for piano and fixed media (2019)

Christopher Knowles (b.1959) first gained recognition in the 1970s when avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson received an audio tape of Knowles reciting his poem, ‘Emily Likes the TV.’ Intrigued by Knowles’ unique use of language, which consisted of continuous, repeated variations on simple phrases in what seemed to be highly organised sequences, Wilson cast Knowles in a number of his productions, including Einstein on the Beach. According to Wilson, ‘it was a piece coded much like music. Like a cantata or fugue it worked with conjugations of thoughts repeated in variations.’

This piece is based on the audio from a 2017 performance of ‘Emily Likes the TV.’ Knowles’ words and rhythms are transcribed and accompanied by blocks of sound on the piano, initially in a literal and mechanical way, as if to mirror the structure of the poem. As the piece goes on the textures become more varied and the relationship between the piano and tape becomes less ‘locked in’ and more free, like two entities dancing around each other.

While transcribing Knowles’ voice, I was struck by how closely it resembles the collage-like techniques of DJs and producers working in sample-based music. It seems to resonate with how language works in the digital era, where syntax is made infinitely malleable by things like cut-and-paste tools and auto-correct functions. It’s language conceived as building blocks, like Lego, to be playfully constructed, deconstructed, shuffled and manipulated at will, an infinite variation of sequences generated from a single line of text: Emily likes the TV, because she watches the TV, because she likes it.