ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how composers and artists orient performers and listeners towards pianos. A crucial piece of furniture in musical thought and practice, the piano shares much with the philosopher’s table. For many composers it was – for many it still is – an assumed background on which one writes. Orientations foreground aspects of worlds and bodies through the backgrounding of others. Ahmed reads this through interlacing Marxist theory and phenomenology. The commodity-form is paradigmatic of the relevance of the former influence: in this form is concealed a history of production that is forgotten at the moment of consumption; the object’s form presents it as independent of the historically contingent material relations that determine it. The domestic piano, a gendered object acting as simulacrum, becomes only more passive when being seen but not heard: yet this simultaneously reconfirms its familiar objecthood.
