Behind the music: “Fragment”
Part of a series exploring each piece on my debut album, Look How Brightly
Fragment began life as a workshop piece for the Ligeti Quartet at a contemporary music conference and festival hosted by Sheffield University in 2018. The original score was deliberately open, a series of short musical cells that performers would repeat freely until cued to move on. The notation itself was fragmented, and the act of performance became a living embodiment of that fragmentation, with materials breaking apart, colliding, reforming, and finding temporary moments of alignment before scattering again.
When I returned to the piece some years later, I decided to rewrite it in a more fixed way so I could be painstakingly precise about how the fragments and repetitions overlap, build, and reintegrate. The new version contains the DNA of the original open score, but the freedom is replaced by a carefully shaped rhythmic drive, where fragments weave through and are passed around the quartet in tightly interlocking patterns.
Fracture and return
At the heart of Fragment is the idea of loss and retrieval. I was inspired by the psychological concept sometimes called “soul retrieval,” the belief that when we experience trauma or profound challenge, a part of the self may splinter or detach as a means of survival. The process of reintegration, the welcoming of those lost aspects home, can be found in many different healing traditions, from Western psychotherapy to certain shamanic practices.
While the piece acknowledges these ideas, it does not attempt to represent or imitate any particular cultural ritual or therapeutic modality. I was more interested in the universal symbolism of fragmentation and wholeness.
We all, at different times in our lives, negotiate between the pieces of ourselves we have lost, the ones we still hold, and the ones we hope to reintegrate.
A quartet in pieces
The piece opens with a low drone on G, a foundation that feels grounded and static, but only fleetingly. From this single tone, the strings splinter, their lines fracturing into restless fragments that twist away from the centre. Remnants of the musical cells from the original workshop version are passed around the quartet in a chaotic yet strangely coherent way, like a mosaic that keeps rearranging itself.
The cello often plays a pivotal structural role. At times a kind of shepherd, trying to gather the fragments back together; at others, pushing against the ensemble and testing its cohesion. The music alternates between these two impulses, one that reaches towards unity and another that resists it.
Frida Kahlo and her painting The Two Fridas (1939)
Fragmented selves
Much of my work has explored the relationship between unison and divergence, and the way music can move between oneness and multiplicity, coherence and disarray. In pieces like One is Fun, Look How Brightly the Universe Shines!, and Strings Attached, this tension becomes a game or quest for unison between parts. In Fragment, it reflects the complexity of human identity.
Here, reintegration does not mean that everything must merge neatly into one. Rather, it is about learning to let separate voices coexist side by side. We all contain fragments, contradictory emotions, memories, and identities from the past and present. This piece is about making peace with them.
The themes of Fragment recall Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas (1939), which depicts a divided self — two versions of one identity seated side by side, bound together by a single artery yet emotionally fractured. One figure appears wounded and exposed, the other more intact, suggesting a psyche split by experience. This image resonates strongly with the quartet’s exploration of fragmentation: the sense that traumatic events can divide the self into separate parts, held in tension yet still inextricably connected.
Towards acceptance
As the piece unfolds, moments of rhythmic synchrony feel increasingly deliberate, as if the quartet is learning to breathe together again. By the final section, there is a sense of acceptance andcompassion. It is not a neat resolution; instead, there is a steady forward motion that feels like conscious surrender. The music stops wrestling with itself. It accepts what it has become: beautifully fractured and whole at the same time.