When I grow up to be the apocalypse

Free Event 

Maria Sappho concept / composition / piano / electronics 
Colin Frank composition / electronics 

Maria Sappho (USA, 1994) 
When I grow up to be the apocalypse (2025) 60’ World Premiere  

This work includes:  

Colin Frank (CAN, 1993) 
Heaving Subterranean Moraines, 15’ World Premiere  

Pianist, improviser and composer Maria Sappho – in collaboration with Colin Frank – performs the World Premiere of When I grow up to be the apocalypse. A one-hour live performance for piano, custom-built feedback system, and field recordings, the work reimagines the grand piano as an underland instrument buried through many evolutions of extinction. Field recordings from soil, migratory crossings, and caves passed through its body. 

“Once, in a conversation with Alvin Curran, we spoke about his Twentieth Century (1994), coincidentally written the year I was born. In that work, he imagines the piano as a future relic, unearthed long after the end of us all, an object entirely detached from the culture that created it: 

‘These [pianos] will be found anywhere the archaeologists look… on every Pacific atoll, at the bottoms of oceans and on mountain tops… if it were only our pianos that survived, imagine how much of our story these mute, half-worm-eaten, rusted black boxes could tell, if they were once again made to speak.’ (Curran, 1994) 

When I Grow Up to Be the Apocalypse is story told from the perspective of the apocalypse itself. A modest witness, a material survivor of some unknowable future. 

The work cheerfully calls itself a piano sonata for the end.” 

Co-produced by CEADA, CeReNeM and hcmf// with support from the University of Huddersfield; also supported by Soil recordings, University of West England 

Photo: Mario Sappho © Colin Frank