The Well-Sorted Disklavier
Installation for Disklavier and Live Video (c. 4 hours)
As opaque algorithms sort our access to information more and more – ranking news, media and music according to our past clicks, it becomes increasingly necessary to engage critically with the sorting algorithm. In its purest form, a sorting algorithm takes elements of a list and puts them into a new order by comparing consecutive elements. The sorting algorithm has primarily been used for curation and control rather than composition.
In The Well-Sorted Disklavier, we begin from the fictional premise that when J.S Bach compiled The Well-Tempered Clavier, placing each set of works in order of its key from low to high, he left the job unfinished. The 544 notes of the famous C Major Prelude from Book 1 are taken apart, shuffled, sorted and recomposed note by note according to the hidden aesthetics of the sorting algorithms.
This process takes several hours to complete, as the algorithms scan through the piece hundreds of thousands of times. Fragments of the original material emerge momentarily, before being lost again amidst the perpetual sorting process until we are finally reunited with the original Prelude. However, the algorithms do not stop sorting and continue to recompose the piece until we are left with a husk of the original; organised successfully according to the algorithm’s own functional agenda, but unrecognisable.
The Well-Sorted Disklavier is an installation-performance for Disklavier and Live Video, created in collaboration with electronic musician Wilf Amis. It was awarded The Conlon Foundation Prize 2021 and presented as part of the Gaudeamus Muzieweek Saturday Night.
This piece represented the culmination of several years’ worth of interest and research into how sorting algorithms might be used as a compositional tool. As far as I am aware, this is the first fully acoustic piece of music which uses sorting algorithms in real-time (if not, please send me information about one as I would be very interested!). In March 2020 I gave a presentation on sorting algorithms and music which you can view here if you are interested.
I had previously explored with using sorting algorthims as a ‘fixed’ means of working with structural permutations, but I was particularly keen on realising this idea in a live, acoustic form. In 2021 we was given the opportunity, with support from The Conlon Foundation and Gaudeamus Muziekweek to finally realise this idea through the Disklavier.
The original idea had been to collate every movement from the WTC into a single movement work which would then be processed, but after doing a bit of maths we realised that the resultant piece would take several months to perform – even at an extremely fast tempo. I am hoping that this piece will be the first in a series of similar works which incorporate sorting algorithms as compositional tools.