Piano Drowning
Soundlands presents Piano Drowning by Annea Lockwood permanently installed at Plas Bodfa, Wales.
‘Piano Drowning’ 2021 at Plas Bodfa - Photograph by Jonathan Lewis
Piano Drowning is one of three scores from Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Transplants’ series, in which pianos are placed in specific locations that would somehow alter their physical states. Removing the piano from the concert hall and living room, bringing the instruments into direct contact with the forces of nature, she allows the pianos to be played by the environment in which they are situated. In this occurrence, the pond at Plas Bodfa.
For the installation’s opening in 2021, Soundlands presented a new piano work specially commissioned for Piano Drowning at Plas Bodfa. The work is composed by Ynyr Pritchard and performed on the partially submerged piano by the composer and Xenia Pestova Bennett.
In 2022 Ynyr Pritchard composed an entirely new composition ‘The Christ of Agony’ for drowned piano and dispersed tape. The work explores issues of climate change, war, protest and the inevitable passage of time.
In 2025, on the occasion of the fall of the piano during Storm Darrah, a third composition ‘Resurrection of Catastrophe’ was commissioned and performed on and around the supine piano.
Resurrection of Catastrophe 2025
On the occasion of the fall.
A new commission by Ynyr Pritchard. Filmed and performed live at the pond.
for four performers, drowned piano and dispersed tape
duration : ~1h 22’
composed by Ynyr Pritchard
performed in and around the pond by the composer
with Giuliana Tritto, Leandro Landolina, Zack di Lello
11th of September, 2025
14:00
Commission Supported by Ty Cerdd Music Centre Wales.
Produced by Plas Bodfa Projects, Soundlands and Culture Colony.
On its 1,181st day in the pond at Plas Bodfa, Piano Drowning by Annea Lockwood fell backwards into the water. To commemorate this re-orientation and the beginning of its next phase of life, we have invited a third new music composition and its live performance in and around the pond.
‘Resurrection of Catastrophe’ is a powerful reminder not to look away from the happenings beyond our domestic sphere. It asks that we consider our own complicity in the violence that we tell ourselves is too far away to affect us. It is not a piece about itself, rather aims to highlight the very things we pretend don’t exist.
The texts within the performance are inspired by or are quoting:
Jacques Lacan — Tuché and Automaton
Abu Saif — Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide
Suzanne Cusick — “You are in a place that is out of the world. . .”
Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”
Bucks Fizz — The Land of Make Believe
Trevor Horn — in Adam Curtis’ Shifty
Steve Mannion and Eddie Chaloner —
Landmines and Landmine Injuries: An Overview
Kate Williamson
Jonathan Lewis
Plas Bodfa’s pond planning application
Sigmund Freud trans. A. A. Brill — The Interpretation of Dreams
Dorota Semenowicz — The Theatre of Romeo Castellucci and Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio
Umut Yıldırım — War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments
Andrei Tarkovsky and Aleksandr Misharin — Mirror
José Saramago trans. Giovanni Pontiero —
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Dominic Chennell
Julie Upmeyer
Biographies
Ynyr Pritchard
Ynyr Pritchard is a Maltese-Welsh performer and composer. They studied at the Junior Royal Northern College of Music, the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague and attended Stanford University to study Dj and remix culture. His tutors included Margaret Scourse, Ásdís Valdimarsdóttir and Calliope Tsoupaki. He gained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford, studying composition with Martyn Harry, Jonathan Packham and Jennifer Walshe. During his time there, they also studied viola privately with Stephen Upshaw. At Oxford, Ynyr was a member of the faculty’s new music ensemble—as both performer and composer—working with student composers and Christian Mason, Elaine Mitchener, Tansy Davies and Sally Beamish.
He was also a member of Red Lipstick, a student-run new music collective founded by Thomas Bruges, and FISHGUY, a free improvisation group opening for Matmos. He is one third of the interdisciplinary trio How to Burp Your Baby, alongside Giuliana Tritto and Zack di Lello. In 2023, Ynyr was selected as a composer for the Limina Contemporary Music Festival in Salzburg to create a new work with Ensemble Adapter and will return in 2025 to work with Ensemble NAMES. Also in 2025, Ynyr performed in the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra as part of the Lucerne Festival Academy and in October Ynyr will start their master’s degree as part of the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt.
