Rejected Ballet Music
(ultimately not appropriate for dancing)
(ultimately not appropriate for dancing)
About the title: It came fairly late in the process of writing the piece, at a delicate time when the piece needed to gather itself around a clear ethos. It doesn’t reflect the idea that started the piece, but rather seeks to extend, bolster, and interact with it, to suggest avenues for listening. (The piece first grew out of software that I developed to generate chord progressions by algorithmically finding paths through vast networks of related harmonies, all bounded by an understanding of the hands’ ability to play only a particular body of chords on the piano. But those technical aspects do not define the piece’s character and I don’t care to make them the center of attention.)
I like to imagine this piece as a kind of undanceable dance (a bit of therapy), something too personal to succeed because it never was actually meant to be shared. Perhaps it was begun with the intention of actually supporting dance but, at some point, it was consumed by an incommunicably personal problem. That’s why this ballet music was rejected but, beyond that, its rejection casts the piece in a more private light: There’s intimacy in our experience of finally hearing it — like reading an article rejected from a magazine or a never-published book. Just like us, it is imperfect and vulnerable; so, in sympathizing with it, we have an opportunity a little bit better to love and accept ourselves.