles to hold them in place to the rear. 

The park setting that they’re in, Carey’s Park, is actually a dividing strip for a service road, so you’ve got Mannum Road, which is a main arterial road of Murray Bridge, 80 kilometre an hour speed [limit].  And then the park that the pianos are in separates that from residences that stretch the 750 meters that the park extends. The park’s in four quadrants. So, four distinct sections along the linear belt. And there’s two pianos per section. So, eight in total.  And you can walk up and down the whole way there if you so wish. 

Nadene: So, the initial idea came from someone else, but what made you want to implement it? 

Jesse: Yes, sure. I mean, I play piano. I went through a composition degree at local conservatorium, but kind of fell into the new music space by the third year of my degree. I’m interested in new pathways, in exploring sound. A large focus I think is also my involvement in acoustic ecology and environmental sound.

So, it sort of ties together, this project, interests in experimental music and aleatoricism, Acoustic Ecology and environmental soundscapes that also have an indeterminate kind of capacity to it; working with local communities in building projects up there. And I suppose on a personal level, being involved in Tibetan Buddhism, it’s impermanence in practice.

Impermanence is always in practice, but this being a very deliberate project that forces attention to changing structures and decay and kind of working with what’s happening at that moment, at that time. Yes. 

Nadene:  Oh, interesting.  Yes, that’s quite interesting. I never thought of the impermanence aspect but it does embody that notion in an interesting way.  It’s also, I mean, I know we’ve recorded a lot or documented a lot of the sounds coming out of the piano at different stages, but there’s also an ephemeral aspect that…. It just is what it is at that moment, and it’s never going to be that way again. And sometimes I just enjoy that.

It doesn’t have to be recorded. It just speaks, the piano speaks to me in this voice today. And I’m letting it speak by doing what I’m doing to it. And there’s a certain magic to that, almost, by releasing that sound that is in that piano at that particular time, on that particular day and letting yourself be free enough to make it happen, let it speak. [It’s] less about your intention and more about letting things flow the way they’re going to.

Jesse: And in that way, you kind of become a conduit. I mean, any musical performance, you are a conduit for bringing that [music to life]. But especially when you’re working with an instrument that needs to be found or the sound needs to be found. Each iteration that you engage with it, or even each moment of that iteration there’s this, an immediacy there where you just have to channel whatever comes through.

Nadene:  And yes, and people are surprised at – like somebody will come by and want to play it and won’t really know how to interact with it. And all I do is just sit down and say, well, you know, just, just let it speak and I just start playing and I can’t believe what I can get from it. But it’s something anyone could get from it. It’s just letting go of your preconceptions about what it should be.  I think that’s a big part of it.

Let the sound be sound instead of some confined idea of what music is

Jesse: Yes, cool, well, I think that’s probably a good place to end I think for today… letting sounds be as they are.