Behind the music: “Strings Attached”
Part of a series exploring each piece on my debut album, Look How Brightly
From the outset of Strings Attached, I wanted to explore a less conventional way of writing for violin and piano, one rooted in my preoccupations with homophony, repetition, sparse material, and horizontal line. The combination of these instruments carries such a weight of history that it can be hard to escape its familiar gestures. I listened to how others had approached the pairing, and two less conventional pieces shaped the language I found for my own: The Spit Veleta by Martin Arnold and Six Melodies by John Cage.
Arnold’s piece, with its vast second half of very slow, sustained chords, fascinated me for the way it alters our sense of time. It is not quite timeless, but what could be described as “tenseless,” a continuum where stasis and movement exist simultaneously. Its sparseness draws the listener inward, heightening awareness of every bow stroke, every resonance, every subtle shift in sound.
Cage’s Six Melodies intrigued me for a different reason. The sharing of a tightly limited palette of material between the violin and piano creates a striking sense of equality between the two instruments, often fusing them together as one. The repetition of these “gamuts” gives the music a wandering, cyclical quality that is constantly changing but always familiar.
Writing in unison
I set myself the challenge of writing a piece that exists almost entirely in unison. The material was derived from a field recording of a Welsh folk song that I transcribed via computer using a similar process to the one I used in The Body Keeps the Score, selecting fragments to construct a single melodic line.
To reinforce equality between the instruments, I imposed another constraint: all material had to remain above the violin’s low G, a rule I largely kept but did break a few times when finessing the score. These limitations created musical and technical challenges, forcing me to rethink colour, voicing, and register, and helping me find a language for this pairing that felt distinctively mine.
Music as ritual
This piece also connects strongly to my fascination with spirituality and ritual in music. Playing in perfect unison, aligning every attack and release, every breath and gesture, is both technically demanding and spiritually resonant. It requires heightened listening and shared awareness that go beyond coordination.
The anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport’s writing on ritual feels relevant here:
“To sing [in unison] with others, to move as they move in the performance of ritual, is not merely to symbolise union. It is in and of itself to reunite in the reproduction of a larger order. Unison does not merely symbolise that order but indicates it and its acceptance. The participants do not simply communicate to each other about that order but commune with each other within it.”
In ritual, to act in unison is not simply to represent unity; it is to participate in it. This idea sits at the heart of Strings Attached.
The piece is a small ritual of togetherness that asks for extraordinary sensitivity from its performers. The virtuosity lies not in speed or complexity, but in the precision, care, and empathy required to sustain such fragile simplicity.
Simplicity and melody
The work of composer Claude Vivier has been very influential to me, particularly his focus on melody as structural and expressive force. As in other works of mine like BARDO, I am drawn to the way he resists a “structural frenzy” in favour of a single line that can carry a whole work. In Strings Attached, the shared melody, stretched, mirrored, and delicately balanced between two instruments, becomes both structure and narrative. It embodies the fragile intimacy of two voices breathing as one, and the quiet tension of maintaining that unity as line begins to shimmer between individuality and togetherness.
Another inspiration for this piece is Meredith Monk’s Hocket from her album Facing North (shown below). In this vocal duet, Monk and her collaborator Robert Een balance on a delicate tightrope, weaving a single, unified melodic line through seamless hocketing. The material is austere, the technique highly virtuosic, the effect hypnotic. A similar unfolding ritual occurs in Strings Attached.
A quiet communion
In Strings Attached, the music feels close to breaking apart, yet its beauty lies in that risk. The piece begins with intense focus on melody, then opens into harmony, as if the instruments are gently testing the boundaries of their shared space. By the end, they drift just far enough apart to reveal the depth of their connection. It is music about listening deeply, about holding something fragile together, and about finding, within that discipline, a kind of peace.