Positioning in Radiography [2007]

for three toy pianos [one player]

duration :: 13’

Written for Isabel Ettenauer

First performance :: Mabel Kwan — ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn, NY), 20 December 2013

Recording :: Mabel Kwan :: Kairos 0015069KAI [ label | amazon | spotify ]

Positioning in Radiography takes its title from a classic medical textbook, first published in 1939, discussing the ways in which a patient’s body is best manipulated for the acquisition of diagnostic radiographic imagery. It was a favorite source for the painter Francis Bacon, who found ample material there for his drawings and paintings of twisted, contorted, stressed bodies.

Strain and awkwardness are among the watchwords of this piece as well, because of the nature of the instruments involved: the relations between the performer and the frail, inconvenient instruments and between the complex, subtle, ramified musical material and the limited capacity of the instruments to convey it can be thus understood. The world inhabited by the musical substance exists in reference to that of a nobler but similarly limited keyboard instrument, the harpsichord, and in particular to the works of Johann Jakob Froberger; everything is ornament upon ornament, from the twisting local figuration to the overlaying of repetition and restatement. The disjunction between the finely tuned filigree (which itself struggles with a tendency towards obstinacy and zeroing-out of expressive content) and the rough, detuned bell-sounds of the instrument produces an unstable and uncomfortable situation, like a patient, neck bent, head pressed between heavy metal plates.