Leandro Landolina
Leandro Landolina is a composer, sound design artist and flautist based in London and Oxford. He is in his final year of undergraduate study reading Music at St John’s College, University of Oxford. He was the President of the St John’s College Music Society in his second year.
Much of Leandro’s music is focussed on configuring and reconfiguring timbres over time. With a particular interest in slow rates of change of various parameters, Leandro invites a multitude of experiential hearings of his works, asking of listeners no correct way to listen to his music. Leandro often works collaboratively; across numerous media, techniques, people, concepts and objects. His interest in spectral music and his proficiencies in both sound synthesis and acoustic instrumental composition are ever intermingling and co-informing, resulting in a highly individuated style.
Leandro is currently under the tutelage of Jennifer Walshe. He has had his works performed by the Castalian String Quartet, CHROMA Ensemble, Sonorité Saxophone Quartet and Ensemble Isis, among others. He was the winner of the 8th Annual Henfrey Prize for Composition.
Zach Di Lello
Zack Di Lello is a composer and improvisor working in the field of contemporary music. His work centers on the relationship between humans and the natural world and asks questions like: how are humans similar to plants? and, how can we use technology to expand our perception in a trans-species way?
His recent works have been about the tree disease Ash Dieback, houseplants, and soil acoustics. Zack is currently doing a PhD in Composition at the University of Oxford where he studies with Jennifer Walshe.
Giuliana Tritto
Giuliana Tritto is a composer, double bassist, and organist originally from Naples and currently living on a houseboat on the River Isis. When not being attacked by swans, Giuli is the senior organ scholar of Hertford College, Oxford and is passionate about increasing access to organ education for state-educated students.
Giuli is in her final year reading music at Oxford where she runs SCREAMING MOUTH, a new music initiative for socially committed art combining music, theatre and performance art. Her recent works explore women’s rage, performative feminism, gender-based violence, and the fourth wall of classical music. Giuli likes the hurdy gurdy and cheese.
The Christ of Agony (a passion) 2022
for drowned piano and dispersed tape
Duration : ~56’34”
celebrating one year of ‘Piano Drowning’
by Annea Lockwood
composed and presented by Ynyr Pritchard
24th of September 2022
Building upon his previous work ‘boddi’, (performed on the newly drowned piano one year ago), Ynyr Pritchard performed an entirely new composition, on and around the piano, which has spent a full year now fully immersed in the pond at Plas Bodfa. Using the structure of the Passion of Christ, along with a ruler, speakers, a bicycle tyre inner tube, two brushes, a piece of plastic sheeting and a large piece of white cloth, Pritchard explores issues of climate change, war, protest and the inevitable passage of time.
Boddi, 2011
for drowned piano
Duration : ~56’34”
15th of September 2021
The commissioned score was played on the drowned piano by the composer Ynyr Pritchard and pianist Xenia Pestova Bennett. It was filmed and recorded, experienced and enjoyed by a limited audience.
Biographies
Annea Lockwood
Annea Lockwood is a New Zealand born composer now settled in the USA. During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and created a number of works such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources.
In 1968, and in synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood began a series of Piano Transplants in which defunct pianos were burned, drowned and planted in an English garden.
She has since created numerous performance works focused on environmental sounds and life-narratives.
Many of her compositions include recordings of natural ‘found sounds’ and can be heard on labels such as Lovely, Harmonia Mundi and Ambitus.
Ynyr Pritchard
Ynyr Pritchard is a Maltese-Welsh performer and composer. They studied at the Junior Royal Northern College of Music, the Royal Conservatoire of the Hague and attended Stanford University to study Dj and remix culture. His tutors included Margaret Scourse, Ásdís Valdimarsdóttir and Calliope Tsoupaki. He gained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford, studying composition with Martyn Harry, Jonathan Packham and Jennifer Walshe. During his time there, they also studied viola privately with Stephen Upshaw. At Oxford, Ynyr was a member of the faculty’s new music ensemble—as both performer and composer—working with student composers and Christian Mason, Elaine Mitchener, Tansy Davies and Sally Beamish.
