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On this page, we highlight West Australian musicians on a regular basis. Our first featured musician is Ross Bolleter, a composer, performer and poet whose work focusses on ruined pianos. We have actively collected Ross's work in recorded and written format for many years and you can see a list og our holdings in our catalogue.

Ross Bolleter

Ross Bolleter was born in 1946 and is a West Australian composer, musician and poet. Bolleter studied music, including theory, history and composition, at the University of Western Australia. His study awoke an interest in the music of composers such as Anton Webern, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. After six years playing cocktail piano at the Parmelia Hilton, he investigated non-conventional timbral and rhythmic possibilities of the prepared piano, and released a cassette, Temple of Joyous Bones, which featured prepared piano.

Bolleter has explored playing ruined pianos, old pianos that have been found after been left exposed to the action of time and weather, thus acquiring novel and unexpected musical possibilities. Thus, a piano is ruined (rather than neglected or devastated) when it has been abandoned to all weathers and has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, tonks and dedoomps.

Ross has five ruined pianos in his kitchen, including the original ruined Piano from Nallan Sheep Station. At Kim Hack’s and Penny Mossops’s olive farm Wambyn, near York, Western Australia, Kim Hack and Bolleter developed the Ruined Piano Sanctuary, where some forty pianos are ruining in their own ways, and at their own pace, variously under trees, in dams, and on roofs. A recent CD of Bolleter’s, Solitary Light was partly recorded at the Wambyn Ruined Piano Sanctuary.

Bolleter has released some twenty CDs, primarily of ruined piano compositions and improvisations. However, his output also includes two CDs of café music, Paradise Café and Café Sophia, which feature his accordion playing. They include many of his compositions, including film music and songs.

Bolleter has performed with artists as various as Kavisha Mazzella, Tos Mahoney, Ryszard Ratajczak, Mark Cain, Jon Rose, Jim Denley – as well as with rock bands, jazz ensembles and cabaret bands. He has performed at the Adelaide Festival, and in tura new music’s Totally Huge New Music Festival between 2001 and 2011, as well as at Café Oto, a major experiemental venue in London.

Bolleter recently completed a commission for New York performer Margaret Leng Tan, as well as a commission for the West Australian Ensemble Decibel in 2011. In September 2011, Bolleter performed his composition Daughters of Time at the State Theatre, Perth. His work is regularly featured on ABC FM.

He was a founding member of The Blackeyed Susans and a co-founder, with Stephen Scott, of WARPS – the World association for Ruined Piano Studies.

Fremantle Press published a volume of his poems, Piano Hill in 2010. This collection includes his Suite for Ruined Piano, imaginative treatments of different aspects of the ruined piano world.