About the world's only Skeleton Piano:
"...Jennifer Wright reinvented the piano, to Western musicians the same analogy as reinventing the wheel, but still wasn’t satisfied. Dedicating tremendous amounts of time to become agile on this new creation, Wright does not just own the Skeleton piano: she possesses it, bends it to her will...
Wright is a born performer...It doesn’t matter what else is on stage – including choreographed dance – all eyes are instinctively on her."
- Tristan Bliss, Oregon ArtsWatch (On "Skeleton Piano Dances")
Wright is a born performer...It doesn’t matter what else is on stage – including choreographed dance – all eyes are instinctively on her."
- Tristan Bliss, Oregon ArtsWatch (On "Skeleton Piano Dances")
* = Graphic design by Jennifer Wright
Ancient Futures concerts, 2024
April 27 & 28, Alberta Abbey, Portland, Oregon
Co-produced with Patrick Brewer and Daniel Brugh, this otherworldly audio-visual experience combined cinematic new music, wild CG storytelling, and adventurous live performances on my Skeleton Piano and Cloud Gamelan writ large on a massive screen.
April 27 & 28, Alberta Abbey, Portland, Oregon
Co-produced with Patrick Brewer and Daniel Brugh, this otherworldly audio-visual experience combined cinematic new music, wild CG storytelling, and adventurous live performances on my Skeleton Piano and Cloud Gamelan writ large on a massive screen.
Guest Artist concert with the EDME (Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble) New Music Festival 2023
October 13, Farmer's Market Pavilion Plaza, Eugene, Oregon
My Skeleton Piano made its way to Eugene, OR for a feature show on festival opening night, the first-ever Mobile Piano Cave installation!
Presented in conjunction with ArtCity's "BEAM Showcase" of outdoor mega-projections & 18 illuminated art installations.
October 13, Farmer's Market Pavilion Plaza, Eugene, Oregon
My Skeleton Piano made its way to Eugene, OR for a feature show on festival opening night, the first-ever Mobile Piano Cave installation!
Presented in conjunction with ArtCity's "BEAM Showcase" of outdoor mega-projections & 18 illuminated art installations.
Songs of Post-Apocalyptic Instruments at the 2023 New Music Gathering
June 23, Lincoln Hall, Portland State University
This concert featured several of my experimental, "post-apocalyptic" instruments: The Chimaera, The Egg, The Skeleton Piano, and The Phoenix in a program of compositions centered around climate change.
This concert was generously supported by a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission.
June 23, Lincoln Hall, Portland State University
This concert featured several of my experimental, "post-apocalyptic" instruments: The Chimaera, The Egg, The Skeleton Piano, and The Phoenix in a program of compositions centered around climate change.
This concert was generously supported by a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission.
The Phoenix Project: Art in the Time of Climate Emergency, 2021 *
2 shows on November 14, BodyVox Theater, Portland
Our piano studio was fortunate to be awarded grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC) and the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) to support this epic project!
This professional, evening-length production featured the world premieres of three new compositions for my experimental instrument "Chimaera" and the Skeleton Piano, the world premiere of our second mini-documentary film The Phoenix Project: The Making of The Transmogrified Instruments, and the world premiere of The Battle Cry of the Phoenix for Skeleton Piano and an army of Transmogrified Instruments: 15 larger-than-life playable trash sound sculptures designed, created & played by the students of Jennifer Wright Piano Studio!
The multi-generational cast of The Phoenix Project with their Transmogrified Instruments: human-sized sound sculptures made entirely of trash
Full program:
"All Imaginable Actions Must Be Taken" for Chimaera
"Anthropocene: Legacy" for Skeleton Piano
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"There Is No Away" for Skeleton Piano and fabric
"The Battle Cry of the Phoenix": the Fire Dancers reveal The Phoenix
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The Phoenix rises!
Incognita for amplified/prepared Skeleton Piano, electronics, and video (2018)
At the intersection of fantastical connectivity and physical isolation, “Incognita” is a multimedia exploration of the divisions between our physical and digital selves, a meditation upon the nebulous nature of digital connections and the search for meaningful interaction.
Swimming in the indistinct waters of the subconscious and accompanied by fleeting, projected words and images, fluttering ‘sound clouds’ delicately emerge, creating a soundscape as difficult to quantify as our emotions. Fading, morphing, and migrating from player to instrument and back, the textures float like clouds in the sky, their changing forms taking on whatever fanciful shapes we see in them. Strange and fragmented, they enchant but also mislead - much as digital communications are so easily misinterpreted - and are themselves misled and frustrated in their efforts to coalesce into a linear thread.
