Musical art

In a recent issue of Vanity Fair (or Vogue, I can't remember now), I found an article on a performance/art piece that had a pianist inside of a piano.  The piano is on wheels, and it had been redesigned to allow for a person to stand in the middle of it (where the strings are) and then they walk the piano around the room and play Beethoven.  What's fascinating about this, besides being a unique art concept,  is that the player needs to learn to play the piano backwards.  Because they are situated behind the keyboard, their left hand now needs to play the treble parts and their right hand plays the bass parts.  And they are also playing upside down, because the keyboard is facing away from them.

I was happy to find that there is a video of this on YouTube.  The piece is a performance work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The artists are Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla and the title of the piece is Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for Prepared Piano.  A prepared piano isn't such a new thing, John Cage and other avant garde composers have been throwing things into pianos (placing metal pieces, metal washers, etc., to create different sounds and vibrations) for years.  What I like about this, though, is that the performer is actually part of the prepared piano.  The musician is now part of the modified instrument.  Love it!