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

Until January 10 of 2011, Artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), their well-known work entitled Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano. Exhibited for the first time in Germany in 2008, this work had also been presented before in New York City at the Gladstone Gallery. Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano represents a fusion between sculpture and performance. It consists of a grand piano that has been intervened by the artists with a perforation in its center and a prosthesis with wheels in each of its three supports. A pianist is placed in the perforation and interprets the well-known fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony Number 9. Because of his placement, the pianist must bend forward to begin to play the piano backwards, and thus he begins to play with the movement of the piano across the space, and with the musical interpretation. Because of the perforation done to the piano, two of the octaves in the instrument were rendered useless. As a result, Beethoven's piece becomes an even more intervened work as the sound is ambiguous, distorted, and filled with the incomplete structures of what previously was a rather well-known symphony that has represented several contexts regarding the solidarity and brotherhood among people and nations, and different ideological facts between cultures and the official hymn of the Schengen countries.