The body of the pianist, armored with new appendages to try to meet the prepared piano on its own terms, becomes inseparable from the instrument. Unusual sound treatments create strange dimensions with electronic aid, at once capturing the irrational and illusory digital experience and revealing, through the direct production of sound, the craving for human touch. The physical concert experience of this piece is similarly augmented: it is meant to be absorbed with the aid of a QR code scanner phone app.
At the intersection of fantastical connectivity and physical isolation, “Incognita” is a multimedia exploration of the divisions between our physical and digital selves, a meditation upon the nebulous nature of digital connections and the search for meaningful interaction.
Swimming in the indistinct waters of the subconscious and accompanied by fleeting, projected words and images, fluttering ‘sound clouds’ delicately emerge, creating a soundscape as difficult to quantify as our emotions. Fading, morphing, and migrating from player to instrument and back, the textures float like clouds in the sky, their changing forms taking on whatever fanciful shapes we see in them. Strange and fragmented, they enchant but also mislead - much as digital communications are so easily misinterpreted - and are themselves misled and frustrated in their efforts to coalesce into a linear thread.
The body of the pianist, armored with new appendages to try to meet the prepared piano on its own terms, becomes inseparable from the instrument. Unusual sound treatments create strange dimensions with electronic aid, at once capturing the irrational and illusory digital experience and revealing, through the direct production of sound, the craving for human touch. The physical concert experience of this piece is similarly augmented: it is meant to be absorbed with the aid of a QR code scanner phone app.
RUSH HOUR with Heidi Duckler Dance NW
5.18.2019 @ NW Marine Artists Studios, Portland, OR
Rush Hour is a site-specific, interdisciplinary dance project, in which an assemblage of cars, trucks, scooters, and bikes provides the setting for a collection of narratives about human relationships and identities. Each story is told in, on or around a different stationary vehicle, including trucks, motorcycles, cars and bicycles - and one very special piano on wheels: my Skeleton Piano!
I've developed a new work for Skeleton Piano and fixed media for this show in collaboration with dancers Snubb and Kya Bliss, entitled Punxsutawney Blues. Inspired in part by the movie "Groundhog Day", it wonders if rush hour isn't actually all day, every day...
5.18.2019 @ NW Marine Artists Studios, Portland, OR
Rush Hour is a site-specific, interdisciplinary dance project, in which an assemblage of cars, trucks, scooters, and bikes provides the setting for a collection of narratives about human relationships and identities. Each story is told in, on or around a different stationary vehicle, including trucks, motorcycles, cars and bicycles - and one very special piano on wheels: my Skeleton Piano!
I've developed a new work for Skeleton Piano and fixed media for this show in collaboration with dancers Snubb and Kya Bliss, entitled Punxsutawney Blues. Inspired in part by the movie "Groundhog Day", it wonders if rush hour isn't actually all day, every day...
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SKELETON PIANO DANCES *
Bodyvox Theater, Portland, OR (2015)
This multimedia live music/dance theater event fused modern choreography by Agnieszka Laska Dancers, large-scale video artistry by filmmaker Takafumi Uehara, and groundbreaking modern music by three living composers that seeks to map the wilderness of the inner human landscape. The evening’s core work was the world premiere of my complete concert-length suite Obscure Terrain, performed live on the world’s only “Skeleton Piano”: a deconstructed, experimental instrument that delivers a unique visual and sonic feast.
Bodyvox Theater, Portland, OR (2015)
This multimedia live music/dance theater event fused modern choreography by Agnieszka Laska Dancers, large-scale video artistry by filmmaker Takafumi Uehara, and groundbreaking modern music by three living composers that seeks to map the wilderness of the inner human landscape. The evening’s core work was the world premiere of my complete concert-length suite Obscure Terrain, performed live on the world’s only “Skeleton Piano”: a deconstructed, experimental instrument that delivers a unique visual and sonic feast.
Obscure Terrain for amplified/prepared Skeleton Piano and effects (2014-2015)
This 45-minute, seven-movement suite and my one-of-a-kind Skeleton Piano came into the world together, each creating the other. The project began as an exploration in discarding the unnecessary and opening up new sonic possibilities, a piratical hijacking of tradition. Rescued from the landfill and stripped down by sledgehammer, crowbar and chisel to its barest essentials, the Skeleton Piano has been reincarnated as a wildly capable sculptural sound machine.
