2026 Bundanon Artist Residency. Project: Palzang’s Piano.

Project Description: 

A piano, untouched, gently resonates with what sounds like the wind. After a period of intense listening the pianist carefully selects and silently depresses a single note. As the performance unfolds, the gentle and not so gentle vibrations of Earth conjure the piano into resonant tones and long understood melodies.

Pianist Sonya Lifschitz, sound-artist Diana Chester, and composer Damien Ricketson are developing a new installation and performance work on the aesthetics of listening to our environment. The work takes its inspiration from a Tibetan story in which the wandering Palzang, sitting for hours in a remote Himalayan valley, comes to understand that all the songs of the world - ever sung, and yet to be sung - exist within the soothing noise of a waterfall. In this conceptualisation, the strings of the piano are imagined as an aeolian harp caressed by the wind, catching filaments of stories from nature that are gently translated and sculpted into music via an act of performative listening by the pianist.

The outcome of the Bundanon Artist Residency is expected to be a performance/composition/sound art work or long-form meditative performance work for solo piano, field recording, and custom instruments that work together to sound the stories and songs held by Earth.

The project emerges from a Collaborative Fellowship held by Diana Chester and Damien Ricketson with the Sydney Environment Institute that resulted in a sensory sound installation - Listening to Earth (Feb 2024) which invited audiences to listen and connect to their environment through sound and vibration in a fixed installation environment: 

https://www.sydney.edu.au/sydney-environment-institute/events/2024/listening-to-the-earth.html

See announcement HERE