Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano

Sculpture and performance are combined, a musician plays part of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on a grand piano while standing in a hole carved into the center of the instrument. He or she leans out over the keyboard to perform the famous fourth movement of the early-nineteenth-century composition, usually referred to as “Ode to Joy,” upside down and backwards. Walking while playing, the musician moves the instrument, which is mounted on wheels, slowly across the floor.