Unfettered by external trappings, its inner workings are laid bare to direct contact with all manner of external materials and techniques. This unprecedented freedom of attack allows wild approaches to acoustic sound production, unearthing an orchestral range of unexpected and captivating sounds created with full-body performance techniques on all parts of the instrument.
The Skeleton Piano challenges every notion of what a keyboard instrument - or, indeed a pianist - is or could be. It requires its performer to evolve past traditional pianism and embody exotic extra-musical demands. As its systematic destruction demolished barriers and externalized the internal, it became a meditation on intrinsic meaning and a metaphor for the most universal of human ambitions: the search for self. As OBSCURE TERRAIN moves through terra incognita, it leaves behind a ghostly map of the wilderness of the human heart.
Each of the seven movements explores a unique capability of the Skeleton Piano, many of which could never (safely) be recreated elsewhere. Every time it is moved or played, it changes and falls apart a little more, its sound evolving. With every fantastical noise that is coaxed from it, the Skeleton Piano reminds us that, like all art and life, it too one day shall pass into eternity - like the ancient Egyptian King of Kings Ozymandias, who gave his name to the suite’s last movement.
In Intro: The Map is Not the Terrain, an electronic delay effect is layered on top of a sparse, percussive musical structure (the map) to expand it into a 3-dimensional soundscape. The sounds are created mainly through direct contact with traditionally taboo parts of the piano, using two of the piano’s own keys as mallets.
Chant for the Unknown is propelled by the optimistic energy and anxious excitement that accompanies every journey. It employs muting and playing the strings with both hands (above the keyboard) and feet (underneath the keyboard) as well as a simple bottle cap rail on the bass strings and a tambourine stick wedged in between the pedals.
Our Bodies Are the Real Continents was inspired by a monologue from the movie “The English Patient”, wherein a dying woman reflects upon the scars left by love and war. It is a meditation on the marks our bodies collect as we go through life, which combine to make a unique physical map of our experiences. The sounds of this movement are created with shot glasses played on the piano strings and case, a paper rail, and various methods of muting the strings with the feet to transform the underlying texture.
Terra Firma explores how precarious the line between steadiness and vertigo really is: how the knowledge of where you are - in your life, in the physical world - can dissolve so frighteningly quickly. Special tools used in this movement include rubber beaters, fingers tapping on and plucking the strings, a junkyard cymbal, and magnet strips placed directly on the strings.
Dislocated / Suffocated was inspired by a line from the U2 song “A Sort of Homecoming” from the 1984 album “The Unforgettable Fire”. To me, this line perfectly describes the isolation and devastation that can occur when we go through life trapped and suffocated by habits and cyclical patterns of behavior that we can’t - or don’t - break out of. This movement is played almost entirely on the strings of the piano and uses an EBow (an electronic bowing device meant for guitars); picture wire, shot glasses, and piano hammers cannibalized from another piano that I destroyed a few years back.
As the Valley Explodes / No Spoken Words, also inspired by the same U2 song as the previous movement, depicts the emotional impact of your life exploding around you. This is perhaps the first piece in the piano literature to employ 88-note full-piano clusters.
Coda: Ozymandias, inspired by Shelley’s 1818 sonnet by the same name, contemplates the fleeting nature of human life and passions. It utilizes a violin bow, timpani mallets and vocalizations (joined by the dancers’ voices) and reintroduces the electronic delay effect. In its spacious and meditative ending we finally attain peace.
This 45-minute, seven-movement suite and my one-of-a-kind Skeleton Piano came into the world together, each creating the other. The project began as an exploration in discarding the unnecessary and opening up new sonic possibilities, a piratical hijacking of tradition. Rescued from the landfill and stripped down by sledgehammer, crowbar and chisel to its barest essentials, the Skeleton Piano has been reincarnated as a wildly capable sculptural sound machine.
Unfettered by external trappings, its inner workings are laid bare to direct contact with all manner of external materials and techniques. This unprecedented freedom of attack allows wild approaches to acoustic sound production, unearthing an orchestral range of unexpected and captivating sounds created with full-body performance techniques on all parts of the instrument.
The Skeleton Piano challenges every notion of what a keyboard instrument - or, indeed a pianist - is or could be. It requires its performer to evolve past traditional pianism and embody exotic extra-musical demands. As its systematic destruction demolished barriers and externalized the internal, it became a meditation on intrinsic meaning and a metaphor for the most universal of human ambitions: the search for self. As OBSCURE TERRAIN moves through terra incognita, it leaves behind a ghostly map of the wilderness of the human heart.
