Piano (2008)
Installation consisting of Charlotte's family piano and a composition made by Eivind Buene
 
The instrument displayed in “In the best of Families” originates from Charlotte Thiis-Evensen’s childhood home. It was at this piano she sat as a young girl, rehearsing the simple pieces given to her by her piano teacher. Over the last 25 years the piano has been neglected, un-played and detuned, burdened by an increasing number of family portraits. The music accompanying the installation is composed for this specific instrument, with special regard to the very irregular tuning and mechanical flaws it has developed over the years. Parts of its registers are still reasonably in tune, while other parts are extremely untuned. I have attempted to conserve the naivety and simple expression particular to the instructive pieces of music one plays as children. As if the sounds heard in the installation are the reverberations of all the music once played on the instrument. At the same time, the frail intonation and mechanical decay of the instrument produces an array of sounds spanning from practically normal tones to sounds that are destroyed and distorted.

Somewhere in the depth of this music, we find the resonance of a Mozart-fragment I have been working on for years, the same fragment I build upon in the piece used in Thiis-Evensen’s video work ”My Uncle”.  For the opening night I performed the piece on the piano, whereas a recorded version is diffused though loudspeakers during the exhibition. The music is written for this specific piano, and the particular intonation it had during the exhibition period. When the instrument perishes (or is restored), so will the possibility of performing this piece of music ever again.

Eivind Buene

Shown at Porsgrunn Kunstforening.