“Channelling Dulcie’s Piano” by Vanessa Tomlinson, Jesse Budel, Greg Harm


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    Channelling Dulcie’s Piano

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Artist Statement:


    Channelling Dulcies Piano: How the River taught the piano to play” is an audio-visual work connecting sounds of post-flood Murray River system on to an aging surplus-to-needs pianola. Drawing on Tomlinson and Budel’s interests in acoustic ecology and freshwater acoustic monitoring, the multi-day composition consists of recording the water-source using hydrophones followed by immediate playback of the recording verbatim, performing live with the underwater sounds, “channelling” the fish sounds, teaching the piano to sing. The series of eight performances travelled up the Murray River, turning north on to the Darling/Baarka River, heading east at Bourke onto the Baron River, and travelling up into the Great Dividing Range via the Mehi River and Boonoo Boonoo Creek. On the 3000km, 10 day journey, water sources were teeming with life in the post-flood environment of May 2023. Using hydrophone recordings, verbatim performance techniques, and site-responsive improvisation, this series of place-led performances captures embodied responses from the creative team that mark time and place – listening to invasive catfish, encountering abundant birdlife in billabongs, hearing the results of climate change and European settlement, camping with introduced wild cats and endemic possums, goats and kangaroos, experiencing change-in-motion of landscape and climate, all bound up in the transformation of the piano itself as it shed its colonial past, to learn a new musical language, of place, of water, of now (then). The video was created by Greg Harm from Tangible Media, and the piano belonged to Tomlinson’s Nana, Dulcie.

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