When I grow up to be the apocalypse

About

“When I grow up to be the apocalypse” is a one-hour live performance for piano, custom-built feedback system, and field recordings, conceived and composed by Maria Sappho in collaboration with Colin Frank. The work reimagines the grand piano as an underland instrument, buried through many evolutions of extinction. Field recordings from soil, migratory crossings, and caves are passed through its body. Inspired by Alvin Curran’s “Twentieth Century” (1994), which envisions the piano as a future relic, this piece tells a story from the perspective of the apocalypse itself – a modest witness and material survivor of an unknowable future. Cheerfully, it is a piano sonata for the end.