bruises; yellow, green, and purple
concerto for steinway spirio player piano, video, and orchestra
10-14 days after a trauma, a bruise will become a faint brownish yellow; at 5-10 days, it will most likely be a greenish color; and in the first few days, it will be its distinctive shade of purple.
In bruises; yellow, green, and purple, the world’s first concerto – or really anticoncerto – for Spirio Player Piano, the orchestra similarly attempts to trace the origin wound of its bruises, while the cyborg soloist battles two inner forces, the nakedly human (Kate) and the impossibly machine (the Spirio), a tangled mess of wire tendons and cable arteries.
Due to the limitations of the Spirio as an instrument, the majority of its material needed to stay on the keyboard, which resulted in the use of strangely classicist idioms in an obsessive loop of two materials, a harmonized chorale melody and 2nd theme, in a series of uncompromising algorithms. Yellow is an introduction scored for orchestra alone, dramatic giant footfalls and their shuddering echoes a premonition of the Spirio’s clangorous pedal. Green, the concerto proper, is combinations and variations of different types of clusters that are formed by layering the chorale and its second theme. And Purple is a duet for the piano and video, one deaf and the other mute, conversing in the language of loneliness. The human soloist appears for the first time, silently imprisoned in a pixelated uncanny valley.
Ultimately, invisible wounds are the hardest to heal because they are the least likely to be believed. We invented machines to try to capture and record these inner traumas, manifesting them as scratches on the surface of time itself. We birthed the utopian immortality of recorded media, desperate wizards using our little devices to reanimate the sick, resurrect the dead, and preserve the living, in the face of the world’s continuously unfathomable suffering.
The machine at the center of this piece, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is monstrous but deeply sympathetic. Absence is at the center of this work, but not necessarily loss, just as a bruised mind is not by default a broken one.