He was also a member of Red Lipstick, a student-run new music collective founded by Thomas Bruges, and FISHGUY, a free improvisation group opening for Matmos. He is one third of the interdisciplinary trio How to Burp Your Baby, alongside Giuliana Tritto and Zack di Lello. In 2023, Ynyr was selected as a composer for the Limina Contemporary Music Festival in Salzburg to create a new work with Ensemble Adapter and will return in 2025 to work with Ensemble NAMES. Also in 2025, Ynyr performed in the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra as part of the Lucerne Festival Academy and in October Ynyr will start their master’s degree as part of the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt.
Xenia Pestova Bennett
Xenia Pestova Bennett is an innovative performer and educator. Much lauded in the international press, she has earned a reputation as a leading interpreter of uncompromising repertoire alongside masterpieces from the past. Her commitment to promoting music by living composers inspired her to commission dozens of new works and collaborate with major innovators in contemporary music.
Her numerous and widely acclaimed recordings include piano works by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen with Pascal Meyer and her own compositions. Her full-length album “Atomic Legacies" features Ligeti Quartet and the Magnetic Resonator Piano.
Xenia has been Head of Performance at Bangor University, and now lectures in music at the University of Nottingham.
Xenia's previous collaboration with Soundlands includes a realisation of Annea Lockwood’s “Piano Burning” in the presence of the composer in 2013.
Artist Observers
In collaboration with two local artist networks DAC and CARN, four artist observers were invited to witness the filming of the very first performance on the drowned piano in 2021. Actively responding to the sights, sounds and surrounds, they were sketching, mark-making, writing, reacting.
Sian Hughes
Menai Rowlands
Marirose Pritchard
Stephen Green
This installation of Annea Lockwood’s Piano Drowning is presented by Soundlands
in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room,
which honours the artist in 2021 with a global staging of Piano Transplants.
The project was supported by a grant from the Arts Council of Wales.
Piano + Time, a blog
Julie Upmeyer, the Custodian of the Pond (and by extension the piano) has agreed to observe and document the piano for as long as she is alive and living at Plas Bodfa.
See the entire blog here
Piano Drowning – path to the pond
The upright piano used in this work was sourced from Collinge Antiques and was indeed beyond repair.
Delivered to Plas Bodfa, it was kept on land for about a week for rehearsals. It was transported to the near side of the pond on a trailer and then carried by hand to the far side of the pond. The piano was gently lowered into the pond using with a team of eight volunteers, using pulleys and guide ropes on a custom-made ramp.
According to Annea’s wishes, the keyboard lid will remain open to the elements, inviting interaction from weather and guests.
Many Thanks To
Bedwyr Williams, Sam Carter and Corey Latham of Mon Caravans
Richard Pritchard
Dave and Peg Upmeyer
Lucy Low, John Stenson, Jeremy Hanniss-Ashton, Kirsty Lindenbaum, Ian Thorpe and Peter Stuart of Llangoed
DAC and CARN
Sian Hughes, Stephen Green, Menai Rowlands and Marirose Pritchard as our artist observers
Agi, Alan, Emily, Femke, Ffion, Jonathan, Karine, Oliver, Lisa, Nesta, Niki, Paul, Rachel, Ruth & Zöe – The Witnesses
History
‘Piano Drowning’ 1972 - Photograph by Richard Curtin
‘Piano Drowning’ was first realised in 1972 in Amarillo, Texas, USA
The original score is as follows:
Find a shallow pond with a clay/other hard bed in an isolated place.
Slide upright piano into position vertically, just off-shore.
Anchor the piano against storms, e.g. by rope to strong stakes.
Take photographs and play it monthly, as it slowly sinks.
Note: All pianos used should already be beyond repair.