Volleyball

This piece is concerned with finding awkwardness within a brand of playfulness I’ve been interested in for a while. I’m interested in finding kinds of motion which know where they’re going but fail to arrive gracefully. What captivates me are sonic spaces where exploration insist on continuing even where gestures ‘off-balance’ is underscored.

I try to imagine the Tonnetz as a playground for ungainly movement. I use Neo-Riemannian transformations (P, L, and R operations typically employed for smooth voice-leading) to generate harmonies that overshoot and stumble. I apply these transformations to trace clear geometric paths while aiming for clumsy results. I'm trying to maintain structural coherence in triadic relationships while making them land very badly,

I'm focusing on awkwardness as compositional fabric itself rather than a quality which is emanated from musical materials. For instance, I want rhythmic gestures to trip over harmonic changes. I cluster textures in uncomfortable registers but with a timbral profile which is . In many senses, the Tonnetz gives me precision for controlling degrees of what would be classically categorized as metrically or harmonically  ‘unfitting’. For me, contiguous transformational distances can feel enormous whilst adventitious ones land with a kind of unexpected intimacy.

I'm looking for playfulness that emerges through friction rather than despite it, trying to make structural clarity and physical ungainliness occupy the same gesture. Ultimately, I'm interesting in exploring motion which thinks understands its own logic but executes it awkwardly, and then also realizes it doesn’t understand itself.