for piano

Program notes

This piece was born out of a fascination with imperfect machines – to me, there is a deeply tragic, yet strangely beautiful quality to the thought of the faulty machine, the eternally imperfect entity. The image of a robot awkwardly trying to dance was a constant thought in the writing of this work. The machine may be able to understand and recognise the human ideal towards which it aspires, but the same processes that allow this understanding impede it to fully realise the idea, and the machine is doomed to an existence of flawed efforts and glitches, awkwardness and imperfections. Never ‘human’ enough. One wonders if the intelligent machine is aware of its limitations and the futility of its efforts, but maybe it does not matter. After all, what can a machine do, other than try again, time after time?

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The work’s soundworld was built through a strict compositional system of rigorous counterpoint of different musical lines, all of them derived from one short line or 'cantus firmus' which was treated and transformed in a serial way. As the piece progresses, this process is gradually ‘humanized’ by allowing greater human involvement, both from the composer and the performer, and tonal relationships, thematic elements and melodic and dynamic shapes make their way to the foreground of the work. As this journey unfolds new registers and sonorities of the instrument are uncovered, and moments of transcendence appear, only to in the end return to its original state – its inevitable circumstance, its inescapable nature.

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And so, the robot keeps dancing, for all it can do is dance.

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Recorded by Keelan Carew.​

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Duration: c. 10'