The Big Silent is an artistic investigation of the grand piano as one of the most powerful instruments of Western musical culture. Drawing on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hameln, where music becomes a force capable of leading bodies away, the work reflects on how instruments themselves can shape, influence, and control those who encounter them.

The publication follows artist Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s collective disassembly and reconfiguration of a grand piano. Its internal parts are extracted and preserved as “piano parasites,” turning the instrument into a speculative archive that exposes the histories, ideologies, and hidden agencies embedded within Western music.

Rather than destroying the piano, The Big Silent softens and destabilizes it—approaching the instrument as a haunted, parasitic body whose authority can be questioned, opened, and transformed.

Text by Majken Overgaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard

The book is published with from the Danish Arts Foundation

Book Design by Nicolai Bejder Studio

Language: English
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 9788797588215
Number of pages: 128
Size in mm (W×H×D): 368×128×15 mm