A virtuoso piece composed as a computer game - and a computer game composed as a piece.
The pianist sets out to climb a mountain. Their playing decides the route. Along the way they meet weather, animals, dreams, and obstacles, each one wired to a musical trigger that can branch the score, transform the sound, or wake the Disklavier into responding on its own. There is no fixed form: every performance is a different ascent.
I grew up inside the classical Romantic virtuoso repertoire, and that repertoire shaped both my pianism and the kind of composer I became. My DPhil at the University of Oxford examined the piano as a super instrument - an instrument whose technical capacities can be extended by software, machinery and design until things that were impossible for ten human fingers become musical material. Climb! is a direct continuation of that question, but routed through a second one: what if the form of the work were not fixed?
The composition is built around three macro-paths through a mountain. The pianist follows a path until a musical challenge appears - a passage that, depending on how it is played, branches the score onto a different route or rewards the player with a new kind of sound, a faster tempo, a re-tuning of the instrument, an octave shift the human hand could not make. The Mixed Reality Lab's Muzicodes system listens for these musical triggers in real time. Inside this network of paths and triggers are dispersed micro-compositions: short, virtuoso scenes that the pianist threads together in their own order.
At the keyboard sits not a single instrument but a duet. The Yamaha Disklavier is a self-playing grand piano; in Climb! it speaks back. During key passages it physically plays alongside the human pianist, takes over from them, opens up extra octaves, holds a chord while the pianist's hands are busy elsewhere. Some musicians have argued that an electroacoustic work like this can never really be a solo - that it is closer to a concerto in modern guise, with an invisible chamber-music partner that learns the player.
The audience can follow the climb in real time on a bespoke smartphone application, watching the route unfold and reading the musical decisions as they happen. Climb! has been studied as much as it has been performed: Anne Veinberg and Zubin Kanga's interpretations were the basis for a chapter on subjectivity and technological resistance in Catherine Laws's Performance, Subjectivity, and Experimentation (Leuven University Press, 2020), and the work has been documented in proceedings of the CHI and Audio Mostly conferences as a case study in human-machine performance.
Like a computer game or the World Wide Web, Climb! is non-linear, with a branching structure that guides the performer along different routes through the work. Maria Kallionpää, FAST blog
Climb! 360 in Concert · Abbey Road Studios · selections