boxmusic is a miniature for toy piano. The title is a play on music-box, and the music is made up of short, monophonic fragments of fixed durations in each hand. Sometimes these overlap and sometimes they don’t. It is a 12-tone piece and the pitches come from a matrix that was used to create a long monophonic line which is distorted due to the ordering of the fragments in the piece. There are twelve sets of durations which make up 12 individual phrases, each heard four times. The piece also has a kind of rotational symmetry at the level of the phrase which can be best observed by looking at the music on the page. There is some freedom for the performer to structure the piece by choosing which pairs of pages to play (and therefore making the piece longer or shorter), choosing the number of times to play some repeat bars, and choosing and varying the tempo (like winding a music box). The intention is that the music is fleeting, and, although related, always changing.
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