Toccata

I began composing Toccata just after I had bought my first ever grand piano. I wanted to write a piece to mark the occasion. I sat down at it and began tapping out a single B, then started adding notes until the B swelled into a great cluster, and then the rhythm broke apart, and I began again.

Toccata keeps doing that. It is a contraption that builds itself up and falls to pieces, four or five times, fast and relentless, each time starting from one note and putting itself together in a new way.

As the piece progressed, I came across a video of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, the machine he built from scrap in 1960 in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. It was built to destroy itself. For twenty-seven minutes a balloon inflated and burst, coloured smoke poured out, paintings were made and destroyed and bottles crashed to the ground, until the fire brigade arrived. Tinguely thought that industry and automation “impose a rhythm on us,” and that his work had to keep moving to stay alive. Watching it helped me shape the form and the mood of Toccata: a machine ecstatically running itself into ruins.