Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher

Musical instruments are special things. There are reactions when electric guitars are broken or pianos are burned. But what happens when artists place musical instruments outdoors, burn them or let them decay in ponds, play already abandoned instruments and/or make new instruments from found materials? In our project, we explore how artists let musical instruments engage with outdoor environments. Drawing on intermedial and posthumanist approaches, we show how these practices transform the musical instrument into a medium of its own right. In our intermedial close reading of Annea Lockwood’s Piano transplants, we explore interactions among people, sounds, and spaces that help us think in new ways about human culture in the natural world.

 

Heidi Hart is an arts researcher focusing on sound and music in environmental art, with a background in music and politics. Her books include monographs on the resistance songs of Hanns Eisler, music in climate fiction, and the sounds of climate grief. She is a guest instructor at Linnaeus University, where she also received a Crafoord Fonden fellowship for the project "Instruments of Repair."

 

Beate Schirrmacher, associate professor in comparative literature at the Linneaus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies She has previously published on the musical transformation of literature, most recently in the Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Her research interests include the relation of multimodality and intermediality and truth claims of media, specifically the narrative strategies of journalism.

 

Joint previous publication:

Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher: “Music, Noise, and Nature: Energetic Ambiguities in Benedikt Erlingsson's Woman at War. With Heidi Hart. Music and the Moving Image 15, 2022: 3–19.https://doi.org/10.5406/19407610.15.3.01

 

 

More information about the project Instruments of Repair/ De-composing Pianos here.  

 

Heidi Hart and Beate Schirrmacher: “Music, Noise, and Nature: Energetic Ambiguities in Benedikt Erlingsson's Woman at War. With Heidi Hart. Music and the Moving Image 15, 2022: 3–19. https://doi.org/10.5406/19407610.15.3.01