Ross Bolleter (born 1946, Subiaco, Western Australia) is a composer and musician whose work is focused on ruined pianos. His recordings are available on Emanem (London), Pogus (New York), New Albion (San Francisco) and Tall Poppies (Sydney), as well as on his WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies) label. https://bolleter.wixsite.com/warpsmusic
Career
Music
Bolleter studied the music theory as well as its history and composition at the University of Western Australia between 1964 and 1967. This fired his interest in the music of composers such as Webern, Boulez and Cage. After playing the piano for six years at the Parmelia Hilton, he explored non-conventional timbral and rhythmic possibilities of the prepared piano and released a cassette, The Temple of Joyous Bones, which featured the piano. Bolleter found inspiration in the eighties playing and recording improvised music with flautist Tos Mahoney and double bassist, Ryszard Ratajczak.
Over the past thirty years Bolleter has explored the timbral possibilities of ruined pianos, as quoted: old pianos that have been exposed to the elements of time and weather thus acquiring novel and unexpected musical possibilities. A piano is ruined (rather than neglected or devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers and has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, tonks and dedoomps. The notes that do not work are at least as interesting as those that do.
Ross Bolleter has five ruined pianos in his kitchen including the original ruined piano from Nallan Sheep Station, near Cue, 800 km north east of Perth, Western Australia. At Kim Hack's and Penny Mossops's olive farm, Wambyn, near York, Western Australia, Kim Hack and Bolleter developed the Ruined Piano Sanctuary, where some forty pianos are ruining in their own ways, and at their own pace, variously under trees, in dams, and on roofs. Bolleter's CD Frontier Piano, which represents the best of his work from 2007–2014, is almost entirely devoted to recordings of these dying pianos. Each piano in decay is a long-running composition. Death comes to every piano, and dying, each sings a different kind of song.
In 1989 Bolleter set up the Synchronicity Project where he devised a series of intuitive pieces where musicians improvised simultaneously but in different centres in Australia and across the world. In several instances these pieces were set up to cast a net for synchronistic events, especially musical synchronicities. The Synchronicity Project produced a series of radiophonic works. The first of these works was Simulplay 1 (September 1989) had Jim Denley playing flute to a live audience at the B rucknerhaus in the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria – with Bolleter playing piano and accordion, together with Carol Henning playing plastic trombone, in the ABC radio studios, Perth. The second work, That Time/Simulplay 2 – an intuitive piece for two musicians on opposite sides of a continent, playing at precisely the same time but unable to hear each other, while a radio audience hears both of them – involved Ryszard Ratajczak playing double bass in Studio 210 of ABC FM Sydney with Bolleter playing both pianos in separate recordings in ABC's Studio 621, Perth. That Time/Simulplay 2 was released on the Pogus label, New York, as part of the album Crow Country in 2000. <Ross Bolleter and Rowan Hammond:“Improvising with synchronistic experiences” in NMA 9, Melbourne, 1991>
Another radiophonic piece Pocket Sky: a worldwide link up between Jim Denley (Radio ORF Vienna), Stevie Wishart (BBC London), David Moss (SFR Berlin), Jon Rose (ABC Sydney), Simone de Haan (ABC Melbourne), and Bolleter (ABC Perth), took place on 21 October 1991. It was released as the CD Pocket Sky (2004) (WARPS W08).
Bolleter's 1996 piece Left Hand of the Universe CD (WARPS W02) linked up Michal Murin and other Slovak and Czech musicians in Bratislava, and Stephen Scott and various musicians at Colorado College, without recourse to radio. All the musicians were playing ruined instruments, or were in the process of ruining them. Left Hand of the Universe was released on CD in 1997 as WARPS W02.
Bolleter's output also includes three CDs of café music: Paradise Café, Café Sophia and Café Antoinette which feature him playing the accordion, his film music, and his songs. Bolleter's songs, sung by Anthony Cormican, are also featured on their CD Songs from the Third Watch. This CD includes Bolleter's setting of Kenneth Slessor's 1937 poem Five Bells and Cormican's setting of Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life.