Lutz Bacher (Pipe Organ)

Narrator: Lutz Bacher’s Pipe Organ is an electric Yamaha that has been outfitted with a set of mechanized hammers. The instrument runs continuously, playing a random sequence of notes and silences.

For this audio guide, Bacher was the interviewer, not the interviewee. She asked Alex Zachary of Alex Zachary Peter Currie Gallery to describe her work.

Alex Zachary: For me, the rows of hammers, this sort of external machine that’s grafted onto the machine reminds you, of your expectation that a piano needs to be played by somebody. There are fingers that will play the piano. And instead it has this thing that is sitting on top of it, or that’s been sort of mounted onto the keyboard, which suggests that in this case nobody’s playing the piano.

A pipe organ in the church sort of leads the congregation in a song of praise or prayer or something. Some sort of music to the heavens. And this thing sort of ended up doing that. It sounds like it’s doing its own kind of otherworldly music in its own way.

Narrator: Bacher frequently describes her project as one of, quote, “cosmological investigation.” She also tries to remove evidence of her own hand from her artworks—letting other, perhaps larger, voices speak.