Lamento—the Italian word for a lament or song of mourning—is a sound work created for a forest. The attentive visitor may hear subdued tones and sounds from eight different pianos, played back through eight loudspeakers placed within the forest. Slowly, an endless scale emerges, branching through the greenery and blending with the sounds of the site. Through the eight speakers, the instruments slowly play a C major scale, time after time—note by note, ascending in a lament.

Through Lamento, the relationship between tree and wood is explored—between nature and culture—and how the wooden objects that surround us all carry the same history: having once been living beings in a forest.

In this work, I have been interested in the piano and its past as a tree, and in how this history and existence can be made audible. I have experimented with recording tones and sounds produced by the piano’s wooden soundboard and allowed these to encounter the forest world from which they once came.

By setting two layers of sound against each other, Lamento seeks to make audible the relationship between wood and tree, culture and nature, human and more-than-human. In the work, all of this briefly merges into one.

Commissioned by:
Kalv Festival for Contemporary Music, 2024—opening. First sketch—2006

Technique:
8-channel looped sound installation. Each loudspeaker constitutes a “voice” from a specific piano.

Forest area:
Approximately 200 square meters