Each of the seven movements explores a unique capability of the Skeleton Piano, many of which could never (safely) be recreated elsewhere. Every time it is moved or played, it changes and falls apart a little more, its sound evolving. With every fantastical noise that is coaxed from it, the Skeleton Piano reminds us that, like all art and life, it too one day shall pass into eternity - like the ancient Egyptian King of Kings Ozymandias, who gave his name to the suite’s last movement.
In Intro: The Map is Not the Terrain, an electronic delay effect is layered on top of a sparse, percussive musical structure (the map) to expand it into a 3-dimensional soundscape. The sounds are created mainly through direct contact with traditionally taboo parts of the piano, using two of the piano’s own keys as mallets.
Chant for the Unknown is propelled by the optimistic energy and anxious excitement that accompanies every journey. It employs muting and playing the strings with both hands (above the keyboard) and feet (underneath the keyboard) as well as a simple bottle cap rail on the bass strings and a tambourine stick wedged in between the pedals.
Our Bodies Are the Real Continents was inspired by a monologue from the movie “The English Patient”, wherein a dying woman reflects upon the scars left by love and war. It is a meditation on the marks our bodies collect as we go through life, which combine to make a unique physical map of our experiences. The sounds of this movement are created with shot glasses played on the piano strings and case, a paper rail, and various methods of muting the strings with the feet to transform the underlying texture.
Terra Firma explores how precarious the line between steadiness and vertigo really is: how the knowledge of where you are - in your life, in the physical world - can dissolve so frighteningly quickly. Special tools used in this movement include rubber beaters, fingers tapping on and plucking the strings, a junkyard cymbal, and magnet strips placed directly on the strings.
Dislocated / Suffocated was inspired by a line from the U2 song “A Sort of Homecoming” from the 1984 album “The Unforgettable Fire”. To me, this line perfectly describes the isolation and devastation that can occur when we go through life trapped and suffocated by habits and cyclical patterns of behavior that we can’t - or don’t - break out of. This movement is played almost entirely on the strings of the piano and uses an EBow (an electronic bowing device meant for guitars); picture wire, shot glasses, and piano hammers cannibalized from another piano that I destroyed a few years back.
As the Valley Explodes / No Spoken Words, also inspired by the same U2 song as the previous movement, depicts the emotional impact of your life exploding around you. This is perhaps the first piece in the piano literature to employ 88-note full-piano clusters.
Coda: Ozymandias, inspired by Shelley’s 1818 sonnet by the same name, contemplates the fleeting nature of human life and passions. It utilizes a violin bow, timpani mallets and vocalizations (joined by the dancers’ voices) and reintroduces the electronic delay effect. In its spacious and meditative ending we finally attain peace.
Movements 1 & 2 of Obscure Terrain for Skeleton Piano & effects,
performed at Crazy Jane: Inner Nature, Nov. 2014 @ Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
performed at Crazy Jane: Inner Nature, Nov. 2014 @ Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
Waters of the World with Heidi Duckler Dance NW
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell Building, Portland, Oregon, June 15-16 & 22-23, 2018
An entire show of Skeleton Piano composed around watery narratives. Six dancers guided the audience through various spaces in the Fair-Haired Dumbbell's dual, canted, 6-story towers while they were still under construction in an immersive, site-specific layering of surround sound & dynamic, overlapped 360-degree visual projections.
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell Building, Portland, Oregon, June 15-16 & 22-23, 2018
An entire show of Skeleton Piano composed around watery narratives. Six dancers guided the audience through various spaces in the Fair-Haired Dumbbell's dual, canted, 6-story towers while they were still under construction in an immersive, site-specific layering of surround sound & dynamic, overlapped 360-degree visual projections.
The SkeletonPiano at Waters of the World. Dancers: Conrad Kaczor and Kiel Moton.
Portland's Fair-Haired Dumbbell Building.
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"The Whispered Counsel of Past Lives" for toy piano and music boxes (world premiere). Kya Bliss, dance.
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Give me a shout!
jenniferawright (at) yahoo.com | 503-475-2406 | 3656 SE Morrison Street, Portland, OR 97214
Check out skeletonpiano.com to learn more about my Skeleton Piano!
jenniferawright (at) yahoo.com | 503-475-2406 | 3656 SE Morrison Street, Portland, OR 97214
Check out skeletonpiano.com to learn more about my Skeleton Piano!