Australian composer
Ross Bolleter had a wonderful idea. Trained as an accordionist and classical pianist, he had spent years playing everything from hotel bar fare to free improvisation, concentrating on prepared piano in the latter. But, in 1988, he "discovered a piano that had been left on a tennis court in searing heat and bitter cold (as well as a flash flood) for about a year" and had an epiphany. Why not compose for and perform on these naturally "prepared" pianos?
Bolleter chooses to call them "ruined" as distinguished from "devastated" (which are "usually played in a crouched or lying position"), but one might rather think of them as "cured" by weather and the random happenstances of time.